‘Million Dollar Weekend: The Surprisingly Simple Way to Launch a 7-Figure Business in 48 Hours’ by Noah Kagan
As Facebook’s 30th employee, Noah Kagan was once sitting on 0.1 per cent of company stock worth about $1bn today. Then in 2006 he was fired. After eight months moping on a friend’s couch, Kagan realised he had been “liberated” by his failure. “It lit a fire under my ass to get going on my own,” he writes. In Million Dollar Weekend, Kagan now wants to light a fire under yours.
Kagan went on to launch eight million-dollar businesses and the aim of his book is to share his methodology. But first, he says, all wannabe entrepreneurs must shed their excuses, lose their inhibitions and dedicate one weekend to focusing on how to launch their own venture. “Just Fu**ing Start,” he exhorts.
Million Dollar Weekend is a lively read that provides a practical step-by-step guide to founding a business and quickly finding product-market fit. But, in truth, the book offers little fresh insight that has not already been explained more comprehensively elsewhere.
Although his manic style may grate with some readers, Kagan’s main strength is as a motivational coach, challenging the reader to take their first step. “Achieving your dreams comes down to one question: how many times are you willing to get back up after falling down?” he asks.
John Thornhill
‘Feel Good Productivity: How To Do More of What Matters To You’ by Ali Abdaal
Ali Abdaal was a junior doctor on a solo Christmas shift when his disciplinarian approach to productivity failed him. The old mantra of working as hard as possible had helped him start a business, pass medical school and become an influencer simultaneously. But it was, this jolly book recalls, no match for the chaos of an NHS ward.
His “revolutionary” solution is “feel-good productivity”. Getting stuff done, he says, “doesn’t have to mean suffering”: when we enjoy ourselves, we do better work more effectively. Success “doesn’t lead to feeling good. Feeling good leads to success”.
Abdaal’s positivity shines through. His infectious style, bank of interesting anecdotes and studies, and practical tips like embracing a sense of play, enjoying processes or taking time to recharge, make this book a breezy read. Its concluding advice — to experiment with what works for you like a “productivity scientist” — makes the task he sets feel fun rather than burdensome.
One wonders, however, whether much here is actually new. Few management books now advocate feeling miserable, and much of Abdaal’s advice is well worn. I was also left feeling somewhat drained by exhortations that feeling good would make me work better, rather than, say, just being a nice thing in itself.
That said, a reminder that enjoying ourselves can have productive consequences is always welcome. And the abundance of tips to access the feelgood factor means Abdaal’s book will be useful to many readers, too.
Bethan Staton
‘The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking’ by Michael D Watkins
The advent of artificial intelligence means business leaders will have access to new perspectives that were previously unavailable. They will also need new skills to leverage this new way of thinking, and the right mindset for the moment when humans and AI systems work together to enhance decision-making and strategy.
With strategic thinking now crucial for leaders hoping to anticipate and respond to challenges, this book presents a comprehensive, practical guide with a wealth of insights for directors at all levels.
The author, a professor of leadership and organisational change at the IMD business school in Switzerland, explains that strategic thinking is an ability everyone can develop with the right tools. He explores six mental health disciplines that constitute a more modern way to think strategically in the new global business environment.
The first three are concerned with recognising and prioritising challenges and opportunities in an organisation. That means the capability to observe and identify critical threats and opportunities; the competence to mentally model complex situations and make predictions; and the skill to anticipate actions and reactions of other stakeholders.
The other three disciplines, centred around mobilising your organisation effectively, include framing problems and developing creative solutions; imagining ambitious yet achievable futures; and building alliances with stakeholders.
Chapters are complemented with sharp diagrams and real-world examples to help leaders think and contribute creatively in the constantly changing workspace, use emotional intelligence to implement results and adapt to the approaching human-AI relationship.
Leo Cremonezi
‘The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder’ by Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao
This is an entertaining and eminently practical guide by two Stanford professors about how to simplify, streamline and subtract the bad stuff that clogs up work and stifles productivity.
The examples of meeting madness and bureaucratic build-up are excellent. They include Sutton and Rao’s opening pop at a 1,266-word email (with a 7,266-word attachment) they and colleagues received from their own vice-provost. It was “wordy, repetitive, confusing, and packed with defensive responses to past criticism”, they write, and there is plenty more no-holds-barred outrage at time-wasting horror stories throughout the book.
But a list of red tape and unnecessary rules would become dull quite quickly. The Friction Project is all the better for recognising and analysing the opposite problem: too little friction. Sometimes speed is the enemy. Sutton and Rao make a great case for pausing, pondering and occasionally even adding some hurdles to prevent hasty decisions.
The heroes of the book are still the “friction-fixers” — “trustees of how people spend their time” — whose work tackling or anticipating obstacles to creativity and productivity is both thankless and endless. Dropbox CEO Drew Houston declared “Armeetingeddon” in 2013 to rid staff diaries of pointless meetings. But by 2015 “things were worse than ever”. Sutton and Rao pick up on his parallel with mowing the lawn. “Constant maintenance [is] required to stem the ugly and excessive growth,” they write.
Andrew Hill
‘Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the USA’ by Rachel Slade
What does it take to manufacture in the US in the 21st century? In the era of Amazon Prime and fast fashion, can production lines be efficient, competitive and also humane workplaces?
Rachel Slade tackles this through the story of Ben and Whitney Waxman, young business owners who set out to make American-sourced sweatshirts with unionised labour after much of the textile industry, like the production of everything else, has been exported abroad.
The book offers a timely examination of the difficulty of reviving manufacturing in the US. Industrial policies such as the Chips Act and the Inflation Reduction Act are helping fuel billions in new factory investments for semiconductors and clean energy. But project delays, labour shortages and high construction costs are early signs that this manufacturing resurgence won’t be painless or accomplished overnight. Also unclear is if it will deliver tangible benefits for the vast majority of Americans.
Slade argues that the US may have no choice but to make things again: “People can only innovate when they fully understand, fundamentally and completely, how things are made.” Domestic manufacturing was central to the foundation of the US, with Alexander Hamilton convincing the first Congress that “the price of American economic and political independence” would be a combination of tariffs and subsidies, she writes.
Slade explores the imprint that decades of neoliberalism and offshoring has left on America’s worker and economic resilience through the Waxmans’ compelling story. From Ben’s idealistic youth working for unions to the couple’s drives up the eastern seaboard in search of the last vestiges of the American textile network, Made-in-USA enthusiasts and free-trade hawks alike will be rooting for this couple to succeed.
Amanda Chu
‘Not the End of the World’ by Hannah Ritchie
How many harvests does the world have left? Claims from sources such as Defra, the UN and the Independent can’t decide if it’s 30, 60 or 100 — but you’d be forgiven for thinking humanity is going to starve within a century.
The problem, according to Not the End of the World author Hannah Ritchie, is that the claim is bogus, derived from unverified sources and misunderstood studies, and parroted and distorted in a well-meaning game of Chinese whispers.
Self-described “optimist” Ritchie is at pains to clarify that she is not a climate change denialist. Instead, Not the End of the World is intended to be an antidote to hyper-pessimism that pervades climate discourse. Just as climate change deniers sow inaction, so too do the prophesiers of climate gloom, which nearly led her to give up altogether on environmental science.
The book is at its best when Ritchie unpacks, refutes and contextualises doomist claims about issues such as air pollution, deforestation and overfishing, and offers specific suggestions for fixing these insurmountable problems.
Take the dire state of Beijing’s air, reported widely around the 2008 Olympics. The city’s air quality has since improved after public outcry led to regulations on industry and dirty cars being pulled off the road. Ritchie further recommends giving populations access to clean cooking fuels, ending winter crop burning and replacing fossil fuels with renewables and nuclear.
But that last goal might sound familiar. Not the End of the World doesn’t claim to be a book about politics, but its fleeting acknowledgment of issues like state capture and fiscal constraints — which often prevent her solutions from being put into practice — means that the book can never fully achieve its aim of convincing us that “while these problems are big and pressing, they are solvable”.
Martha Muir
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