Hcmc

** 76th book of 2020: Class struggle isn’t new ** “What was it about these steep, western, water-locked cities, Seattle, Spokane, San Francisco? All three I’d visited, and in all three, the money flowed straight uphill.” The book exudes a bitterness about class society, where at the end of the belle-epoch, “all people, except this rich cream, living and scraping and fighting and dying, and for what, nothing, the cold millions with no chance in this world.” Our protagonists gawk at riding in rather than on the train car, or eating “gnocchi that might have been pinched from the ass of an Italian angel.” Yet beyond the cardboard cutout villain and our protagonist who mainly a narrative camera lens, it felt like the book didn’t have much to say. Even the title is a rehash of old concepts. The 8th century Tang poem comes to mind: 朱门酒肉臭，路有冻死骨: ‘While the poor masses freeze to death outside, the rich let wine and meat putrefy from excess.’ ...

** 77th book of 2020: 5 Dysfunctions of a Framework ** A good framework in business literature can simplify an otherwise complex space, provide predictive power, or shed light on previous experiences from a new perspective. In my 2020 business-lit odyssey (https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6023167-jonathan-mckay?shelf=leadership), I’ve been surprised at just how many frameworks turn out to be useful. Yet despite participating in and supporting many dysfunctional teams, 5 Dysfunctions leaves me struggling to match its rules to reality. ...

75th book of 2020: Lost in Calculations Read through this in one sitting, which was about as long as I think I would be able to suspend my disbelief. The world itself held promise, like a rotary calculator working through a math problem. Every obvious crack in the worldbuilding is addressed by some expository aside. Yet characters are part of worldbuilding, and that’s where things fell apart. The main character was consistently mean, sarcastic and indefatigable. While this is a bold character choice, it strained credulity. The entire school, and premise of the book, is that everybody is playing Queen’s Gambit worthy mental chess with one-another in order to stay alive. There are themes about inequality, but the plot makes me think it should be a book about trauma. If only 50% of the students survive, there are no teachers in order to serve as emotional role models, it feels like the place would turn into hunger games faster than the hunger games themselves.

74th book of 2020: Marches of Folly. The 14th century in Western Europe really drives home the way other civilizations can look down upon western culture. Kingdoms were little more than bickering nobility that scarcely had power outside their own castles. Military campaigns were little more than extended farces, achieving no military objectives. Such campaigns, however, did succeed in pillaging the countryside. Plague was a recurring and devastating phenomenon. Religion was dogmatic and an everyday source of strife. Chivalry was rarely followed, and even when followed, led to disastrous results. Peasants rose up, and were cut down by knights. Military campaigns were planned, only to be blown off course by bickering nobility, poor winds, or the end of the season. ...

** 73rd book of 2020 - 同床异梦 - Same Bed, Different Dreams ** ‘It’s easier to hire an employee than to find a partner.’ Partners in business are a dicey proposition. If you were to ask me to hire employees I couldn’t fire, or bosses that I couldn’t leave, I would simply say ‘no thanks’ and look for the next opportunity. There’s just too much that could go wrong, and I’d prefer to take either complete accountability, or none at all. ...

72nd book of 2020 - Nice Escape. It’s November 3rd, as the American republic follows perilously close to last days of the Roman republic: a contested election, extreme partisanship, and cries of criminality. I’m having flashbacks to 2016 when my candidate didn’t get elected and my girlfriend at the time left without warning. But wait! What is that coming in outside of the object of Jupiter? Surely, just because we can’t explain the strange trajectory or lack of spin that doesn’t mean life… but when the photos come back the evidence is clear. ...

71st book of 2020. ** Tidy History of an Important Story, Perhaps Too Tidy ** The story of Genghis Khan is of course amazing. If I could start over with history, this might be the first story I’d want to learn. Genghis Khan (Temüjin) started as an orphan and a slave, eventually won over his rivals, unified the steppe, then launched a dynasty that over the course of the next 100 years conquered more of humanity than any other. Mongolian steppe culture may be alien, but seems like the nomadic version of many modern successful companies: “they did not find honor in fighting, found honor in winning.” ...

** 70th book of 2020: Generational echoes of neglect. ** Born to parents of the greatest generation, childhood for both my parents was an alternating gauntlet of neglect and criticism. My maternal grandmother suffered severe complications giving birth to my mom, and my paternal grandmother seemed to have an ambivalent view towards child rearing, with both families exhibiting the typical greatest-generation authoritarian parenting style with sporadic criticism, a workaholic patriarch, and a willful ignorance of children’s emotional lives. ...

69th book of 2020: An elegant turd. After being in the business of ‘managing’ for about two years, it feels like I’ve learned enough to write a book. I have the scars, fines, and wrecked relationships, to prove the tuition paid for becoming a better manager. Will Larson takes a similar experience at Uber and in ‘An Elegant Puzzle’ actually turns it into a book. Unfortunately, both Will and I have no business writing so much about a subject we know little about. This isn’t to say that the lessons in the book are wrong, but that they are not presented in a way that is absorbable, or useful to any reader that cannot tie a list of bullet points back to their own experience. The lessons are presented more in a way of ‘here’s how I do things’ without a thoughtful examination of the alternatives and ways in which separate strategies could work. No subject is covered in any reasonable depth, and many of the sections felt like reading a bullet list. The 3 pages spent on what it means to be a PM I found amusing but not informative. The most memorable takeaway I have is that “A deeply flawed system can’t be saved by bandaids, but can easily absorb your happiness to slightly extend its viability.” but you can save yourself a few hours and just read the blog post (https://lethain.com/doing-it-harder-and-hero-programming/) itself. The second most useful takeaway was the list of book and paper recommendations. I plan to go read: The Goal, Accelerate, 5 dysfunctions of a team, and will revisit the list of papers if I become more engineering focused. Yet if the highest recommendation of a book is its bibliography, maybe better to just look elsewhere.

68th book of 2020: We all work on the phoenix Project Using fiction as a means to teach the audience can be dicey, and while part of me wishes there was a non-fiction version of the book, the narrative structure means that it will be hard to forget the simple lessons that the author was trying to imbue. * Brent - The hero who has trouble setting boundaries and inevitably makes themselves the bottleneck for the entire team. I have one on my staff for my real estate company. * Chris - The middle manager who prioritize their own organization goals above top business objectives. I work with these folks every day, and am also at risk of becoming a Chris with my work on metrics in the day job. * Sarah - The nemesis executive that prioritizes personal gain over company objectives, and is able to use personal relationships to subvert standard attempts at process. The plot has all the subtlety of an Ayn Rand novel, but by giving characters arcs that are not impossible, it provides an easy starting point for the key concepts: * Minimize Work in Process - The more work in process the slower everything goes. * Constraint Theory - The system can only move as fast as its weakest link. * Align Services with Business Objectives - Otherwise certain functions will add negative business value. I’ve found myself using the lessons almost immediately, putting Phoenix Project in the company of ‘The Lean Startup’ and ‘High Output Management’.