John’s Blog

I’ve been posting a bunch of books on my blog today — I think I’ve finally cleared out the queue — and want to start writing a bit of personal reflection about my life in 2005 — but first I want to revisit my reading list for the year and make some recommendations. I don’t really want to do a top 10 list, so instead what I’ll do is go through the 80-ish books that I read in 2005 and put down the ones that I think are really, really worth picking up and reading.

– “Kafka on the Shore” (Haruki Murakami) — one of my 3 favorite authors

– “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6)” (J.K. Rowling) — these books are just consistently amazing & fun to me

– “No Country for Old Men” (Cormac Mccarthy) — fantastic novel about running for (away from) your life

– “John Adams” (David McCullough) — everything that history should be

– “Regional Advantage : Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128” (AnnaLee Saxenian) — great book about the difference between Silicon Valley & Route 128

– “Things Fall Apart: A Novel” (Chinua Achebe) — takes me back to Civ from freshman year

– “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda” (Philip Gourevitch) — everyone should read this.

– “Cat’s Cradle” (Kurt Vonnegut) — one of my all time favorites. Won’t be the last time I re-read it.

– “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” (Jonathan Safran Foer) — sort of about 9/11. Foer is an amazing talent.

– “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture” (John Battelle) — not fabulously written, but important background for what’s happening in tech today

There were a bunch of others that were great, but these are the ones that stand out for me. Next up, I think I’m going to read a short history of California, by Kevin Starr, and “The Brief History of the Dead : A novel” (Kevin Brockmeier)“, a novel that Mom sent.

Other tidbits: my very favorite album of the year is “Amos Lee” (Amos Lee). Runners-up are “American Idiot” (Green Day) and “In Between Dreams” (Jack Johnson).

And television is just too giant to get into in a posting like this, but to name just a few fantastic shows: Arrested Development, Entourage, Deadwood, The Wire, Rome, Lost, Extras.

Best podcast, far & away: the Ricky Gervais show. Man, that guy is awesome.

Anyway, out with the old, in with the new. Happy 2006 in books, music & television to everyone.

This is a fun book that tells the backstory of the Wicked Witch of the West. But not as fun as it should be, honestly. Very creative about the politics & interactions of Oz leading up to Dorothy’s arrival, but ultimately not all that gripping. I think I’ll try to read another of Maguire’s books — probably Mirror Mirror — and see how that one is. I’m betting the musical is a lot more fun & interesting.

Terrific, terrific book. Well written, fast-paced, thought-provoking. But not for the faint-hearted. It’s a very hard-edged story (think of the movie “Unforgiven”) about a series of crimes in West Texas (think of the movie “Lone Star”). But not a book for people who want things that are neat, or have clear moral lessons, or are even just a little on the positive side.

While on the surface this is a crime novel about a drug deal gone bad on the border between Texas & Mexico, that’s really just a device — what McCarthy does in this book is to take a few of his characters’ lives and strip everything away — home, family, work — all their context, really — and uses that technique to really look into what makes up a person’s life. What defines each of us? Is it what we’re willing to give up? Is it the things that we did yesterday?

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about this book over the past few days — I could write a lot more but don’t want to ruin it for anyone. Would love to talk about it sometime with someone else who’s read it.

It’s been a while since I really wanted to read a book by Geoff Moore — living in Silicon Valley, it’s easy to get a little jaded about his chasm or tornado or main street mixed metaphors, as useful and widespread as they are (and they are very useful ideas). This book I found super-interesting, at least the first 100 pages or so — it’s about innovation — what it’s for, when it’s appropriate, and how to try to get it if you want it.

Like most of Moore’s stuff, I net this book out with 2 important ideas that I’ve applied to things over the past few weeks. The first is core v context: what differentiates your company/product is core; everything else is context. While you may have some very important context (getting maintenance releases out, billing in a timely way, whatever), you’ll never win because of great context (although you could lose because of bad context). Core is what matters most. So always look for ways and be structured about taking resources away from context (assuming you’re not creating bad context) and moving them to core activities.

The second idea is that innovation is never the right thing to do for innovation’s sake (I worked in Apple’s research labs, so understand this idea very well). He posits that innovation has 4 potential outcomes: differentiation (enabling pricing power), neutralization (getting to parity with your competitors’ features), productivity (reducing production cost), and waste (often this is the main outcome).

Anyway, it’s a book worth reading for anyone who’s thinking much about how to make sure your company (at any stage) innovates in appropriate & productive ways.

(Just came out on 12/29, but I’ve had an advance copy for a few months.)