“A metaphor for good information design is a map. Hold any diagram against a map and see how it compares.” –Edward Tufte
For me, reading a book is like reading a map and following a path to a destination set by the author. Both books and maps make you work: figuring out where you are, finding the destination, critiquing a route, judging obstacles or shortcuts, and marveling at oddities along the way. Both map designers and book authors solve problems of information design, and it is rewarding to study books and maps to assess the designs. Today, the convenience of digital apps obviates actual map-reading and distills whole books into short summaries. Therefore, why take the trouble to read actual maps and books?
One reason is that apps can fail, forcing you to fall back on older skills. For instance, despite the prevalence of geolocation apps, the U.S. Navy has resumed teaching midshipmen how to use a sextant as a defense against the possibility of a cyber-attack.[i] Another reason is that reading a lot is great exercise for the brain and builds a fund of knowledge that can come in handy. Warren Buffett counseled an inspiring investment manager to read a lot every day, “That’s how knowledge works. It builds up like compound interest.”[ii] Third, many worthwhile topics entail complexity, nuance, and disagreements about analysis and evidence. If you want to master a subject, you must dive into the depths of argument. Mark Zuckerberg said, “Books allow you to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media today.”[iii] As I have argued previously, reading books sharpens one’s purpose and performance as a leader (see 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, and 2023.
Annually, my holiday gift to blog readers is a list of books that dazzled, surprised, or usefully challenged me in the past year. I read 35-60 books a year and pick a few besties. I hope you enjoy these suggestions!
Business
I’m not a big fan of sensational books about business, many of which are hyped, tendentious, poorly researched, and not well-written. But I try to keep track of the better critics of business for the same reasons that it is important to listen to short-sellers, whistleblowers, street protesters, and the opposing political party: can they offer facts (not just opinions) that might warrant an adjustment in the way we see things? Three recent books caught my attention.
- Dana Mattioli, 2024. The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power. I would guess that readers of this blog have been customers and investors in Amazon with growing brio for the breadth and quality of its services and for its vaulting share price. Mattioli’s book gives a backstory to the firm’s rise and reports anti-competitive behavior, toxic work culture, and a domineering leader. At the heart of Amazon’s astonishing advance (and the advances of other prominent tech companies) are platform economics. Platforms enable firms to facilitate transactions in ways that attract more customers. As the number of customers grows, the platform becomes more valuable, enabling the firm to raise money and scale quickly. Recent antitrust lawsuits by the FTC and Department of Justice allege that platform companies flex their growing market power to the detriment of consumers, workers, suppliers, and competitors. Mattioli’s book is essentially an exploration of that thesis. Her depth of reporting (she writes for the Wall Street Journal) is impressive and largely sustains Lina Khan’s assessment that “the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon it. Elements of the firm’s structure and conduct pose anticompetitive concerns—yet it has escaped antitrust scrutiny.” (page xi) I think that the effects of platform economics upon competition are likely to be an important concern for years to come. Whether one agrees with Mattioli’s (and Khan’s) conclusions about Amazon, the profile presented in this book will prepare you for antitrust debates springing from the digital economy.
- Zeke Faux, 2023. Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Ride. Trading in cryptocurrencies is a so-called “shadow market” because it lies beyond the reach of regulators and the kinds of private institutions that might moderate market excesses. To those of us who study financial instability, the outlandish personalities, the hyperbolic claims that crypto will displace government currencies, and the volatile cycles in crypto prices invite attention. We should care about what happens in the shadowy outreaches of the financial system. Crises tend to break out there, rather than the center, of the financial system. Institutional guardrails keep the mainstream in check, but don’t constrain the shadow firms and markets very much. The absence of guardrails underpinned the fraud at the heart of Faux’s book. Richly researched, the book narrates the boom and bust of FTX and its “boy genius,” Sam Bankman-Fried. The book garnered more “best book of the year” accolades than I could track. The author is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek. Faux concluded that “From the beginning, I thought that crypto was pretty dumb. And it turned out to be even dumber than I imagined. Never before has so much wealth been generated with such flimsy schemes. But what shocked me was not the vapidity of the crypto bros. It was how their heedlessness had devastating consequences for people across the world.” (page 6)
- Rob Copeland, 2023. The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend. The more extreme the advertising pitch the less likely I am to pick up a book. This one garnered blurbs including “unsettling exposé,” “explosive, mind-blowing,” “defining,” “taut,” “classic American story,” “shock and entertain”. I have wise friends who have had positive things to say over the years about Bridgewater Associates and its founder, Ray Dalio. And his books about financial instability (The Changing World Order, which I recommended in 2023, and Big Debt Crises) reveal someone who likes to distill big complex events into provocative insights. Therefore, skeptical of the hype and the book’s promise of a take-down (the “Unraveling”) I came to it ready to discount its thesis. Instead, what I found was award-winning research and reporting, cogent argument, and an unsettling profile of a firm and its leader. Copeland is a finance reporter for the New York Times. Essentially, the book describes Dalio’s career and the history of Bridgewater, a macro-oriented hedge fund that grew to be one of the largest with some $172 billion in discretionary assets under management in March 2024. Over the past three decades, Bridgewater beat the market by an average of 5-6 percent annually.[iv] Such out-performance attracts attention: what is Bridgewater’s secret to success? Dalio points to an intense internal culture stimulated by “radical transparency,” psychology, real-time performance evaluations, and plenty of employee turnover. However, most hedge funds would feature an intense internal culture but without hoo-ha terminology—is this just verbiage, or is there a there there? Copeland’s answer is yes, maybe, and no. The “yes” and “maybe” stem from the fact that Dalio’s design of management and incentive systems initially reflected provocative HR practices in the 1990s and 2000s. Then Dalio put those systems on steroids punctuated by his philosophizing and bizarre interventions. Anecdotes and interviews depict Dalio as impulsive, tyrannical, prone to seize briefly on one new fad after another—all bound up in a fascination in human personality. Copeland wrote, “For Dalio, a mistake was never just a mistake. It was an opportunity to dive into the individualistic human psychology that led to errors—particularly ones that Dalio himself might have avoided. He often said that he had made a string of them early in his career—allowing his emotions to rule in his blowup with his boss, for one, and being too categorical in predicting calamity ahead in his testimony to Congress. He believed he had successfully identified the causes of these mistakes and corrected for them, and he was determined to impart this wisdom to his charges, to prevent such errors from repeating in the future.” (page 50.) However, the workforce monitoring and intervention this entails borders on Orwellian; a degree of surveillance, public shaming, and detailed correction that most people would not tolerate. Some people admire Dalio’s management philosophy. But were the incredible internal turmoil, anxieties, and posturing that Copeland documents necessary to achieve Bridgewater’s success? For enterprise leaders in the world of practice, this book will summon serious reflections on styles of managerial intervention in the work of employees.
Histories of Infrastructure Investment and Project Management
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) in 2021 (authorizing $1.2 trillion in spending) put the word, “infrastructure,” in the daily lexicon of journalists and pundits. Should governments commit to such investments? If so, which ones? How should the projects be managed and the funds disbursed? By what standards should the projects be assessed? Efficiency versus effectiveness? Employment? Social justice? Environment? Political outcomes? We’ve been here before. Two histories—about the Panama Canal and the first steel bridge across the Mississippi River—depict the challenges of major infrastructure projects: cost overruns, funding constraints, technological failures, political obstacles, natural disasters, labor disputes, engineering mistakes, delays in completion, and once the project is completed, revenue shortfalls. The histories also display the impact of human agency, typically in the form of a charismatic promoter, a larger-than-life personality who shapes an appealing vision and lifts expectations for success. To the extent that history repeats itself (or rhymes, as Mark Twain allegedly said), the issues in the following books are likely to recur in the wake of the IIJA.
- David McCullough, 1978. The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914. For hundreds of years, the creation of a waterway through the Isthmus of Panama had been the dream of leaders in politics and business. But not until the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 was the construction of a canal in Panama deemed plausible. Then, the promoter of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps, brought to the French Government a proposal to fund construction in Panama. The government and French investors bought in. Unfortunately, the usual challenges—not least of which was the difficulty of digging a canal overt a mountain range–drove the French venture into bankruptcy. In 1903, the U.S. Government purchased a perpetual lease and restarted the project at the insistence of President Theodore Roosevelt. The proponent of a muscular navy, Roosevelt deemed the canal a matter of national security. The U.S. Congress bought in. Despite the expense, widespread malaria, engineering challenges, labor shortages, and infighting in Panama and Washington, the canal opened to traffic in 1914. McCullough concluded, “For millions of people after 1914, the crossing at Panama would be one of life’s memorable experiences. The complete transit required about twelve hours, and except for the locks and an occasional community along the shore, the entire route was bordered by the same kind of wilderness that had confronted the first surveyors for the railroad …For those on board a ship in transit, the effect for the greater part of the journey was of sailing a magnificent lake in undiscovered country” (page 614). Much lauded, including the National Book Award for history, this book cemented McCullough’s stature as a writer of popular history.
- John K. Brown, 2024. Spanning the Gilded Age: James Eads and the Great Steel Bridge. This book tells the history of the first bridge to span the Mississippi River below the Missouri River—indeed, the first steel structure in the world. The bridge advanced uninterrupted railroad travel across the continental U.S. The promoter and chief engineer of the project was James B. Eads, who educated himself in science and engineering and made his name salvaging wrecks from the Mississippi River and building military ships for the Federal side in the Civil War. And other outsized personalities including J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Jay Cooke weave in and out of the tale. Built between 1867 and 1874, the bridge traversed more than a mile across the river in three spans. The caissons (piers) extended 100 feet below water level using a novel pneumatic technology that James Eads perfected. And Eads’s demand that the bridge should employ steel rather than iron was unheard of. Naysayers abounded. Despite the challenges that plague all big infrastructure projects, the bridge opened in July 1874, upon which Eads announced that the bridge would be “a great financial success” (page 217). Yet within a year of completion, the bridge’s operating company declared bankruptcy owing to a revenue shortfall: the railroads, on whom the company depended for business, boycotted the company to drive it into their arms. P. Morgan restructured the operating company and organized a syndicate to control it, bringing most of the interested parties into the deal. Brown reflected on the entire story: “the strength and breadth of [Eads’s] vision continued to shape St. Louis Bridge, the city, and the region for many decades. The bridge was the central piece in a mosaic of transformations across a half century or more. …It had such broad influence partly because Eads proposed far more than the structure. …he integrated the bridge into plans for rail, road, river, and commercial infrastructures to shape the entire region. In this era before activist government or urban planning, Eads demonstrated how a private-sector entrepreneur could build wealth for himself by offering a blueprint for his city as a whole.” (page 249). The author taught history of technology at University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.
These two stories prompt various lessons for the IIJA. There will be delays. There will be cost overruns. The optimistic visions of promoters will be dashed. Yet in the long run, if the project meets an obvious social and economic need, its impact is likely to be transformational.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
We are swamped with potential readings on artificial intelligence, more than 50,000 books according to one search. AI is important: it would appear on any short list of possible disruptors in the near, intermediate, and long-term future. Where should one start? If you are not a computer technologist, I recommend the following two books, which speak clearly to an enterprise leader about this technology, its significance, and implications for the future of work.
- Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar, 2023. The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma. If you question whether AI is hype or reality, this book is a good point of departure. The title reveals the thrust of the book—a “wave” is “The global diffusion or proliferation of a generation of technology anchored in a new general-purpose technology.” (page 15). The authors’ thesis is that we face dramatic change similar to earlier technology revolutions. But this time, the change will be bigger, more pervasive, and both more beneficial and possibly pernicious than earlier waves. They declare, “The very scale and interconnectedness of the coming wave create new systemic vulnerabilities: one point of failure can quickly cascade around the world. The less localized a technology, the less easily it can be contained—and vice versa. … However many safeguards and security protocols are in place, the scale of impact is far wider than we’ve seen before.” (pages 139-40). Suleyman knows AI: he is the CEO of Microsoft AI and is a leader in artificial intelligence. This book has garnered a host of commendations and has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list.
- Ethan Mollick, 2024. Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. Where Suleyman describes a coming revolution, Mollick discusses (in general terms) how AI can augment human intelligence—how to make it work for us rather than against He is a professor at the Wharton business school and in 2024 was designated by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in AI. Mollick offers four principles for engaging with AI: (1) “Always invite AI to the table”: only by actively engaging with AI will you really learn how it can help you. (2) “Be the human in the loop.” AI needs regular feedback and coaching from humans, especially about hallucinations. (3) “Treat AI like a person (but tell it what kind of person it is).” By telling AI what its point of view must be and what problems it must solve, you put guardrails around the responses AI will give you. And (4) “Assume this is the worst AI you will ever use” because AI is evolving and improving very rapidly. What’s the value proposition with AI? Mollick reports the results of one study: “Participants who used Chat-GPT saw a dramatic reduction in their time on tasks, slashing it by a whopping 37 percent. Not only did they save time, but the quality of their work also increased as judged by other humans. These improvements were not limited to specific areas; the entire time distribution shifted to faster work, and …to higher quality …[and] helped reduce productivity inequality.” (page 111.) This book has also been listed for some time among the New York Times bestsellers.
Politics
A long interest of mine has been the U.S. Presidents: their autobiographies as well as leading presidential biographies by (a) excellent writers unaffiliated with the president and (b) political contemporaries. For instance, in the first category (a), see works by Robert Caro, David McCullough, Ron Chernow, and Doris Kearns Goodwin.[v] Presidential biographies in the second category (b) can be myopic and self-serving. An outstanding exception is the following:
- Stuart Eizenstat, 2018. President Carter: The White House Years. This book stands out for its remarkable balance and objectivity, its depth of documentation (some 5,000 yellow pads in Eizenstat’s own archive and over 350 interviews of major figures including Carter), insights about federal policy-making and electoral politics, and its quality of writing. This is a comprehensive history of the Carter Administration and Carter’s life to 2018–it strikes me as a likely candidate to be the definitive But weighing in at 900 pages, why devote such attention to Carter? Starting as a peanut farmer from Georgia, he never gained the cachet of embrace by coastal opinion-makers. The economic stagflation of the 1970s clung to him like a wet blanket, as did his iconoclasm, his prickly personality, the internal Democratic Party conflicts, the second oil shock, and the Iran embassy crisis. He served only one term, failing in his re-election bid to Ronald Reagan. Over the past decade, he has ranked only at the middle of all presidents.[vi] To many people, Carter seems to have been a weak and hapless president. Eizenstat’s aim is to correct the conventional view: “I believe that the single term served by the thirty-ninth president of the United States was one of the most consequential in modern history. Far from a failed presidency, he left behind concrete reforms and long-lasting benefits to the people of the United States as well as the international order. …He was not a great president, but he was a good and productive one. He delivered results, many of which were realized only after he left office. He was a man of almost unyielding principle. Yet his greatest virtue was at once his most serious fault for a president in an American democracy…[he] took on intractable problems with comprehensive solutions while disregarding the political consequences. He could break before he would bend his principles or abandon his personal loyalties.” (pages 1-2). Eizenstat details the lows of Carter’s administration, as well as its durable successes, such as the Camp David Accord, the Panama Canal Treaty, support for Jews in the USSR, the reversal of decline in defense spending, response to the USSR’s aggression in Afghanistan, deregulation of transportation, and the appointment of Fed Chair Paul Volcker to tame inflation. I think this is a valuable and instructive book for enterprise leaders because of its frank illumination of presidential policymaking, crisis-management, diplomatic negotiations, and the strengths and foibles of an honorable leader. As I write this (December 2024) Jimmy Carter has surpassed his 100th birthday and lies in hospice with a terminal illness—this book affords a timely retrospective on his life and work.
Crime Fiction—the “Guilty Pleasure”
Once again, I confess that not all of my reading is serious stuff. This past year, I finished and commend:
- John Mortimer, 1998. The Third Rumpole Omnibus. This is a compilation of short stories about a fictional public defender in Britain. These ingenious mysteries afford witty commentary on life and the legal profession. Each chapter is the perfect antidote to a busy day, just before lights out at night.
- Lee Child’s Jack Reacher Series. Amounting to some 29 books, of which I read the first six in 2024, these books are addictive page-turners about good people chasing bad people. I especially enjoyed Without Fail (book six in the series). The character of Jack Reacher has been depicted in two movies featuring Tom Cruise (Jack Reacher and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back) and two season-length features on Amazon featuring Alan Ritchson (for samples, see this and this).
Enjoy your reading. Best wishes to all for the holidays and for 2025!
[i] See “U.S. Navy Midshipmen Returning to the Sextant,” The Maritime Executive, 2015, https://maritime-executive.com/article/us-navy-midshipmen-returning-to-the-sextant.
[ii] 2013 April 28, Omaha World-Herald, Investors earn handsome paychecks by handling Buffett’s business by Steve Jordon (World-Herald Staff Writer), Omaha, Nebraska.”
[iii] https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10101828640656261
[iv] https://atticcapital.com/bridgewater-associates-average-return-and-the-man-behind-the-money/.
[v] I commend Robert Caro’s four volumes (eventually to be five) on Lyndon Johnson, David McCullough’s biographies of Truman and John Adams, Ron Chernow’s biographies of Washington and Grant, and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals (about Lincoln and his cabinet.
[vi] In the 2024 poll by the American Political Science Association, Carter ranked 22 out of 46.