291–300 of 454 posts
"Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed" by Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos. Details, among other things, the engineering challenges faced during the development of the F-117 Nighthawk and the SR-71 Blackbird.
"The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York" by Robert Caro This is an incredibly long biography of a man who figured out how to build an urban empire. While he wasn't an "entrepreneur" per se, he figured out how to generate huge amounts of revenue via tolls/bridges, how to manage and manipulate public policy, and how to attract the best urban planning talent. ... and you can then read about how it all f…
Reading some of these books recommended here, perhaps the most shocking thing is that so much is due to randomness: an arbitrary person does something small that turns out to be on the critical path, and without it the big thing would not get completed. I like the kind of books recommended here, but please be aware of survivor's bias (there not many books about failures! Any great recommendations? "How we could NOT g…
I have a contrary opinion: most important things are started by apparently small things, but there is a huge amount of training, effort and persistence behind getting to that small thing. Zuckerberg was a serial entrepreneur who already made a few successful websites/apps before Facebook, Nvidia spent decades becoming the world's best GPU manufacturer (when they started there were ~300 graphics processor companies),…
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Perhaps not, but I think you can be "very successful" while remaining ethical. Most people want to be successful because success brings happiness. But there is a level of success at which happiness starts to plateau and yields diminishing returns of happiness.
Thank you for saying that. I get low-level irritated at the constant background murmur that success means that you had to screw someone over at some point.
How many Billion dollar businesses can we name that are run ethically? Not that many, correct me if I am wrong. I suppose at some level, profit and monopoly becomes the one and only motivation. Plus if you didn’t do shady stuff, your competitors surely would, putting you at a disadvantage.
Why else would Google drop “don’t do evil” from their principles?
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/574979/changing-how-...
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Shackleton and his crew became something of a hero of mine after I read South and Endurance. Less so frok.a masculine perspective, but more of a fortitude thing. There is a certain triumph felt when we persevere through impossible odds, and ever since I've been attracted to a genre of stories that I loosely label as "Frozen Thrillers," where humans just have to deal with bad things happening in cold unforgiving envir…
If you liked that, you should read "Empire of Ice and Stone" by Budy Levy which was about an Arctic expedition. It's a good read from a leadership perspective. The "leader" of the expedition (Vilhjalmur Stefansson) abandoned his crew in the middle of the frozen arctic seas and went off the hunt caribou and meet his secret inuit wife. The book portrays him as being completely irresponsible and interested only his own…
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Shackleton and his crew became something of a hero of mine after I read South and Endurance. Less so frok.a masculine perspective, but more of a fortitude thing. There is a certain triumph felt when we persevere through impossible odds, and ever since I've been attracted to a genre of stories that I loosely label as "Frozen Thrillers," where humans just have to deal with bad things happening in cold unforgiving envir…
I am reading a book about it right now and as I learn more it seems too crazy and unbelievable to sustain (and im quite gullible person), especially part about living on full ocean in small boats with no food, water and heat, in extreme cold, still travelling those 100s of kilometers.
"Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed" by Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos. Details, among other things, the engineering challenges faced during the development of the F-117 Nighthawk and the SR-71 Blackbird.