Anxious People: A Novel

Author: Fredrik Backman

Backman sets up the story in the most farcical way possible. A bank robber failed to rob a bank and accidentally created a hostage drama. A few pages in, I thought this was going to be some kind of comedy and almost abandoned it. I am really happy that I stuck with it as the book is so much more than the story that unfolds as you turn the pages. 

The investigation into the hostage crisis is carried out by father and son policemen in the local police department. One thing that was evident early on in the book is that Backman is very observant of human behavior and draws out the distinctions between the generations — father and son policemen — very nicely.  The prose is evocative of life in small town Sweden with descriptions like “The air passes through the old policeman‘s throat as roughly as a piece of heavy furniture being dragged across an uneven wooden floor.” 

He is just as comfortable critiquing that posts on social media don’t reflect reality, by saying “so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit."

In every couple of chapters he introduces new characters and engages them in light banter that reveals their personality and shares some of their wisdom with the reader.  He must collect a lot of random information as I discovered many little useful Nuggets of wisdom. This line about “eggs last much longer than you think” made me google it and I found it to be quite true.

If you throw your eggs out once the date on the carton has passed, you may be wasting perfectly good eggs. With proper storage, eggs can last for at least 3–5 weeks in the fridge and about a year in the freezer. The longer an egg is stored, the more its quality declines, making it less springy and more runny.

Little pieces of wisdom like “You end up marrying the person you don’t understand. Then You spend the rest of your life trying.” make you stop and look at yourself in the mirror.

What are you waiting for? Grab this book and fasten your seatbelt.

The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

Author: Scott Galloway

NYU Stern professor Scott Galloway provides a compelling and thought-provoking analysis of the four tech giants, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.  He gets your attention with sharp observations that go something like this. We used to look up to the heavens and ask God for wisdom. Now we look down to our phones and ask Google for the answer. The style is very engaging and makes for a great read.

His personal story of trying to get NY Times to restrict Google’s access to its content resonates with my beliefs. It’s too bad for NYTimes and the world, that he was not successful in that quest.

With Facebook he didn’t have much new information to share. It is very clear to all of the world that Facebook, in its heydey, knew too much about all of us. The following had been written by Yuval Noah Harare several years ago, “With knowledge of 150 likes, their [Facebook’s] model could predict someone’s personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself”. 

Overall, this book is entertaining and it will get you to think hard about the The Four and what their dominance bodes for the future.

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

Author: Bhu Srinivasan

You are probably wondering, what more is there to write about American History? Anything and everything about US History is probably written, narrated and made into a movie by now. Children learn about this in school and maybe that is one reason why this is really a poor choice of topic to write a book on. I, however, didn't go to high school in the United States, and found the premise of the book interesting. It narrated American History from a purely economic and capitalistic point of view. 

Bhu starts by telling his personal story of how he landed up in the United States and a college assignment to write an essay that reflected on the relation between American History and his own story, had him stumped initially. I can safely say that by writing this book on American History, he far exceeded his college professor's expectations.

The book starts at the very beginning of how the first Pilgrims raised capital to contract the Mayflower and fund their journey to America.  Bhu dives into the details of the contracts to demonstrate how they were written to benefit the investor with little provision for the welfare of the Pilgrims. In many ways the investors resembled Venture Capital firms, that I am all too familiar with, having lived the past two decades in Silicon Valley. 

Once the Pilgrims land on American soil, they are in for some rude awakening. Most likely these circumstances are much better documented in many other books. However, for completeness, Bhu gets into some of the details so we can understand the economic motivation for their actions. He has a writers sense of keen observation. Rather than just narrate events, Bhu gives his perspective on the prevailing state of affairs and does not hesitate to reach out to a popular novel of the time to make his point. He uses Upton Sinclair to make his case about the state of the meat-packing industry, or Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath to illustrate how even poor families all had cars in the late 1930s US, an unusual standard relative to the rest of the world. 

On the topic of Slavery, Bhu underscores how slaves formed the single biggest asset class in the 1800s. "At an average price of $700, the nearly 4 million slaves in the American South in 1859, can be estimated to be worth $2.8 billion collectively".   Much like we take out loans with our homes as collateral today, the landowners in the south were loaned money based on their slave assets. These loan contracts, would have made it impossible for them to free slaves even if they were inclined to do so.  Bhu observers how slavery had an outsized impact on the American economy in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

In describing the lack of America’s appetite for big spending on defense, he offers up that it “made perfect sense considering that America’s two most formidable defensive assets didn’t cost anything to maintain”.  He is referring to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that border the east and west coasts from North to South. 

Bhu is a big fan of Alex de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” and often quotes from it marveling at how accurately it describes America even a century later!  While reading this book, I couldn't help but wonder how Bhu made his choices of whom to pick when he described a particular timeline in America’s history. For example, he could have talked about the technological war being waged by the different computer companies in the seventies.  Instead he chose to focus on just IBM and EDS. The latter resulting in making its founder, Ross Perot, the first tech billionaire of all time. 

Overall, I enjoyed Bhu's fresh perspective on American History.  His assumption that people do things for economic gain seems quite reasonable to me.  He interprets all of American History through this capitalistic lens and it makes for a wonderful retelling of American History. 

The Underground Railroad: A Novel

Author: Colson Whitehead

I purchased this highly acclaimed book and it sat on my shelf for several years. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 and was on numerous top 10 lists, but having recently read “Washington Black”, I didn’t have the will to read another tale that recalled American’s ugly history with slavery. The local library provided a steady supply of alternatives and I almost forgot about this little red book. But in 2020, COVID19 shut down everything, including the library and I could avoid it no more. I started reading the “Underground Railroad” with much fear and trepidation, but after the first handful of pages, I was hooked. I finished the book in a day.

Like me, if you don’t know about the Underground Railroad, this book will pique your curiosity to learn more about it.  I learned — not from the book — that the Underground Railroad was a network of both African American and White people who helped runaway slaves, by offering them shelter, aid and most importantly, providing them crucial information on how to make it across to the free states in the North and Canada.  The book re-imagines this time in American History, by inventing an Underground Railroad that ferries runaways into the elusive land of hope and freedom.

The Railroad is not the only thing imagined in the book. Colson Whitehead vividly describes life in a plantation in Georgia, a city in South Carolina, a town in North Carolina and a few other places. These are all a figment of the author’s imagination, but the sad part is that it all seems so plausible. 

The protagonist in this tale is a young slave girl named Cora, who meets her life of misery head on. As the novel progressed I was increasingly impressed with how she stoically dealt with all that the pre-civil-war South threw her way. The book is peppered with wisdom that I found myself reading over and over again. Sometimes, it takes just a single sentence — “Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood” — to describe the times vividly. 

The book is gripping and thought provoking. This quote sums the book up well. “Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth”

Sandworm

Author: Andy Greenberg

Unless you’re a certified Luddite, you would have heard about at least one of WannaCry, NotPetya, Bad Rabbit, Black Energy or Guccifer2.0. What you may not know is the extent of damage that these hacks have unleashed on their victims. This book ties all of these and many more cyber crimes together, and takes us on a quest to find out who is behind all these attacks and why they might be doing it.

First, I have to disclose that I am in the cybersecurity industry and the material in this book is of extreme interest to me. Nevertheless, the descriptions of the technical aspects of the attacks are very brief and I do believe that the book will appeal to a general audience. Mr. Greenberg takes us on a wild ride as he is on a quest to find out who is behind some of these really nasty cyber attacks. He structures the narrative like a thriller as he describes the cataclysmic failures that result from the attacks and gives us a glimpse of the detective work that goes into reverse engineering the malware.

The book starts out by explaining the choice for the title “Sandworm”. It turns out that the authors of the malware were big fans of Frank Herbert’s epic novel Dune, and have chosen the many different characters in the book for their user handles. This turns out to be a lucky find as it helps security researchers identify the relationship between many different attacks and if the same group is behind them. 

Ukraine is the epi-center for most of these cyber-attacks and Mr. Greenberg does a great job of describing the political landscape in Ukraine. Unfortunately, they are at the receiving end of Russia’s cyber wrath and the author makes their dire plight very clear. Given how interconnected we all are with the internet, it is not a big leap to imagine that the US could suffer similar (or worse) consequences if these attacks were unleashed on us.

The final chapter is a thought provoking discussion on what we can do about all of this. While the US may be harder to attack, our reliance on technology will make it very hard for us recover quickly from an attack. The author quotes Dan Geer an elder statesman in the cybersecurity industry as saying, “It may be time to no longer invest further in lengthening the time between failures, but instead on shortening the meantime to repair”. 

What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

Author: Ben Horowitz

I somehow find it difficult to wrap my head around the titles of Ben Horowitz’ books. The first book I read was “The hard thing about hard things” which seemed kind of obvious and repetitive and now this one is called  “What you do is who you are”, which also doesn’t seem particularly insightful. Unlike the title, however, the book is quite straightforward and is about the importance of culture to an organization. 

Horowitz starts out by looking at the eighteenth century sugar cane plantations of Saint-Domingue (modern day Haiti), where enslaved Africans planted, harvested and processed sugar cane. Like in other plantations any attempt to resist was met with severe punishments, often ending in death. Ultimately, led by a former slave, Toussaint Loverture, they overthrew slavery to establish the Republic of Haiti. Horowitz argues that slavery, by design, eliminates any type of culture taking root in the population. He examines how Toussaint Loverture, overcame this setback and was able to build a culture among slaves that culminated in their freedom. 

He cites many other examples from Genghis Khan to prison gangs that are interesting in their own right. I got the feeling that Horowitz runs fast and loose with these stories and conveniently prescribes a culture and then goes on to attribute their success to this culture. Even though the history is debatable, but the lessons in culture are relevant and applicable to most organizations. 

It's fun to look at culture from the lens of computer science. Horowitz says that “Cultural design is a way to program the actions of an organization, but like computer programs, every culture has bugs. And cultures are significantly more difficult to debug than programs.”  Maybe he should have taken his analogy seriously and refrained from debugging cultures that he did not have a first hand view of!

Trailblazer

Author: Marc Benioff

Over the last two decades Salesforce has become the dominant player in the  enterprise space, by providing the platform for their marketing, sales, service and IT teams to connect with customers. Their founder and CEO is Marc Benioff and he is one of the few very successful entrepreneurs who have combined business success with social activism. 

He starts out by describing his first hand experience watching his running a small clothing business, “Stuart’s Apparel” and often-times was up until 11 pm at the Kitchen table, doing the books by hand. Through his father’s business he also got a sense of the importance of human relationships in making a business successful. 

There are many nice quotes in the book and I particularly liked this one. “To be effective, a leader needs to both learn from the past and project the future. But you can’t do either of those things until you carve out some time for being in the present”.

His simple definitions to create strategic alignment in Salesforce have the catchy acronymn V2MOM

• Vision - what do you want?
• Values - what’s important to you?
• Methods - how do you get it?
• Obstacles - what is preventing you from being successful?
• Measures - how do you know you have it?

From the start it is clear that Mark Benioff’s mission is improving the state of the world and not just being CEO of salesforce. In fact, he has written an entire chapter that is titled activist CEO. I must confess that there is a good deal of bragging about the great things that Salesforce and Marc Benioff have done, which doesn’t make for an entertaining read. However, there are some nice concepts like the ones about building trust, and the importance of developing a strong company culture. Specifically his idea of giving back 111 which is 1% equity 1% of product and 1% employees time seems to be a nice catchy motto for other companies to emulate.

Mark truly seems to have committed himself to alleviating the homelessness problem in San Francisco.  He was instrumental in getting proposition C passed in San Francisco. Itrequires all businesses with more than $50 million in revenue to be an additional .5% of tax on the profit.

Overall, Mark is one of those few individuals who have had both a business and social impact in our times. Read the book to appreciate his contribution and see what you can learn from him.