Pop quiz, hot shot: think of your favorite business book and distill the description of it down to a couple of words. (Might be a raucous way to liven up your next dinner party, no?) I’d boil down Burn Rate to “willful ignorance.” Author Andy Dunn, erstwhile CEO of Bonobos, practiced this over most of the decade following the launch…
The Madness of Herd Mentality
“I was, to be completely honest, starting to feel as if I had absolutely no sense of reality.” Among all the sharp commentary made by journalist Gabrielle Bluestone in her 2021 offering, Hype that was a line that stood out. While the book is primarily about the spectacular fraud called the Fyre Festival, it was Bluestone’s deep research into the…
With Friends Like These
Peter Thiel’s high school classmates voted him Most Likely to Succeed. Good call, kids – at least on the face of it. Assuming mid-80’s San Matteo youth would have defined success as making scads of dough, their boy Theil (pronounced like the greenish color) has checked that box several billion times. But if they reconnected with him via PayPal or…
Thank you, (YOUR CITY HERE)!
You know how a big book is sometimes described as a doorstop? Well Steve Waksman’s Live Music in America is like a goddamn cinderblock. At 570 pages – plus another hundo of Notes and Index – even in paperback it’s legit hard to hold up but worth it for music nerds. If you love going to concerts and wonder how…
Beach Reads: R.E.L.A.X.
Break time! Proud to bring you my 7th annual report on non-business book recommendations. And people, when I tell you these six selections are all outstanding, that any are worthy of your precious downtime in a hammock or on a raft, sprawled out on a lakeside deck or in a rusty ol’ beach chair, I mean it. In order of…