Book-Review

One of my Kiwi buddies who specializes in Power BI is Reza Rad. I was pleased to see he had a set of eBooks now on Power BI but was especially happy to see he had a book called Pro Power BI Architecture.

There are lots of books around to discuss how to use Power BI but there’s been a real lack of books on architecting solutions using Power BI. So if you want to learn to develop dashboards or reports, this isn’t the book for you. Reza has other books for that.

2019-05-10

Over the years, I’ve been really interested in what makes people happy in life. I’m always fascinated by people who think that wealth, products, properties, the latest handbag or car, new partner, etc. will make them happy. I’m sure the media has tried to tell them that, but it’s never been true.

I’ve had friends all colleagues all across the wealth spectrum, and I can say without any doubt in my mind, that some of the richest people I know are also some of the most unhappy. Worse, I’ve seen money destroy families so many times.

2019-04-30

Weight has been an area of interest for me for a very long time, given my struggles with it. All throughout the 1980s, I wish I’d known what I do know now. Gary Taube’s book Why we get fat and what to do about it was a seminal work in this area, helping to remove the nonsense that’s been peddled as “science” and “medicine” for decades.

I was already pretty much across most of Gary’s work before I listened to this as an audiobook, but it helped me to see where much of his thinking had come from.

2019-04-26

I like serious investigative journalism that’s released as podcasts. I enjoyed Serial with their story about Adnan Syed, and in a similar vein there’s now The Drop Out from ABC Radio.

I’m surprised that I hadn’t heard about Elizabeth Holmes or Theranos, or at least that if I had heard about them, I hadn’t taken much notice of them. After listening to The Drop Out, I’m stunned that it hadn’t been something I already knew all about.

2019-04-05

You probably already know that I’ve been learning Mandarin for about 8 years now, and have a fascination with Chinese business and technology. Learning the language has made this more approachable for me.  The story of Jack Ma and Alibaba is one of the really interesting aspects of Chinese business today, so I was intrigued to read this book:

Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built by Duncan Hall

I ended up listening to the book via Audible rather than reading it.

2019-03-22

Leigh Sales is a well-respected local journalist. I feel some affinity for her, as she’s grown up in Queensland and often comments on things from her childhood that I clearly remember, even though Leigh is younger than me. I was fascinated to read her book Any Ordinary Day: Blindsides, Resilience and What Happens After the Worst Day of Your Life.

I decided to read her book before I knew anything about it at all. I knew it was “Any Ordinary Day”. I hadn’t realized it was “Blindsides, Resilience and What Happens After the Worst Day of Your Life”, so it was quite an unexpected story for me.

2019-03-15

I recently read The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz. I was interested to read it because Ben is a well-known and experienced entrepreneur, based in the Silicon Valley area south of San Francisco. He offers advice on how to really run startups.

I loved the way that Horowitz addressed failure. Instead of taking the business school approach of telling you how things should be done, and assuming that you’ll do everything correctly, he spends time telling you what to do after you’ve already screwed up.

2019-03-08

The title of this book caught my eye. I’m sure it’s intended to be a play on the title of  Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and it’s all small stuff: Simple Ways to Keep the Little Things From Taking Over Your Life by Richard Carlson. I reviewed that book here.

So this one is The Little Things: Why You Really Should Sweat the Small Stuff by Andy Andrews.

Andrews tends to write small (and short) books that get pretty much to the point. This one also does the same. I saw a large number of people taking about how much they enjoyed it, but for me, it fell flat. In Carlson’s book, there were great messages about how easy it is to have your life overcrowded, particularly with things that in the end really don’t matter.

2019-03-01

I mentioned in a previous post about how one of my colleagues Orin Thomas is a prolific reader and every time I talk to him, he suggests more books that I should read. Another one in that category was No Ordinary Disruption One by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika, and Jonathan Woetzel. The sub-title is The four forces breaking all the trends.

The authors claim that our intuition on how the world works could be very wrong. I suspect that the degree of change in the accuracy of our perception is a recent, and accelerating thing. In the book, they are summarizing years of research they have done at the McKinsey Global Institute.

2019-01-11

I’ve also tackled a number of non-technical and non-scientific books recently. On that I’d heard good things about was Shrill (Notes from a loud woman) by Lindy West.

First note about this book is that it’s full of NSFW (not suitable for work) words, so be warned if that would offend you.

As well as being loud, Lindy has spent her life being big. I’d say that’s shaped her world view as much as anything else. Having been big much of my own life, I can directly relate to so many things she says.

2019-01-04