The Lean Startup

Here’s another book I have know the main arguments relatively well, but just now read from back-to-back. The Lean Startup(Eric Ries, 336 pages). And this is definitely a classic worth reading.

The book builds on personal experiences Eric Ries has had in the startup world. According to his own description, he was first part of a startup that “had it all”, and failed. Later on, he succeeded, using methods that were controversial.

For what the book defends is that building a sustainable business involves managing a series of experiments, that all the time “tune” the company actions in the directions pointed by the results of these experiments. In other words, “learning” is the main goal of a startup organization.

Learning involves first proving the “value hypothesis”, meaning to question if the product or service actually delivers value for someone willing to pay for it. And also, the “growth hypothesis”, which shows how new customers can be achieved, “paid for” if need be, so that the company can actually grow.

This book was not the first time these topics were discussed or introduced, but it seems to have been the catalyzer of making these ideas becoming mainstream in the startup world. And that’s probably why it became a classic.

The idea that a company can test and learn what it should build, as well as the notion of an “innovation accounting”, with metrics that can prove (or not) the progress of the startup. All that is quite powerful, even it may sound a bit extreme.

Of course, the lean methodology has been popular and well known for quite some time. The difference here, when applying it to startups, is the uncertainty levels in which a startup organization operates. And therefore, the need to be much more conscious over how to actually measure if there is any merit in the main hypothesis behind the business idea.

So that the lean startup method described in the book aims high at raising the bar over how to go about creating a startup business. It makes it in a very compeling way, and the concepts presented seem to have gained practical importance when talking about startups. It remains to see if the discipline it entails will actually become a common practice worldwide.

Djinn

Je viens de finir de lire le livre Djinn (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1981, 139 pages), et c'est la première fois que j'ai lu une livre entière au français!

C'est vrai que j'ai été étudié le français pendant du beaucoup temps. Mais c'est aussi vrai qu'il y a plusieurs d'années que je ne priorité pas la langue, sur tout parce que je ne vivre pas dans un pays dont se parle français. On contraire, je vivre ou Norvège, et c'est ça que le norvégien, le anglais et le portugais sont les langues avec lesquelles je me communique régulièrement.

Mais j'aime le français, et finalement j'ai pris la chance du étudiez la langue encore fois.

Donc le livre Djinn n'est qu'une partie de cet effort récent pour améliorer mon français. Et certainement est une livre qu'est très remarquable pour beaucoup de façons.

Primairement à raison de que ce c'est un livre caractéristique d'une école littéraire qui s'appelle Nouveau Roman. Cette à dire qu'il n'est pas comme un traditionnel roman, avec un genre spécifique, caractères bien définis, et une progression logique du temps. Pas du tout. Djinn a beaucoup de anachronismes, personnages qui se change même de nom et âge, et sur tout se concentre plus sur les objets que sur les personnes.

Dans quelque moments, Djinn se ressemble un roman policier. Après un peu, on va dire qu'il s'agit d'un livre de science-fiction. Et après en peu encore, que on lit une histoire d'amour. Et tout cela fait partie du plan d'auteur pour rompis dans le traditionnel roman, et montrer qu'une nouvelle façon de penser un roman est possible.

Donc Djinn n'est pas un livre facile à comprendre. Si un en lis d'une manière réaliste, en trouve beaucoup de problèmes avec les absurdes situations que se passe. Et quand en lis d'une manière symboliste, il y a aussi beaucoup d'alternative façons à l’interpréter l'histoire.

Malgré tout ça, je peux dire que c'est un très bon livre. Même pour quelqu'un qui connaît peu cette école litteraire, comme moi, le livre a une perspective intéressante sur la littérature qui en vaut la peine.

Conceptual Blockbusting

I recently finished reading Conceptual Blockbusting (James L. Adams, 5^th edition, 309 pages), and I like the book quite a lot.

To be fair, perhaps I should have read it about 15 years ago, to maximize the effects it could have in the earlier days of my professional career as an engineer. Because I think I ended up grasping different concepts the book deals with by either experience or other readings.

However, what is still unique in this book, in my opinion, is the practical approach to problem solving, with real problem enunciations, and some guidance on why they are difficult to solve depending on the biases or types of languages it may be approached with.

Biases are indeed a major issue that has deep effects on our thinking. Much self-reflection is required on this area, not only because they may be hard to identify – since some biases are very well camouflaged – but also difficult to consistently overcome via conscious control over mental processes.

And, to mention another area I enjoyed reflecting over, alongside this book, is the use of different languages when thinking about problems, which can greatly improve interconnections between different knowledge domains, and increase the chances of creative problem solving.

By the way, creativity is probably the main thread behind it all, for this book. And it is never enough to read and reflect on what can be done to try and simply be more creative.

The most recent edition is reviewed and looks quite fresh, even if the initial text dates back to about 50 years ago. The main topics remain very relevant, though. And this is a great reading to help reflecting over them.

The Innovator's Dilemma

This book is a classic one, and I have known its core arguments for a long time. But just now I’ve gone through it all consistently. And The Innovator's Dilemma (Clayton M. Christensen, 2011, 336 pages) does not disappoint.

The main dilemma in the book revolves around the question as of why well-managed firms, with lots of available resources and know-how, fail in the marketplace. It may not seem so, but many companies in this category indeed fail.

When looking at the data for companies and market distribution over a few decades, comprising a period in which several generations of products (and companies) had entered (and left) the disk-drive market, from around the 1960’s to the 1990’s, Clayton found information that did not fit any previous explanatory models.

At the core, the most intriguing fact was that most companies that failed actually had great management, which did apparently a great job. They listened carefully to their customers, invested in improving the quality of their products on the precise metrics that their customers required, and even invested on new generations of products that in some cases were perfectly compatible with the new generation of technology that eventually put them out of business.

The problem is that their organizations grew accustomed with their marked situation. They got used to deliver on market segments that were the most lucrative, and typically their clients never asked for new generation of products until it was too late.

The dilemma here is that “disruptive innovations” are not a technological challenge to incumbents. They are a marketing challenge. Firstly, because the marked leaders grow used to good margins in their operations, and natually search for even higher (premium) tiers of the market, whenever possible. While technologically disruptive products typically start on lower tiers, and typically do not satisfy the main requirements of the majority of users. Often, however, despite being initially simpler and cheaper, they eventually catch-up on different quality metrics to be “good enough” to conquer new market segments.

Secondly, and related, it is organizationally almost impossible to get collaborators excited around new ideas when they seem to point to currently smaller or inexistent market segments, with lower potential revenue. Even when mid-managers get a mandate to invest on the “new wave”, resources in practice are sucked up into those parts of operations that “pay the bills”.

The solution to the dilemma? In short, creating a separate organization, with a cost structure that matches the new market, and whose people can get excited with the lower monetary value of orders they can obtain. The challenge here is to find new markets that also get excited with at least one of the new properties of this new product that is not yet good enough to serve the majority of the users in existing markets.

One of the aspects I like the most in the book is that it dialogues with my preferred book on innovative products: Crossing the Chasm. The chasm approaches the same problem from the perspective of the new users' profiles for a new product (innovators, early adopters, early majority, etc.), while here the same market evolution is seen from the perspective of existing companies serving current clients before and during the unfolding of a new technology wave.

The 48 Laws of Power

I’ve recently concluded the book The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene, 452 pages). It was an interesting reading, and one can easily see why it is a bestseller.

To start with, this is not an average book, in the sense that it does not appeal to good moral principles and politically correct arguments. It’s almost the opposite. The author argues that power struggle is an essential part of the human experience. No way around it. Therefore, one must study examples of the past, in situations that can allow us to understand how some people acquired and maintained positions of power over their pairs.

Of course, the main assumption behind the book – that power struggle is always innevitable – can be discussed. Since most of the examples used draw on historical figures and events happening typically centuries ago, one must argue that we currently are much better than that, in our (mostly) democratic world, where old courts almost ceased to exist, or do not exert much power anymore, for those that survived.

However, it is also true that there is a multitude of organizations out there nowadays which, being for profit or not, are mostly controlled by a small number of persons. So that the courtisan experience is still a valid source of inspiration for those aiming at raising the ranks inside different organizations.

In any case, I enjoyed the book because of its historical examples, which I found mostly entertaining. In addition, it is clear that one cannot make «laws» out from few examples. At least not when we think rationally about it. And it is also the case that some of the book «laws» actually contradict others. Nevertheless, I still found the text convincing and interesting to follow.

To conclude, this is a recommendable book, that can be amusing either you take it seriously or just as anecdotal way of looking at some human interactions and disputes we all can relate to.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

I concluded recently Why Nations Fail (Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson). And it was an incredibly rewarding experience.

To be fair, I didn’t like much the beginning of the book. The contrasts presented between two cities across the boarder between the US and Mexico seemed more like a caricature of the reality, and perhaps a bit exaggerated, although certainly factually correct.

After that, though, the authors go through several other countries and regions of the world, with a plethora of interesting facts and historical pieces of information that just make their points very clear and their explicative model very plausible.

In short, the book claims that the degree of development of a nation corresponds to the levels of political and economic openness and general participation. And here the institutions of a country play an important role. There are namely inflection historical points that can change the structures of governing, and there is organizational drift that makes institutions “float” on the direction of more openness and development, or more concentration of power and inequalities.

Although the main argument may seem not very original, the book is very solid in giving various examples of how this dynamic took place in reality. And it also convincingly explains how development under concentrated pollical and economical institutions is actually possible, although not sustainable, when for example resources in society are reorganized from activities with lower productivity to others with high higher added value.

In short, this book is really interesting and it can be an important piece in composing the mosaic of knowledge we all should have about the reasons behind the levels of success in different parts of the world today.

Design Patterns

Reading technical books on the field in which I have concluded my formal education for more than 15 years ago has turned out to be a super interesting exercise. It brings the possibility of learning new things, while allowing me to reflect on my own professional experience on real-life projects. The most recent of those readings is the book Design Patterns (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides, 416 pages).

What’s so interesting about this book is that it is a classic, and to some extent its content is almost commonplace between experienced programmers. I found myself before using multiple times many of the design patterns described in the book. However, the experience of reading the book from cover to cover is still extremely useful, I would say even for experienced engineers.

The idea of documenting design patterns, as the authors say, was inspired by something done on the Architectural field of knowledge, which saw similar descriptions for the design of doors, windows, buildings, etc. As much of innovation otherwise, the idea of applying the same approach to object oriented design turned out to be extremely well succeeded.

There is in general a great benefit in, first of all, learning from some of the best design approaches, which more often than not are result of multiple attempts and refactoring rounds. This is the type of distilled knowledge that can lift younger engineers to the a level of understanding that could otherwise require years of experience to achieve.

In addition, the vocabulary and concepts introduced and popularized by this seminal book brought up a common language that allows engineers to discuss design approaches on a dimension that can go on in parallel with the application domain of knowledge. That is a powerful way of designing better applications, across the board.

Despite having being originally published almost 30 years ago, it is easy to spot how important the concepts introduced by this the book still are for today’s software development practices. An evidence of its relevance is the fact that several of the patterns have made their way into modern programming languages and some of their basic data types. For example, events (Observer), enumerators (Iterator), and command interfaces (Command) are at the fingertips of those using a modern language like C#, in the .NET world, which was first launched in the beginning of the 2000’s, and therefore many years after the first release of the book that came out in 1994.

To conclude, reading and re-reading this book is highly recommendable to anyone interested in refreshing or deepening his or her skills on and possibilities as a object-oriented systems designer.

Sapiens

I concluded today Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind (Yuval Noah Harari, 2015, 464 pages).

This is for sure one of the most thought-provoking books I have ever read.

The breadth and depth of topics covered is staggering. It goes through millions of years, and evolution theory and history, to chemistry, biology, religion, epistemology, economy, philosophy, etc. All together. All with a common thread and meaningful context. 

 

Absolutely impressive. 

 

Of course, the book is very ambitions, starting from the title. But it does deliver on it! 

 

And the language style used could hardly be any better. Not superior, not banal. I think it just suits the tone and the approach by the author. 

 

If there is one critical aspect about it, though, it is due to the very fact that too many scientific fields are covered. Yuval is definitely gifted, and seems to have absolutely control over most topics. At the same time, and I think he himself would agree, he is not an expert in many of these fields. Which may have caused some interpretation errors here and there, and which we, as readers, may also fall into, alongside with the author. 

 

I noticed it, for example, in one of the final chapters when he talks about software virus, in an analogy with real virus, including their potential to mutation, when transferring from one machine to the next. As a computer scientist myself, I understand this scenario as very little likely. If possible at all. 

 

Nevertheless, I think these situations do not take the huge value the book brings. It definitely bears all signs of good science, in a breathtaking and well succeeded account for us human beings and our history.