Kill Decision is startlingly real. And equally plausible.
Suited masters of perception playing games with reality while skipping scotch in Crystal City. D.C.’s incestuous relationship between big defense business and… everyone else. Nameless, compartmentalized operators fighting through the night in cesspools loosely labeled as countries. Drones raining from the skies.
For those familiar with the constellation of clandestine units, private military contractors, and information warriors that comprise much of America’s counter-terrorism capacity, this book will feel very, very real.
(If you’re not up to speed, I heartily recommend Marc Ambinder’s The Command as a quick/cheap/quality introduction to that world.)
But Kill Decision takes that reality a step forward. In a way that perhaps cements Suarez’s position as the best near-future fiction author of the post-9/11 era. He folds in equal parts science, warfare, and informed futurism to take today’s sleek drones to their logical conclusion. The results will gnaw on your brain like a swarm of gnats, for weeks after you read the book.
This is possible, of course, due in large part to his foundation in John Robb’s work (something Suarez graciously mentions in his acknowledgements). Readers of Brave New War and Global Guerrillas will find themselves nodding along.
Kill Decision is that real, yet, like Suarez’s Freedom and Daemon, it’s also a lot of fun. Great action sequences that just scream MAKE A MOVIE. Compelling characters. Quality narrative. It’s all in here.
Grab it today if you want to see tomorrow.
-Shlok
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The Ultralight Startup: Launching a Business Without Clout or Capital by Jason L. Baptiste.
Baptiste is the cofounder/CEO of OnSwipe.
To be honest, I loath OnSwipe.
If you’re not familiar with it, the product turns normal websites into piles of ‘tablet friendly’ ugly. Worse, it operates like a precision suck missile, targeting people with iPads (which was designed to show the web as normal, not the mobile garbage).
I’m not alone in my disgust. Winer says it is “another example of the web breaking up.”
So yeah, I didn’t love the product or what I imagined to be its cackling, hooded creator. But, to be fair, Baptiste has built a company with a lot of traction, and, as it turns out, his book is actually pretty good.
That said, there is little to no original material in this book. Rather, it is a good compilation of best practices. Perhaps the best way to describe it, is that The Ultralight Startup provides the 100 ft view to the 20,000 ft view presented in The Lean Startup and The Four Steps to Epiphany.
So you’ll get a lot of bullet points of, basically, how to take a business from zero to something. Basically checklists of content marketing, raising funding hiring, finding cofounders, ideating, building, hiring freelancers, a brief legal section. Baptiste could have gone deeper on each subheading, but I get he wanted to present an overview, and in that, he succeeded.
It’s quick. (I read the book in an hour or so.) And though I wouldn’t try stick to his roadmap, it does present a starting point, which is useful in its way.
-Shlok
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Ian Bremmer’s Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World is an eminently readable, current, mainstream take on the geopolitical environment. It’s a step above the toilet paper put out by the likes of Friedman, Zakaria, and the other Friedman.
Every Nation is a 20,000 ft view of what happens to world as the massive debt bubble pops. Chapter One is a fantastic discussion of why nothing is going to get done re: climate change, oil, terror. Simply: when they launched globalization, they forgot about control systems. It’s a chapter that should be taught in schools.
The rest reads like someone narrating a game of pool just after the break: China’s going one direction, the 8-ball another, and in the corner Turkey’s slamming into Greece. It the ricochets of globalization. And as far as what that means to nation-states and Fortune 500 companies, this is a good read. These are, after all, Bremmer’s bread and butter clients.
But in doing so, he ignores the drivers. The major trends. Things like peak oil and systems disruption. Even when he tries to include cybersecurity, it reads like one of his marketing aides told him to add a buzzword. It’s un-nuanced at best (he only covers it as a tool of states and kingmakers).
So it’s not for anyone concerned with unpredictable events or disruptive innovation. But it is a good way to stay on top of white-collar mainstream thinking – which, appropriately, is all it claims to be.
-Shlok
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Insanely Simple: The Obsession that Drives Apple’s Success by Ken Segall.
Ken’s the guy behind the i. As in the iPad, iPod. He worked with Jobs at NeXT, then at Apple again. He knows the man, the company. (Note, he worked for an agency, not Apple itself.) As a history of Apple, it supplements. If you’ve read the Isaacson bio you’ll be fine. There’s a couple unique stories of personalities but its not really the premise.
Taking a note from Steven Pressfield’s War of Art: Complexity is given life as a creature of such evil that it deserves a swift but utter demise. Kill it, and you will be victorious.
Is that true? Kind of.
Complexity is creating a business and sustaining it. Simplicity is creating a product and selling it to people. Two very different approaches that probably need to be balanced.
Still, simplicity is not base. It is not easy. It is complex and messy and the result of slashing and cutting every thing you can while keeping something whole and real and worthwhile.
And that’s stuff Ken gets at and wants you to think about. Which is why this book is useful.
The one thing this book struggles with is, Ken’s passion for advertising selling product is on every page. Does advertising sell stuff? Of course. Do amazing, well designed products that solve problems sell stuff? Of course. Which comes first?
The egg.
-Shlok
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This is probably my favorite podcast right now.
It’s well produced, even aesthetically pleasing (rare for a radio show), and covers a great variety of design (and therefore, social) issues, quickly (~10 min max).
Start with this episode about the first patent troll (and how he was murdered). Really interesting stuff.
-Shlok
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