When More is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession with Economic Efficiency

Roger L. Martin

Reviewed December 31 by Jon. I know Roger and have read much of his work. I've been concerned for a while about American capitalism's singular focus on "shareholder value" which - as Roger argues - translates into a focus on efficiency - at the expense of other things - such as resilience - a point brought into focus by 2020. Roger asserts that we see the world as a normal or Gaussian distribution whereas a singular focus on efficiency drives systems toward a Pareto distribution - which results in a winner-take-all economy. I thought this was an interesting insight - and seems to match reality. Roger says that the singular focus on efficiency is at the root of our challenges. His view is quite similar to that espoused in the Kennedy School course on Leadership for the 21^st Century that I took in 2019 and in Leadership on the Line in that we need to view our challenges as complex adaptive systems rather than one-shot, short-term technical fixes. Roger asserts, as did the course, that we need a learning leadership style to move complex adaptive systems. In contrast to other books about similar topics, Roger goes beyond description and spends over half of the book on prescription - what leaders, educators, politicians, and citizens can do. Overall, I liked this book It is very much in line with my evolving beliefs on the economy and capitalism. It was not complete and did not have any silver bullets but it did add to my undertanding and mental models of what is happening and how to address it. This is exactly what Roger espouses - getting away from rigid ideological models and learning through experimentation and adaptation.

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The Law of Innocence: A Lincoln Lawyer Novel

Michael Connelly

Reviewed December 26 by Jon. This is Mickey Haller book six and it is one of the better ones. Haller is framed for a murder and most of the book takes place in the courtroom with Haller representing himself along with co-counsel and ex-wife Maggie McPhereson. It is a potboiler, keeping the reader on the edge of the seat but, ultimately, through a variety of pot twists, Haller prevails. The book takes place in the Spring of 2020 and Conelley does inject both the emerging Coronavirus and Trump presidency. Very timely. A good holiday read.

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An Eames Primer

Eames Demetrious

Reviewed December 25 by Jon. This is a definitive biography of Charles and Ray Eames, written by ther grandson. It covers both of their lives and I found it fascinating to see how they had interwoven with places we have touched - in particular St. Louis and Cranbrook. I knew some about the Eameses and this book filled in the gaps. They were truly renaissance designers - Charles started as an architect - at Washington University with Charles Hellmuth - one of the founders of HOK (where we both worked), and Ray was a painter. This book gave an overview of their work and lives. It was interesting to see their connections with 20^th century luminaries such as the Saarinens and Bucky Fuller. Well worth reading to learn more aobut this seminal couple in the field of design.

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Fantasyland: How American Went Haywire. A 500-year history.

Kurt Andersen

Reviewed December 23 by Jon. I really liked this book, which I read after Anderson's Evil Geniuses. It has the same dense, engaging, and informative tone as Evil Geniuses and provides some scaffolding to understand the points Anderson was making in Evil Geniuses. Like Evil Geniuses, this is a big, sprawling, and deep book. He starts with the very early American settlers - many of whom came with a religious bent. Anderson maintains that Americans - from the earliest settlers have always engaged in magical thinking - religion, superstition, conspiracies, ... often in contradiction to reason. He asserts that we are now in the thrall of a Fantasy-Indusrial complex which encompasses entertainment, politics, media, religion, ... almost all aspects of society. He asserts that the fantasy-industrial complex creates stories which are counter factual and people can no longer distinguish between fantasy and factual reality. He sees the 60s and 70s as an inflection point where people felt free to invent their own realities. The book was written before the pandemic but after Trump took office. He very much sees poltiics today as in the thrall of the fantasy-industrial complex. If were to write a squeal, I'm sure he'd have lots of evidence from COVID-19. The relationship to Evil Geniuses is that magical thinking around finance and free-market economics was the core premise of Evil Geniuses. I'm currently watching Mad Men and cannot help but think that advertising run amok is the epitome of the fantasy-industrial compelex and has contributed to our inability to distinguish fantasy from reality. This is a long book, but worth the read. Anderson writes in a very absorbing way.

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Thinking In Systems

Daniel Fast

Reviewed December 13 by Jon. This is a disappointing book. I expected it to be about systems and systems thinking and, indeed, the author describes systems thinking, but the book is really a self-help book on thinking - mostly critical thinking. Some useful tools but pretty lightweight, no clear point of view, and not what it purports to be.

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New York Collapse: A Survival Guide to Urban Catastophe

Ubisoft, Melcher Media, Alex Irvine (Warren Merchent)

Reviewed December 6 by Jon. What a presicent book! It is a companion to a 2016 Tom Clancy videogame called The Division. The book is set up as a survivalist guide for what to do when a panedmic hits New York. It describes a deadly pandemic in New Yor spread by dollar bills. The survivalist guide is written by Warren Merchant (a pseudonym for a former governm disaster planning official). The book has been discarded and found by April Kellaher, a 30ish woman in NYC whose husband was a bio-scientist killed for some mysterious reason connected to the pandemic. Her contribution is a series of margin notes follow the lessons in the book and chronicle her struggle to survive in post-pandemic New York. The book also contains a number of "artifacts" such as a map and some posters from the story. I bought this book a couple of years ago - little to expect that NYC and the world would suffer from a pandemic of global proportions, albeit with less systemic level failure than depicted in the book. The book was really enjoyable and informative, too It was produced by Melcher Media who we worked with to produce Autodesk's two books Imagine, Design, Create and The Future of Making. The format was really good and I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

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The Mandibles: A Family 2029-2047

Lionel Schriver

Reviewed December 3 by Jon. This is a book of dystopian fiction that describes the arc of the Mandible family through a currency crisis in the time period described in the title. Unlike most future dystopian fiction, the precipitating crisis is not evironmental, but economic. The story describes the effects of a U.S. soverign debt default on four generations of the prosperous (at least at the start) Mandible family. The book is OK but a bit hard to follow - it has a complex set of characters and sometimes murky story line. It got much better at the end where all US citizens have implanted chips so they can be automatically taxed and the US has become a welfare state - with Nevada succeeding from the union as a free state - with a rugged frontier free market (and tiny state) economy and political structure. The book was interesting but could have been more clearly written.

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Angrynomics

Eric Lonergan and Marc Blythe

Reviewed November 27 by Jon. I bought this book on a lark after reading a Medium article about it. I thought it might be interesting, but I was wrong. It was fascinating. Very clear and lucid. It is one of the best economics books I have read lately, and I read a lot of them. The title of the book hints at one of the core concepts - economics treats people as purely rational beings maximizing their economic well-being, but this does not take into account human nature and emotions. The book is structured as a set of five dialogs between the two authors:

1. Public anger and the energy of tribes. This dialog describes how and why groups of people are angry - and how they use the energy of tribes to amplify that anger.
2. The moral mobs and their handlers. this dialog describes those such as demogogues and political parties who exploit the tribalism described in dialog 1.
3. Macroangrynomics: capitalism as hardware, with crashes, and resets:. They express eras of economics like versions of hardware and software - with inherent bugs and inevitable crashes and resets:
   • 1.0 was liberal capitalism prior to the great depression.
   • 2.0 was Keynesian economics that shifted power to labor.
   • 3.0 was neo liberal capitalism that emerged in the 1970s and shifted power back to asset owners.
   They postulate the various eras as power shifting between asset owners (i.e. financiers) and labor. Altough not a surprise, their lucid treatment of this issue was one of the big insights from the book.
4. Microangrynomics: private stressors, uncertainty and risk. This dialog private anger - expressed as microeconomics of people's individual situations - which amplifies the public anger and makes it personal.
5. Calming the anger: from angrynomics to an economics that works for everyone. This dialog describes potential solutions. I found some fresh thinking, not just old solutions rehashed. I don't know if the are workable but they are plausible.

This books was clearly written before the pandemic, but the authors provided a postscript that acknowledges the pandemic - they feel that the pandemic does not change their observations or solutions - and I agree. This is a popular book, not an academic one. The authors provide an appendix with futher reading to dig in further. Once I started reading this book, I could not put it down. Imagine that, an economics page-turner!

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Promised Land: How the Rise of the Middle Class Transformed America, 1929-1968

David Stebenne

Reviewed November 25 by Jon. Stebenne, an Ohio State University historian, describes the rise of the middle class in American from the New Deal through 1968. He describes how government policy and events such as the great depression and World War II shaped what iwas arguabley a golden age of prosperity, middle class growth, and income equality in the United States. This period also ushered in the beginnings of more equality for women and minorities. Of course, it also failed to address issues such as racism and sowed the seeds for urban sprawl, climate change, and neoliberal economics - all pathologies we are now dealing with. This is a good prelude to Evil Geniuses, which begins in 1970 to describe the rise of a particularly dysfunctional politics rooted in neoliberalism. It is worth reading and provides good context on the New Deal and rise of the middle class in an era that is often looked upon nostalgically, it provides some realism for that era.

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Future Survivor

Deserée Matel-Anderson

Reviewed November 24 by Jon. I met Deserée a few years ago when she was leading FIT - the Field Innovation Team for FEMA. She was trying to bring innovation to disaster recovery and involved some of my team members. This book is part innovation in disaster recovery and part self-help. Deserée outlines a three-step process for innovation under pressure:

1. Determine what you are solving for.
2. Identify who you are focused on and why you are solving this challenge - what are the underlying needs?
3. How -- explore all possible solutions to solve the "challenge" based on what, who, and why.

This is pretty much common sense, but Deserée does a nice job of organizing into a framework. The book is a little lightweight but credible for a first book. I look forward to her nexts one.

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Apocalypse Now: Scene by Scene

John David Ebert

Reviewed November 16 by Jon. This books is pretty much what it purports to be, a scene by scene description of Apocalypse Now. In the beginning the author says he will try to avoid film "theory" in his descriptions. He cannot help himself, though. He puts in lots of allegorial references. I wonder if Coppala thought of all of this literary theory stuff or just wanted to tell a good story. If you ignore the literary theory, the book does do a pretty good scene by scene rcounting of th story. Like The Apocalypse Now Book, Ebert is fascinated with the French plantation scene which was left out of the original movie but added to the 2001 Redux.

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Design Like Apple: Seven Great Principles for Creating Insanely Great Products, Services, and Experiences

John Edson

Reviewed November 11 by Jon. Jon Edson was president of Lunar Designnow McKinsey.com/Design (McKinsey acquired Lunar in 2015) and a graduate and instructor in the Stanford Design Program. This book purports to be about Apple, and it is. It is a well crafted and designed book about general design principles, using Apple and some of Edson's Lunar projects as examples. The book is right down the centerline of the genre expressing how design is important in business. It explains what design is and how it is done, but probably informs designers more than general business people. Here are the principles:

1. Design makes all the difference: Beauty, ingenuity, and charisma create a unique competitive advantage.
2. Design the organization: Nurture taste, talent, and a design culture.
3. The product is the marketing: Great products sell themselves.
4. Design is systems thinking: Product and context are one.
5. Design out loud: Prototype to perfection.
6. Design with conviction: Commit to a unique voice.
7. Design is for people: Connect with your customer.

Overall, a good book that does a good job of laying out key design principles.

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The Apocalypse Now Book: The Making of Francis Ford Coppola's Epic

Peter Cowie

Reviewed November 1 by Jon. Apocalypse Now is my favorite movie. I have never read a book about the making of a movie, and this book was fascinating. It covered the filming in the Phillipines and lot of drama in making the movie. Coppala was only 37 when he made the move - fresh off the making of the Godfather. There was lot of discussion of the material that was not used - although some of it appeared later in the Apocalype Now Redux, which was released in 2001. Overall this was a fascinating view of the making of an iconic film with great behind the scenes color.

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The Wake Up Call: Why The Pandemic Has Exposed The Weakness of The West, and How to Fix it.

John Mickelthwaite and Adrian Wooldridge

Reviewed October 30 by Jon. The Authors are two economist columnists (Mickelthwaite is now with Bloomberg). The book purports to show how the pandemic exposed the weaknesses of the west - that part was actaully a bit weak. The authors are center right in their views and I'm not sure I bought some of their diagnosis. The better part was their presecription. They used the device of "What would Bill Lincoln do" were they made up a politician who was an amalgam of Abraham Lincoln and William Gladstone. Their prescriptions were much more compelling and, in fact, were pretty much center-left. They did want to make government relevant and useful again. Here are their core prescriptions:

1. Build Resilience
2. Protect and Unite
3. Lift the Fog
4. Simplify, Cut, Modernize, Sell
5. Stop Subsidizing the rich and the old
6. A fairer healh care system
7. Educate our Masters.
8. Unleash Technology
9. Go Local
10. Reinvigorate Talent
11. National Service For All
12. Make Government Dowdy
13. Rebuild the West and Expand it

Their message is to make Western government work again - and they seem to advocate government like Singapore's. We could have worse role models!

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Full-Spectrum Thinking: How To Escape Boxes in a Post-Categorical Future

Bob Johansen

Reviewed October 23 by Jon. Bob Johansen is a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for the Future. I know Bob and like his message. He has been instrumental in getting CEOs and other executives to think about the future with a longer focal length and broader perspective. This book is about breaking out of a future steeped in categories and boxes - a topic near and dear to my heart. Bob expresses the notion that we are mired in 20th century slice and dice, divide and conquer models focusing on execution not systems. His posits that this mindset will not serve us well with the more VUCA world we are confronting. Bob spent time at the US Army War College and learned some lessons there - about things like strategic intent and a constant learning mindset as embodied in after-action reviews (he specifically notes that after-action reviews imply learning - while an alternate term "post mortem" does not imply learning). This book is a little lightweight but I like the concepts Bob lays out. It is an easy read - which may make it appealing to those who need to heed his lessons.

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Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History

Kurt Andersen

Reviewed October 17 by Jon. This is a long, sprawling book about the United States from 1970 to now. Andersen claims to be chronicling a threat that is rooted in 60s and 70s culture. I could not find that threat, but the book is illuminating. It starts with Milton Friedman and free market economics creating almost a religious orthodxy around capitalism, then moves on - as a consequence - the the finanicalization of the economy, the rigthward pull on Clinton and Obama, and a critique of conservative politics today. Andersen asserts that the fundamentals of conservative capitalism - unfeettered free markets, limited role for government, and tax cuts for the affluent are not popular. To get people to vote, the conservative intelligensia co-opts social issues - race, abortion, guns - to gain voters. He also describes the roots of the Federalist society and the 30-year conservative quest to pack the court system - including the Supreme Court - with conservative justices - again, because they do not believe long-term they have the popular legistlative votes. There is a lot of intellectual coherence to the book. It does not cover a lot of new material but it is well-written, readable, and comprehensive. Overall I agreed with much of it but, in the spirit of fairness and open-mindedness, have to wonder if it is a left-leaning chronicle of a vast right-wing conspiracy that might be overstated. That said, the book does make sense and its tenents are quite plausible.

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The Bourne Betrayal: A New Jason Bourne Novel

Eric Van Lustbader

Reviewed September 28 by Jon. The Bourne Betrayal is a Robert Ludlum style spy thriller written by Eric Van Lustbader, who is trying to follow in the Ludlum tradition. The book was typical Ludlum with lots of violence and twists and turns of the plot as Bourne tries to thwart an attempt of a terrorist group to obtain and build a nuclear weapon. The book was candy reading. A sugar high and not very fulfilling. OK for what it was -- and Van Lustbader does a pretty faithful job of replicating the Ludlum style -- but I may have outgrown Ludlum.

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Normal: A Novel

Warren Ellis

Reviewed September 25 by Jon. Normal is very short - almsost not a novel but a short story. It is about foresight professionals who look into the future. The author decribes two types - corpore futurists who look at opportunity or ways to evade doom and strategic forecasters - usually in intelligence organizations - who look to prepare society for doom. The book is about a mental institution in Oregon where futurists go after then go insane from thinking about all of the possible bad future outcomes. The book was OK but I found it a little hard to follow. Supposedly there is a sinister plot revealed at the end but I could not find it. Perhaps it is just not my style of writing.

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The Great Rupture, Three Empires, Four Turning Points, and the Future of Humanity

Viktor Shvets

Reviewed September 13 by Jon. Like Yuval Noah Harari, Shvets looks at world history and tries to imagine what our future would be like. He looks at why China, Russia, and the Ottoman empire did not succeed. He basically believes, unlike some others, that societies succeed or fail based on intrinsic factors - such as their institutions, their values, and freedom - and less on extrinsic factors such as geography or natural resources. He has a pretty lucid description of the industrial revolution and how it changed the world and projects forward to the information revolution, which he thinks will change the world more profoundly than the industrial revolution did. A pretty provocative book.

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Dayton: The Rise, Decline, and Transition of an Industrial City

Adam A. Millsap

Reviewed September 7 by Jon. I grew up in Dayton, Ohio so this book was interesting to me. In the early 20th century, Dayton was a font of innovation - primarily serving the auto industry (but don't forget the Wright brothers and NCR). It was a thriving manufacturing city. But though the 20th century Dayton declined. As manufacturing became less important and other places had more appeal, Dayton lost population, revenue, and prestige. Much of the story was familiar to me but it was useful seeing it all put together in a book. The author had a number of recommendations to revitalize Dayton but I fear that none is sufficient to return this once great city to its former glory. I am evidence of what happened to Dayton. I left there right after high school and never returned to live there.

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Make It New: The History of Silicon Valley Design

Barry M. Katz

Reviewed August 31 by Jon. This book is exactly what the title says - a history of Silicon Valley design. More accurately, it is a history of Silicon Valley industrial design. Although at the end it makes passing references to interaction design, service design, and design thinking - it is primarly about giving physical form to technological objects. It was fascinating to see the geneology of design firms, people, and schools in the bay area. I found I knew or knew of many of the players in the book. A fascinating study in how physical design evolved to shape technology. Given the focus on physical form in this book, it almost cries out for a sequel on experience design and systems thinking.

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Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

Mary L. Trump, PhD.

Reviewed August 29 by Jon. Perhaps I am just jaded (or exhausted) from reading too many books about Trump, but the was not a lot of new here. Mary Trump is Donald's niece and writes a history of the Trump family. I got a little insight into the forces that shaped Donald. Donald plays almost a cameo role, showing up frequently as the spoiled bad-boy in the family. No real surprises. The book does give some insight into the Trump family, for what that is worth.

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Film Directing Shot by Shot: Visualizing From Concept to Screen

Steven D. Katz

Reviewed August 19 by Jon. This is a classic on film directing. For some reason, my mental model of directing was that you just point the camera and shoot. Katz changed all of that by going through each type of shot and describing the effect is achieves. I came to appreciate the planning and thought that go into the visual aspect of storytelling by the position and moves of the camera. This was a great introduction to film making and I feel like I have just scratched the surface. The only quibble with the book is that it is a bit old and has some very outdated (and inaccurate) descriptions of computer technology used in filmmaking.

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It Was All A Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

Stuart Stevens

Reviewed August 15 by Jon. Stevens was a former Republican campaign strategist for 25 years. The book is a blistering indictment of the Republican party. To read it, you would think that Stevens is a pretty far left democrat. It is hard to believe that he was/is a republican given some of his views. He clearly covers the racism and dysfunction of the Republican party. He does not think Trump morphed the party to fit his views, but rather that Trump represents what the Republican party has become. Not a lot of surprises in the book, but some insider insight. Again, it is amazing that the author was so deeply involved in the Republican party himself.

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Rethinking Real Estate: A Roadmap to Technology's Impact on the World's Largest Asset Class

Dror Poleg

Reviewed August 10 by Jon. I think this book was written before the COVIC-19 pandemic, but it is even more relevant now. It chronicles technological forces acting upon commercial, residential, and industrial real estate. Real estate is a pretty conservative industry but has the potential of undergoing major disruptions. For example, COVID-19 has made in-person retail less relevant and logistics (warehouses) way more valuable. Many of these changes were well underway before the pandemic, and COVID-19 has accelerated them or, perhaps, been a catalyst for change. The book is written from a real estate perpective, but easily readable. It was not as comprehesnive as I might like - but a good start in laying bare how this part of the economy might be disrupted and reshaped.

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What's Your Problem: To Solve Your Toughest Problem, Change the Problems You Solve

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg

Reviewed August 6 by Jon. This is a "design thinking" book about problem reframing. At first, I thought it a little simplistic, but as I read it, I gained more respect for the topic. Clearly reframing the problem and questioning the problem is a key to coming up with creative solutions. The author prescribes a process and set of techniques for doing so. Overall, this is a useful addition to problem-soliving approaches - making sure you are solving the right problem and framing the problem in a way that yields a good solution.

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Fair Warning

Michael Connelly

Reviewed August 4 by Jon. This is part of Connelly's Jack McEvoy series - which is kind of nice because McEvoy is a character that Connelly does not write about often so he does not suffer from some of the staleness of the Connelly's other characters. McEvoy is a journalist, who - with former girlfriend and FBI agent, Rachel Walling, is trying to solve a series of serial murders by an incel known as the Shrike. There is plenty of action and twists and turns fo the plot. I enjoyed the book and home Connelly keeps the McEvoy character going - altough not so much as to get stale.

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Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths

Reviewed August 4 by Jon. This book is by two computer scientists who cover a variety of computer science concepts - sorting, searching, networking, game theory, caching, scheduling, etc. and try to apply to lessons from everyday life. In some ways it was a trip down memory lane - reminding me of the algorithms and concepts I learned and used in my programming days. It was a good refresher. Where it fell down was in applying them to everyday life. I would have liked to see a more robust discussion and application to everyday problems. The book was interesting but unsatisfying.

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Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals

Saul D. Alinsky

Reviewed July 26 by Jon. This is an old book, which I read long ago. It is the canonic text for community organizers written by a famous Chicago organizer. Although some aspects are dated, there is some classic advice about how to gain the trust and respect of those you are organizing and to act boldly.

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Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World: Ecologies of Change

Ann M. Pendelton-Jullian and John Seeley Brown

Reviewed July 21 by Jon. This book is the third in a series after Pragmatic Innovation and Design Unbound - Volume 1. This continues with design technques to solve unbounded and complex challenges. It includes Worldbuilding and systems approaches. A surprise was a discusion of Stan McChrystal's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) techniques. This was not a recipe book but rather a provocation. It does not show how to but instead gets one thinking about approaches. Like its companion books, it draws heavily from architecture and employes architectural thinking more broadly.

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Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time

Gaia Vince

Reviewed July 19 by Jon. I read this for our team book club. It is basically about how humans evolved and separated ourselves from the other species - first with life, then language - storytelling. It was an OK book but not profound. I liked Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens better. My colleage Scott Sheppard wrote a very complete book review with a lot more detail.

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Best Practices Are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition

Stephen M. Shapiro

Reviewed July 18 by Jon. I loved the title of this book because it articlulates my belief that best practices are not innovation because they dont't create competitive separation. Shapiro did not disappoint. The book has a coherent theory of innovation and competitive separation behind it andhas 40 innovation methods. It is refreshing to see a book about innovation that is actually about innovation and not just innovation theater.

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The World's Greatest Architect: Making, Meaning, and Network Culture

William J. Mitchell

Reviewed July 11 by Jon. This is a collection of 32 short essays by the late William Mitchell - former Dean of MIT School of Architecture and one of the pioneers of computing in architecture. The essays are really about architecture and life. Easy reading and Bill's personality shows through.

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The End of October

Lawrence Wright

Reviewed July 6 by Jon. This was kind of an eerie book to read during a pandemic. It is about, well, a pandemic. It was initially a little chaotic but eventually settled down into a reasonable story. The protagonist is a physician at the CDC. It is a reasonably good story about a pandemic, possibly caused intentionally by the Russians. A good combo of medical and political thriller. Timely, but could have been better written.

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How to Have a Beautiful Mind

Edward de Bono

Reviewed July 4 by Jon. I was attracted to this book because I admire de Bono's thinking. As one of the original thinkers on creativity, I thought he would have something interesting to say. When I first started reading, I was dismayed because the book seemed so simplistic - kind of like How to Win Friends and Influence People. But as I got into the book, it did have more nuanced lessons in how to have a more curious mind and be a good conversationalist. It is not a heavy weight intellectual book, but has lots of practical advice in how to train your mind and conversation to be more effective and "beautiful".

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Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life and Maybe the World

Admiral William H. McRaven

Reviewed July 4 by Jon. This is a tiny little book with some big lessons from McRaven - former head of US Special Ops and Chancellor of the University of Texas. He mostly has lessons from his life as a Navy seal:

1. Start your day with a task completed.
2. You can't go it alone.
3. Only the size of your heart matters.
4. Life's not fair - Drive On!
5. Failure can make you stronger.
6. You must dare greatly
7. Stand up to the bullies.
8. Rise to the occasion.
9. Give people hope.
10. Never, ever quit!.

Simple but powerful!

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The World: A Brief Introduction

Richard Haass

Reviewed July 4 by Jon. Haass is a former diplomat, leading thinker on world affairs and foreign policy, and president of the Council on Foreign Relations. The title accurately describes the book. It is organized into three sections. The first section describes the various regions of the world and their challenges and opportunites. The second describes global challenges from climate change to nuclear proliferation. The third section describes the various mechanisms and instutions used to orchestrate the world. Haass is a member of the foreign policy establishment and this book reflects fairly orthodox views. It does explain our current international system - dating back to the Treaty of Westphalia. Interestingly, a lot of stuff people thing are natural "laws", such as the notion of international sovereignty, are really human constructs. Haass makes a compelling case for knowing about the world and makes foreign policy issues pretty clear and accessible in this book.

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Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy

David Frum

Reviewed June 18 by Jon. Frum is a conservative and was a speechwriter for George W. Bush and author of Trumpocracy. He is a moderate repubican who is dismayed by what he sees in the Trump administration and its takeover of the Republican party. The first part of the book covers Frum's views on the issues, and I found his views surprisingly similar to my own - more conservative but well reasoned and thoughful. He even acknowledged the need to address climate change and environment. The next part of the book was a familiar rant on how unfit Trump is for office and how white nationalist idenity politics took over the Republican Party. Frum even says he wished Hilary had won becuase it would have caused the party to reevaluate itself to try to become more relevant. Finally, Frum describes what he says is an ever-growing group of Republicans who will vote against Trump so they can reclaim the Republican party and get on with remaking conservatism. I hope that is so.

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Conditional Design: An Introduction to Elemental Architecture

Anthony Di Mari

Reviewed June 18, by Jon. This is a companion to Operative Design, with a very similar idea of developong a form generation system. Kind of intellectually interesting, but not sure about the practical application.

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Hawke's Green Beret Survival Manual: Essential Strategies for Shelter and Water, Food and Fire,

Tools and Medicine, Navigation and Signalling, Survival Psychology and Getting out Alive!

Mykel Hawke

Reviewed June 17, by Jon. I really liked this book. It was a comprehensive view of the technical aspects of survival - with a lot of survival psychology. It has a particularly good section on wilderness medicine and the realistic decisions - and their implication - one has to make in a survival medical situation. Probably the best I've read of survival books.

Purchase Hawke's Green Beret Survival Manual from Amazon.com

You're It: Crisis, Change, and How to Lead Whan it Matters Most

Leonard J. Marcus, Eric J. McNulty, Joseph M. Henderson, Barry C. Dorn

Reviewed June 8, by Jon. This is a book on Crisis Management, from the Harvard course on Crisis Management - and drawing upon lessons from Ron Heifetz Leadership on the Line. The book describes adaptive leadership in a crisis situation. It is a reasonable book but not as good as Heifitz original book. It does put leadership into a crisis context - which is pretty adaptive.

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US Army Guerilla Warfare Handbook

Department of the Army

Reviewed June 8, by Jon. This book is just what its title says it is - a handbook for Guerilla Warefare for the US Army. Guerilla warefare is defined as a part of unconventional warefare that helps the local resistance. The book is pretty dry - as it is mostly intended as a field manual for soldiers. Interesting, though to see how the Army thinks about such issues.

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Special Forces Survival Guide: Wilderness Survival Skills From the World's Most Elite Military Units

Chris McNab

Reviewed June 6, by Jon. This is a basic, but comprehenisve wilderness survival guide - similar to several I have read. One nice feature is a number of sidebar columns with tips from specific special forces units on the topic at hands. Very readable and accessible.

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Earth Abides

George R. Stewart

Reviewed June 2, by Jon. I wanted to like this book but it was a stinker. It is about a pandemic. Specifically, the life story of Isherwood Williams - "Ish" - from Berkeley. It is the story of Ish and some survivors after a pandemic. It has kind of a Lord of the Flies kind of character about it. The book is long and tedious with little new insight. Not recommended.

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Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire

Rebecca Henderson

Reviewed May 17, by Jon. I first encountered Rebecca Henderson in 1998 when she was an MIT professor teaching an executive education class on Technology Strategy. She has since moved to Harvard Business School where she teaches operations and strategy. The "world on fire" reference is the book is to climate change. Henderson is a big propoent of corporate social responsibility - refreshing coming from HBS. She claims that the incoming students are driving an interest in corporate social responsibily. The book is well written and follows the new orthodoxy on stakeholder capitalism. There is little new here but I enjoyed reading it. She does, at the end, talk about personal steps to take, which was refreshing.

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The Whole Truth

David Baldacci

Reviewed May 14, by Jon. This is a pretty lightweight thriller about a defense industry mogul trying to create world conflict to juice up his business. He is fought by a shadowy spy figure - like Ludlum character, Shaw, - with dubious origins and employment but good intentions, and an alcoholic Pulitzer winning reporter. This book is listed as Shaw novel #1 so we can expect more similar thrillers from Baldacci with the same character (s).

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Why We're Polarized

Ezra Klein

Reviewed April 29, by Jon. Ezra Klein is a journalist and the founder of VOX. His basic theis is that polarization is a feature, not a bug, of our politics. He posits that we are naturally inclined to organize around identity and parties and the media amplify this tendencies. One interesting fact is tht the parties used to be less polarized and actually moved apart to give people more choice. Like a lot of these kinds of books, the description is better than the prescription - and Klein fully admits this. He does not expect polarization to go away but does have some suggestions - among them being aware of our own tendencies to polarize around identify and the news media to amplify that. He also suggests process changes such as rank-choice voting. Overall a good read which shed some light on the topic.

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Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America

Adam Cohen

Reviewed April 28, by Jon. The fundamental thesis behind Cohen's book is that the Supreme Court - since the end of the Warren supreme court, the court has taken a decidely more conservative stance - often favoring business, the wealthy, and powerful against the poor - thus exacerbating inequality. Cohen tells the history of the court through the lenses of education, campaign finance, democracy, corporations, and criminal justice. He describes each of the justices and key cases. He does build a compelling argument that the court has slanted toward the well financed and well organized and disenfranchised the poor and relatively powerless.

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The Day It Finally Happens: Alien Contact, Dinsaur Parks, Immortal Humans -- and Other Impossible Phenomenon

Mike Pearl

Reviewed April 18, by Jon. Pearl is a Vice Magazine columnist. The book is a series of vignettes about a bunch of improbable phenomenon. Each one starts with a small story, followed by a handicap indicating the likelihood and plausabilty of the event and an explanation of the phenomenon and any science behind it. Not a very serious future forecasting or foresight book but an entertaining one that is well presented and easily digested. I learned some things from reading it.

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The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It.

Robert B. Reich

Reviewed April 14, by Jon. This is the latest in Robert Reich's books about politics, economics, and society. He starts and ends with an open letter to Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who he feels is well-intended but part of the problem. Reich says that the divide today is less about right and left, Republican and Democrat, than about a divide between democracy and oligarchy. He maintains that the American "system" has been captured by the oligarchy. So far so good, I pretty much agree with him. What is lacking in the book is a clear prescription of what to do about it. Reich has done a good job of describing the problem, less so with a prescription of how to fix it.

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A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America

Donald Rucker and Carol Leonnig

Reviewed April 5, by Jon. The authors are with the Washington Post and chronicle the Trump presidency from the begininning to just after the Muller report is released. Like several other books of this type, it offers a depressing view of a corrupt and inept administration and the figure at the head of it. Regrettably, much of what is reported in the book is familiar and depressing. Even more so, now that the country is gripped in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the administration seems to be fumbling its response and leadership. I look forward to reading a similar book, perhaps by the same authors about the administration now, in a unique time in history.

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Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

Paul Krugman

Reviewed April 1, by Jon. I am an avid follower of Paul Krugman. This book is a collection of his New York Times columns. I have probaby read many of the mover the years. What is nice about the book is that he has organized the columns thematically and it is clear that Krugman has a strong, internally consistent point of view on economics, politics, and their interaction. While there was not a lot of new material, it was well organized and structured to provide, what I think, is a very coherent framework to think about economics and politics.

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Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

Dan Heath

Reviewed March 18, by Jon. Dan Heath has written a number of popular books and he takes complex concepts and makes them accessible. Upstream is no different. The subtitle of the book tells the story. It is about problem prevention - which requires systems thinking, anticipation, and working across silos. He has practical advice on upstream thinking as well as a host of examples. Among other things, he notes that problem solving gets rewarded and problem prevention does not. This is a very important and readable book - particularly relevant as I shelter at home to wait out the COVID-19 virus. Well worth the time to read.

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Extreme Economies: Lessons from the World's Limits

Richard Davies

Reviewed March 18, by Jon. Davies wants to teach economic lessons by studying extreme economies - Aceh, Indonesia after the tsunami whiped it out, Kishansa, Zaataei refuge camp in Syria, Glasgow, Akita in Japan, and Tallinn in Estonia -- among other places. The stories are interesting but the economic lessons are murkey. He could have been much clearer in drawing out the economic lessons. I wanted to like this book but it was meh.

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Die Broke: A Radical Four-Part Financial Plan

Stephen M. Pollan and Mark Levine

Reviewed February 25, by Jon. A friend recommended this book to me. It is about the third stage of life we usually refer to as reitrement. The book is in two parts - the first is a litle bombastic but it has four key pieces of advice.

1. Die Broke. End your life with a zero balance. Enjoy using the money you saved. Don't leave it to your kids - it will ruin their lives.
2. Pay Cash. Don't accumulate debt. Know where your money goes. Pay cash when you can.
3. Quit Now. Not necessarily literally but realize that your job is not a growth vehicle or a path to fulfillment. It is a way to get paid.
4. Never Retire. Don't totally stop working but look for a portfolio of projects which might be paid or at least will keep you meaninfully occupied.

Some of the advice is remarkably similar to The 100 Year Life. The second part of the book is a set of short chapters on various aspects of financial and retirement planning. That section is kind of useful but a bit dated since the book was written in 1997. Still useful but check the facts because things have changed.

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The 100 Year Life: Thriving in an age of longevity

Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott

Reviewed February 18, by Jon. The authors posit that our lifespans are getting longer and might be approaching 100 years for those who are just entering the workforce now. With such a surplus of time, we will have to figure out how to use it wisely. Our financial, healthcare, social, and educational systems are not set up to handle such longevity. They are set up for the three traditional phases - education, work, and retirement - but these will become less relevant. They focus on money, health, resilience (the ability to learn new things and adapt), and relationships. Each area has a set of scenarios for fictional characters in different age cohorts. The book is an interesting thought experiment for aging and does bring some new dimensions in beyond traditional money, health, and relationships.

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The Ravens: The True Story of A Secret War in Laos: Vietnam

Christopher Robbins

Reviewed February 10, by Jon. The Ravens is a about the forward air controllers flying Cessna taildraggers based at a secret base called "the alternate" a bit north of Vientiene Laos. The controllers fly low and slow over Laos, find targets, and direct US air power based in Thailand to their targets. This is the book I thought I was reading when I read Secret War in Laos. It is much better and explains the lives and missions of the Ravens who officially did not exist but were instrumental in helping US air power in find targets in Laos and Vietnam.

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Agent Running in the Field: A Novel

John Le Carré

Reviewed January 25, by Jon. Classic Le Carré. The protagonist, Nat, an aging spy, gets involved with a younger badminton player at his club. It turns out that the badminton player, Ed, is a government employee who is a spy for the Russians. Nat gets embroiled in operation to catch Ed. The book is well written and entertaining. At first there is a lot of anti-Trump and anti-Brexit rhetoric, which kind of marred the book (it just seemed unnecessary and gratuitous). However, it later became the basis for their relationship - and did have a purpose. I liked the writing but the book just sort of fell off the end. Nothing really got resolved and it was difficult to see the point of the book. Entertaining with some good character development, but unsatisfying.

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The Border (Power of the Dog): A Novel

Don Winslow

Reviewed January 15, by Jon. I thought this was the second in Winslow’s trilogy about the drug cartels/wars. I really enjoyed The Power of the Dog and wanted to read the whole series. It turns out I inadvertantly skipped volume 2 and read this, his third novel. In this one Art Keller is now head of the DEA and a new president - who he thinks is involved in drug money laundering is getting elected. There is a lot of political maneuvering and he is eventually forced out. The president is a very thinly disquised Donald Trump and his son in law a very thinly disguised Jared. The book has lots of sub stories about the drug trade. He starts some new ones and resolves some long standing threads. The best thing about the book is that he describes the texture of activities in the drug trade and cartels. I liked the book, but am conflicted, do I go back and read volume 2 or just let it be.

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