SAM ZAWADZKI

Wow this book earns a straight 10 on the Z scale of awesome. Caveats would be: it's very American & focused on larger / later stage start ups. Horowitz stands out by talking about the un-sexy parts of business, like firing people and messing up. It's refreshing to learn from someone's mistakes, rather than having to listen to them blow their own propaganda trumpet. There is far too much interesting material in here for me to go through in a blog, you really should just read i

This book makes for a fun read. At the core of the entire business is the importance of narrative. Darren explains that Gatorade became a success due to it's heritage, there is a truly fantastic story behind the drinks name. College athletes were dying from heat stroke, and the University of Florida football coach challenged university physicians to come up with a solution for the home team, the Florida Gators. Gatorade wasn't designed to be a commercial super story, it's her

After listening to the audio samples, I decided to buy the lecture version of this ebook, rather than the standard text. Gerber is half comedian half business guru. This book scores 10/10 on the Z scale of awesomeness, I rate it so highly that I've already listened to it twice and plan on listening to it a third time. Many of Gerber's arguments resonated very strongly with me. The core precept of this book is that: A business should give you more life, not take it away. I kno

This book sounded a little too 'self helpy' for my liking however I really enjoyed Shawn's scientific style, he does a nice job of explaining his points and providing simple overviews of the research that backs them up. The central argument of the book is that success doesn't make people happy. Being happy makes people successful. It's a profound inversion to popular logic. Shawn coins a number of phrases to explain his research: - The Tetris Effect - Shawn talks about how th

Audible only had the abridged summary version available, so alas I only got the highlights. Key take aways for me on this book: - The company was always focused on sales. It needed to clear it's stock urgently in order to have the working capital to pay its creditors. - The founders had industry expertise and passion, one of the investors was a running coach and wrote a best selling book about running. - The company was incredibly good at sales and marketing, they sponsored o

Emotive and engaging, the case studies in this book are powerful stories that explain Syed's arguments well. Syed argues that everything in life, from business to sport, can be treated highly scientifically. If you would like to optimise or improve any process it can be done by treating the process like an experiment. Create a clear hypothesis of what you expect to happen, then conduct the experiment, and review the results to draw a conclusion. While this may seem very simpl

I'm a big fan on Dan Ariely (so much so that I just signed up for his Udemy course on Changing Customer Behaviour). PAYOFF uncovered some interesting truths about motivation that are very counter intuitive. Who would have thought that giving employees a cash bonus would REDUCE motivation? In the book Dan runs through an interesting experiment that shows cash can be de-motivating, while free things like compliments can have a significant impact on motivation. Dan talked a lot

This is the most useful book that I have read all year. It left me thinking, why don't they teach this stuff in school or university. This book is a practical guide to dealing with conflict. I'l try and give you a flavour of the basics. My interpretation of the book is really about de-escalating conversations to a safe space, and then taking the time to talk through issues while constantly referring to a mutual objective. When conversations become confrontational, us humans b

This book frustrated me, Middleton has a wealth of knowledge, but tries to cover too much. Branding in 3 days rather than 30 would have been way better. Some of the lessons I took from the book are below. Brand is an output, its how customers see your service. Branding is everything you do to nurture a brand. Even if you have no time for marketing you should do PR. PR means 'public relations', but at it's core there is 'media relations', relationships with journalists editors

This book is a quick read that has some fun business lessons, to give you a flavour I will share my favourite quote: "The ROI on a smile is infinite because a smile is free." I was positively surprised by the key theme of the book, it's all about people. Don say's it's important to treat people with respect. He states that you must treat people as the person you want them to become. Don starts the book by talking a lot about team, he says that Walmart exceeds because of its a