Warbreaker Brandon Sanderson But he’d found that imaginary things were often the only items of real substance in people’s lives. pg. 159 Unknowing ignorance is preferable to informed stupidity. pg. 311 After all anyone with a strong faith different from your own must either be a crazy zealot or a laying manipulator. pg. 543

The Goal Eliyahu M Goldratt “A bottleneck, Jonah continues, is any resource whose capacity is equal to or less than the demand placed upon it. And a non-bottleneck is any resource whose capacity is greater than the demand placed on it.” pg. 138 “…when I was a physicist, people would come to me from time to time with problems in mathematics they couldn’t solve. they wanted me to check their numbers for the, But after a while I learned not to waste my time checking the numbers – because the numbers were almost always right.

Steve Jobs Walter Isaacson Steve wasn’t much of an engineer himself, but he was very good at assessing people’s answers. He could tell whether the engineers were defensive or unsure of themselves. Pg 100 “Steve had a tendency to look at vulnerabilities and neuroses and turn them into spiritual attributes.” Joanna Hoffman pg. 263

What Do You Care What Other People Think Richard P. Feynman “That story was probably incorrect in detail, but what he was telling me was right in principle.” pg. 15 “Your situation is just an accident of life.” pg. 51 “They got all excited and began to describe the problem to me. I’m sure they were delighted, because technical people love to discuss technical problems with technical people who might have an opinion or suggestion that could be useful.

Absolutely American David Lipsky “Cadet sex is like a gass, cadet Ryan Southerland explains. And you know how a gass will expand to fill any space? Well, any space that is possible, cadets will try and have sex in it.” pg. 86 “Dads hoist video cameras to their eyes, the one-armed salute people pay to the future: this meets the memory criteria, this is souvenir-worthy.” pg. 143 “The corporation is composed of the patient cadets who understand that every chapter of life is also groundwork for the next chapter, that cow year is really and audition for firs tie year - that all the good striper leadership positions will be handed out on the basis of their performance now.

The Innovator’s Dilemma Clayton M. Christensen “For instance, is a notebook better than a mainframe? This is an ambiguous question because the notebook computer established a completely new performance trajectory, with a definition of performance that differs substantially from the way mainframe performance is measured.” pg. 9 “Three factors - the promise of upmarket margins, the simultaneous upmarket movement of many of a company’s customers, and the difficulty of cutting costs to move downmarket profitably - together create powerful barriers to downward mobility.

Dealers of Lightning Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age Michael Hiltzik (Alan) Kay observed, “Everybody has to be able to play the whole game. Each person should have certain things they’re better at than the others, but everyone should be pretty good at everything.” pg. 116 “In the course of one frustrating encounter (Alan) Kay blurted out the line destined to become his (and PARC’s) unofficial credo. “Look,” he said, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it!

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland “And once again, work is providing us with a comforting sense of normalcy – living and working inside of coding’s predictably segmented time/space. Simply grinding away at something makes life feel stable, even though the external particulars of life (like our paychecks, our office, and so forth) are, at best, random.” pg. 135 “The industry is made up of either gifted techies or smart generalists – the people whop were bored with high school — the sort of people the teacher was always telling, “Now, Abe, you could get As if you really wanted to.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations Clay Shirky “It is easier to understand that you face competition than obsolescence.” pg. 59 “Two things have to happen for someone to become famous, neither of them related to technology. The first is scale, he or she has to have some minimum amount of attention, an audience in the thousands or more, and second he or she has to be unable to reciprocate.

A Team of Rivals Doris Kearns Goodwin Lincoln: “Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgement, is not the sole question…A universal feeling, whether well or ill founded, can not be safely disregarded.” pg. 206 “When he advised temperance advocates to refrain from denouncing drinkers in “thundering tones of anathema and denunciation,” for denunciation would inevitably be met with denunciation “crimination with crimination and anathema with anathema” pg. 168

Meatball Sundae by Seth Gudin “Oprah is a superstar because she has the power (the right? the expectation?) of regularly putting new ideas in front of people who weren’t looking for that particular thing.” pg. 65 “Your job will be to convert that momentary attention into long term permission and then into action. The question, then, isn’t how you get Dugg. The question is how do you make stuff worth Digging.