Book - Midnight Library

Just completed reading Midnight Library. The central theme of the book is that while we may regret in life for not having made a different choice that could have led to a different life, we all have a unique purpose and reason to be whatever we are in life and whatever we do. Sometimes, things that look most ordinary might end up being the things that lead one to victory. There is no way of life that can immunize against sadness and that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness.

5/5 recommended

Gandhi- the Mahatma - Book review of My Experiment with Truth

"The Story of My Experiments with Truth" by MK Gandhi is his autobiography or as he puts it, his experiments with truth, starting from his childhood days to his days in England to the starting of Satyagraha in South Africa to the beginning of Independence movement in India around 1920.

Before reading this book, I thought he was called Mahatma because he steered India's freedom struggle but I now realize, it was his endeavor towards the welfare of the people that made him earn this respect from people. Through multiple stories from his life, I understand the aim of his life was to try to discover and embark on the path to Truth and attain Moksha. His ashram first set up in South Africa and then later in Gujarat was aimed to lead by example where everybody voluntarily shared all work irrespective of caste and creed. He would take up cases for people for free, raise social and political causes with authorities, challenge the status quo and try to reform people around him. Few would know that during the Boer war in South Africa, Gandhi went to the battlefield as a volunteer for ambulance corps ferrying the wounded on a stretcher.

He was a big proponent of Brahmacharya but his idea of the same included not only monogamy but also simplicity of clothes and the food one eats. Despite being a Barrister, Gandhi gave up his European dressing, started to live in a simple home, traveled in the 3rd class in train/ship and choose to donate whatever extra money he had apart from covering his basic expenses. He has dealt extensively about his experiments with what we today call as 'vegan diet'.

We all pretty much know about Gandhi’s take on standing for truth. His idea was hate the sin but not the sinner coming from the notion that we are all created from one single Creator and hating a sinner is the same as hating that ultimate Creator. At another place, he says, it is the reformer who is anxious for the reform, and not the society, from which he should expect nothing better than opposition, abhorrence and mortal persecution. His idea of non-violence through Satyagraha is I guess the most difficult thing to do. It takes a lot of courage to hold back one’s natural instinct which is to take revenge and instead face opponent gracefully.

All the things that Gandhi tried didn’t come to him overnight. He constantly experimented with ideas, adapted those before embracing those to his life.

Gandhi has painted a very sober portrayal of himself in the book which I guess is the mark of a true learned person. He has highlighted how he was an average student in the class, how he failed at his first practice in Bombay and how he had great difficulty in speaking impromptu including the ones where he was an organizer.

Overall, it’s a very inspiring read and there cannot be a better quote than what Einstein said for Gandhi “Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth”

Book review- Discovery of India

An awesome book that traces all of Indian history from pre-historic times to 1944 when the book was written. As Nehru puts it, the intent of the book is to establish the integrity of the Indian past, history independent of British renditions and make people of India proud of their heritage. Nehru wrote this book while in jail with little access to journals and other books and so this is mostly a work of his learnings from explorations across the country. I am not sure how many of present day politicians possess that understanding of Indian culture and have a vision for future as expressed by Nehru in 600+ pages book.

While book presents interesting bits for anyone who wants to understand our culture and heritage, here are some of them –

1. Our origins in form of Indus valley civilization was more advanced (stemming from city planning, houses, trade and law) than similar civilizations elsewhere but probably didn’t get noticed because European researchers who came up studying in 18^th century focused more on the later (the Greek, Roman etc.)
2. Our civilization has been based on security and stability via joint family etc. and that makes it successful than any other in West. Indian philosophy is “individualistic under a social structure” which means perfect freedom to think and believe what one liked while adhering to the social norms
3. While there are many theories of how caste came into being but one theory relates to Aryan conquest of India. Instead of terminating or enslaving the entire population, as was the norm those days, they created a caste system assigning lower caste to people here and upper caste for themselves. While the system had its own shortcomings, caste system allowed people from new conquests to be merged into respective castes.
4. Coming on to Akbar, Nehru says while he was a great ruler, what surprised him was his lack of sea knowledge, no focus on scientific research, no training of people abroad, and no book printing. This legacy carried forward by later Mughal rulers was exploited by Europeans to bring in their rule in India
5. An interesting take on why we find certain skills confined to certain religions only. The reason for this is that religions conversion those days were group conversion and not individual conversions and hence the entire village (the villages in those times being organized around skills) would convert
6. Rise of British is attributed to multiple reasons including conquest of Bengal which gave them enough money to proceed to other regions and then keep adding, possible fluke as individually each of the Sikhs, Marathas, Tipu had defeated them but never together, infighting amongst Indian states and finally fall of Mughal Empire and disintegration of country into smaller states
7. With British rule, for first time, center of gravity fell outside India and with people who felt that they were superior and that the ‘new’ people didn't want to Indianize.
8. All talk of great infra development and running of government during British raj came at significant cost. For example, the railway was guaranteed by government of India at 5% return on capital invested
9. 1857 revolt was essentially a feudal outburst and it was only in 1900s that the real struggle from masses began to oust British

Book review- Good Strategy Bad Strategy

A good book to understand good and bad strategy with real life case studies from different companies. One-line summary - good strategy is not about some vision statement but set of coherent actions to tackle one or two identified critical issues. One example that stuck me was case of silver machine that churns silver coins is an advantage but not an competitive advantage. The former is more like a bond. An competitive advantage would accrue when either machine can be engineered to increase output or market be manipulated to increase demand.

Book review- 48 Laws of Power

Wonderful book - Being powerful is an exaggeration but in this world where we socialize with so many people at office and at work, it does help to deal better with everyone. If I would want to pick a few rules, I would say - Never outshine your master, Never get into argument, when asking for help appeal to self-interest, make your accomplishment seem effortless, think as you like but behave like others, despise free lunch, never reform too much at once, assume formlessness. 

I also enjoyed sharing some of the stories with my young son too.

Book review - Design Of Everyday Things by Don Norman

"Design Of Everyday Things" by Don Norman is a book that not only shares principles of good design but also evaluates those from perspective of human psychology.

Book starts from design principles including making things discoverable, understandable and making it more delightful for users.

It then delves into difference between human and machines and who is good in what. Basically, human strength is being creative, flexible and imaginative while machines are good in being precise and acurate.

It then talks about how humans can interpret precise behavior from imprecise knowledge in the head and in world and that's something that even AI cannot do.

Finally, it talks about errors and how can they be classified as slips and mistakes. It further classifies them and talks about how to use design principles to avoid them.

Overall a must read for everyone interested in solving customer needs.

Creating habit forming products

We all (ok, most of us) are hooked to Facebook, Google, WhatsApp and other similar apps. Such is our hook that some of us are actually addicted to these apps. What is the secret of these habit forming apps? Nir Eyal in his book Hooked tries to provide an answer.

He explains that any habit forming app has 4 parts as depicted in following image-

Lets see this with an example of Facebook –

1. Trigger

• First time trigger for downloading FB app could be –
• You heard it from one of your friends via word of mouth
• Saw some online ad for FB
• An automated email from one of your friends who has been using FB for some time. 
• Some product ad that has a FB page and has a campaign etc running that you would like to be part of 
• Once you have downloaded FB and have started using it, the external trigger would be the app notifications for one among many of the following
• Friend requests, 
• Video recommendations, 
• Friend suggestions, 
• Likes on your picture, posts etc. 
• The internal trigger could be that you are feeling bore and therefore would like to see Facebook. Notice that in this case Facebook has successfully mapped an emotion in your mind with their app. 

2. Action

• Comes in form of user opening the app and viewing updates from others, sharing his own. 
• Nir talks about making action task as frictionless as possible and that’s what Facebook has been good at - App is available on mobile and desktop, provides infinite scroll and for people in countries with limited data speed, it even provides for a Facebook Lite app. 

3. Variable reward

• Reward in Facebook comes in form of 
• “Reward of Tribe” which is a rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included in our community.
• “Reward of Hunt” which is to do with reward that makes us feel that we have acquired new knowledge, maybe about our friends, new skills (through some video, group pages etc. )

4. Investment

• Comes in form of user storing his personal photos, his check-in details, his posts with Facebook. 
• Also comes in form of user inviting more of his friends
• Eventually, user forms a network of friends who like or provide comments to his stuff and thus giving him a trigger to come back later to check what his friends have written and who all of them liked his stuff. 

Similar to Facebook, Hook model can be applied to other products too.


However, there are few cases where Hook Model doesn’t seem to have an answer. In my opinion, these are products which are not "social" in nature. As an example, if we were to apply Hook model to a successful product of last decade, say Acrobat Reader, this is what I get -

• External trigger- I receive a PDF from a friend/office etc. or I download a pdf from some site
• Internal trigger- The pain is related to ability to read content of pdf document.
• Action- Motivation is to read the doc and ability is ease of opening at no cost to buy a software (via free Acrobat Reader) to open pdf
• Reward- I can read content and that's possibly a reward but it doesn't fit into tribe, Hunt or Self category and there doesn't seem to be variability.
• Investment- I don't seem to store anything with Acrobat. I am probably inclined to use any other software which can let me open pdf. For that matter, I am ok to use any product A which lets me open a document of type B. 

As can be seen, reward and investment is not very obvious but still Acrobat has been a very successful product.

Understanding Indian society through advertising

Nawabs, Noodles and Nudes by Ambi Parameswaran provides interesting insights around how Indian society has evolved over the past 50 years (and more so after Indian economy opened for liberalization in 90s). Advertising has used both social trends as well as attempted to change behavior when selling products and services.

Few examples of such changes include -
- Changing men- In 70s, the depiction was of macho man (refer Lifeboy ad) to a man who is using Fair Lovey to remain ‘fair’.
- Dynamics of husband-wife relationship from a suffering women to empowered women (refer Airtel ad where wife is the boss)
- Changing role of women from being a housewife to aspirational (refer, Santoor ad in 1986 showing woman at wedding while one in 1994 shows woman doing aerobics.)
- Ads depicting older people not showing the pain/suffering but of celebration and second innings (refer SBI Life ads) due to improved longevity

Its interesting also to see how some ads in India have brought in major changes like –
- Commodity mindset to brand mindset in wheat. Refer Captain Cook ads
- Making eggs food habit for Indians. Refer NECC ad

The book is organized into 4 broad sections, namely, people, product, services and ad narratives, each of which looks at changes in society from a different lens. The author also predicts the trends in next few years at end of each section and sub-section. The book is very interesting read for somebody who wants to understand what goes in an advertiser’s mind when creating an ad. For me, born before liberalization and seen a ‘controlled’ version of television and ads, this book provides interesting memorabilia of old ads as well.

Book review- FIRE: How Fast, Inexpensive, Restrained, and Elegant Methods Ignite Innovation

FIRE is a book for project managers and people in leadership positions that outlines four core principles for a successful project – fast, inexpensive, restrained and elegant. ‘Fast’ is doing quality work on short timeline, no cutting corners, no haste, going in right direction, ‘Inexpensive’ is about setting cost ceiling, not about making a cheap solution, ‘Restrained’ means self-control in all other principles and ‘Elegant’ is making things simple.

The book has been authored by Dan Ward who is a Lieutenant Colonel in military engineering in US and he shares his insights based on analysis of several defence projects, the likes of spacecrafts, propellers, rockets etc, a lot of which have been highlighted in his book.

Dan advocates reliance on smaller teams, tighter budgets, shorter schedules and simpler goals. Smaller teams gel well and have fewer communication issues. Tighter budgets foster creativity to complete within constraints including dropping of unnecessary feature. Shorter schedules help us to see things better in short term (at the same time not losing control of larger vision). Simplicity is moving away from creating a complicated solution, one which is easier for users to train on.  

Dan also highlights why we keep following the opposite of FIRE. The reasons for the same includes notion of associating bigger project with costly and bigger team, notion of a better product only if it has more features and belief that complexity is same as sophisticated.

Personally, I found these principles as a good refresher. I had heard or read about these on a piecemeal basis and it was good to discover these principles also working for most complicated projects as in defence. I also found FIRE principles to be close to Agile manifesto, especially around smaller teams and short-term planning. 

Book review- Product Leadership

I had a chance to read “Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams” by Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, Nate Walkingshaw. What inspired me to read this book was interviews with more than 100 product managers and how they built awesome products. Unfortunately, this book didn’t live up to my expectation. More details down below but first some pros of the book.

This book is good compilation of what product management is all about. It even takes it a step further to explain product leadership and share how it’s different from product management. If one is starting out in product management, this can be a good beginning point.

Now on why I think this could have been better. First, there is nothing new in this book. If you have spent few years in product management and have read some books already (likes of Lean Startup, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Hard things about hard things) or read/watched online stuff (likes of Sam Altman series), the only thing that this book serves is to refresh some of those concepts.

Second, I felt that the writing style was too verbose, making it boring to read. Few ideas were repeated throughout the book. For example, part 2 of the book calls out how a PM is different across various organizational states, that is startup, emerging and enterprise, but there doesn’t seem to be much difference in the ways a PM would perform his job. Instead of this, exact difference in each of these would have been a better way of putting things together.

Third, the USP of this book was interviews with more than 100 Product Managers. These interview snippets spread across the book seem to be just touching the surface with no real-life examples of why they feel so and/or any practical actionable items for readers. This makes all concepts and ideas look weak and half-cooked.

Fourth, some of the concepts attributed to product leadership are true for general management. Example of these include, how to hire a team, buy vs build decisions, how to work with external partners etc.

Overall 2 out of 5 for me.

Book Review- Halo Effect

Halo Effect

By Phil Rosenzweig

The book talks about how different management gurus point to high financial performance of a successful company and then EXTRAPOLATE it to believe high on other counts – strategy, values, people and leadership. The author points out that our study of the successful companies is deluded based on HALO EFFECT. The author pokes fun at bad science of the management world and believes there is no publicly available secret to a successful company. In the preface the author writes “Most management books try to answer the first order question: What leads to high performance? This book sets out to answer- Why is it so hard to understand high performance?” Towards the end the book sets out to give some principles which are not guaranteed source of high performance but leads to a more thoughtful approach.

The book in multiple chapters take case studies of multiple companies whose policies were lauded when they were successful and then ridiculed for poor performance when they started showing losses - Lego (Danish toy company), Cisco, ABB, Intel to name a few.

So what exactly is Halo Effect – it is a tendency to make inferences about specific traits on the basis of general impression. As author explains in one of this example- George Bush’s rating rose after Sep 11 attack as country stood by their President which is ok. However, on a question related to handling of economy his rating increased from 47% to 60% as well. Now whether his handling of economy suddenly became better in weeks after Sep 11 is a question mark. The American public conferred a Halo on their President and made all favorable attributions to him. In business there are HALOS every where – in people, in leaders, surveys. When a company's sales and profits are up, people often conclude that it has a brilliant strategy, a visionary leader, capable employees, and a superb corporate culture. When performance falters, they conclude that the strategy was wrong, the leader became arrogant, the people were complacent, and the culture was stagnant. In fact, little may have changed -- company performance creates a Halo that shapes the way we perceive strategy, leadership, people, culture, and more.

In the appendix of this book there are tables showing the performance of the companies studied in "In Search of Excellence" and "Built to Last", two great management books of their time. It is interesting to note the difference in performance in the years before and after these studies.

Overall, highly recommended!