book

I had read a lot of good things about this book and it had sat on my Kindle for a long time. Really enjoyed the first half of the book but thought the second half was more focused on things that weren't relevant to me. There were some statements made that were clearly opinions but were stated as facts. Overall a bit disappointing.

I've had this book a while but never got around to reading it properly. One of my colleagues at work was listening to the audio version of it and recommended it. This was an excellent read and very relevant to what is happening at the company I am working at at the moment. For me the key takeaway was that what most people call strategy is not actually strategy but vision or goals. Strategy is setting a direction and what needs to happen to achieve it. The observations about the approaches of Walmart and Cisco were particularly good.

This story documents one scenario that could happen when the nightmare happens of a massive power cut across Europe. It starts with a number of threads and weaves them well together. It follows an Italian as he realizes it is a terrorist attack on the smart power meters. This destabilizes the power grid which takes down most of the grid across Europe. A second attack targets the power plants. This leads to a power cut across Europe that lasts days and the storyline of how they track down the cause and the perpetrators.

I really liked Simon Sinek's other books but didn't get into this one as much - don't get me wrong, it is still an excellent read and you can learn a lot.

I was really looking forward to this book as I had listened to a podcast where they explained the ideas behind it. The two authors run a design course in Stanford that gets massively oversubscribed and has a huge impact on those who take it by looking at life as a design problem. The aim is to come up with lots of possible routes for your life that could be awesome and then design a path to achieve one of them. If that doesn't work you can use the same approach to look for new opportunities. I have not yet made the time to do the exercises and these are absolutely key to getting the most out of it.