My Favorite Reads of 2020

I’ve previously (2019, 2018, 2017, 2013) compiled lists of some the books and articles I most enjoyed during the year. Thanks to the pandemic, I read more in 2020 than usual. In no particular order, here are the books and posts that I enjoyed and/or learned from most during the year. (Note: these weren’t all published in 2020 — that’s just when I got to them.)

Books

On Having No Head by Douglas Harding

A short treatise on the experience of consciousness and being. Reconnected me with Zen Buddhism, a great influence in my late teens and early 20s.

I have never been anything but this ageless, measureless, lucid and altogether immaculate Void: it is unthinkable that I could ever have confused that staring wraith over there with what I plainly perceive myself to be here and now and always!

Amazon

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

An invitation to lead generative lives within the bounds of planetary systems. The doughnut is a “21st Century compass” — a visual prompt that articulates these boundaries clearly and simply.

what enables human beings to thrive? A world in which every person can lead their life with dignity, opportunity and community — and we can all do so within the means of our life-giving planet.

Amazon

The Universe of Design: Horst Rittel’s Theories of Design and Planning by Jean-Pierre Protzen and David J. Harris

A collection of Rittel’s writings — essential if you’re dealing with wicked problems.

A model can be defined as a suitable abstraction of reality, presenting the essential structure of a problem, a representation of a subject of enquiry into objects, processes, or systems, for prediction and control. It can be used if the manipulation of the represented entity itself is too expensive or impossible.

(This is one of the best definitions I’ve found of models.)

The innovator, or designer, or planner acts politically in all cases where he is producing essential innovation — even though he may not know it — though he should!

Amazon

The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society by Kenneth E. Boulding

A short treatise on “the image”: “the sum of what we think we know and what makes us act the way we do.” Provides insights on mental models.

Amazon

Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice by Clay Christensen, Karen Dillo, Taddy Hall, and David S. Duncan

Go-to book for the Jobs-to-be-done theory. JTBD has become very popular, and this book is a good articulation of the theory. (I was also pleased by its defense of theory itself.)

New products succeed not because of the features and functionality they offer but because of the experiences they enable.

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Data is always an abstraction of reality based on underlying assumptions as to how to categorize the unstructured phenomena of the real world.

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Organizations typically structure themselves around function or business unit or geography—but successful growth companies optimize around the job.”

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If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, then you don’t know what you are doing.

Amazon

High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove

The best book I’ve read about management. My career would’ve been very different had I read High Output Management twenty years ago.

All managers in such companies need to adapt to the new environment. What are the rules of the new environment? First, everything happens faster. Second, anything that can be done will be done, if not by you, then by someone else. Let there be no misunderstanding: These changes lead to a less kind, less gentle, and less predictable workplace. Again, as a manager in such a workplace, you need to develop a higher tolerance for disorder.

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A manager’s output = the output of his organization + the output of the neighboring organizations under his influence.

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The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them.

My book notes • Amazon

Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding by Stephen Anderson and Karl Fast

Great book on how we make sense of the world. Lots of useful implications for designers. (Disclosure: both co-authors are friends and I received this book for free as a previous Rosenfeld Media/Two Waves author.)

Rosenfeld Media • Amazon

Reagan: The Life by H.W. Brands

One of several books about U.S. politics I read during this election year. This biography gave me a new appreciation of President Reagan’s leadership during a critical period in world history. (I came of age during the years portrayed in the book, and remembered many of the book’s episodes from the news.)

Reagan wasn’t acting when he spoke; his rhetorical power rested on his wholehearted belief in all the wonderful things he said about the United States and the American people, about their brave past and their brilliant future. He believed what Americans have always wanted to believe about their country, and he made them believe it too.

Amazon

On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft by Stephen King

A combination memoir and instruction manual on better writing from a master storyteller. I loved the image of the story as a fossil to be unearthed.

write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you’re very lucky (this is my idea, not John Gould’s, but I believe he would have subscribed to the notion), more will want to do the former than the latter.

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Some people don’t want to hear the truth, of course, but that’s not your problem.

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Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.

Amazon

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters by Richard Rumelt

Strategy is a key, yet elusive, concept. This book clearly defines what constitutes “good” strategy by showing lots of examples of good and bad strategies.

The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.

Amazon

Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life, and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt by David McCullough

A compelling biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt by one of my favorite writers on U.S. history. The Roosevelt family’s aristocratic milieu feels at times like an alien world; McCullough takes us there and makes us care.

Amazon

Children of Dune by Frank Herbert

This year I read the first three Dune books. I’d read the first one in the mid-80s, when the David Lynch movie came out, but I hadn’t read Dune Messiah or Children of Dune. I thought I’d tackle the trilogy now that a new movie is imminent. I especially liked the third book.

“The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.”

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He had to be as precise as possible. At the same time, he knew that precise thinking contained undigested absolutes. Nature was not precise. The universe was not precise when reduced to his scale; it was vague and fuzzy, full of unexpected movements and changes.

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Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.
— LAW AND GOVERNANCE, THE SPACING GUILD MANUAL

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Is your religion real when it costs you nothing and carries no risk? Is your religion real when you fatten upon it? Is your religion real when you commit atrocities in its name?

Amazon

Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-term Fulfillment by George Leonard

Don’t be put off by the cheesy title. This is a good book on the lifelong journey of mastery, inspired by Aikido and Zen.

How do you best move toward mastery? To put it simply, you practice diligently, but you practice primarily for the sake of the practice itself.

My notes • Amazon

The Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers

Pulitzer-prize winning novel about the relationship between humans and the environment, the tension between individual drive and the common weal, and the allure (and perils) of groupthink. Wise, engaging, layered.

His brow crumples. He shrugs. What else is there to say, to a bear? “Apologize! I tell him, people very stupid. They forget everything—where they come from, where they go. I say: Don’t worry. Human being leaving this world, very soon. Then the bear get top bunk to himself again.”

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The confirmation of others: a sickness the entire race will die of.

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“Then why doesn’t the market respond?” Because ecosystems tend toward diversity, and markets do the opposite. But she’s smart enough not to say this. Never attack the local gods. “I’m not an economist. Or a psychologist.”

Amazon