Veeky Forums book summaries

Post what you read, and briefly summarize it.
I'll start:

>pic related
>DUDE MONOPOLIES LMAO

How to win friends and influence people
>smile
>listen more than talk
>ask questions about their interests
>be a phony, win trust, make bucks

What to Say When You Talk to Yourself

>your brain will create pathways through repetition.
>stop negative thought patterns/loops immediately
>Reframe negative thoughts to positive ones.

That just sounds like instructions for coping with autism.

Principles, Ray Dalio
>Ask the right questions, "What don't I know about this, and what should I do about it?"
>unlike a maths test in school, in real-life you can, in fact should "cheat" when something is beyond your abilities in the sense that if you can't do something or you don't have the answers, you can find them from someone more competent or outsource the things which are your weaknesses
>Ask the smartest people you know their opinions on something, and understand how they came to form those conclusions - reverse engineer their thinking rather than taking their conclusions wholesale
>Don't tolerate "below the line" outcomes. Don't tolerate anything less than "good".
>You can have anything you want, but not everything that you want
>When you feel "emotional pain" don't shy away from it, don't repress it. You must interrogate it - it's usually an opportunity to improve your life "problems are opportunities for improvement screaming at you." "When you find a problem, you should be glad"
>ALWAYS IDENTIFY WHO'S RESPONSIBLE: More often than not in a organization sub-optimal performance isn't because there's a problem with the process or the overall system, it's because either A) people haven't received proper training in the job they've been assigned, B) there is a lack of clarity in who is suppose to do what, or C) the wrong people have been assigned. So when solving problems it's very important to understand not just what thing that should have happened didn't, but WHO didn't do what they should.
>Identifying a directly responsible individual shouldn't be ad homenien, it's a action they took you are criticizing, not the person ad hominem

You're not wrong

How to kill a unicorn
>Be realistic!
>It's tempting to come up with business solutions where if all the stars were aligned, if you had infinite resources you could do this and this and that... well don't. Look within your resources and leverage what you have
>limitations are conducive to creativity - it gives you a starting point
>Be mindful of opportunities that have hereto gone untapped, sometimes you do in fact have the resources and the customers have a desire for something that isn't being provided but nobody has fucking bothered to ask them

Politics as a Vocation, Max Weber
>There's three kinds of Authority - Legal-Rational, Charismatic, and Traditional. While they often fall more towards one, it's virtually impossible to find a leader who possesses only one of these authorities sine qua non
>Charismatic Leaders (like demagogues, cult leaders, etc.) are unified by one trait - a powerful 'calling' or vision of the future
>However, Charismatic Leaders are not intrinsically so, instead their "charisma" and therefore their authority is bestowed upon them by their followers - their followers belief in them sustains their authority, and that belief, well, the followers giveth but they can taketh away
>Charismatic Leadership thrives in times of uncertainty and upheaval, but even if things are stagnant and the status quo is stable the intrinsic appeal of the Charismatic Leader is his anti-establishment message - his intrinsic attraction is his fringiness.
>This creates an "us versus them" feeling against the mainstream
>The rules of conventional society as such, do not apply to the Charismatic Leader and his followers, although he may pick and choose to gain leverage from, say, Religious dogma or historical antecedents

And now you understand Steve Jobs and Elon Musk

Leading with Steve Jobs, Jay Elliot
>Be "intreprenurial"
>Pirate vs. the Navy. Macintosh was a Pirate vessel against the Navy of Apple. Apple was a pirate vessel against the established navy of IBM (see how this relates back to Max Weber!?)
>Jobs liked to ask questions like "have you ever been fired?" to gauge their reaction - are they embarrassed or proud? More importantly, did they stand up for something when the were.
>Another question he would as was "What did you think of IBM", NOT "what was it like working there"
>Challenge people! Use a velvet glove: "I heard you're good, we only hire the best. Are you good enough to work for Apple?"
>People freak out over free t-shirts, no one is too rich for a free t-shirt
>When headhunting people Jobs would show the person he was interviewing his watch, and ask "what do you think". If they said they liked it, Jobs would pull out a brand new watch, exactly the same and give it to them. This does two things: 1. It's a litmus test for if they have the same 'a e s t h e t i c s' as him, and 2. it's a psychologically manipulative tactic to make them feel like they have to accept the job.
>Jobs wanted to prove to the engineers that an iPod could be made more compact, so he threw one in a aquarium and said "see the air bubbles coming out? You can make it more compact"

Full Disclosure: IMO Jobs, while an excellent persuader and manipulator of people was a terrible manager

bump

ironically this works

> ask questions about their interests
Holy fucking shit. I can't hold a single conversation at all, and this was THEE key.

>persuader and manipulater
>bad manager
pick one
management is all about working people

Finaly an interesting post!

Thx all anons for this

Lol, don't know how people got business strategies from this book on swordsmanship. It's probably serves more of a validation of their personal beliefs.

>Don't play by your opponent's rules.
>Force your opponent into bad terrain.
>Restrict your opponent's movements.
>Be unpredictable by restraining your movements.
>Just defeat your opponent. Showing off is pointless.
>Use your weapon with the intent to kill.

>management is all about working people
Are you sure you understand management? Persuading and working people is important - if you have a good strategy.

Here's the thing about Jobs, he was prone to whims! He would bully people just because he could, not because it would whip someone into shape, not because someone needed a wake up call - he did it just because he felt like it. that made him a bad, wasteful manager. He threw away his gifts regularly. Yes, he got better and more in control over the 90's - but he was still prone to demand changes to prototypes at the drop of a hat, things that everyone retroactively justifies as signs of a perfectionist genius but really were just him swinging his dick around and added nothing to the bottom line of the company or to the morale of the people working.

Put it this way, have you ever noticed people with Borderline Personality Disorder are great at manipulating and controlling people but cause chaos and pain everywhere they go - apply that to a business environment, doesn't sound like good management.

TL;DR - Not a contradiction - people skills are only as good as the strategy you utilize them for

Thanks for the summaries. Which of those books would you be most likely to recommend? Which was best written, and which had the most meaningful impact on your life?

Nice thread OP. Here's a bump

>It's probably serves more of a validation of their personal beliefs.
Seems likely. Militaristic analogies sound cool and have cachet even if they are irrelevant. I think I learned 3 business related things from Sun Tzu's art of war, and a lot about, well, anachronistic Chinese ground tactics.
I'm sure an inventive reader could turn everything into an analogy, a metaphor for the business world, but why not write my own book?

You're welcome. Best written, hard to say. Most meaningful impact? Too early to tell but probably Principles.
I don't like to recommend books out of the blue: What do you think is the most important thing for you to learn about right now? I also think reading Politics as a Vocation was very important, but that's not really a Veeky Forums read.

It doesn’t have to be biz related. Politics as Vocation seems pretty interesting. If you had to re-read one book, which would it be?

>just create something new and you're gonna be a monopoly, lmao

Good, glad that fucking faggot is dead from cancer top kek

>glad that fucking faggot is dead from cancer top kek
Yup. The funniest thing about it is he was such a narcissist and believed his own hype so much he thought that a Fruitarian diet would cure his pancreatic cancer. What a fucking twat!

Off the top of my head:
>On the Fortune and Virtue of Alexander, Plutarch
It's an essay that basically frames Alexander the Great as an underdog who triumphed over ridiculous odds. Made a huge impact on me when I was younger.

Yep. When that awkward silence starts to creep up just ask a question. Any fucking question will do.

yea but everuone loves him lol

>>be a phony
Literally the opposite message of the book

Or a compliment.

Sadly yes. Narcissists can be very good at making everybody love them. If they're smart. The amazing thing is that Jobs made people pay an inflated price for the privilege

A word on Sun Tzu's Art of War. I don't see why Carl Ichan and Mike Ovitz got so wet over it, I think like the guy above said about Swordmanship it's just about validation.

After all, what the fuck does:
>Keep a hill to your right rear, and occupy the sunny side.
help me in Veeky Forums?

But none the less here's the three things I did learn from from it
>1. Know thy enemy and thyself - easier said than done, but if you can anticipate your competitors, know their strategy, their resources, their reserves, even the temperament of their board and CEO. Then you can do things like get a product to market before them and steal their thunder, or disrupt their value and supply chains. Of course, don't be tempted to always mimic your competitors strategy - know thyself!
>2. "cleverness has never been associated with long delays" -- protracted wars exhaust moral and resources. If you're a t-shirt company and suddenly there is massive demand for something in your range, the faster you can have a decision and permission to produce more and get them to stores, the less likely you are to either miss the boat - or even worse - get your sales cannibalized by another garment maker. The thing that makes Space X, Renault-Nissan, and FCA all run so well is that there is a clear line of decision -Sergio Marchionne carries around 3 mobile phones at all times, if the engineers have a question that until they know the answer prevents them going ahead - they don't have to wait long. Time is money!
>3. However, always have more resources and reserves than your enemy - know that if it comes to a war of attrition they will lose. I suspect this is why Google and Apple keep such massive cash liquidity. No one can outspend those guys, it's a suicide mission, perhaps a Pyrrhic victory.

But is it really tho?