Category: Reading

Amazon has had a long, notable rise that has been turbulent and often controversial. Under the driven leadership of Jeff Bezos, the company has managed to succeed better than their competitors to dominate the internet not just as a retailer but as an internet company.

Stone lays out the company’s course with a good blend of stories pulled from many sources to illustrate the Amazon story. Not all rosy or gloom, Stone’s rendition of history feel fair and gives enough context to grasp the difficult decisions that often led to controversy.

Interesting tidbit: Amazon launch Amazon Web Service losing money so that competitor would be less interested in competing. It ended up giving them a massive advantage.

It was not until I was halfway through this way thick book that I realized something important: the book’s title is incredibly clever. Reading the title, I assumed that in explaining how not to be wrong that it would explain how to be correct. In reality, there is a lot of ground between not being wrong and being correct. Some interesting points:

• All lines are curves so stop drawing straight lines all the time. Basically, anytime you are using a linear graph, with a straight line, you can be very confident that your chart is wrong.
• Be careful with regression calculations. They are easy to do but often make up a story that is far different than reality.
• Beware of the Gamblers fallacy. Each instance has an equal chance of occurrence regardless of how many instances there have been before.
• Don’t talk about percentages of numbers when the numbers might be negative. For example, percent of sales is a bad practice because it deludes the story: if sales are down 50%, is everything down 50% or is a single category doing so poorly it drags everything else down? Expenses, revenue and populations, however, are rarely negative (an expense that pays you?) so they are acceptably expressed in percentages.
• Small data sets are susceptible sample volatility. Beware.
• Inference is a tricky sport that can often lead to dangerous conclusions.
• Things are not usually equal and the inequalities often matter a lot.
• Lead with data, it will show who should win.
• Instead of asking what the chances of getting into a slot are, ask what are the chances that something in the slot is wrong. The chances you got something wrong are often the scary numbers we should be concerned about.

With a narrative that twists and turns, Witt describes the dramatic and often revolutionary forces that upended the music industry (and parts of the entertainment industry as a whole), bringing it to its needs as well as the accompanying technical revolution that was at first abhorrently rejected before finally being welcomed.

Munroe uses his physics degree, and considerable talent for explaining things, to explore hypothetical questions on just about every science topic possible. His responses are easily accessible and quite witting as he explains what would happen if you suddenly, endlessly started raising in the air; how long people on a submarine could survive in space; and how far a steak would have to fall to be cooked by the time it landed.

Beyond just answering the questions, Munroe is brilliant at explaining why things are that way. For example, I learned that a steak will never be cooked by falling through the atmosphere because it is too easy for air to get around it. I always thought that things warmed up when the went through to atmosphere because friction, this is not the case.

Interesting tidbit: Water is not very compressible.

The authors launch into a wonderful and engaging narrative as they use their various experiences to explain why we need chaos in order to progress.

They suggest that innovation requires three things in order to flourish:

1. Blank space (chaos is an agent of opportunity)
2. Unusual suspects (it takes an unusual player to get different results)
3. Supportive serendipity (purely random chance takes too long)