I was legitimately bummed out when Carrie died, I spent December bouncing between Ho Chi Minh City and Bangkok, ultimately spending Christmas itself in Bangkok after watching Rogue One in Ho Chi Minh City!

The amusingly named memoir is fun to read, giving a glimpse in to Carrie’s Hollywood upbringing and partying antics, written in a kind of jovial, this happened, deal with it kind of manner.

I read this book because a group of us were moving to China, just as Trump was getting voted in to be President of the USA and various military exercises(?) were taking place by both America and China that seemed .. awkward. What would we do if something happened? Where would we go? How would we get there? I didn’t know what I didn’t know and now after reading this book I now know a little bit more about what I still don’t know!

Like The Game, the book documents a year or so in Neil’s life as he decides to become prepared for an emergency, engaging in escape and evasion courses, survival courses, shooting courses and meeting people who have ‘flags’ in multiple countries and passports, reading this book alone won’t prepare you for anything but it gives some interesting ideas and directions that you might want to head in if any of these issues are a concern for you, or just of interest.

Whilst our paranoia about China turned out to be unfounded, the Chinese absolutely LOVE Trump and compare him to Chairman Mao… It’s a good read about getting prepared whilst also skipping aside any politics or opinions on whether getting prepared is actually necessary.

The Year Without Pants is an insightful look in to Scott’s year working as a team lead for WordPress and Automattic’s company culture that allows remote work. What’s most interesting about it, is the culture works! Running a remote team successfully can be incredibly difficult at scale. Their culture was unconventional, employees are independent, working from wherever they wished and most interestingly, rarely using email to communicate.

The book makes a great case for why remote work can work, especially if you consider how much time at a traditional workplace is spent purely through the computer. I know for myself I could actually spend days during a busy project not speaking to a single soul in my office and just working through the day on my computer and collaborating with the team on IRC and Skype whilst handling tickets in Jira. The principle is sound and in my opinion the things that make it a success or not are employee commitment and competence and the company culture and processes. A remote team with a paranoid and suspicious company culture will never work.

Automatic doesn’t make you run the Google gauntlet of trick questions, e.g. why manhole covers are round or how to upgrade SSHd on servers on the moon but instead hires you by trial to tackle a simple project and work on real things. As an approach this is great and something I experienced myself whilst “interviewing” for a company in Australia and then blockchain.info. It’s a great way to see if people can actually do the job or not, I’m a big fan of hiring people that can do the work, whilst it’s a nice idea to hire people with the capacity to learn what you’re already doing it’s a great idea to bring people on who already know what they are doing and can help you improve what’s already been done!

What is important to note is that whilst Automattic has a remote culture, they also have a head office in San Francisco and regular company meetings, in real life, where all employees turn up and work together in the same place. Reading the book suggested a culture of competent people, all part of the same team, who wanted to be there, working together to solve problems they believe in. This culture was also always there from the start, with the Founder, not shoe-horned in later.

I took so many notes from this book that writing them up would have yielded a book of a similar size and scope. Scott Berkun is ex-Microsoft having worked on Internet Explorer, he knows what he’s doing and is able to succinctly put it in to words. I think that is also why Automattic’s culture of remote work, works. Put the right people in the right place doing the right thing!

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler was fantastic to read after Exponential Organizations and Abundance. If Exponential Organizations discussed the problems and Abundance discussed the solutions, Bold can be thought of as discussing the implementation!

The world’s biggest problems = biggest business opportunities.

Like the previous 2 books, Bold is incredibly optimistic about the future. The first section discusses the 6 ‘D’s of exponentials

• Digitalisation
• Deception
• Disruption
• Demonetisation
• Dematerialisation
• Democratisation

Anything that becomes digitised, e.g. biology, medicine, manufacturing can then leverage Moore’s law of exponentially increasing computational power.

The second chapter is about the democratisation of power, essentially how things that were once the forte of big governments are now attainable by companies and individuals. Where as once manufacturing plastics was a complicated process, only possible with bulk manufacture, the advent of 3D printing now offers affordable manufacture-on-demand services, anywhere in the world.

Whilst once space flight was only possible for organisations the size of NASA, now many much smaller organisations with just a handful of members/employees are putting rockets in to space whilst striving to win an X-Prize!

Section 2 then discusses mindset, opening strong with a discussion about basic income. Once everyone is paid enough so all their basic needs are met, intrinsic rewards that meet your emotional satisfactions become far more important than financial rewards.

Encouraging creative and passionate minds becomes a problem in itself.

Peter’s Laws™ The Creed of the Persistent and Passionate Mind

1. If anything can go wrong, fix it! (To hell with Murphy!)
2. When given a choice—take both!
3. Multiple projects lead to multiple successes.
4. Start at the top, then work your way up.
5. Do it by the book . . . but be the author!
6. When forced to compromise, ask for more.
7. If you can’t win, change the rules.
8. If you can’t change the rules, then ignore them.
9. Perfection is not optional.
10. When faced without a challenge—make one.
11. No simply means begin one level higher.
12. Don’t walk when you can run.
13. When in doubt: THINK!
14. Patience is a virtue, but persistence to the point of success is a blessing.
15. The squeaky wheel gets replaced.
16. The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live.
17. The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself!
18. The ratio of something to nothing is infinite.
19. You get what you incentivize.
20. If you think it is impossible, then it is for you.
21. An expert is someone who can tell you exactly how something can’t be done.
22. The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.
23. If it was easy, it would have been done already.
24. Without a target you’ll miss it every time.
25. Fail early, fail often, fail forward!
26. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
27. The world’s most precious resource is the persistent and passionate human mind.
28. Bureaucracy is an obstacle to be conquered with persistence, confidence, and a bulldozer when necessary.

The 3rd and final section is about implementation using the crowd! i.e. the billions of people across the world looking for things to do! This was quite nice to read as it’s how I personally run my businesses and solve my problems.

By leveraging services like Upwork it’s possible to find affordable, talented people to solve problems all over the world. Other services like 99Designs or Tongal can be used to run competitions to source creative works.

If you genuinely have that one great idea, but are struggling to take it to the next level, crowdfunding can be an option, if you have the right pitch for the right audience. Whether it’s donation based, microlending, equity sales or even prepurchase, sites like Kiva, GlobalGiving and CrowdFunder can help people raise money.

This book is a must read for anyone, if you’re already leveraging the Internet to run your online business you are probably implementing a lot of these techniques and practices anyway so it’s good to be reassured by the inventor of Paypal that you’re doing the right thing! If you’re just starting out (and even if you’re an old hand) you will get great exposure to new ideas that can help you get moving.

Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter Diamandis is a fantastic, tackling the world’s largest and most important problems such as overpopulation, food, water, energy, education, health care and freedom.

This is probably the most optimistic book I’ve ever read.

In today’s hyperlinked world, solving problems anywhere, solves problems everywhere.

Abundance is a great follow up to Exponential Organizations as a lot of the techniques covered to solve the worlds largest problems involve exponential thinking as the human race is growing exponentially.

if you can’t be yourself, it’s hard to know yourself, and if you don’t now yourself, how can you ever tap into your true potential?

Essentially the book applies exponential principles to the different exponential problems we face throughout the world and how they will be used to create a world of abundance for everyone.

Using networks and sensors to plot, track and co-ordinate everything can lead to increased efficiency and much less waste making more resources of every type readily available.

Robotics is automating manual processes, driving costs down whilst creating more at a higher quality with less defects.

Technology is shrinking in size and cost exponentially, just look at how mobile phones have changed in the last 10 years and see how that is effecting medical equipment. I already have a small blood sugar monitor that fits in my pocket, with a tiny pool of blood I can immediately tell my blood glucose levels, extrapolate that out and soon we’ll have ubiquitous devices that can detect viruses, cancers and all manner of diseases for the cost of a cup of coffee. Solving logistical problems with drones will then be able to get this technology to anyone in the world who will need it.

The exponential solutions to these big problems are also massive business opportunities so trying to solve them could be a massive economic opportunity.

I love reading as it exposes me to new ideas and the ideas in this book are incredible, ambitious, optimistic and inspiring, so I definitely recommend it.

Salim Ismail‎ – Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, cheaper than yours (and what to do about it) is the first of 3 books I’ve read recently, all stemming from Singularity University, and was full of big thinking around what exponential organisations are and case studies of how some were formed, how they scaled and problems that they went on to solve.

I don’t have an MBA in business, I’m a computer nerd who’s worked with successful startups and large enterprise companies, so I still have a lot to learn and this book filled a few gaps with solid explanations. e.g. obviously I’ve been exposed to the waterfall model of software development (since 1997..) but wasn’t aware of the formal New Product Development process, or NPD, which includes the following steps:

1. Idea generation
2. Idea screening
3. Concept development and testing
4. Business analysis
5. Beta and market testing
6. Technical implementation
7. Commercialisation
8. New product pricing

Whilst basically being the waterfall approach I learned a long time ago, it’s nice to experience formalised positive reinforcement and see it written down and discussed in an interesting manner.

Entrepreneurial success rarely comes from the idea. Instead, it comes from the founding team’s never-say-due attitude and relentless execution. Those who really want something will find options.

One of the biggest takeaways from the book covered something I’ve always been curious about for a while, how to build business models around products that are given away for free. I registered https://www.idimmu.net November 2005 and every time I had to use the Internet to solve a work related problem, I blogged about it. Over the years I engaged with other Linux bloggers and we all faced a similar problem, how to monetise a blog based around freely available information? Everyone in the industry who is good is self taught based on other people’s blogs and white papers, you don’t generally want to hire someone with an RHCE.. This book covers how to build an exponential organisation around free information.

1. Immediacy: Immediacy is the reason people order in advance on Amazon or attend the theatre on opening night. Being the first to know about or experience something has intrinsic cultural, social and even commercial value. In short: time confers privilege.
2. Personalisation: Having a product or service customised just for you not only gives added value in terms of quality of experience and ease-of-use or functionality, it also creates “stickiness”, as both parties are invested in the process.
3. Interpretation: Even if the product or service is free, there is still considerable added value to any service that can help shorten the learning curve to using it.
4. Authenticity: Added value comes from a guarantee that the product or service is real and safe.
5. Accessibility: Ownership requires management and maintenance. In an era where we own hundreds of apps on several platforms, any service that helps us organise everything and improve our ability to find what we need quickly is of particular value.
6. Embodiment: Digital information has no “body”, no physical form, until we give it one – high definition, 3D, a movie screen, a smartphone. In 1997 I paid for RedHat CDs even though it was free to download as it was more convenient than my 33.6kbps modem 😉
7. Patronage: Some fans want to pay and will if given an easy way to do so and the amount is reasonable. I personally will buy limited edition vinyl of an album if I love it, despite services like Youtube or Spotify offering virtual, and often cheaper, alternatives.
8. Findability: Creative works have no value if no one can access them, so putting yourself out there on effective channels and digital platforms so your great content can be found has considerable value in itself. Some of the amazing photographers in Asia who just use Facebook for marketing need to understand this as it took me 9 months to find them and that was only through word of mouth.

I find blogging about books I have read helps the reflection and understanding, and if I could sit here listing all the takeaways I got from Exponential Organizations I’d just end up writing another book.