It’s easy to slow down toward the end of the year. In 2018 I’ll try to be more deliberate in front loading the first half of the year. Here is the list of books I read. I’d like to try and hit 52 books per year.

1. When Breathe Becomes Air – Kalanathi
2. Purity – Jonathan Franzen
3. The Art of Grace, On Moving Well Through Life – Sarah Kaufman
4. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life – William Finnegan
5. The Tower – Kelly Cordes
6. Competing Against Luck – Clayton Christiansen
7. Nothing is True and Everything is Possible
8. Hooked – Nir Eyal
9. The World Beyond Your Head – Matthew B. Crawford
10. The Glass Cage (Nicholas Carr)
11. Machine Learning for Designers – PDF
12. Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
13. Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Donella Meadows
14. How to Makes Sense of any Mess – Abby Covert
15. Presence – Amy Cuddy
16. Hillbilly Elegy: A memoir of a family and culture in crisis
17. Quiet: The Power of Introverts, Susan Cain
18. Service Design: From Insight to Implementation
19. Radical Candor
20. Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters
21. The Second Machine Age (McAffe/Brynjolfsson)
22. The Last Samurai – Helen DeWitt
23. Ready Player One
24. Blue Ocean Strategy
25. Product Leadership
26. Annihiliation
27. What Got You Here Won’t Get You There – Goldsmith
28. Sprint – Knapp (Google Ventures)
29. Super Intelligence, Nick Bostrum

Best fiction book of 2017 (from this list) – Barbarian Days … or The Last Samurai. Both were great. I can’t decide.

Worst book of 2017 (from this list) – Competing Against Luck (fucking terrible)…but I powered through it.

Best nonfiction/work book of 2017 (from this list) – Thinking in Systems. I was surprised at how much I was able to glean from this little tome.

Reading Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom. Either we’re already living in an simulation or it’s all bullshit. I’m unsure which it is. The book is mostly a philosophical overview of the point at which machine intelligence becomes  “conscious” and begins to optimize for whatever goal it has determined. This is the crux of the problem – how can humans seed machine intelligence so that the goal of the AI is beneficial … or in the least doesn’t optimize for a goal that destroys humanity. It’s not a science fiction book. Consider the IQ difference between the village idiot and Einstein. The difference is nominal. Now consider a machine with an intelligence that is 1000x Einstein. What does that even mean? What would it want to achieve? Terrifying.

When I’m feeling the weight of the world or push myself up a long climb while running, I growl. It’s a primitive queue to try harder. And I do.

I need to bounce over to some fiction. The nonfiction business books are making me grumpy. Maybe the next Annihilation book .  I finally cleaned up my Goodreads lists.

Currently reading Blue Ocean Strategy. I have a relatively short collection of business strategy books I’d like to get through this year. So far this book is infinitely better than Competing Against Luck (fucking terrible). I’ve been mixing in some fiction to stay sane. Here are the last few with some quick commentary.

Radical Candor – extremely practical management book. Key takeaway: be direct + care personally.

Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters – Things to remember when raising daughters.

The Second Machine Age (McAffe/Brynjolfsson) – Hmmmm… not as bad as I thought it was going to be. Not terrible. It’s a position. Don’t be afraid of automation. Tempered message overall.  Recommend.

The Last Samurai (Helen DeWitt) – Easily made my list of top 10 books, shy of Infinite Jest, but still ground-breaking. So much complexity and nuance to consider. Highly recommend. I’ve found myself watching the Kurosawa segments on Every Frame a Painting after reading this book.

Ready Player One – quite the juxtaposition after the above book. Maybe an 8th grade reading level? Hard to get past the prose, but I did and enjoyed the world he created (while trying not to think too much about the dystopian setting).

On deck (since I might not be back for a while):

• Inspired – Marty Cagan (might wait for the v2 in January)
• The Hard Thing about Hard Things
• Team of Rivals
• The Captain Class
• Blockchain Revolution

Quiet:  The Power of Introverts (everyone likes a book about power, right?). Thumbs up. Good read.

Or you’re told that you’re “in your head too much,” a phrase that’s often deployed against the quiet and cerebral. Of course, there’s another word for such people: thinkers.

it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly.

Service Design: From Insight to Implementation

Tough read, but in the end very insightful and valuable in thinking about expanding the concept of a journey map. I felt the most interesting examples at the end of the book were about public service design. There is definitely a phase where the design of services overlaps with public policy and politics in general. Think of dark patterns in user experience and the design of services that purposefully extract money from a population. Health care is of course the ultimate service (that is best experiences when it’s not used, e.g. you’re healthy).

A useful way of thinking about people’s roles in services is to think of every exit “off stage” as an entrance somewhere else. This is particularly true in situations in which the staff involved in delivering the service are service users and service providers at the same time.

Do people understand the service—what the new service is or does? Do people see the value of the service in their life? Do people understand how to use it? Which touchpoints are central to providing the service? Are the visual elements of the service working? Does the language and terminology work? Which ideas do the experience prototype testers have for improvement?

typical service blueprint template, with the phases of the customer journey along the top (here it’s Aware, Join, Use, Develop, Leave) and the various touchpoint channels in rows underneath, including the backstage activities at the bottom. A couple of touchpoints have been filled in as examples.

Some examples of Service Design Blueprints.

Currently reading: Radical Candor

Burned through Hillbilly Elegy in a few days.  I thought he did a great job of making the time period relatively abstract and focused more on the demographic, cultural and social implications of growing up in Kentucky/Ohio. There were few period references – the war in Iraq (I’m assuming the second one, not the first). Just a few pop culture references.

The thing that struck me was how much I related to some of his stories. Not so much the family dysfunction (some of that) but mostly just what it’s like to grow up poor. I remember my dad taking me to McDonald’s for my birthday -which was a huge deal. The kind of food that my family ate growing up (not super healthy). Just generally the class distinctions between rich and poor.

My dad was enlisted military, there were 4 kids in my family – there was never any money for anything. We went to church every Sunday and the special treat after church was getting donuts. Being a military brat, we lived on base in military housing until I was in middle school. Shopping was done at the commissary and the PX (post exchange). One of the extraordinary things that I realized later in life was how diverse my schoolmates were – enlisted families were mostly poor families: black, hispanic, asian, white. The common denominator was that our parents all worked for the same “company”. Without the structure of sports teams I’m not sure what we would have done. I think I played every sport offered by the DYA (I’m guessing that stood for the department of youth activities).

After moving off of base housing at Fort Benning, Georgia (where the School of the Americas was based) my parents sent all of us to private Catholic school, where my mom also taught.  I remember having the discussion of whether or not I wanted to go to the Columbus, GA public high school or Catholic school and I pleaded with my parents to go to private school. I remember the times that tuition was late or my mom was worried that we didn’t have the money to pay.  I was the first in my family to go to college.. that’s essentially where I split from the family — I started college on a studio art scholarship and then transferred into the University of Maryland in College Park.

There is definitely an age – around middle school / high school, where kids need the support to make the leap to jump out of their class. For me it was the decision to go to private school and my parents acquiescence.

The book is a best seller because he nails what it’s like growing up in Appalachia. There is a bit of a mixed message about abdicating personal responsibility and viewing everything as hopeless and stacked against your versus taking responsibility and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. In his case his mawmaw (grandmother) was the person to put him on the right path.

In the last few chapters of the book as he moves from undergrad to law school – it’s interesting to read about his realization of the distinction between poor and rich. The things about how the world really works in upper / upper-middle class families. I won’t give it away – but it’s definitely worth a read.

On the broader socioeconomic side of where the author is coming from – Chris Arnade is doing amazing ethnographic research on Twitter.

For some reason I thought Amy Cuddy had written another book and Presence was her blockbuster follow-up… but I think *this* is the book that captures all her research about power poses. First half of the book is a bit too anecdotal for me – I think it’s a pet peeve. Second half details the results of all the studies that support her research. Excellent.

Some notes:

Anxiety gets sticky and destructive when we start becoming anxious about being anxious. Paradoxically, anxiety also makes us more self-centered, since when we’re acutely anxious, we obsess over ourselves and what others think of us.

We like our distinctions to be clear—it’s a human bias. So we classify new acquaintances into types. Tiziana Casciaro, in her research into organizations, refers to these types as lovable fools or competent jerks.2 Occasionally we see people as incompetent and cold—foolish jerks—or as warm and competent—lovable stars. The latter is the golden quadrant, because receiving trust and respect from other people allows you to interact well and get things done.

I am issuing a challenge to all of us, and it’s one that I do not take lightly: Let’s change it. When you see your daughters, sisters, and female friends begin to collapse in on themselves, intervene. Show them examples of girls and women in triumphant postures, moving with a sense of power, speaking with authentic pride. Change the images and stereotypes that kids are exposed to. We don’t need to tell women to be like men. But we do need to encourage girls not to be afraid to express their personal power. Let’s stop thinking about powerful postures as masculine and powerless postures as feminine.

When we embody shame and powerlessness, we submit to the status quo, whatever that may be. We acquiesce to emotions, actions, and outcomes that we resent. We don’t share who we really are. And all this has real-life consequences.

The way you carry yourself is a source of personal power—the kind of power that is the key to presence. It’s the key that allows you to unlock yourself—your abilities, your creativity, your courage, and even your generosity. It doesn’t give you skills or talents you don’t have; it helps you to share the ones you do have. It doesn’t make you smarter or better informed; it makes you more resilient and open. It doesn’t change who you are; it allows you to be who you are.

… and too many more to post. It’s a great read. Here’s the original TED presentation from a few years ago. I’m surprised when I hear people haven’t seen it… so good.

For another quick and fun read into communication, The Secret Life of Pronouns by James Pennebaker.

https://embed.ted.com/talks/lang/en/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are

If I would have known that this was a short ebook I would have read it years ago. It’s less than a 2 hour read.  My biggest takeaway was getting a concise list of terminology for diagram types. I know that sounds dumb but over the years I’ve created my own design artifacts that pull from many different types of diagrams and have various levels of fidelity. It works for me, but it’s tough to communicate it to someone else.

A few quotes from How to Make Sense of Any Mess from Abby Covert.

We can be insecure or secure about the language we’re expected to use. We all prefer security. Linguistic insecurity is the all too common fear that our language won’t conform to the standard or style of our context.

You can turn a space into a place by arranging it so people know what to do there. This act is called placemaking.

The jars, the jam, the price tags, and the shelf are the content. The detailed observations each person makes about these things are data. What each person encountering that shelf believes to be true about the empty spot is the information.

Meaning can get lost in subtle ways. It’s wrapped up in perception, so it’s also subjective. Most misunderstandings stem from mixed up meanings and miscommunication of messages.

The next information architecture book I’d like to read is Pervasive Information Architecture by Resmini and Rosati. Andrea spoke at EuroIA when I presented in Edinburgh. The other book on my list is The Poetics of Space… which I started and abandoned. It was dense and I wasn’t ready at the time – but I’ll be back for that one.