Reading Recap: December 2023
🏉Legacy: What The All Blacks Can Teach Us About The Business Of Life by James Kerr – I didn’t expect a lot from this book, but it surprised me with a very solid overview of business and performance concepts. I wasn’t quite an All Black, but I loved played playing collegiate rugby.
🤷Messy by Tim Harford. Messiness is often the call sign of creativity. Don’t expect to understand someone else’s mess. I thought about shadow IT and how organizations try to stamp out the mess it makes even though it often fills missing gaps. It also reminded me of how Louie Simmons talked about the weights strewn all over Westside Barbell as the sign of a gym concerned with building real strength.
📷Misery Obscura: The Photography of Eerie Von (1981-2009) – This title sat on my to-read list so long, that it has gone out of print. I opted for the e-book instead of paying ten times the price for a hard copy. I loved The Misfits / high school days photos. The unique creativity of those kids is amazing. The rest of the book was pictures of Samhain and Danzig, which was just meh for me.
Business Takeaways:
đź’€ Iconic branding. You may not know The Misfits, but you have probably seen The Crimson Ghost.
🌊Blue Ocean Strategy: Horror, Punk, Rockabilly, and Physical Culture combine into a totally new genre.
🗺️Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford – An inconvenient truth for the technology industry in general and AI in particular. This should be required reading for everyone in tech. The book was not at all what I was expecting, which was great. I am surprised that I have not seen this referenced anywhere with all the recent AI hype.
📝It was the worst of sentences. It was the best of sentences. by June Casagrande – I never thought reading about grammar would entertain me as much as this book did. I write intuitively and I don’t have a great understanding of formal grammar rules. I want to write better. So, I am reading for sentence structure and not just for content. I sacrifice myself at the altar of the grammar gods. Don’t say I ain’t ever done nuthin’ for ya.
