One of my favorite things about going dark for a week is that I get to consume a bunch of books.  Since we’ve been back from Alaska, my reading pace has been slower than normal, so it was nice to have plenty of uninterrupted time to lay on a couch and read.  I usually manage to read a book a day on vacation – this time I only gobbled down five.  All but one was great.

I started off with The Cure.  Every entrepreneur should read this book. I can’t remember who recommended it to me (someone at the Return Path board dinner?) – it’s the extraordinary personal and professional story of John Crowley, his wife Aileen, their three children (two of whom have Pompe disease), and John’s creation of Novazyme Pharmaceuticals – a company he created to cure Pompe disease in order to save his kids.  While John steps firmly on (and possibly over) the lines of medical ethics, his singleminded focus helps make tremendous progress on this disease while creating a very successful company that was acquired by Genzyme for $137m within 18 months of being founded.  An old friend – David Hendren – makes an unexpected visit in this book as the lead investor in Novazyme (David was the lawyer who represented Feld Technologies – my first company – when it was acquired by AmeriData.)

Hundred Dollar Baby: I need some mental floss next.  Spenser (and Robert Parker) didn’t disappointment me (they never do.)  If you are a Spenser fan, this is the latest – both Hawk and Susan play prominent roles.

Destined for Destiny: George W. Bush’s unauthorized autobiography was as disappointing to me as GWB’s performance as president.  Scott Dikkers – the editor-in-chief of The Onion was the co-author – and I expected 90 minutes of hilarity.  The first few chapters had me laughing, but the book stalled out and I ended up looking at the pictures and skimming.  I guess that fits with the topic.  Oh well.  Unless you are a serious Bush-basher or Onion-lover, don’t bother.

High School Confidential: I love ethnography.  My favorite course as a doctoral student was John van Mannen’s – we spent a lot of time understanding how to best do qualitative research using fieldwork.  I’ve always fantasized about dropping out and getting “regular jobs” – I love reading books about people that have the courage to do this and then document it.  Jeremy Iversen – at age 25 – spent a year as a high school senior in a school in the Los Angeles area.  The book is superb – Iversen does a phenomenal job of having the other high school kids tell the story.  The most remarkable thing to me was how similar things were to my high school experience (public high school in Richardson, Texas – J.J. Pearce in case you wondered.)  While the language is a little different, the social dynamics, sex, teachers, drugs, parents, school administrators, and struggles seemed pretty equivalent.

The Immortal Game:  Awesome book.  I’ve always loved chess, although I’m an “ok beginner” and I’ve never spent the time necessary to study the game in order to get past “level 1.”  Shenk does a superb job of explaining the history of chess, which mixing in a famous game (Adolf Anderssen vs. Lionel Kieseritzky – June 21, 1851, London – known as “The Immortal Game”) to highlight / teach chess and its notation.  It’s an incredibly compelling approach to teaching the history of chess – I found myself unable to put the book down.

Overall it was an extremely bookalicious week.

My dad just wrote a great review of Bob Woodward’s State of Denial. We were both reading it at about the same time and had a couple of interesting conversations about it.  When Rumsfeld got fired, I moved on to another book (I had about 100 pages left) – I figure Woodward had accomplished his mission.  But – I never wrote a review of the book.  Now that my dad has done it, I don’t have to.

On my Q3 Vacation, I read Anonymous Lawyer and loved it.  Jason – one of the lawyers in my life – just read it and had the following to say.

It’s a great read for anyone – non-lawyers included.  Jeremy blogged as a fictional hiring partner at a top law firm while still a student at Harvard and many people thought he was the real deal.  The book is one of the funniest books I have read in recent memory and is the perfect way to unwind at the end of the day or while traveling.  Please buy this book so Jeremy doesn’t have to go work at a law firm.

One of my favorite parts of vacation is to voraciously consume a pile of books.  I’m a fast reader (and a good skimmer when I’m bored of a book) so most vacations end up with at least a book a day read.  My algorithm for picking the books to read is random.  I have shelves of unread books, piles of unread books, and bookstores full of unread books.  Of course, there is also Amazon where a book is merely 1–Click away.  I try to mix in “mental floss” every three books (e.g. a novel) – just to make sure I don’t become a “dull non-fiction only” reader (ok – it’s actually because I like to read fiction.)

Following are short reviews of the books I read last week – in order.  Some were great, some were ok, and a few sucked.

Bone Games: I started this one on the way back from the New Mexico Marathon.  It was a fascinating personal exploration by the author into extreme sports, shamanism, zen, and the search for transcendence (whatever that means.)  I’m regularly asked why I’m running a marathon on the North Pole in April – the long answer is “read this book.”  Recommended for all athletes and extreme sports fanatics.

Anonymous Lawyer: Two works – “fucking hilarious.”  For a taste, check out the blog.  This was – by far – the funniest / funnest book of the week.  If you blog, or like to read blogs, are a lawyer, or hate lawyers, this is for you.

4 Hour Marathon: I must get faster.  5 hours is too long to be running 26.2 miles.  My PR is 4:05 – there is no question that I should be able to comfortably break 4 hours in a marathon.  However, I didn’t learn anything from this book – it basically said (a) run more, (b) do intervals, (c) do tempo workouts, and (d) lift weights.  Doh.

Promoting Your Podcast: I can’t remember who recommended this book, but I figured I should read it since I’ve got investments in companies that are related to podcasting, including FeedBurner, NewsGator, and ClickCaster.  If you are a beginning (or aspiring) podcaster, this is full of great information.  I was delighted that FeedBurner is a key part of this book’s recommendations.

The I Chong: Another awesome book.  I vaguely knew that Tommy Chong had recently spent some time in jail.  As a child of the 70’s, Cheech and Chong was my first real exposure to “The Herb.”  While I’ve never been a stoner, I remember being a young Dallas Cowboys fan while rolling around on the floor laughing at Up in Smoke.  Our current administration busted Chong for ostensibly selling glass bong pipes across state lines and tossed him in jail for nine months.  This is his story of the experience along with a bunch of personal philosophy tossed in.  Excellent.

The End of Medicine: Every book that Andy Kessler has written has been superb.  The End of Medicine was no different – it was deep, insightful, fun to read, and full of great stuff.  If you are an investor, entrepreneur, or are interested in the health care system, this is a must read.

The Return of the Player: I loved Robert Altman’s movie The Player so I thought I’d give Michael Tolkin’s sequel a try.  It was ok.  I’m a little bored of the “LA Novel” – this is another one that fits the genre.  The first half drags on while the second half happens too fast.  As I read it, I felt like I was watching a movie, so feel free to wait for the screenplay to come to a theater near you.

The Connoisseur’s Guide to Sushi: I love sushi.  I learned a lot from this book.  It’s long so I was reduced to skimming since I didn’t want to learn endless details about every type of sushi known to man.  But – it was good.  And no – I don’t put that neon green stuff in my soy sauce (although I like to put in on pickled ginger and snarf it down while I’m waiting for my fish to come.)

24: Veto Power: January 2007 can’t come soon enough for me so I’ve been reduced to reading Jack Bauer novels. 

The Art of The Long View: I dug deep into my bookshelf for this one.  I can’t even remember when I bought this – Peter Schwartz is a well known futurist and the chairman of Global Business Network.  This book was originally published in 1991 (and the dust on it showed – I wonder if I hauled it all the way from Boston.)  It was fascinating, especially to read the history of what a futurist predicted.  Some of the “how to scenario plan” stuff was dull (and got skimmed), but all of the predictions and theorizing was super interesting.

Sense & Nonsense in the Office: Sucked.  Boring.

24 more hours and I’m back in the real world.  Doink, Doink, Doink.

I usually enjoy Tom Wolfe.  I remember reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test when I was in junior high and thinking something akin to “far out.”  I loved I Am Charlotte Simmons, especially Wolfe’s extraordinary detailed characters and complete mastery of the word fuck.

I never got around to reviewing I Am Charlotte Simmons but Ben Casnocha did today.  Ben is a recent high school graduate, a close friend, and an amazingly articulate guy.  His review of the book was as good as the book.  If you are in high school, recently started college, or a parent of either of the preceding categories of kids, this is likely to be a wildly interesting book for you to read.  If you simply love the incredible characters and storytelling of Tom Wolfe when he’s really on, you’ll also love it.

Bill Venema sent me a copy of his book The Strategic Guide to Selling Your Software Company.  If you are a founder of CEO of a software company and you’ve sold less than three companies in your career, this is a must read book.  If you’ve sold three or more companies, it’s probably still worth having it on your bookshelf to pull down and look at when you are gearing up for the next sale you are involved in, or to be able to quickly hand it to one of your partners who has sold less than three companies.

I was surprised by the book – most books like this aren’t very good.  I struggled through the first few chapters because of the setup – Bill uses a military context to describe how he approaches selling a company (the subtitle – “Essential Advice from a Veteran Deal Warrior” should have given that away to me.)  However, once I got about 70 pages in (Chapter 4), I found the rest of the book to be easy to read, highly relevant, and a great basic overview of all the key issues involved in selling a company.

Bill has a broad background – including three degrees (one in engineering, an MBA, and a JD), Army officer experience, and 20 years as a transactional attorney.  His writing is clear and concise – this book can be read from cover to cover or used as a reference.  As you’d expect, Bill has a giant “caveat emptor!” at the beginning of the book followed by “this is not legal or accounting advice – hire a professional.”  True – but this book will help you understand what the professional is talking about.

A while back I wrote one of my periodic rants against PowerPoint.  I’ve sat through so many horrible PowerPoint presentations that I’ve ceased to be patient with them.  When I occasionally get a good one, I stand up and cheer.  Of course – the problem isn’t PowerPoint – it’s the person that created the presentation in the first place.

After my rant, Cliff Atkinson sent me a copy of his book Beyond Bullet Points along with a nice note that said:

Brad, A complimentary copy hot off the press.  Hopefully this can ease the “tortuous world of PowerPoint” a little bit!  Enjoy, Cliff.

I’m usually pretty good about quickly getting to books that people send me.  However, this one sat on the pile for a long time.  Every time it got near the top, some mischievous book resorting goblin moved it back down in the pile.  I finally chased the goblin away and read Cliff’s book tonight.

If you have to create or give PowerPoint presentations, you owe it to yourself to read this book.  You won’t necessarily agree with everything Cliff says, nor should you slavishly follow his instructions, but his broad approach to using PowerPoint to tell a story – without bullets – is excellent and thought provoking.  Nicely done Cliff.

We hit a rainy stretch the past few days – good for reading; not so good for getting a sun tan.  In addition to The Big Six, I managed to finish four other books this week.  All of them were good, but for different reasons.

Hayduke Lives! was the funnest (and the only one that was fiction.)  I read The Monkey Wrench Gang a few weeks ago – it was my first introduction to Edward Abbey (thanks Dave.)  I loved it, so Amazoned Hayduke Lives! which was published posthumously, but was a continuation of the characters and stories in The Monkey Wrench Gang.  I had a difficult time getting into Hayduke Lives! (I imagine if Abbey had been alive he would have worked it over a few more times), but I was deeply hooked after 100 pages.  Abbey’s characters are insane, beautiful, hilarious, and brave – in an insane, beautiful, and hilarious way.

The Long Tail has been widely reviewed, praised, and discussed.  It earns its praise – Chris Anderson has written an excellent book that nicely balances analyzing what has happened in “the new economics of culture and commerce” (his words) while being instructive and predictive about how things will play out in the future.  It’s credible, well written, full of relevant examples, and thought provoking.  If it’s not on your bookshelf, it should be.

I’m not a huge fan of books on “how to sell”, but I liked The Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer.  It’s part of Gitomer’s arsenal of sales stuff – extensively promoted on his website at Gitomer.com – and was surprisingly good.  A blog reader recommended it (thanks – leave me a comment so I know who you were) and it was worth the time.  If you are in sales, or a CEO of a startup, it’s worth a read, if for no other reason than to charge you up, clean off some mental cobwebs, and give you some fresh ideas and a kick in the ass.

Blueprint to a Billion was a mixed bag, but fundamentally good.  It’s being positioned as a Jim Collins like treatise on how to create great companies (which the author – David Thomson – calls “Blueprint Companies.”)  Thompson analyzed the 387 companies that have gone public since 1980 and have achieved $1 billion dollars in revenue looking for common characteristics that drive their success.  While there is plenty of data and solid analysis surrounding it, unlike Collins, Thomson ends up getting lost in the data in places and lets the numbers dominate his thought process, rather than stepping back and articulating profound and powerful conclusions.  Jim Collins is unmatched at this type of analysis, and – although Thomson falls short – Blueprint to a Billion was still very good.  Thomson’s web site has a blog, although there are only a few posts and then end on 4/30/06 – I guess Thomson is too busy running around doing consulting and giving his book tour to keep the blogging up.

Next week will have a lot more fiction in it – I promise (myself.)

I read less this week than I read last week (mostly because it was a busy week) but I still managed to get through five books.  Looking back on the week, four of them were business books, which is unusual for me – I think I was stalling reading the last Dennis Lehane book for as long as I could (it’s up next.)

The best book of the week – by far – was The Big Six.  I’m generally grumpy (that’s a nice euphemism) with the accounting industry these days, especially the Big Four.  The combination of the accounting scandals of 2001 – 2003, which led to extensive new government regulations such as SOX, had the unintended consequence of making the Big Four more arrogant, lazy, ineffective, and non-responsive to entrepreneurial companies.  In the late 1990’s, these firms would do practically anything to get audit work with early stage companies, promising that they would “grow with them.”  Today, not only do they have no interest in working with young companies (“we don’t have enough time – we are too busy working with our large public company clients, helping them deal with SOX and other regulations”), they behave incredibly inappropriately with regard to any sort of client transition activity (I have a long list of stories here – ranging from requests for $185,000 to transfer work papers to a new auditor (a 10 hour process) to cover “cumulative discounts over the past four years” to holding up merger accounting for a public company for 12 months “because we don’t have time”, resulting in the public company having no way to get the SEC to approach an S-3 registration statement.)  I could rant for a while about this – I suppose that should be the topic for another blog post (or seven).

The Big Six – subtitled The Selling Out of America’s Top Accounting Firms – was written in in 1991 by Mark Stevens and is a brilliant description of the Big Eight landscape at that time, the people (and personalities) that led these firms, the scandals that rocked them, and the market pressure that generated the first wave of accounting firm consolidation that resulting in The Big Six.  Included is a short narrative of each firm, which provided context for their history and culture that I had never read before.  In addition, the book has several stories of major accounting scandles in the late 1980’s, including the fraud of ZZZZ Best (and how they hoodwinked Ernst & Whinney – mostly displaying the incredible incompetence of the people involved at Ernst & Whinney) and the S&L crisis – most notably the story of the demise of the Beverly Hills Savings & Loan and the revolving door of audit firms involved in this.   

This book made me more – rather than less – grumpy (see euphemism above).  Fifteen years later, I think things are much worse.  The accounting industry had a major breakdown – again – in the beginning of this century with the apex possibly being the complete demise of Arthur Anderson during the Enron scandal, the one firm in the Big Eight that went out of business rather than merging with someone else.  Ironically, all of this simply resulted in extensive government regulation, which made the audit firms who participated in the debacle in the first place more powerful.  While some unintended consequences are at work here, it’s doesn’t take much of a cynical mind to question the validity of the entire system.

You’ll hear more about the other four books in my next post.