Last Updated: 2024-03-16
This is a page (that will be updated regularly) of books that I’ve read (and at least partially recommend) on how to do good in the world. While there may be some books that stray into the philosophical and ethical, most of them will be concerned more with the “how” than the “why”. Most of the books on list list I can’t recommend in my general reading list as they are audience/intent specific, but for me, reading them has been an essential part of my work.
Invention and Innovation: A History of Hype and Failure by Vaclav Smil
Smil explores (through detailed historical anecdote) our tendency to overestimate the impact and benefit of the new. I have a difficult time recommending this book wholesale as I think the main argument of the book isn’t necessarily proven (in a logical sense) by the 9 primary examples carefully selected and exposited by the author, but the awareness of constraints and nuance that he brings are most certainly useful. Some of the main ideas from the book:
- Naive belief that all of our problems will be solved by a miracle technology in the next 10, 20, or 50 years typically ignores fundamental physical constraints, the cost and complexity of engineering after a fundamental discovery, the history of work on the problem already, and the economic and political realities the prospective technology will interact with.
- In the case of climate change, in particular, the decarbonization goals set by the UN (and its member countries) are optimistic indpendent of the availability of new inventions. As an example, electrifying transportation by the dates set will require more electric vehicles to be produced each year than all combined vehicle production in any year prior.
- Many hard problems require holistic solutions, involving collective changes in more than one area.
- Even incredible advances in computational technology and AI don’t trivialize problems bound by physical constraints - e.g. the search for better refrigerants, where nearly all feasible molecules have been explored, or in-air transportation speeds, where speed and efficiency are directly at odds.
- Real tradeoffs between different forms of wellbeing among different people have to be navigated, and industrial-scale mass-application of technologies often have unintended consequences, sometimes both long-lasting and undetectable for a very long time.
- We tend to overstate the significance of individual discoveries.
I don’t agree with all of the conclusions Smil draws, but I find his sober (and counter-culturally concrete) evaluation of technological progress to be quite helpful in rebalancing my expectations for the future.
The Power to Get Things Done (Whether You Feel Like It or Not) by Seve Levinson, PhD, and Chris Cooper
This is more or less a self-help book focused on “Follow-Through”, but is informed by both a clinical and consulting background. The punchline of the book is essentially that motivation is temporary and unreliable, so it’s important to use moments of motivation to change your future circumstances so that you’ll do the right thing when the time comes. One of my favorite examples from the book was a business executive who hated going to the gym, so he decided to keep his deodorant in his rented gym locker. Not having any at home, he would have to physically go to the gym before work anyway or risk the embarrassment of growing smelly. Leveraging your weak motivation into greater follow-through requires some creativity and self-knowledge, but common strategies include involving other people, creating consequences (social or practical), making non-compliance impossible (and removing temptations), and replacing “achievement” goals with “showing up” goals.
In the context of doing good, my main takeaway is that there’s strong evidence from psychological research that my good intentions won’t result in doing good. I can’t personally conceive of the true magnitude of the problems we’re tackling — who can imagine millions of people suffering in a way that’s truly more felt than the suffering of one person that you know well? So I need to use my rare rational and sober-minded moments to trick, coerce, and manipulate my future self into doing the right thing by making it near-impossible for my future self to do otherwise.
Business, Entrepreneurship, and Management
This subsection is specifically on books that relate to starting, growing, and managing organizations. Organizations are powerful tools for increasing the scale of impact.
Zero to One by Peter Thiel
Peter presents his philosophy on what makes a good startup. Highly impactful startups are those that create something new (the number existing goes from “zero to one”), as opposed to those that repeat and refine what has come before (“one to many”). Starting a business is hard, and there’s more implicit competition for money, time, and attention than we realize. Startups shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that a highly targeted and untapped market exists, and should explicitly focus in on a niche where they can provide a solution that’s at least 10x better than anything already available. A good indicator of a startup’s likelihood of success is its “monopoly potential”. Is there a reason why the company might be the “last mover” in a field? (Note: Peter interprets monopoly more generally/pragmatically than in legal practice. To him, Google has a monopoly on search, for example, despite the existence of plausible alternatives.) Peter suggests that the amount of value created and the proportion of that value captured by a company are largely independent. He argues that the greatest value is in creating new markets, which is also where the largest percentage of the created value can be captured (because it isn’t driven down by competition).
Peter also offers some practical wisdom on getting started. Founding teams matter in terms of their expertise, but even more so in terms of their ability to collaborate productively. Compensation and incentives need to induce long-term values alignment. The startup needs to view hiring as a core competency (it shouldn’t be outsourced), and needs to have a compelling reason for talented individuals to pass up higher-compensation opportunities. The company should outsource activities that are not central to its 10x advantage.
While I don’t think Peter’s rules have to be hard and fast, the premise that enduring companies start by rapidly capturing a niche market with a 10x advantage is a useful prioritization mechanism over possible directions and ideas. But this is only helpful to the extent that the identified niche can be reliably targeted and scalably serviced.
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
I was put off from reading this book for many years by people who misquoted and apparently misunderstood its primary message. The book is old enough (published 2011) and influential enough that many of its ideas have become quite widespread, at least as memetic touchpoints. As far as I can tell, Eric coined the term “pivot” in the context of entrepreneurial strategy, popularized the idea of “validating” testable business “hypotheses”, and popularized the idea of a “minimum viable product”. A great irony is that Eric (who is an engineer, and suggests applying the engine of science to discovery of viable businesses) has had his ideas misrepresented by a great number of people without scientific training who use the vocabulary of science, but not its substance. (This is ironic because he explicitly warns against the development of an entrepreneurial pseudoscience near the end of his book.) When I finally got around to actually reading the book, it was revelatory.
The title of the book comes from the inspiration that he drew from Lean Manufacturing (initially driven by innovation at Toyota) in creating organizations that could rapidly discover a viable business under conditions of extreme uncertainty. He posits that for a startup, the primary measure of progress should be validated learning (the development of a theory about the customers, product, and market at large that inform testable improvements to the business), and he speaks against the procedural waste of working very hard to ultimately deliver a failing product. (A common misconception is that “lean” refers to the startup’s finances, not its production. The book is in fact, about minimizing wasted business development effort.)
Eric posits that every viable business is based on at least two premises (“hypotheses”). The value hypothesis is a prediction about a kind of product/service/activity/result that will be perceived as valuable by customers. The growth hypothesis is a prediction about a mechanism by which the number of customers engaging with the business will grow. The goal of a startup should be to develop validated theories for each of these questions by experimentally invalidating key assumptions as quickly as possible. Eric elaborates on key processes that help accelerate the “Build-Measure-Learn” cycle, allowing faster end-to-end learning on statistical samples of real customers, measuring real behavior.
One of the most valuable parts of the book was Eric’s elaboration on effective metrics for testing growth hypotheses. He identifies three kinds of business-driven growth: sticky, where users accumulate because they stay a long time, and where cohort-based retention/churn metrics are the most meaningful; viral, where the product itself drives engagement of new users, and where the “infection rate” is the key thing to measure; and paid, where revenue is spent directly on acquiring new customers, and where the cost of acquiring a customer is the key metric. The sticky/viral/paid ontology is artificial and imperfect — most businesses are composites — but the question of whether growth is being primarily driven by current users, the product, or revenue is very helpful in identifying which growth metrics should be prioritized.
For those new to Lean methods (or those with only secondhand exposure) - the illustrative analogies to other business types will also be very helpful. It is easy for individuals to feel they are being productive when they are engaging in their (individually) highest-value activity. But this leads to unseen or unowned waste (e.g. unusable inventory, engineering of products no one will buy). It’s critical to reorient teams around organizational success metrics that prioritize total system performance.
The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
The Goal is a business fable that focuses on the application of lean processes to modern manufacturing. After reading the Lean Startup, this (and the included article at the end, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants”) gave me a much deeper understanding of the principles motivating lean system design. Where before, Kanban-based agile task planning (controlling the amount of “inventory” at any stage of completion) was incomprehensible to me, I now have a lot of clarity around when it is and isn’t beneficial and what problem it’s trying to solve.
Some of the big ideas of the book are that the thing that matters (the goal) should be defined at the whole system level, and often requires sacrificing the “efficiency” of system subparts. This is very counterintuitive to people whose view is on an individual component of the system (say a component, machine, worker, member, or employee). In fact, overproduction of non-rate-limiting parts (or completion of unnecessary tasks) is not just a form of waste, but often counterproductive (backlog build-up and resource activation slow down production along the critical path). The book explores a number of concepts and techniques that are abstract enough to be applied to a wide variety of operational tasks. Another major counterintuitive insight is that optimizing for throughput, or flow (minimizing total per-task production time) is generally much better for a business’ bottom line than focusing on operational cost savings.
When I think about how these lessons apply to education, I think there is a deep perspective shift that could unlock significant gains, but the lessons are difficult to apply as the relative complexity and ambiguity are much higher than in traditional manufacturing. To start with, what if the goal were to maximize throughput (say, end-to-end how quickly students mastered their defined curriculum) rather than to minimize operating costs (maximize learning per dollar spent)? This would be a major cultural shift for US Public Education and would require better ways of certifying educational completion (e.g. a more socially-promoted GED).
Maybe at some point I’ll update this post or my book with some follow-up thoughts on the implications.
$100M Offers by Alex Hormozi
This book doesn’t use tactful language, but it does present a useful abstraction over sales and consumer decision-making. Alex claims that the value consumers attribute to an offering is driven by four factors:
- The Dream Outcome (/Current Pain) - What is the gap (and how clearly envisioned is it) between the customer’s current reality and their end goal? The bigger the problem you solve, the more valuable the solution. Framing affects the value proposition a lot.
- The Perceived Likelihood of Achievement - How confident is the customer that your solution will actually solve their problem? This is an especially important factor for startups, as they usually have low brand credibility, but they can improve purchase confidence by demonstrating evidence of past success, giving customers trials, and by offering guarantees.
- The Perceived Time Delay between Start and Achievement - People value immediacy, often disproportionately. This also plays into the factor above and below.
- The Perceived Effort and Sacrifice - Outside of the financial cost, there’s the effort of learning how to use the solution, the potential changes that will have to be made as a consequence of the solution, and the ongoing effort that remains. Streamlining purchase and onboarding processes has an enormous impact on the attractiveness of an offering.
Notably, these four factors are all primarily perceptual (although they are hopefully based on real considerations), and startups tend to overindex on just one or two of these dials, missing opportunities to capture more of the real value they are offering.
Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal (with Tantum Collins, Chris Fussell, and David Silverman)
Stan McChrystal was the director of the US Special Task Force in the war on Al Queda in Iraq (AQI), and relates how the task force was transformed over the course of the war from a siloed organization overindexing on individual efficiencies to a responsive organization that optimized for end-to-end organizational efficacy. While the context of the war was illuminating (I was too young to know much about it when it was happening), the lessons for management tie in quite nicely with the takeaways from The Goal and The Lean Startup.
For a military organization, success isn’t measured directly in fiscal sustainability, but there is a regular operational cadence (Find a target, Fix its location, Finish, Exploit for intelligence, and Analyze to find new targets). In the early stages of the war, the siloed constituent organizations in the task force worked efficiently as isolated teams, but long or missed handoffs between teams, misaligned strategic priorities, and internal fragmentation of knowledge led to many missed opportunities and overlong cycle times, meaning that once a target in the terrorist network had been caputured, intelligence gathered from them was often no longer useful by the time it made it through the organization.
Similar to The Goal and The Lean Startup, a major theme is that organizations where individuals optimize for their own “efficiency” or “productivity” often lead to massive waste at an organizational level. If we think about the unutilized intelligence of the task force as inventory, and take The Goal’s target of maximizing throughput, organizational efficiency is all about minimizing the time between when intelligence is first collected and when it culminates in gathering more intelligence.
General McChrystal identifies two major thrusts that transformed the task force and led to a more than 17x increase in organizational throughput. The first was creating a “shared consciousness” — aggressively aggregating and sharing knowledge across the organization, redesigning physical spaces to encourage communication and transparency, and creating extensive rotational liaison programs to improve inter-team trust and functional understanding. The second major thrust was to empower distributed decision-making, reducing communication overhead and eliminating bottlenecks on in-situ responsiveness. McChrystal frames this as a major challenge to leadership to shift from being heroes to being gardeners. Where Taylor, Ford, and other business pioneers found system-level efficiencies by standardizing repetitive processes, many modern problems are now made difficult by their dynamism. It is responsiveness (or agility), not single-task efficiency, that determines the success of many modern organizations.