Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella, 2017

As part of my career development plan learn more about the tech industry, Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone was a book I would have previously passed over.

The takeaways I got from the book:
* Growth Mindset - not focused on pointing fingers or assigning blame; interested in elevating everyone, one company

* Leadership principals:
     1. Bring clarity (and I would add, consistency) to those you work with
          - synthesize all the noise, synthesize the complexity
     2. Generate energy
          - not just on my teams, but across the company
     3. Find a way to deliver success
          - driving innovation, finding balance bet/ long-term success and short-term wins

Nadella is only the 3rd CEO of Microsoft, following Bill Gates & Steve Ballmer. 

With the help of a ghostwriter & assistant, the book is a bit contrived, continually emphasizing the 'Hit Refresh' on his approach to thinking about Microsoft's corporate culture and partnerships.

Having been a Microsoft employee for over a decade (& Indian American, originally from Hyderabad), his rise to CEO is impressive. 

Despite stories about his childhood & current family, I did not get a sense of his drive and how he ended up as CEO.

One of the projects Nadella spearheaded was search & advertising, what would become Bing.  I've always detested Bing & IE pushing the search engine, but Microsoft considers it a success.

Despite it only being a small percentage of search revenue, given how large the market it, Bing is actually a billion dollar business. 

Company strategy is always to be the best, but sometimes being 2nd, even a distant one, is ok too.

To complete the company manifesto feel of the book, there is also a plug about technologies Microsoft is investing in: mixed reality, quantum computing & artificial intelligence.

First, Break All The Rules by Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman, 1999

Marcus Buckingham is a well known name in management theory. 

Read this book a few years (possibly decades back), but re-read since it was recommended by a mentor I met for lunch.

Good to read the book now that I manage team of 30+ people v reading it when I was in business school aspiring to be (more of a) leader.

Full title of the book is: First, Break All the Rules: What The World's Greatest Managers Do Differently.  In essence, what great managers do differently is that they accept people for their strengths and weaknesses.

The do not try to change people drastically but figure out how to play to strengths to find projects/roles that fit strengths.

(Great managers sound like they are great at relationships too...)

Great managers do not believe everyone on their team are equals.  They advocate spending time with the best people since they have the most potential.  They do not try to 'fix' people.

They give their best people the best teams/projects to work on (instead of giving them challenging teams/projects, which would only lead to frustration). So counter-intuitive thinking. 

Great managers have awareness that one's filter is not the same as everyone else's.  Don't treat people as I would like to be treated since each person is unique and not like me.  (I know, cray-cray)

To be a great manager:
1. Select for talent; not intelligence or experience
2. Define the right outcomes & objectives, the what not the how
3. Motivate someone by focusing on strengths, not weaknesses
4. Develop someone by finding the right fit, not the next rung in the ladder

Three kinds of talents (use this to score candidates while interviewing?):
1. Striving - why a person gets out of bed
2. Thinking - how a person thinks, does things
3. Relating - whom person builds relationships with, confronts/ignores

Interviewing tips:
- interview for talent
- listen for consistent messaging/responses
- listen to initial responses, what is top of mind
- ask for examples, determine talents - past behavior is predictive of future behavior
- take notes & refer back to see what statements do or do not correlate to strong performers (like everyone thing else: document, measure & refine)

Track my own success, goals and growth and encourage my team to do the same thing.  Similar to above: document, measure & refine.

As I type up my notes from re-reading this book, have already made a few notes in regards managing my team.

Can't Help Myself: Lessons & Confessions from a Modern Advice Columnist by Meredith Goldstein, 2018

I wish I was as talented & funny a writer as Meredith Goldstein. 

A fan of her Love Letters column on boston.com & inaugural novel Singles, I was looking forward to reading Can't Help Myself. 

Even though I knew she would talk about her Mom's battle with cancer.

Hilarious memoir where Meredith talks about giving advice without judgment (something I need to learn to do) which  makes her so endearing.

She talks a lot about her commentators, and how they have become a family and even support group for her.

Honest about past relationships, her non-existent relationship with her father, her 'Rachels' friends in their 20s once her friends have started coupling off, and how she lost interest in dating while dealing with her Mom's health.

She is honest about snapping at her Mom as she goes through chemo, and wishing her Mom would get out of the hospital so she could go home.

More substantive than I though.  Goldstein is self-aware, honest & just plain comedy.

The Startup & The People We Hate at the Wedding

April reads before I went off to UK for vacation & India for work.

The Startup by Doree Shafrir, 2017
Enjoyable novel of start up culture in NYC, imaging the master of the universe feeling these twenty-something white kids feel.  Dealing with building a company, constantly asking for money from investors - what an intense and odd world.

Biting commentary on 'news' today with instant updates, regardless if accurate or verified.  Google employees who are brilliant yet hesitant to leave the benefits of Google to strike out on their own.

Katya Pasternack is a reporter, whose editor Dan Blum struggles to go become a 'grown up' with wife Sabrina & family in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Mack McAllister is the personality driven founder of a 63 employee startup TakeOff taking advantage of his 'celebrity' startup by sleeping with woman and drinking his own kool aid to sell his non-profit generating app.

Thirty-something Sabrina ends up going back to work after having two children, reporting to 20-something Isabel at TakeOff.  The start-up 20-something world of TweetDeck and insta-everything is overwhelming.

Characters include first-generation Russian-American Katya, Korean-American Sabrina and an anonymous Tweeter who gives the African-American take on the very white start up world.

The People We Hate at The Wedding by Grant Ginder, 2017

Siblings Paul & Alice are self-loathing siblings making poor personal choices on their self-destructive path.  They take their anger out on their half-sister Eloise, whose father is a debonair Frenchman.

Paul's & Alice's father is a Midwestern nice accountant named Bill.  Donna is the mother who has not quite gotten over her French ex-husband Henrique and who Paul resents for how Donna so quickly got over the death of Bill.

Eloise is getting married in England, bringing the family together.  Paul finally opens communication with Donna, and eventually finds out how she has shielded him from Bill's resentment after Paul came out.

Alice reacts brutally to Eloise's generosity but in the end, accepts her help.

Family drama captured so well.  Insecurities & ruts, perfect Eloise's snobbery showing - all the 'best' qualities that only family can bring out.

Nomadland by Jessica Bruder, 2017

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century is non-fiction account of a (mostly) older generation of retirees who can no longer find a job & 'decide' to move into their cars or campers.

This is not the romantic portrayal of road tripping across the United States, but driving to low-paying-back-breaking job to low-paying-and-back-breaking job. 

These people are trying to survive - without heat, medical care and sometimes food.

Corporations like Amazon to private agencies contracted to national parks take advantage of these people to staff short term, part time positions.

It is heartbreaking to read about these people who have fallen on hard times but inspiring to read about the community they have embraced.

Tips are shared, including where to find cheap dental care in Mexico and how to convert a bucket into a toilet.

Similar to Janesville, it is especially jarring to find people whose lives & struggles I have read on social media, that these are not characters in a book nor do they necessarily have a happy ending.

I imagine by parents - some of these Workampers are in their 70s - living in a car or old camper driving miles on end for menial and hard labor jobs and it really is heart breaking.

This is what America has come to, the divide between the haves and have-nots getting more vast and shocking that a nation so wealthy has so many people living on so little.

The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell, 2015

Fascinating look into Danish culture. 

Each chapter represents a lesson of the month so the book reads much like a series of articles, which was the premise for the book. 

Would have been nice if the memoir was more of a fluid story.

Things I learned about living Danishly:

Hygge is a term that means coziness, warmth that results from the brutal winters in Denmark, where the temperature falls to below freezing & there is only a few hours of daylight. 
- As a retreat from the harsh winters, people hibernate
- The Danish believe the best way to hibernate is with aesthetically pleasing interior,  candles & proper lighting to escape the harsh reality outside
- When Danes move, they not only take their lightbulbs, but light socket fittings...they take their lighting serious
- This explains why virtually every Danish apartment will look like a Design Within Reach catalog

Tradition - The Danish take their rules & tradition seriously
- They trust their fellow Danes and will leave their doors open
- They are proud to be Danish
- They accept their high tax rate because they know education & health care will be provided for
- Everyone holidays in July, forcing couples to spend weeks together with none of the everyday distractions...with August being a busy month for divorce attorneys

Equality - There is no social economic divide
- CEO of a company is just as likely to be biking  to work along the janitor
- There is no stigma with someone's profession
- People like their profession - part of the aforementioned high tax rate means that unemployment benefits are generous and allow people the safety net to quit a job & look for another one or to take (free) training classes to prepare for a new career

Work Week - Short work weeks & subsidized/guaranteed day care...  wow

Strange Stuff - Porn is common in Denmark, not anything that is particularly stigmatized
- Corporate holiday parties are a drunken free for all
- Despite the trust and pride, Danes tend to be very violent - the Viking blood the author muses

Rich People Problem by Kevin Kwan, 2018

Engaging and fun.  The 'Return of the Jedi' of Kwan's Crazy Rich Asian trilogy.

Kwan's chapters end in a cliffhanger and there are enough characters in his cast of crazy rich Asians that it would keep me reading through a few chapters until find out what happened with the cliffhanger.

Rich People Problems bring us back to Singapore with uber rich families who are so old, rich money, that they are not even known to the general public. 

'Heros' or non-materialistic-non-judgmental-nothing-to-prove rich kids Nick & Astrid return.

Nick returns to Singapore to make peace with his grandmother, who has had a heart attack & not long to live, while Astrid is in the midst of a messy divorce.

Kitty Bing steps up as she attempts to buy herself into respect & the upper stratosphere of high society. 

Soon, everyone is fighting over Tyersall Park, the estate in which Nick's grandmother resides.

The name dropping becomes a bit tedious with a cheeky footnote stating that by just mentioning a watch brand, sales will surely go up.

The run down checklist for a fellow Asian in descending order of 'importance' made me laugh, with New York & San Fran Chinese ranking decently, but rest of American Born Chinese not faring well.