The Light and Fast Organisation

Author: Patrick Hollingworth

This book makes a comparison between organization structure and styles of mountain climbing. The traditional style of mountain climbing is with large expeditions that are epitomized by the commercial ascents to Mount Everest. They involve large teams carrying lots of gear and supplies that a few of the climbers will use to make the ascent. This becomes a logistical nightmare and is not something you can modify in the middle of your journey. The weather and conditions on the mountain can change dramatically and if they are outside the bounds of the expeditions plans, things can get real ugly.

Patrick contrasts this with an alpinist style of mountain climbing which is light and fast. He gives the example of climbing the North Face of the Eiger mountain in Switzerland. This is a very technical climb that is extremely difficult and many groups have been unsuccessful at reaching the top. In 1938 a team of 4 climbers took 90 hours after surviving some really close calls. In 2008 a Swiss Alpinist named Ueli Steck climbed the North Face alone with just a small backpack. He made the ascent in less than 3 hours. 

He posits that the traditional expedition-style is similar in nature to a large hierarchical organization. The alpinist style is a lean organization embracing agile principles. Patrick is himself an accomplished mountain climber and you can feel the authenticity with which he brings out the comparison. The premise of the book is to embrace the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) that is intrinsic to every organization and adapt your strategy to it. Don’t try to plan every dimension of a 3 year plan and expect to win in the market. Things are changing really fast much like the weather on the mountain. 

I liked the premise of the book and the education on mountain climbing. Once you get past the comparison, most of the advice seemed rather obvious and was not particularly enlightening. 

Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes

Author: Svante Paabo

Like most people, I was vaguely aware that Neanderthals were somewhere along the path of our evolution from ape to human, but knew very little about them. Then one day, I happened to stumble upon Svante’s TED Talk about “DNA clues to our inner Neanderthal” and was riveted by the idea that we all had a little bit of the Neanderthal genome in us.

This book is a first person account of Svante and his team’s journey in sequencing the Neanderthal genome and comparing it to humans across the globe today. He goes back to how he got his start in the genome sequencing business, and does an excellent job of describing all the technical challenges that he had to surmount. It is hard enough to sequence the genome for living beings where you have an abundance of DNA to work with. Svante and his team had to deal with a very limited supply of Neanderthal remains that could have been significantly contaminated by the DNA of other living things that they shared the soil with for the last 40,000 years. 

By force of necessity, he invents various mechanisms to distinguish between the original DNA and possible contaminants and manages to find a way to sequence a majority of the Neanderthal genome. The book is very well written and I was drawn in by Svante’s enthusiasm for the subject. On completion of the book, I am obsessed with finding out more about how the modern homo sapiens came to be.