Personal
Business Storytelling.
That’s the theme of the books I read in 2024. It was an unplanned yet interesting ride. On Spotify, I was in the top 2% of Business and Technology podcast listeners globally so it adds up.
Some books were completely unrelated like Death Interrupted and This is Not America. They are among my best reads of the year. Glad I discovered them.
I abandoned a few books along the way. The Economics of Feasible Socialism by Alec Nove and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid. I’ll give both another try in the future.
As I am neither a book reviewer nor experienced with books, the reviews may not match your expectations. Keep them low — very low.
So, here are all the books I read this year and a tip at the end for anyone struggling to read books.
Leaving the Tarmac by Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede
Finding stories on Nigerian businesses is hard. Leaving the Tarmac will have you curious about other Nigerian companies and their backstory. It chronicles the journey of Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede and Herbert Wigwe from GTBank staff to owners of Access Bank from Aig’s perspective.
The book’s strength is that it exists. It is relevant for readers trying to understand how Access Bank came to be and anyone generally curious about the banking business in Nigeria. The visionary and dogged nature of Aig and Wigwe shines through the book, but the author tries not to toot his own horn.
Leaving the Tarmac is weak on details. It passes for an overview but will disappoint anyone looking for depth and rigour from a business book. There is room for a more expository book on Access Bank, one that would include perspectives from others who worked at the bank, its acquirees, regulators, competitors and investors, to paint a better picture of the institution’s growth from Nigeria’s number 65 to number 1.
With less than 200 pages it was my shortest read, was done in four days.
Only the Paranoid Survive by Andrew Grove
Picked this up because in Leaving the Tarmac, Aig-Imoukhuede mentioned that “Only the Paranoid Survive” was the philosophy behind Access Bank’s risk management approach.
Grove’s book is a top recommendation for managers, leaders and entrepreneurs. It is especially important because he used to be Intel’s CEO. While reading his book, I couldn't help but wonder what he say about the company if he were still alive.
A core idea in the book is what he terms strategic inflection point, a term that investors and business analysts use today. A strategic inflection point is not very easy to spot but it has been responsible for the rise and fall of many businesses.
Only the Paranoid Survive is a complete book and the author’s honesty is a plus. The book is useful for every kind of person as it is a nudge to not get too comfortable with the status quo — it could get upended at any time. It is not lengthy and its ideas are not repetitive to the point of a bore.
It is a 90s book but Andrew Grove’s ideas will remain relevant for a long time.
Death Interrupted: How Modern Medicine is Complicating the Way We Die by Blair Bigham, MD
This one may be hard to chew because the subject is uncomfortable. Death was a subject I was fascinated about at the start of the year so the book was a good fit when I read it.
I discovered it while listening to a RadioLab episode where the author, Dr Bigham, discussed how he didn’t want his father who was suffering from cancer to die, a 180 from what he emphasized in his book.
The book questions what it means to die. It is easy to say a person is dead when the person isn’t breathing or the heart stops. But with medical innovations, breathing can be done without the lungs and blood can be pumped around the body without the heart.
Bigham goes much further and asks why we hold on to life when a terminal illness or devastating accident happens, prolonging the patient’s suffering. As an ER doctor who has seen multiple near-death scenarios, his first-hand perspective is not one to miss.
Placing the book side by side with his personal experience shared in the podcast, we’re made to confront the stark difference between knowing what to do and doing it when we have to make a choice. Easy to say “I don’t want to be placed on life support or use a feeding tube” until we’re faced with the decision.
It is an excellent book. It will have you questioning the role of technology in healthcare and help you prepare for your own death.
No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
I thought the book was business storytelling on Netflix but it is on the company’s bizarre culture. Hastings is one of the company’s cofounders and the Netflix culture is otherworldly. It is no surprise that there’s no company that has replicated its entire ethos.
From allowing employees unlimited leave, giving room for employees at all levels to disagree without fear of being wrong, paying above-market salaries, and constantly reviewing whether employees are a culture fit or their role is still important, the Netflix culture is one of ownership at a level that will scare most people.
A standout from the book is how Netflix had to adapt its culture when it began expanding outside the US. The company had to tweak its culture to fit what was obtainable in Europe and Asia without ditching it completely or ignoring the local context.
The Netflix culture deck is very popular but what is less popular is that the company has changed its 15-year-old culture deck this year. There are disputes among observers on whether this is the right direction to take but time will tell. But the book is useful for people who lead and work in teams.
Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac
The second book I discovered via podcasts. The Business Wars series was great, but the book turned it up a 100 degrees. Mike Isaac chronicles what can only be called a ruthless company with a ruthless CEO.
Uber is an insane company.
From fighting taxi unions to having a fake app to deceive local regulators, sexual assault, paying musicians with Uber stocks, pulling pranks on its competition and a number of jarring things, Uber is far from an exemplary company. The move fast and break things ethos was taken too far as Uber broke everything possible. It was no surprise that its CEO got kicked out.
Mike Isaac inserts himself a little too much in the book, referencing his articles repeatedly. But the book covers all the grounds on Uber and its rise to global dominance. There’s a TV Series based on the book.
TikTok Boom by Chris Stokel-Walker
This was a little below expectation. TikTok’s backstory is not as exciting as Uber’s and the writing does not compensate for that. However, it is a complete story, beginning with TikTok’s Chinese roots, going over its culture and global dominance.
TikTok’s boom is a testament to Andrew Grove’s strategic inflection point theory, with the pandemic serving as TikTok’s springboard. The book exposes how TikTok is essentially an AI product company, iterating fast and doubling down on what works.
Of course, it did not miss out on the geopolitics that TikTok has found itself in. As it is a fast-changing scene, that section of the book will feel outdated.
This is Not America: Why Black Lives in Britain Matter by Tomiwa Owolade
The book is akin to an Ibadan man asking people to stop using the Lagos brush to paint the entire country. To do that, he writes about the Ibadan experience — it is quite interesting.
This is Not America highlights the increasing use of the Black American experience as the yardstick for Black people everywhere. He combines a historical context and some academic rigour to make a compelling case.
Owolade’s book may be uncomfortable for anyone with a hard stance on race and it has gotten tough criticism from Kehinde Andrews. However, Owolade’s arguments are not without merit. It emphasizes the need to treat not only racial conversations, but social issues generally, on a case-by-case basis, as they tend to be multifaceted and nuanced.
One example that stood out for me was that black African pupils in Britain are thriving but Black Caribbean pupils are struggling. Black children, but different experiences. Thus, statistics that generalize about black people would miss out on this kind of detail. There is a need to look out for disparities within ethnicities and races.
“To define someone exclusively by their race is to acquiesce to the visions of racists”
I will read this again in the future.
The Spotify Play by Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud
Reading books on business history allows you to appreciate the product better. Spotify is a true disruptor, it took the music business and changed how it operates fundamentally.
Spotify fought (still fighting) Apple, warded off acquisition attempts from Google and Microsoft, tried to buy every other competitor including SoundCloud and clashed repeatedly with the music industry.
Daniel Ek having his investor as cofounder, Ek’s close ties with President Zuckerberg and Facebook’s role in taking Spotify to a million users were quite a surprise. The book is a good one for startup people outside the US.
There’s a Netflix series based on the book but it doesn't do justice. Every time you play a song on Spotify, you’re enjoying the outcome of the engineering and legal battles the company fought in its formative years.
The Technology Trap by Carl Benedikt Frey
This one has a boring start. It is a historical perspective on technological innovation, analyzing how each technological era impacted society and its reaction to it. Frey’s book reads like an analyst trying to make a prediction, leveraging historical patterns to make a credible case for it. This is the strength of his book.
Frey repeatedly explores the reaction of society to technology that is dependent on its type— labour replacing or labour enabling. Across the ages, the latter tends to face less scrutiny and he views the future of AI as one that will be determined by where it falls.
The challenge with the book like some others is the time it spends on the foundation, with little room for the rest of it. By sticking with historical patterns, Frey downplays any other potential factors involved in shaping technological progress. This is good for analysis but puts a caveat on his work.
A personal favourite is how he uses the death of labour-intensive jobs in parts of the USA to explain Donald Trump’s win in 2016. A convincing argument but the caveat stands.
Great storytelling. It combines data and academic research to paint a picture of how technology impacts inequality. Read it.
The Subscription Boom by Adam Levinter
Adam Levinter’s book is a book of books, with each chapter worth delving into as a separate book. Levinter points out that the subscription model is not new and uses case studies to explain how different business verticals have leveraged it.
The book’s central idea is clear. Subscription works. Shopify, Salesforce, and Spotify are some of the examples he highlights, dedicating a separate chapter to each. The chapters on food and fashion make very strong cases.
While it is a great book, the reader is left to wonder if the subscription successes are replicable outside the US. It is a book that emphasizes the need for business books written with emerging markets as the context. The global applicability of the subscription model is not clear in the book, but I wouldn’t expect the author to emphasize examples outside his reach.
Mindset by Carol Dweck
This is the most popular of the books I read and the central idea is a quality one. It is a self-help book but it is not like the usual as it relies on academic research.
The author hooks the reader from the start by going straight to the core ideas; a fixed and a growth mindset. She proceeds to use numerous examples to drive home her point which is great at the start but gets repetitive and boring.
By opting for examples, Dr. Dweck makes it easy for the reader to grasp her point but this is the book’s flaw. The examples in the book move from useful to excessive and tiring. It is not a book to read from cover to cover. The opening is great, and the end is a needed conclusion. The middle? Best to pick one or two chapters and leave it.
How China Escaped the Poverty Trap by Yuen Yuen Ang
This competes with Frey’s book as my best read this year. They are big theme books and the authors are academic in their arguments. Yuen Yuen Ang takes popular development theories and contends with them.
The book’s opening feels too much like a rant and gives too much away, preventing the reader from discovering the ideas as they read. I read her arguments against the ideas of this year’s Nobel Prize winners in Economic Sciences — Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (AJR) — and the book is a quality defence in favour of her arguments.
The title doesn’t properly capture the book’s content but it is a thorough work on how China developed without boring the reader with its political history. She takes a part-of-whole approach, emphasizing how specific counties evolved at different paces.
This part-of-whole view allows the reader to see that China didn’t develop altogether and all at once. Counties in coastal areas developed faster and those in inland areas much slower. However, there was a common theme among the counties — a process she calls coevolution.
By having central guidelines, China allowed local governments to experiment, with each county leveraging its institutions as they were — weak, informal and corrupt — transforming them as the counties grew richer. Thus, economic growth coevolving with political institutions, disputing AJR’s idea that the right institutions are necessary precursors to development.
It’s a book best experienced first-hand as reviews will fail to capture the quality of its insights.
Broken Code by Jeff Horowitz (Current Read)
I thought I would be done with this before the year ended, but I lacked the motivation. I have just been in shock by the number of problems at Facebook, the subject of the book.
The book so far tells the attempts by employees at different times to fix Facebook, not Meta. As I no longer use the app, the scale of problems the book outlines is jarring and an open question of the company’s priorities.
I should write a thread when I am done with the book next year.
A common theme among the books on business stories I read is they are authored by journalists. This is easy to miss but it makes plenty of sense. They are in the best position to write about companies they reported on for years.
Nigerian journalists need to collect the pen from politicians.
I already have some of my next year’s reads lined up — Chip Wars, Power and Progress, The Arc of the Possible, Zero to One, Of Boys and Men, The Prosperity Paradox (yes, I haven’t read Efosa’s book yet), Prof Galloway’s The Four, The Time-Travelling Economist — and it is leaning towards Economic development for now. I am looking to dive into Energy and Semiconductors, so Daniel Yergin’s books will be featured next year.
Not a bad lineup so far but I am on the lookout for recommendations, including fiction. For fiction, I am not interested in anything that’s not simple. I’m looking for entertainment, not intellectual rigour.
Koku Baboni and Eze goes to school type of entertainment.
Please, don’t box me into business and technology books for recommendations. Let me decide if it is worth my time.
So, the tips…
- Read what you like. I don’t like self-help books so I don’t try reading them. Some people find them useful — not me.
- Ignore popular books. There’s a long list of such books I have never read. This ties back to point one, don’t touch it if you don’t like it, even if the whole world swears it is good.
- How do you find what you like? Easy. Find books close to your current interests. They’re easier to take on as they reinforce the interest. Reading about tech businesses was easy because I listen to business podcasts.
- A way to find books around your interests is to look out for recommendations from people/content streams within your present interests. Podcasts are my stream, but social media can be useful.
- Don’t be scared to drop a book. If it is overwhelming, confusing, boring, or too much to handle, put it down. I dropped The Economics of Feasible Socialism when it was more than I could chew.
- You don’t owe anybody a detailed recollection of the book’s details. Don’t make the mistake of reading like you have to keep all the info. You can share insights on social media as you read or take notes.
- Aim for a habit. Some say a page or two a day. Others, a chapter a day. I’d personally recommend a book a month for a start. Don’t create unrealistic reading goals.
- If you’re trying to read for professional reasons, all these tips don't apply. Here’s some advice; “Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep: so shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth; and thy want as an armed man”.
In an internet-first and bite-sized content age, books are a good way to disrupt the flow and keep you focused on one subject for a long period. It has helped me read lengthy articles and reports with less struggle.
If you didn’t know, comics are books too.
