Isaacson highlights the merits of collaboration among innovators as well as between humans and computers in his history of the digital age. Such an imIsaacson highlights the merits of collaboration among innovators as well as between humans and computers in his history of the digital age. Such an imposing topic is destined to be incomplete, and it is, but Isaacson does a nice job of highlighting the primary contributors and showing how each innovation built off the previous ones. As with Steve Jobs, you won't learn a lot about the technology itself beyond the most basic level, but Isaacson is clearly more interested in the cultural history and the interplay among the various creators, so as long as you know that going on, you ought to enjoy this book....more
This is a meticulously researched book that flows with beautiful storytelling. Snow develops nine principles of working smarter, and illustrates each This is a meticulously researched book that flows with beautiful storytelling. Snow develops nine principles of working smarter, and illustrates each one with a chapter that weaves together several mini-histories and mini-biographies, which seem to always dovetail perfectly by the end.
Smartcuts brings together a lot of the ideas I've been reading about in other books, plus some I haven't, and it builds a strong framework that I am excited to explicitly follow.
What fascinated Snow was how certain people and companies have been able to achieve amazing things in hardly any time -- he became obsessed with finding the uniting principles behind their success. He calls them Smartcuts.
The Nine Smartcuts
Snow shows how the most well-regarded presidents Hacked the Ladder by moving laterally into the White House from top positions in other fields, instead of paying their dues in lower elected offices. Indeed, lateral thinking is the thread that ties all the smartcuts together: this is the ability to question the basic assumptions of a problem and approach it sideways, and in an unconventional way.
Training with Masters is an essential method for learning a skill rapidly. The cases of Jimmy Fallon and a team of heart surgeons show that the best mentors are in it for the long haul, and are personally invested in your success. But you can also have mentors that you never meet. Jimmy Fallon studied his favorite comics for years. And anyone can watch videos online, read books, and imitate the masters.
Another way to make progress that sticks is to employ Rapid Feedback. This technique is all the rage in tech startups who are "running lean" (see Eric Ries' Build-Measure-Learn loop in The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses), and Snow also shows how The Second City uses it to pump out brilliant young comedians. The best feedback is depersonalized, so you see your efforts as experiments instead of referendums on your ability. Experiments can fail, but you can't.
Leverage is power, and Platforms are one of its most powerful forms. The Ruby on Rails web framework has enabled newbie coders to develop their apps at blistering speeds, and the result is an explosion in useful software. Just like cars use the platform of a road (which is made of dirt, gravel, tar and asphalt) for smooth rides, you don't need to reinvent the wheel in your work; use all the existing infrastructure you can to save effort and focus on innovation and creativity.
How are pro surfers like the electronic artist Skrillex? They're both brilliant at catching waves. Surfers study the ocean for hours before a competition, so they can understand how the waves are breaking and catch the right ones. Skrillex did the same with EDM and the disruption of the recording industry. Research shows that you can learn to spot waves in markets, too, and you can prepare yourself to jump on them fast by always keep a toe in the water -- in other words, experimenting with lots of ideas, like Google does with its well-known "20% time."
Superconnectors are another way to gain leverage -- these are people (influencers) and platforms (social media) that allow you to spread messages to millions of people in no time. Snow uses the clever example of Radio Rebelde, which enabled the Cuban revolutionaries Castro and Guevara to galvanize the country against a dictator despite being terribly outnumbered and outgunned. Superconnectors provide amplification, and if your message is authentic and enticing, it will resonate (see All Marketers Are Liars: The Underground Classic that Explains How Marketing Really Works - and Why Authenticity is the Best Marketing of All).
In order to make enormous gains, you need to achieve and maintain Momentum -- after all, "an object in motion tends to stay in motion." This means never resting on your laurels when you do hit it big, and not doing the same thing over and over (like a band that has a hit and then re-writes it again and again).
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. A lot of the greatest innovations come from re-envisioning existing models by taking a step back to first principles (lateral thinking at its finest). Take Embrace, a famous solution to the high death rates of premature babies in developing countries. Instead of trying to make cheaper incubators like a NICU has, some smart entrepreneurs realized that babies just need to be kept warm. So they created a "sleeping bag for babies" that costs thousands of times less than a fancy incubator.
The final Smartcut is 10x thinking, which is one of the central ideas in another recent book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. This principle says that it's actually easier to create a ten-times improvement in something than to make it only 10% better. Because such problems are so hard, there's little competition, and it's easier to keep going toward a solution. And if you can get others on board with your ambitious vision (like some superconnectors), you can create massive leverage -- people are much more likely to support an audacious plan with strong ideals than a run-of-the-mill incremental improvement. Elon Musk and Space X provide the canonical example of this.
Smartcuts is the kind of book that will give you ideas for your own work on every other page, and you'll leave the book feeling smarter indeed....more
This is an excellent, almost comprehensive introduction to learning about how real operating systems work. The 3rd edition is already somewhat outdateThis is an excellent, almost comprehensive introduction to learning about how real operating systems work. The 3rd edition is already somewhat outdated as it still spends a lot of time on things like magnetic tape and makes no mention of large-scale flash storage. But these are minor quibbles. Comes with source code and a CD containing the MINIX 3 OS, a microkernel that is meant to simulate a UNIX system. This means that it is actually small enough to read most of the code and understand how it works, and it's open source so you can fiddle with it if you want....more
This is a biography for those who are broadly unfamiliar with Steve Jobs. There is a lot that is left out. Isaacson is not a technical guy -- he hits This is a biography for those who are broadly unfamiliar with Steve Jobs. There is a lot that is left out. Isaacson is not a technical guy -- he hits the proper concepts, but he doesn't provide much nuance, and his take is narrow.
More well done are Isaacson's descriptions of Jobs the man, although as another reviewer noted, we don't get enough detail about his upbringing to try and figure out how he became such a colossal jerk. Though I think the answer is between the lines -- even though Jobs himself believed in nurture over nature, I think he was just born that way. It's called Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
The question at the heart of this biography is, "was Steve Jobs a net-positive for the world?" It's a complex question, and it depends on how you feel about the purpose of technology. While there are plenty of ways this book could be better, I think it effectively penetrates to the heart of the man, particularly for those who are not familiar with Jobs and Apple....more
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