Author

Russel Jurney

Summary

Instructions for a technical setup to iteratively develop practical Data Science applications.

Takeaways

Many Data Science applications fail because of a missing feedback loop between the Data Scientists developing the solutions and the business stakeholders and users. To avoid a disconnect, Data Scientists need to share work in progress frequently. Software development methodolodies like Scrum need to be adapted to account for the larger uncertainty of data exploration.

An Agile Data Science process needs to leave room for experimentation and variable goals. Instead of providing the ship date of a predetermined artifact, an Agile Data Science team should produce working software that describes the state of exploration (“What will we ship, when?” instead of “When will we ship”).

Quotes

“A researcher who is eight persons away from customers is unlikely to solve relevant problems and more likely to solve arcane problems."

“Several changes in particular make a return to agility possible: Choosing generalists over specialists. Preferring small teams over large teams. Using high-level tools and platforms: cloud computing, distributed systems, and platforms as a service (PaaS). Continuous and iterative sharing of intermediate work, even when that work may be incomplete."

“One thing we require is that every level of the stack must be horizontally scalable. Adding another machine to a cluster is greatly preferable to upgrading expensive, proprietary hardware. If you have to rewrite your predictive model’s implementation in order to deploy it, you aren’t being very agile."

“We will only explore a simple heuristic-based approach, because it turns out that in this case that is simply good enough. Don’t allow your curiosity to distract you into employing machine learning and statistical techniques whenever you can. Get curious about results, instead."

Author

Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein

Summary

Practical recommendations for how to design systems that support people in making the right choices.

Takeaways

The design of the environment in which choices have to be made (choice architecture) often greatly influences the results, e.g. the order of food items in a cafeteria or the order of options and default values on a website. The goal of designing choice architectures should be to nudge people to make a choice that best reflects their true intention.

Any “sludge” or obstacles that can get in the way of making the right choice should be reduced, e.g. too many or too complicated options, should be reduced.

Quotes

“Our goal, in short, is to help people make the choices that they would have made if they had paid full attention and possessed complete information, unlimited cognitive ability, and complete self-control."

“The false assumption is that almost all people, almost all the time, make choices that are in their best interest or at the very least are better than the choices that would be made by someone else. We claim that this assumption is false—indeed, obviously false. In fact, we do not think that anyone actually believes it on reflection."

“The discussion thus far suggests that people may most need a good nudge for choices that require memory or have delayed effects; those that are difficult, are infrequent, and offer poor feedback; and those for which the relationship between choice and experience is ambiguous."

“So, if you remember just one thing from this book, let it be this. If you want to encourage people to do something, Make It Easy. If you’re so inclined, hum it to the tune of the old Eagles song: ‘Take It Easy.'"

Author

Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Summary

An overview of communication techniques for effective messaging of ideas.

Takeaways

In order for ideas to stick with an audience they have to be framed as Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories (SUCCES). If we follow the SUCCES framework, we can drill to the core of the message to know what to say (simple) and frame it in a way that helps people to pay attention (unexpected), understand and remember (concrete), believe and agree (credible), care (emotional), and act (stories).

Quotes

“Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it. It also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in very different ways."

“How can we make people care about our ideas? We get them to take off their Analytical Hats. We create empathy for specific individuals. We show how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about. We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities—not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be”

“The story’s power, then, is twofold: It provides simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act)."

“So, rather than guess about whether people will understand our ideas, we should ask, ‘Is it concrete?’ Rather than speculate about whether people will care, we should ask, ‘Is it emotional? Does it get out of Maslow’s basement? Does it force people to put on an Analytical Hat or allow them to feel empathy?'"

Author

Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace

Summary

Practical advice on how to establish and maintain a culture of creativity and innovation in an organization

Takeaways

Running a large organization requires dealing with great complexity, and high uncertainty and instability. It is easy for managers to lose sight of the problems of their employees. The only way managers can avoid this is to encourage candor and open feedback, and to actively work on uncovering and understanding anything that is hidden.

Leaders need to embrace a mindset of humility, admit mistakes and course-correct when new evidence comes to light. Being too fixated on goals and stability is ill-advised as change and failure is unavoidable. Leaders should hold on to their ethics and values, but re-balance priorities and adjust goals as they learn.

Quotes

“I will discuss many of the steps we follow at Pixar, but the most compelling mechanisms to me are those that deal with uncertainty, instability, lack of candor, and the things we cannot see. I believe the best managers acknowledge and make room for what they do not know—not just because humility is a virtue but because until one adopts that mindset, the most striking breakthroughs cannot occur. I believe that managers must loosen the controls, not tighten them."

“Creative people must accept that challenges never cease, failure can’t be avoided, and ‘vision’ is often an illusion. But they must also feel safe -always- to speak their minds."

“Unleashing creativity requires that we loosen the controls, accept risk, trust our colleagues, work to clear the path for them, and pay attention to anything that creates fear. Doing all these things won’t necessarily make the job of managing a creative culture easier. But ease isn’t the goal; excellence is."

“Do not accidentally make stability a goal. Balance is more important than stability."

Author

Jocko Willink, Leif Babin

Summary

A set of leadership principles from the Navy Seals and how to apply them to the business context.

Takeaways

Successful leaders need to take ownership to the next level. “Extreme Ownership” includes owning up to mistakes, believing in the mission, and providing enough context for subordinates and supervisors. The best leaders keep their egos in check and critically assess how they can contribute to the team’s success.

Quotes

“On any team, in any organization, all responsibility for success and failure rests with the leader. The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame. The leader must acknowledge mistakes and admit failures, take ownership of them, and develop a plan to win."

“In order to convince and inspire others to follow and accomplish a mission, a leader must be a true believer in the mission. Even when others doubt and question the amount of risk, asking, “Is it worth it?” the leader must believe in the greater cause. If a leader does not believe, he or she will not take the risks required to overcome the inevitable challenges necessary to win. And they will not be able to convince others—especially the frontline troops who must execute the mission—to do so. Leaders must always operate with the understanding that they are part of something greater than themselves and their own personal interests."

“Ego clouds and disrupts everything: the planning process, the ability to take good advice, and the ability to accept constructive criticism. It can even stifle someone’s sense of self-preservation. Often, the most difficult ego to deal with is your own."

“Simplifying as much as possible is crucial to success. When plans and orders are too complicated, people may not understand them. And when things go wrong, and they inevitably do go wrong, complexity compounds issues that can spiral out of control into total disaster. Plans and orders must be communicated in a manner that is simple, clear, and concise."

Author

Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Summary

The story of a plant manager who discovers the benefit of systematically assessing the processing bottlenecks instead of relying on conventional wisdom.

Takeaways

Instead of relying on conventional wisdom, it is crucial to deeply reflect on the goal of an operation or organization and take a scientific and systematic approach to explore the factors (bottlenecks or constraints) that prevent us from reaching it.

The following process can serve as a blueprint to work towards achieving any goal.

1. Identify the system’s constraint.
2. Decide how to exploit the system’s constraint.
3. Subordinate everything else to the above decisions.
4. Elevate the system’s constraint.
5. If in the previous steps a constraint has been broken, go back to step 1, but do not allow inertia to cause a system constraint.

Quotes

“Finally, and most importantly, I wanted to show that we can all be outstanding scientists. The secret of being a good scientist, I believe, lies not in our brain power. We have enough. We simply need to look at reality and think logically and precisely about what we see. The key ingredient is to have the courage to face inconsistencies between what we see and deduce and the way things are done."

“I stop and look at him. “What are we asking for? For the ability to answer three simple questions: ‘what to change?’, ‘what to change to?’, and ‘how to cause the change?’ Basically what we are asking for is the most fundamental abilities one would expect from a manager. Think about it. If a manager doesn’t know how to answer those three questions, is he or she entitled to be called manager?”

“The lesson that Shewhart brought to manufacturing from Physics, and Deming made known worldwide, is that trying to be more accurate than the noise (in our case, trying to use sophisticated algorithms that consider every possible parameter in an environment of high variability) does not improve things but makes them worse—the results will most certainly not be an improvement but a deterioration in due-date performance."

Author

Cathy O’Neil

Summary

A warning of the destructive power of black-box algorithms that govern our lives.

Takeaways

Algorithms and mathematical models are ubiquitously applied and drive decisions in every aspect of our lives. They, for example, determine college admissions, calculate insurance fees, and determine the content in our social media feeds. Many of the algorithms are intransparent, making it impossible to understand and challenge the results. If there is no alignment between the objectives of the models and the interest of the modeled subjects and if there is no feedback loop to improve the model over time, these “weapons of math destruction (WMD)” can cause significant harm.

Quotes

“The first question is: Even if the participant is aware of being modeled, or what the model is used for, is the model opaque, or even invisible?"

“That makes it extra hard to answer the second question: Does the model work against the subject’s interest? In short, is it unfair? Does it damage or destroy lives?"

“The third question is whether a model has the capacity to grow exponentially. As a statistician would put it, can it scale? This might sound like the nerdy quibble of a mathematician. But scale is what turns WMDs from local nuisances into tsunami forces, ones that define and delimit our lives."

“So to sum up, these are the three elements of a WMD; Opacity, Scale, and Damage."

Author

Mik Kersten

Summary

A practical guide to developing a product focussed management framework that allows competing in the Age of Software.

Takeaways

We are at the turning point of the digital revolution. Companies need to transform their business practices to effectively leverage software development and technology. Many companies realize the need for transformation but rely on management practices that are not adequate for the task.

Products differ from projects in multiple ways. Products have a longer life cycle and receive incremental funding based on business results. The direct mapping to business results enables transparency into the delivery progress and the impact a product has. The Flow Framework is a way to track and visualize the network of product value streams of an organization and identify bottlenecks that require attention.

Quotes

“Software delivery concepts near and dear to technologists, such as technical debt and story points, are meaningless to most business leaders who manage IT initiatives as projects and measure them by whether they are on time and on budget."

“The problem is not with visualizing the information; the problem is that, at a business level, we have not come up with a compelling set of abstractions for what to visualize. Contrast this with the DevOps team, who knows the exact telemetry to show, such as deploys per day and change success rate. Or contrast it with the development team, who uses Scrum or kanban boards to make work in progress visible to the entire team. In other words, the work should already be visible at the specialist and team level. It’s the business-level visibility that organizations lack. This is what flow metrics provide."

“In contrast, the key aspect of tracking business outcomes using the Flow Framework is that they are tracked continually for each product-oriented value stream. This is in contrast to many existing approaches, which track metrics according to project or organizational structures. It is this shift in what we measure that is key to accomplishing the move from project to product, as accurate feedback at the right level of granularity is essential to supporting decision making."

Author

Peter Thiel

Summary

Practical advice for founders how to build a successful startup and create something new.

Takeaways

Competition is a concept that has a high value in our educational system and economic thinking. The emphasis on competition leads to a uniform approach to development and only incremental improvements. Innovation and success come from avoiding competition and focusing on individual strengths and believes that set yourself apart from others.

If we believe the future to be something definite, we can create bold plans and see them through completion. An indefinite attitude leads to a lack of specific plans, missing innovation, and prevents us from shaping the future.

Quotes

“Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival. So why do people believe that competition is healthy? The answer is that competition is not just an economic concept or a simple inconvenience that individuals and companies must deal with in the marketplace. More than anything else, competition is an ideology –the ideology– that pervades our society and distorts our thinking."

“If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it. Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options."

“Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it ‘well-roundedness’, a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substansive–to be a monopoly of one."

Author

Jack Welch

Summary

The life and professional career of Jack Welch, Chairman of General Electric from 1981 to 2001, described in his own words.

Takeaways

Leadership requires more than the knowledge to make sound business decisions. It is equally important to establish the right culture with a focus on people that allows for differentiation and development, and that empowers everyone to contribute ideas (“boundaryless”).

Being able to react to changes trumps a well thought out longterm strategy. Speed and decisiveness are important to remain competitive in changing circumstances even if not all decisions or judgment calls stand the test of time. The characterization of some associates who receive high praise in the book but were later on criticized for their leadership (Jeff Immelt, Bob Nardelli) or general conduct (Roger Ailes, Matt Lauer), is one example that appears to not have aged well.

Quotes

“We learned the hard way that we could have the greatest strategies in the world. Without the right leaders developing and owning them, we’d get good-looking presentations and so-so results."

“Business success is less a function of grandiose predictions than it is a result of being able to respond rapidly to real changes as they occur. That’s why strategy has to be dynamic and anticipatory."

“Informality isn’t about first names, unassigned parking spaces, or casual clothing. It’s so much deeper. It’s about making sure everybody counts–and everbody knows they count."

“Your back room is somebody else’s front room … Don’t own a cafeteria: Let a food company do it. Don’t run a print shop: Let a printing company do it. It’s understanding where your real value added is and putting your best people and resources behind that.”