Book Worm

It’s quite common to find business leaders dispensing advice about what it takes to be successful. But it takes a genius to recognize that, in business and life, what needs to be investigated is not what works, but what fails. Don’s lifetime experience in business made him realize the same and he shares the lessons in this book.

They say you should never judge a book by its cover. It’s a good rule of thumb about what not to do.

So how do you judge if a book is worth reading or not? I agree, it’s a difficult question to answer but if you find a book, which starts with a foreword from Warren Buffett, there is no question about whether to read it or not. Don Keough’s The 10 Commandments of Business Failure is one such book. This is what Buffett says about the author –

It has been an article of faith for me that I should always try to hang out with people who are better than I. When I am with Don Keough, I can feel myself on the up escalator…He’s an incredible business leader…Don talks such sense and offers such inspiration…he is one of the very few guys I feel I can hand the keys over to.

Keough worked in The Coca Cola Company for close to 40 years and retired from the post of president and CEO. So even if Buffett hadn’t endorsed him, it would still be a huge mistake to miss a book written by a person who ran one of the most iconic companies of the last century.

It’s quite common to find business leaders dispensing advice about what it takes to be successful, expounding on the secret sauce of success. But it takes a genius to recognize that, in business and life, what needs to be investigated is not what works, but what fails. Don’s lifetime experience in business made him realize the same.

So instead of developing a step-by-step formula for success, he came up with commandments for failure. Don writes in the introduction of his book –

…I give you these ten commandments and with them comes the assurance that if you carefully follow one or more you will fail, or at least have a head start on the downward path to ultimate failure…view this little book as a cautionary tale. If you find yourself a disciple of one or more of these commandments, watch out. You are on your way to failure and taking your company with you.

These commandments are especially useful at the time when the going is good. It’s at the times of success that people lower their guards, develop vulnerability and make way for the seeds of failure.
[Read more…] about BookWorm: The 10 Commandments for Business Failure

Have you heard of Kent Evans? No?

Okay, have you heard of Bill Gates? Yes?

Let me spill the beans here. Kent Evans was Bill Gates’ first best friend, his classmate at Lakeside School in Seattle, and a co-member of a school-sanctioned computer club called the Lakeside Programmers Group.

In the documentary Inside Bill’s Brain, Bill Gates described Kent as extremely clever, carrying a briefcase with all kinds of gadgets and magazines everywhere he went.

The two self-proclaimed geeks loved scheming about what they would be doing in the future, much to the eye rolls of their classmates who were more concerned with the activities of that moment, the upcoming school dance.

Together, they would read Fortune Magazine and imagine, “If you went into the civil service, what did you make? Should we go be CEOs? What kind of impact could you have? Should we go be generals? Should we go be ambassadors?”

Bill and Kent believed they would go on to do extraordinary things.

Just one of them did it. Bill Gates went on to start Microsoft and the rest, we know, is history.

What happened to Kent Evans?

[Read more…] about 📚 The Psychology of Money

At the beginning of the First World War, 27-year-old British soldier Henry Tandey was serving with the 5th Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. On September 28, 1914 a weary German soldier wandered into Tandey’s line of fire. The German soldier was wounded and did not even attempt to raise his own rifle. Tandey chose not to shoot. The German soldier saw him lower his rifle and nodded his thanks before wandering off.

The German soldier was Adolf Hitler.

Historical research throws serious doubts on whether the incident actually ever occurred. Question is how do you even prove or disprove it? And that’s the dilemma every historian faces — what to accept as historical facts and what to discard as apocryphal account.
[Read more…] about 📚 The Lessons of History

None of the history classes in my school answered what is thought to be one of the biggest and most important questions about human civilization —

Why do some societies advance so much faster and further than others? In other words —

…why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?

Jared Diamond, in his book, argues that societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion. These were the people who developed potent weapons of war and adventured on sea and land to conquer other cultures.

And this early advantage in food production was conferred to these societies because of their geographical milieu. Which means the sequence of events that eventually shaped the modern world, can all be tied back to environmental factors.
[Read more…] about 📚 Guns, Germs, and Steel