How To Win at The Sport Of Business is Mark Cuban’s book in which he chronicles his life experiences in business and sports. It starts with Mark Cuban’s story, how he started as a salesman at Your Business Software and started a company called MicroSolutions after getting fired. Later parts of the book focus on the lessons he learned along the way and his advice to entrepreneurs. Here are some quotes from the book:

Grouped is a book by Paul Adams on social interactions. It explains how we’re connected to each other, how we communicate with each other and how we influence each other. Using research findings on social interactions, Paul Adams provides actionable items for marketing people on how to communicate their brands using social networks. Here are some interesting bits from the book:

• We communicate with the same 5 to 10 people 80 percent of the time.
• Products that are visible and accessible will be talked about more. Giving people the full product to try can lead to a 20 percent increase in conversations about that product.
• A researcher at Microsoft analyzed 30 billion instant messaging conversations on MSN and concluded that, on average, we are all connected through 6.6 people.
• On average, people have 160 friends on Facebook yet communicate directly with only four to six of them. People with more than 500 friends on Facebook often have a hard time figuring out who some of the people are.
• In a study of 74 milion tweets, only a few dozen generated a thousand retweets. Twitter users with the most followers do not necessarily have the greatest number of retweets or mentions. Instead of looking for overly influential people, businesses should look for regular people who are likely to be interested in what they have to say. Targeting large numbers of these people is more likely to spread ideas than trying to find a small number of influential individuals.
• People eating with one other person eat 35 percent more than they eat at home. People eating in a party of four eat 75 percent more. If your friends are happy, you’re more likely to be happy.
• Research on amazon.com found that people don’t give things objective reviews and ratings; they tend to give the same ratings as other people have given before them.
• If someone gives us somethings, we have a natural desire to give something in return at some point in the future.
• When faced with many choices, people often can’t make a decision and walk away from all the choices. When P&G reduced the number of Head & Shoulders products from 26 to 15, they saw a 10 percent increase in sales.
• When you add a new product line, remove an older one. Apple basically only sells four things: Macs, iPods, iPads and iPhones.
• People are much more likely to vote for the first candidate on the ballot than someone in the middle or at the end because they are primed to think of a list of people as a leaderboard.
• People are much more likely to buy meat that is labeled 85 percent lean than meat that is labeled 15 percent fat.
• People tend to avoid extremes and make choices that are intermediate between what they need at a minimum and what they can possibly spend at a maximum.

Overall it’s a fantastic read full of interesting research findings that are actionable.

Reid Hoffman’s The Start-up Of You is a book on careers. He makes analogies between startup principles and careers, and explains how one can use these principles in their career. In this book, you’ll also find stories and pivot examples from companies such as Netflix, Flickr, Zappos, Square, Starbucks, Pixar and PayPal.

Here are the bits that I’ve found interesting:

• If you’re not growing, you’re contracting. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward.
• If you try to be the best at everything and better than everyone, you’ll be best at nothing and better than no one.
• Go where there’s fast growth, because fast growth creates all opportunities. Work in a market with natural momentum. Ride the big waves.
• Think two steps ahead. A goal that can be achieved in a single step is probably not very meaningful or ambitious.
• A good Plan A is one that offers flexibility to pivot to a range of possible Plan B’s.
• Relationships matter because the people you spend time with shape who you are and who you become. The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.
• 70 percent of Americans meet their spouses through someone they know.
• Humans should be able to maintain relationships with no more than roughly 150 people.
• I have never funded a company directly from a cold solicitation and my guess is I never will.
• Great opportunities almost never fit your schedule.
• Entrepreneurs strategically pursue only those opportunities with enough upside to justify the possible downside.
• If something worthwhile will be riskier in five years than it is now, be more aggressive about taking it on now.

Overall, careers is not the most interesting subject. It was a short and enjoyable read, however, don’t expect to find any secret formulas regarding your career.

They say don’t judge a book by its cover, but the cover of this book sets the right expectations. It mostly contains business advice for people in suites and ties. Nevertheless,  here are some bits that I’ve found useful:

Attitude

• The world generally favors people who are energetic and extroverted. People with positive energy are generally extroverted and optimistic.
• It is very, very hard to get ahead without being a positive person because, very simply, no one likes to work under or near a dark cloud. Even if the “cloud” is very smart.
• People with passion tend to be passionate about everything.

Career Advice

Losing My Virginity is Richard Branson’s autobiography. It depicts Branson’s life in chronological order, starting with his school years and Student magazine days. It continues with Virgin Mail Order business, setting up Virgin Record Shops and a recording studio, and eventually signing up artists to create a record label. Later parts of the book focus on his airline business and the competition between British Airways and Virgin Atlantic.

Branson’s energy reflects in his writing, he starts the book with an exciting hot-air balloon adventure and knows how to engage the reader. There are some lessons to be learned from Richard Branson:

Effective Java by Joshua Bloch (creator of Java Collections Framework)  is a book on programming. It contains examples on common mistakes people make, best practices for software design, Java gotchas and introductory material on new features of Java language.

Although some parts of the book are specific to Java, in general it contains advice that would be useful in any object oriented language. Even tough it’s heavy in content and requires your full mental attention, it is organized in chapters containing several suggestions on a specific topic that make it easier to read.

Alan Sugar’s autobiography is quite peculiar in the sense that it’s written as if he is talking to you. You’ll hear his voice as you read the book which makes it more sincere.

I was interested in this book mainly because he’s a self-made millionaire from a very poor family in East London.

In this book, you’ll learn about his journey in business as he starts from being a salesman to owning a public company, his success as a retailer and manufacturer, his involvement in the football club Tottenham Hotspur, his involvement in The Apprentice and how he got knighted and appointed to House of Lords.

Steve Jobs was my personal hero, his biography is a great reflection of his attitude and perspective on life. Here are my notes from the biography of Steve Jobs:

On simplicity and focus

• One of Jobs’s great strengths was knowing how to focus. Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do he said. He had the power to focus like a laser beam.
• We needed to limit what the device itself would do. Instead we put that functionality in iTunes on the computer.
• Jobs’s intensity was also evident in his ability to focus. He would set priorities, aim his laser attention on them, and filter out distractions. He attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen training. It honed his appreciation for intuition, showed him how to filter out anything that was distracting or unnecessary, and nurtured in him an aesthetic based on minimalism.

On his attitude

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries is a book about his approach to building products and creating companies.

One concept I embraced from this book is to view your startup is a set of experiments to systematically figuring out the right things to build. It involves defining your startup as a set of hypotheses you need to test, and try to be efficient in finding out what works and what doesn’t. An important aspect of Lean Startup methodology is experimentation. It mentions some leap of faith assumptions startups need to test, such as:

I was hesitant to buy Brad Feld’s new book on venture capital after being disappointed by “Do More Faster”. However, this book has proven to be very informative and valuable read. As an early employee in a venture funded startup, my motivation in reading this book was to get more familiar with terms and technical details of a funding round.

Venture deals, as the name suggests, is all about raising venture capital, and explains a term sheet in great detail, and provide guidance on which terms to focus on. It reads like a school textbook from time to time.