How Design Makes the World. Scott Berkun. 2020.  A journey into design literacy

The author poses  four powerful questions for us:

1. What are you trying to improve?
2. Who are you trying to improve it for?
3. How do you ensure you are successful?
4. Who might be hurt by your work, now or in the future?

In explaining design and the world around us he makes very telling and simple arguments.

What to ask of things you see around you:

What were they trying to improve?
Who were they trying to improve it for?
How successful were they?
What hidden constraints could explain its weaknesses?
Who were the powerful people who made these decisions?
Who paid for it?
Did people come first, or a technology, or an organization?
What message is the style sending to you? Who is included
or excluded from participating?
What systems is this design a part of?
Where in the natural world, or in another culture, might
there be a better solution for this problem?
Does this design create flow or conflict
What new problems does this design create if it’s
successful?
What are you going to do about all of this? (If in doubt,
start a conversation.)

Very useful book to anyone who designs and builds.

The End of October. Lawrence Wright. 2020.  A New York Times bestseller, this is a pandemic novel.  Closely paralleling the Covid-19 pandemic, this book offers a cataclysmic  view of when things all go wrong.  Take a pandemic with a 70% death rate, add in a Russian hack of all American power stations along with a major war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.  Makes for quite a doomsday novel.  Fast paced and timely its makes for an interesting albeit fatalistic read.

Stop Killing Deals. How to avoid deadly assumptions and achieve sales excellence. George Bronten. 2020.

The author has really hit to the core of much that causes sales initiatives to fail.  I agree with his three false assumptions:
Salespeople are born, not made..
Salespeople are disciplined..
Buyers and sellers are logical.

From these is built a solid argument on how to make things better.  A rigorous and proven sales process model with resources, better coaching from sales management and getting away from a reliance on CRM systems that have false assumptions.

The author also provides a plethora of useful tools to help an organization transition to to better way.  Along the way you learn a little bit about his product Membrain.   Its all good. I recommend this book.

Sell More Faster. The ultimate sales playbook for startups. Amos Schwartzfarb. 2019. ISBN 9781119597834.   A concise yet insightful books for the startup world.  The author has carried the bag in sales in companies from startup to growth and been successful at it.  Each chapter has good meat in it that any startup CEO should read and implement with care. I particularly enjoyed how to select the first sales hire  and then grow your sales force including a thoughtful no nonsense examination of compensation models.  After sales support ot reduce churn and to realize the growth of along term book of business was clearly laid out.

I have been working through most of the Karin Slaughter books.  This includes  the  Will Trent series, Grant County series , Good Daughter series and a selection of different novels and short stories many of which are placed in the South.  These are very good crime novels with very strong female characters.  Her male main characters can have a flaw/disability.  The writing is crisp and flows  well. These are  “can’t put them down” type of reads.  I especially appreciate her insights into police minds and the struggles of female officers to gain respect.

I recommend this author