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Author Archives: Ben Casnocha
Book Reviews From Our Book Giveaway
There’s only 24 hours left to pre-order the Start-up of You and in return get a free bookplate and the chance to win 20 other books that we recommend. In this post, I wanted to highlight a few of the books we’re giving away.
Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making
By Gary Klein
One of my favorite books of 2010. Klein opens each chapter with a set of statements describing conventional wisdom on the topic of the chapter: decision making, uncertainty, risk, adaptation, heuristics and biases. Then he proceeds to show why conventional wisdom is wrong. Unlike many books on decision-making, Klein assumes that when making decisions you have incomplete information and high levels of uncertainty—in other words, he assumes you live in the real world, not an academic lab.
Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd
By Youngme Moon
Moon argues that to have a true competitive advantage in today’s business world means that a company must be fundamentally different from the outset. It can’t bolt on differentiators after the fact. An eloquent exploration of one part of competitive advantage.
Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives
By Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler
Drawing on extensive (if not completely proven) research, social scientists Christakis and Fowler argue that connections up to three degrees away from us have a profound effect on our mind and body. Christakis and Fowler say that we are very much the company we keep–out to the third degree.
Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career
By Herminia Ibarra
This is a great book on career reinvention and transition. A professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, Ibarra tells the stories of men and women who pivoted into new industries. She observes how difficult it is to shed your old identity and create a new one. She stresses the importance of experimentation. And she hammers home the idea that there is no “one true self ” that can be conclusively discovered. Here’s my post on the LinkedIn Group about a recent article by Herminia.
Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed
By Michael D. Eisner with Aaron Cohen
Eisner, former CEO of Disney, writes about ten notable partnerships. Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken are featured in the book, as are Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, Bill Gates and Melinda Gates, and others. These inspiring and well-told stories show the power of lasting professional alliances.
Intrigued by any of these books? Buy the Start-Up of You now and you may just get all of them in the mail — for free!
Notes from Books About Jobs and Work
Highlights from a recent stack of books I’ve been reading.
From The Coming Jobs War by Jim Clifton:
Of the 7 billion people on Earth, there are 5 billion adults aged 15 and older. Of these 5 billion, 3 billion tell Gallup they work or want to work. Most of these people need a full-time formal job. The problem is that there are currently only 1.2 billion full-time, formal jobs in the world. This is a potentially devastating global shortfall of about 1.8 billion good jobs. It means that global unemployment for those seeking a formal good job with a paycheck and 30+ hours of steady work approaches a staggering 50%, with 10% wanting part-time work…Until rather recently in human evolution, explorers were looking for new hunting grounds, cropland, territories, passageways, and natural resources. But now, the explorers are seeking something else.
From Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford:
We are experiencing a genuine crisis of confidence in our most prestigious institutions and professions. This presents an opportunity to reconsider basic assumptions. The question of what a good job looks like — of what sort of work is both secure and worthy of being honored — is more open now than it has been for a long time. Wall Street in particular has lost its luster as a destination for smart and ambitious young people. Out of the current confusion of ideals and confounding of career hopes, a calm recognition may yet emerge that productive labor is the foundation of all prosperity.
From Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, sound advice on how to fuel job growth:
Eliminate or reduce the massive home mortgage subsidy. This costs over $130 billion per year, which would do much more for growth if allocated to research or education. While home ownership has many laudable benefits, it likely reduces labor mobility and economic flexibility, which conflicts with the economy’s increased need for flexibility.
From Pinched: How the Great Recession Has Narrowed Our Futures and What We Can Do About It by Don Peck
Arguably the most important economic trend in the United States over the past couple of generations has been the ever-more-distinct sorting of Americans into winners and losers, and the slow hollowing of the middle class….
Women’s growing success in the classroom and workforce is of course a cause for celebration. But the failure of many men to adapt to a postindustrial economy is worrying. The economy appears to be evolving in a way that is ill-suited to many men—at least outside the economy’s upper echelons. Men’s struggles are hardly evident in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street. But they’re hard to miss in foundering blue-collar and low-end service communities across the country.
May the Muses Embrace You
From the fun blog Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, a letter from Norman Mailer to Salman Rushdie:
Dear Salman Rushdie,
I have thought of you often over the last few years. Many of us begin writing with the inner temerity that if we keep searching for the most dangerous of our voices, why then, sooner or later we will outrage something fundamental in the world and our lives will be in danger. That is what I thought when I started out, and so have many others, but you, however, are the only one of us who gave proof that this intimation was not ungrounded. Now you live what must be a living prison of contained paranoia, and the toughening of the will is imperative, no matter the cost to the poetry in yourself. It is no happy position for a serious and talented writer to become a living martyr. One does not need that. It is hard enough to write at one’s best without wearing a hundred pounds on one’s back each day, but such is your condition, and if I were a man who believed that prayer was productive of results, I might wish to send some sort of vigor and encouragement to you, for if you can transcend this situation, more difficult than any of us have known, if you can come up with a major piece of literary work, then you will rejuvenate all of us, and literature, to that degree, will flower.
So, my best to you, old man, wherever you are ensconced, and may the muses embrace you.
Cheers,
Norman Mailer
(h/t Tyler Willis)
Fortune Excerpt on Networks and Relationships
This week’s Fortune magazine contains two articles of note! The first is a lengthy excerpt from The Start-Up of You. The second is a brief profile/introduction of Reid.
The brief profile ends by mentioning the book:
In 2009, Hoffman joined venture firm Greylock, where he runs a seed fund and helps manage a portfolio of nearly 100 companies, including Groupon (GRPN), Tumblr, and AirBnb. With LinkedIn’s IPO and other investments, Hoffman is worth some $1.5 billion. Now comes his book, The Start-Up of You, in which he shares tips on building a great career. Paramount among them: being an authentic networker. After all, Hoffman has 800 Facebook friends and 2,579 LinkedIn connections, and sits on six corporate and four nonprofit boards. At meetings he spreads out no fewer than five screens — iPads, Androids — to keep up with contacts. That skill has helped Hoffman recruit to Greylock such web stars as former Mozilla CEO John Lilly. Hoffman now believes that the defining principle of the web’s next innovation cycle is data. “We are generating a massive amount,” he says. “What are we inventing?” It’s one of the first questions he asks everyone he meets. The other: “How can I help you?”
The funny thing is, “authentic networker” is oxymoronic to some. The cynical view of “networkers” is that they are by definition not very authentic. We prefer the term “relationship-building” and talk more about building “networks.” As it relates to authenticity, there’s also the challenge of trying too hard–obvious attempts at sincerity leave us cold. This made writing about the topic particularly challenging for us: in the very act of writing analytically and prescriptively about how networks work and how you should deploy them in your career, it’s hard not to come off as overly calculating–exactly what we’re saying not to be.
The reality is that unless the process of bonding and allying with others comes off as effortlessly as tying your shoes, which is to say, unless allying and helping really *is* what you want to be doing, the collaborative mind-set will fail, and so, ultimately, will the relationship.
All that being said, check out the excerpt for an introduction to some of the network themes we address in the book. In the full chapter, we go deeper on each of these points, and expand into other topics.
Over the next week or so, I’ll be posting a bit more on networks here on my personal blog, over at the Startup of You blog, and leading discussions in the LinkedIn Group, which I encourage you to join and participate in. The book is about much more than networks, but it is an excellent theme to start with!