Review: My Years with General Motors

My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan Jr.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read “My Years at General Motors” when I was in college, roughly 32 years ago. My interest at the time was in reading a piece of business history, and I find I still recall a number of topics covered in the book. I can’t say that for many books I read so many decades back. I think that what struck me was that Sloan and his managers really changed how things worked, and organized the automotive industry in a way I see many companies trying to organize their industries today. As I think about it, I realize that what made this book resonate with me all those years ago was that I recognized so many of the business and technical innovations that Sloan described, innovations that really created the world I lived in by being embedded in every organization I interacted with, from schools and colleges to Kmart to the Boy Scouts. I learned of customer segmentation from Sloan’s division of cars by class of the customer they aimed at, Chevy for the masses and Caddy for the upper class, with Olds, Buick, etc. falling in the middle, and with defined target customers. That business move lasted decades and drove changes, usually replication, across the industry. I also remember learning about technical innovation – the good and the bad. Sloan described some of the innovations that GM came up with, including, if I recall correctly, leaded gasoline. Some innovation is right for the times but wrong for other times. Other innovations included allowing car buyers to buy on credit, and building a massive organizational structure with staff departments and hierarchy and span of control optimized to the company’s needs. I also learned of Detroit, and of Dayton, GM hotbed of research. This book made me think highly of Dayton, and when I visited there for a job interview soon after I read Sloan’s book I felt I understood the city a bit better.

I’ve read other reviews that point out that Sloan’s book could be quite dry, with long company memos recorded. Thankfully, the years have allowed me to forget those kinds of difficulties in reading. While I do remember this was a challenge to read through, my interest was kept high by reading of the growth of modern big business from an early master. Impactful.


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Review: The Dark Worlds of H.P. Lovecraft, Vol 3

The Dark Worlds of H.P. Lovecraft, Vol 3 by H.P. Lovecraft
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another collection of 4 Lovecraft horror tales. All creepy. Much of the credit goes to the narrator, who at times struck me as a fellow with a chest wound having a hard time putting much air into his deep and croaking voice, drawing you closer and closer…. The longest story, “Herbert West: Re-Animator”, must have been written for serialization. It consists of 5 short chapters, and each chapter begins with some repeating of earlier bits. The subject of this one is reanimating corpses. The other, shorter stories cover different topics, gruesomely described, but not as gruesome as the previous books in this series. Some racial “insensitivity” in evidence here. Lovecraft would not have won any PC awards.

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Review: Read This Before Our Next Meeting: How We Can Get More Done

Read This Before Our Next Meeting: How We Can Get More Done by Al Pittampalli
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A short manifesto deriding many types of meetings, and providing rules to apply to limit meetings to just the good kind. What is the good kind? Ones were decisions were already arrived at, where documentation has been passed along beforehand and studied beforehand, where there’s an agenda and a belief that the meeting will keep to the agenda, and where there are no extras or what I would call “professional meeting attendees without portfolio.” The author distinguishes types of meetings, and he focuses on ones that end with assigned action plans. There is also some discussion of informational meeting, social meetings, and brainstorming sessions, as well as conversations about meeting topics. Fortunately, in my current work I’ve been involved in very few of the meetings the author describes here, so I won’t be able to enact the advice given, but it’ll remind myself if I get back to those kinds of meetings. The best of the book is that it is short and high energy. Or at least high opinion. I’ve heard the concepts before, but they are put together in an entertaining way here. You can gather the author’s basic concepts by reading some of the more detailed book reviews.

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Review: Trajectory: 7 Career Strategies to Take You from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

Trajectory: 7 Career Strategies to Take You from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by David L. Van Rooy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I listened to Trajectory and found the book felt very familiar. To the good, the advice I had heard before and I already believed it to be true. To the not-so-good, because of the familiar advice and the examples the author used, this felt like a decades-old career self-help book. I listened to the audiobook, so I was not always “in the moment” as the book played, but early on I noticed examples and stories that I would consider typical “guy” themes – professional men’s sports analogies, examples of the military, and the like. I tried to notice the topics of examples and analogies point forward, and the ones I did recall were about men’s careers. I certainly could have missed a number of other examples while I was driving, but from what I recall I was left with a belief that the book catered to men and men’s careers. By itself this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I see women reviewers on Goodreads and Amazon didn’t call this out. But this is what made the book feel like something out of the 70s or 80s to me. For career advice, certainly not bad, and I thought well organized and sized right for the topics and advice given. But not very unique.

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Review: If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating

If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating by Alan Alda
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this book on science communications, Alan Alda tells a story of how he noticed that he was becoming more empathetic with people when he first tried to name their emotional state to himself, silently, while interacting with them. He mentions this to a researcher, who runs with the idea and creates a study. Alda tells of the study, his participation in it, and the results, which were positive, but were also extended by the researcher beyond Alda’s original intent. Then Alda does a funny thing, he relates how others have recommended “his way” of becoming more empathetic. To me, Alda is being a bit self-centered. But you can get away with that if you are entertaining. And in this book, Alda is. Taking a cue from his research, he keeps the topics covered to a small number. At first, he relates communication with improv acting, and his stories about this, including relating interviews with scientists, discussing research, and dropping personal stories, many related to his hosting of the Scientific America TV series, that entertain while building Alda’s science-cred. (Or at least his pop-sci-cred.) A major enabler of improved communications with improv is empathy with your audience, so Alda spends most of the rest of the book talking about how to increase your empathy. The last third hit on a number of topics, including the basics of storytelling. It doesn’t feel like a self-help book, but in the end it is, with plenty of interesting digressions. And if you liked Alda in Scientific American Frontiers, you’ll like this book. He uses the same kind of story introduction and flow that he used in the TV show. It reads very familiarly. Alda does the audiobook version, and that lends even more to the TV show vibe. Although this was a book limited in what it wants to accomplish, it accomplished its mission with aplomb. I feel I learned a few things I’ll be trying for bettering my communications. This would be a great book for a new teacher, with plenty of examples and anecdotes about education for all ages.

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Review: How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another book on a tech high-flyer written by an author that doesn’t have access to key sources within the company he’s profiling. Gallagher was frat-related to the founders and early employees of Snapchat, but lost his access when he began writing for Silicon Valley media. The story felt a lot like “The Accidental Billionaires”, heavy on frat mores and stories in the beginning, and putting the founder on a pedestal at the end. The remaining founder, Evan Spiegel, comes off by the end of the book as a frat version of Steve Jobs.

I liked what Gallagher covers, up to a point. Snapchat is an interesting story. But without access to key personnel, the story at times sounds like mildly jazzed up financial press releases. I believe the “completeness” of the story could have been trimmed out, making this more readable. I listened to the audiobook version of this, narrated by the author. The author has a way of speaking and pronunciation that I found challenging to follow at times. In this case, listening at a faster playback rate helped, but I still missed occasional words. Overall, I found the stories of this tech unicorn -- Snapchat -- to be quite entertaining as business history anecdotes, but despite some great reporting of Snapchat becoming a media competitor, I didn’t get other levels of perspective and analysis that I feel are part of the story.


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Review: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Beautiful little stories, mostly about normal folks, or better – abnormal folks that average out to normal – just living life. Many have issues, and many of those are alcohol related. But the thoughts expressed seems odd yet normal. I found the cadence and the topics of conversations to evoke feelings of a small town in the nostalgic 60s. It seemed very familiar. I’d like to read more.

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