Insights To Live A Better Life
One of the best manuals on writing better is Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style”. Here’s a taster:
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences… Continue reading “Write Better!”
Sir Alex Ferguson has just come out with a book called “Leading” which he co-authored with Sir Michael Moritz, chairman of Sequoia Capital. I was lucky enough to see them interviewed by the Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, at the Southbank centre in London. The talk was fascinating, and the book is well worth reading.
Indeed, even as a Liverpool fan , I have to admire Alex Ferguson’s track record as manager of Manchester United: he won 13 league titles, 5 FA Cups and 2 Champions leagues. Admittedly, he didn’t reach Liverpool manager Bob Paisley’s 3 Champions leagues, but no-one is perfect. To get some sense of what made him tick is intriguing. Continue reading “The Alex Ferguson Way”
The beauty of Shakespeare’s works is that they can interpreted in many different ways. One of my favourite is to think of his biggest plays as representing the three stages of life- youth, adulthood and old-age: Continue reading “The 3 Stages Of Life According to Shakespeare”
“We were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters” says Peter Thiel. He co-founded PayPal with Elon Musk, Palantir* and was the first outside investor in Facebook. Thiel is perhaps one of most original thinkers to come out of Silicon Valley. In his book “Zero to One”, he outlines his take on the world. Continue reading “Don’t Iterate, Be Bold”
Elon Musk is hailed as the new Steve Jobs. He has been immortalised in the movies thanks to the character Tony Stark/Iron Man being modelled on him. He created the first private company, SpaceX, to launch a satellite in space and the first to dock with the international space station. Oh, and his Tesla electric car company is the first major American car company to be established since Chrysler in 1925. So what makes him tick? I recently read Ashlee Vance’s biography of him, and 3 things stood out: Continue reading “The Sweet Smell of Musk”
I’m about to take time out for my summer holidays. I like to fantasize about what I’ll get up to; that is, before reality hits and I end up doing admin, some DIY and vegging around. Here’s what would be on my fantasy list: Continue reading “What I’ll Be Reading/Listening/Watching On My Summer Holiday”
In my last post, I summarised half of Peter Drucker’s amazing “The Effective Executive“. The post introduced the context, and discussed two of five essential practises of effectiveness: knowing where your time goes and focusing on outward contribution. In this post, I complete the summary with the remaining practises. Here goes: Continue reading “Double Your Effectiveness At Work (Part 2)”
Written in 1967, Peter Drucker’s “The Effective Executive” has to be the best management book ever written. All other ones are simply a footnote to his book. His recognition that firms which employ knowledge-workers require fundamentally different management techniques to those that employ manual workers was far ahead of his time. His recommendations on how to be an effective executive is still as relevant to any organisation today as it was then. Best to read the book, but here’s my summary (part 1 below, part 2 later): Continue reading “Double Your Effectiveness At Work (Part 1)”
The best book I’ve ever come across on coming up with ideas is a very short one called “A Technique for Producing Ideas” by James Webb Young published in the 1940s. The summary of which is:
“An idea is nothing more or less than a new combination of old elements”
“The ability to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships”
His 5 step technique is: Continue reading “A Technique For Producing Ideas”
1. Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull. One of the founders of Pixar describes the secret of their success including turning Disney Animation around. It comes down to focusing on how people interact with each other. Their “braintrust” meetings are a core part of this where ideas are debated, but the idea-owner can ignore or take on whatever he or she wants.