Knowledge that impressed me

Transcript

1. Knowledge that impressed me Ivan Vaganov “You ever listen to K-Billy's Super Sounds of the Seventies" weekend? It's my personal favorite” ©
2. What’s inside Here is a list of my favorite books, articles and links. It took me a while to find these sources, and I thought you might like to check it out – maybe there is something interesting here for you too! I've included only references that are not well known and left out popular and "mainstream" materials.
3. It takes time and specific strategies to find nuggets Good books are like good wine • If you come across references to a book from the 1950s, most probably it is good wine. The "perfect storm" of marketing • The "perfect storm" of marketing keeps recently published books afloat while drowning older books into obscurity. • 99% of information is just noise. • It is hard to find knowledge that has personal value. One book – one thought • Many books today contain only one thought¸ sweetened with thousands of examples. • It is easy to market, it is easy to sell, but it is hard to find value in such books. Strategies that help to find good wine: GetAbstract.com. Website that offers 5-page summary. I read 50 summaries, select and buy 1-3 books. Wikipedia. It has categories “business literature”, etc. Excel file. It is used to save info about books, articles and speeches that were advised.
4. Instead of intro: speeches from YouTube (1/2) • LINK - Course on model thinking. Takes a lot of time to go through the course. However, the author does an amazing job of introducing a lot of models. He teaches how to apply models during decision making. • LINK - Shumeet Banerji, CEO, Booz & Company. Geopolitics and life wisdom for those who start their career. • LINK - Jamie Dimon: Address to HBS MBA Class of 2009, head of JP Morgan. Advices for graduating students. • LINK - Warren Buffett speaks to UGA students. • LINK - Wells Fargo CEO: "What I've Learned Since Business School". Head of a huge American bank shares some wisdom. • LINK - Carol Dweck On Being Perfect. Long lecture on education strategies and personality types.
5. Instead of intro: speeches from YouTube (2/2) • LINK - Top 10 mistakes in your twenties. • LINK - Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory. • LINK – Dominic Barton, Global Managing Director of McKinsey. • LINK - Dominic Barton, Director of McKinsey. Commencement Speech YSB. • LINK - Boardroom Insights - Dennis Nally, Head of PwC. • LINK - Steve Ellis, Bain & Company – speech in Haas School. • LINK - Charlie Munger Speech at USC (for graduating students). He is a business partner of Warren Buffet. • LINK - The Psychology of Human Misjudgement, Charlie Munger (business partner of Warren Buffet). Great speech for those who are interested in the topic. Great insights into securities trading.
6. Books on business • "Up the Organization!" by Robert Townsend – handbook on agile business, written in 1970. Fun to read, a lot of advice that is relevant to the 21 century mixed with the flavor of the 70s: “when your secretary brings you your morning coffee…” • Managing the Professional Service Firm – an encyclopedia of business consulting, written by a person who was consulting consulting firms (no typo here). • Zero to one – wisdom from the PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel. The book is based on lectures he gave at Stanford. • Warren Buffett’s letters to shareholders, especially from 2008. “Dear all, the global economy is going to hell, but we have outstanding profits again – as we've had every year for the last 40 years”. • Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. “Ideological superstructure of capitalism”, as Marx would say. • Chasing Daylight by former CEO of KPMG. The author was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor, he describes how he spent the last 3 months of his life. • Inside Coca-Cola. Autobiography by the CEO of Coca-Cola. After he was elected as the CEO of Coca-Cola, he had to apply for a US work permit: “why do you think you fit this position?” “I don’t know, ask the shareholders. Please look more carefully – I am the CEO of Coca-Cola, not a taxi driver”. • Liar's Poker – autobiography and stories about the financial trading in late 80s. “let’s bet $1m that the dollar bill in your wallet ends with an odd number”.
7. Books on communication and psychology • Getting to Yes – the essence of formal negotiations. • Notes from Underground by Dostoevski. Heavy and scary. • The Double by Dostoevski. Heavy and scary. • Structure and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups by Eric Berne. • The Search for Existential Identity: Patient-Therapist Dialogues in Humanistic Psychotherapy by James Bugental, 1976. Goes wonderful in audio version. • On becoming a person: A therapist's view of psychotherapy by Carl Rogers, 1961. Rogers had great influence on the cultural revolution in the US in the 60s.
8. Books on philosophy • 101 Zen Stories, 1919. Compilation of Zen koans. If you dream that you are butterfly, how can you be sure that you are not a dreaming butterfly? • The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy. • Tao Te Ching. “The knowledge which can be expressed is not the ultimate knowledge”. • The Water tower by Viktor Pelevin. A person's life is just a sentence - with some complicated grammar. • The Future of an Illusion by S. Freud. • Karate-do, My Way of Life by Gichin Funakoshi – autobiography by the founder of Karate. A fight that you have avoided is a fight that you have won.
9. Amazing articles from Wiki on communication and psychology One way to read them is to print them all out and brutally use a marker pen. Big Five personality traits (!), Fight-or-flight response, Flow (psychology), Mushin, “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”, Environmental enrichment (neural), List of cognitive biases (!), Tend and befriend, Broaden-and-build, Delayed gratification, Defense mechanisms (last part of the article), Experiential avoidance, Self-schema, Amygdala hijack, Memorization, Nootropic, Mentorship (as well as articles Co-counselling MENTOR, eMentors, Maybach Foundation),Emotional competence, Emotional labor, Neuroticism, Neuroplasticity, Flourishing, Distress (medicine), Eustress, Cognitive behavioral therapy, Schema Therapy, Ego depletion, Brain fitness, Memory improvement, Neurobiological effects of physical exercise, Schema (psychology), Work self-efficacy, Positive psychology, Burnout, Workaholic, Self-esteem, Self-efficacy, Locus of control, Openness to experience, Cognitive distortion, Optimism, Business networking, Optimism bias, Memory, Four-sides model (also known as communication square)
10. Additional: movies • Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Documentary about the root causes of the frauds. • Adam's Apples. A skinhead has to join a small Christian community. • The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power . Documentary based on a book that won a Pulitzer Prize. Explains how fights over energy determined the history of the 20th century. • The Method. On communication under tough conditions. • Dead Poets Society. A classic movie about free will. • The Man from Earth. On communication.