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Latest Read: To Pixar and Beyond

To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History by Lawrence Levy proves to be a wonderful read. Levy, the former Pixar CFO reveals significant financial challenges Pixar faced upon his arrival.

To Pixar and Beyond

Steve Jobs purchased Pixar from George Lucas for $5 million and then invested $5 million into the company. Steve brought Lawrence to Pixar in 1994. Lawrence Levy shares how Disney really put the screws to Pixar. Disney played hardball with a small company struggling and got away with it.

Lawrence shares how he and Steve took walks around their neighborhood around Palo Alto on Saturdays. He described many of the topics of their walks. This reveals much about Steve’s view of the company. Steve was growing Pixar to be a rockstar animation company.

My insights gained from To Pixar and Beyond is that Steve always saw the company holding an amazing future. There were roadblocks with Disney at times, yet Pixar was unknowingly growing into a change agent for Hollywood.

Much has been written about Steve’s control of Pixar stock. This included a negative image held among Pixar staff when he purchased the company. To be blunt, Jobs burned over $10 million of personal money to keep Pixar afloat. At the time the company really did not have a solid business revenue model for many years.

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Design Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Scaling Up Excellence

Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less by Stanford professors Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao. This book is a wonderful, insightful read for today’s world. Robert Sutton continues to provide deep analysis for successful leaders. Those leaders in turn generate (and sustain) ideal performers. Coronavirus is challenging business to fundamentally re-think their core business model.

scaling up excellence

Scaling Up Excellence will help organizations understand how to embrace change faster and effectively in the short term. And short term as of mid April may be forecasting this into December 2020.

Let me begin with a new twist for business projects. Conduct a pre-mortem. Organizations conduct post mortems to discover where tasks failed. Sutton’s pre-mortem can drive project goals or reveal scope creep.

The key is dividing your team into two. One team will imagine project delivery as a success specifically down to the details. The second team takes the opposite road, also in great detail. Bring your teams back together and place all points on a whiteboard. Find your hits and misses in a new way and determine if your scope is accurate enough to deliver.

Scaling Up Excellence provides great case studies and academic research. From start-ups, pharmaceuticals, airlines, retail, financial services, education, non-profits, and healthcare. All benefit from pre-mortems.

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Design Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Focus

Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence by Daniel Goleman is a book for our coronavirus moment. Chapter 12: Patterns, Systems, and Messes addresses the 1918 flu pandemic. Does Focus have your attention now? Goleman provides many insights we need to understand today. He delivers direct lessons for our new coronavirus world.

Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence

Maybe what readers should enjoy is a quick test on your reading memory. What? A memory test in a book? Ah…Yes. This approach brings into sharp ‘focus’ how we read.

Focus addresses how business needs to pay more attention to the market. The refrigerator business does not change. The mobile handset market dramatically changed.

Goleman addresses the sharp rise and sudden fall of Blackberry. A smartphone market lesson would not be complete without a story of Steve Jobs and the iPhone.

And to some extent what Goleman may have missed was the demise of Blackberry was their simple lack of ‘focus’ on 4G networks. Yes, Blackberry actually stayed with 3G, did not embrace 4G just as mobile began BYOD.

Blackberry’s leadership (engineering backgrounds) led them to success very early in the mobile device marketplace. They rested on their laurels. The iPhone killed their company. Smartphones do not equal, as Goleman suggests a refrigerator marketplace. He points to many lessons about corporate shooting stars.

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Latest Read: When Gadgets Betray Us

Robert Vamosi wrote When Gadgets Betray Us: The Dark Side of Our Infatuation With New Technologies in 2013. Today in the age of COVID-19 this book remains very relevant. Upon his book release, Robert spoke at Microsoft Research.

When Gadgets Betray Us: The Dark Side of Our Infatuation With New Technologies
When Gadgets Betray Us: The Dark Side of Our Infatuation With New Technologies

When Gadgets Betray Us is really about the internet of things (IoT) and the explosion of cheap gadgets.

This is a two fold problem: the impulse of human behavior to jump right into a new, innovative, ‘shiny’ devices. We more often skip reading the manual. Who reads manuals anyway these days?

However the ability for a nation state to remotely hack building controls and manipulate industrial machines seemed like stuff from a Hollywood movie, even back in 2013.

Clearly Vamosi could not have considered the impact of Stuxnet, the attack by Israel and the US NSA to destroy centrifuges in an underground facility in Iran. My review Countdown to Zero Day will surprise many readers.

This is a good starting point for many readers. Generally When Gadgets Betray Us reveals how our devices (phones, cars, smart watches, home thermostats and even baby monitors leaked location data. Worse, baby monitors permitted hackers to hijack the video feeds meant for remote grandparents, family and friends.

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Design Education Innovation Reading Technology

Latest Read: Think Like a Freak

The authors of Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner publish Think Like a Freak. This is their third, and potentially last book in the Freakonomics platform.

think like a freak

Their idea is to train people to … well, think like they do, like a Freak. For example, the soccer penalty kick. Which way will the kicker try to strike the ball into the net? Go left side, middle or right? Well this is their first lesson to dig into the analytics and the mental thoughts of the kicker and goalie.

The level of attention they pay to the soccer question may be viewed as overthinking. Yet with your legacy riding on the kick, you have to decode a lot of data in a minute. Take this idea further. You will see the book’s insights develop for your life.

They teach readers to boil events down to incentives. Then measure the hell out of it. Yes this is an interesting take on how to change someone’s position. They even address the idea that you are too old to change your ways. The book’s subtitle is their offer to retrain your brain.