Category: Book

One Book At A Time – 2021

Second year of COVID-19 but another year of good Kindle readings. 15 books I read this year with the device and here are those one-line comments.

For me, the best read this year goes to book #10.

  1. Life 3.0 : Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence – Before AI, let’s have some hard thinking.
  2. Block Kong : 21 Entrepreneurs and Financiers Leading Blockchain in Hong Kong – 21 interesting interviews of Hong Kong’s Blockchain pioneers.
  3. The Right it : Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed – Techniques to validate your bright ideas.
  4. AI 2041 : Ten Visions for Our Future – 10 amazing AI Scientific (not Science) Fictions with great explanations.
  5. The Innovation Stack : Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time – Basically it’s about vertical integration, with Square as the example.
  6. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant : A Guide to Wealth and Happiness – Self-learning book for IT professionals … be happy.
  7. Indistractable : How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life – A great follow up to the previous book “Hooked”.
  8. The Unicorn Project – Stories about Development environment, Data Warehouse, QA, Operations, Security, Functional Programming, Digital Marketing.
  9. The Data Detective : Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics – Be curious, to your data.
  10. Leonardo Da Vinci – The real Da Vinci Code, decoded by Walter Isaacson
  11. Think Again : The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know – Individual Rethinking, Interpersonal Rethinking, Collective Rethinking.
  12. Think Like a Rocket Scientist : Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life – Nothing succeeds like failure.
  13. Experimentation Works : The Surprising Power of Business Experiments – What business experiments really are.
  14. Invent & Wander : The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson – Day 1 mindset, Long term mindset, and Customer obsessed.
  15. How to DeFi : Beginner – DeFi guide for dummies, but you are not dummy.

How To Display Book Cover In Kindle Lock Screen

I have been a fan of Kindle eBook reader for over 12 years, and believe it or not, I waited for one simple feature for 12 years. That is – display the book cover of the book I am reading, in the Kindle lock screen instead of random images or advertisements. Following is my Kindle Oasis with the current book I am reading (with the Display Cover option turned on) – “Think Again” by Adam Grant.

The book I am reading – “Think Again”
My Kindle 2 Lock screen 12 years ago

Here are the steps to enable that feature, with tips on how to make it work for an “Ad-supported” / “Special Offer edition” Kindle. (Ad-supported Kindle costs US$20 less, but you will see Amazon special offers and advertisements in the lock screen)

The steps, in summary:

  1. Upgrade your Kindle firmware to version 5.13.5
  2. Remove the “Ad-supported” feature, if you’re an owner of this type of Kindle
  3. Restart your Kindle
  4. Go to Device Option screen, and turn on Display Cover option
  5. If you cannot see that screen in step 4, turn on the WiFi option in your Kindle and likely this option will be made available to your device soon !!

All the 5 steps, with a little bit more details. The first step, upgrade the Kindle firmware.

  • Turn on your Kindle
  • Tap the top to toggle the menu option
  • Tap the upper right corner, 3 dots icon
  • Select Settings in the pull down menu
  • Select Device Options, then Advanced Options, and then Update Your Kindle (if it is in gray color, then likely your Kindle is already updated to latest firmware version)
  • You can check the version of the firmware, by Select Settings, Device Options, Device Info.

The second step is the tricky part, to remove the “Ad-supported” feature.

  • With your desktop machine, start your favorite web browser, surf to Amazon.com and login.
  • On top of the Amazon.com web page, find Account and Lists option, then click Content and Devices. Then click Devices on the top menu, then select your device.
  • If you have an “ad-supported” Kindle, you shall see a screen something like this.
Device details in your Amazon.com account
  • The next step is to click the Remove offers button, then pay the US$20 to turn off that feature (you saved US$20 when you bought your device in the first place …)
  • And here was the area I have problem – the Amazon.com website didn’t take me to the screen to pay for that US$20 and kept asking me to update my address, which I did many times but still failed.
  • The solution was, contacted them with online chat and told them the problem I had. And then Amazon’s magical customer services agent waived my US$20 payment and turned off the “Ad-supported” feature for me. Wow !!
My chat history with Amazon CS agent

Now the last few steps are easy. And here is screen for step 4 … Turn on the Display Cover option (top of the screen).

Display Cover option on top

That’s a wrap and hope you will find it useful. More importantly, have this feature turn on and enjoy the book covers !!

Decision Making

“One common pitfall for large organizations – one that hurts speed and inventiveness – is ‘one-size-fits-all’ decision making.” – 2016 Letter to Shareholders, Amazon

How many decisions you make, today, have to go to the top management ?

Are they big decisions ? Or small ? Did that make your process faster ? Or slower ?

And then it reminds me the great quote from Sir Ratan N. Tata…

One Book at a Time – 2020

Year 2020 is a year of Work From Home, for me it means less time to commute and therefore less time to read. Unlike what I promised last year, I didn’t read books about Artificial Intelligence and Decentralised Identifier. Instead I read books about product management, history, organisational design and even meditation. Here are my books of year 2020.

Get the best Kindle for you : Kindle / Kindle Paperwhite / Kindle Oasis.

  1. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones – One of the best books about developing good habits. Don’t miss it. (https://amzn.to/3mxPuy8)
  2. Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation In Everyday Life – Believe it or not, the daily morning 20 minutes meditation helps me getting through this tough year.  (https://amzn.to/2Wrz145)
  3. Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society – One very deep book, but if you’re in the world of IT, don’t miss the “Data as Labour” chapter. (https://amzn.to/3rcMVFA)
  4. The Anticipatory Organization: Turn Disruption and Change into Opportunity and Advantage – If you repeat one idea hundreds of time, you can write a book … you can safely skip that one. (https://amzn.to/3anbfyk)
  5. Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments – We all know it’s important to test our ideas, business models … but how ? Check out this book. (https://amzn.to/3mvFmWW)
  6. Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem – The story behind the 350 years old mathematical puzzle, Fermat’s Last Theorem. One of the best books I read in 2020. (https://amzn.to/2Wu9wiK)
  7. INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love – If you’re a product manager, or want to be one … in a startup or an enterprise, it’s the best book in town. (https://amzn.to/2KzOAEi)
  8. The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data – Want to get a good book to read after The Phoenix Project ? This is the one. (https://amzn.to/2K8cQgY)
  9. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World – Lot’s of methods and stories about how to be an “original”, as long as you don’t mind most references are from USA. (https://amzn.to/2LOXwpS)
  10. Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos – I am a big fans of Jeff Bezos’ annual shareholder letters. If you are a fan as well, this book is for you, in his own words. (https://amzn.to/34m8ppl)
  11. No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention –  Talent Density, Candor, and Reduce Controls … these are the three ways Netflix designs their organization. To me, it’s BEST book of the year. (https://amzn.to/3nwqLvJ)
Hotel lobby of Eslite Hotel, Taipei

Good Bye, Professor Clayton Christensen

I’ve been a big fan of Clayton Christensen’s works for almost 20 years now, and it’s really sad to learn about the news two days ago. I learnt a lot from his books and his HBX MOOC online course on Disruptive Strategy.

If you’re interested in Disruptive Innovation, Jobs-to-be-done, living a rewarding life, some unreserved recommendations –

“The first thing is to look at disruptive technology as a growth opportunity and not as a threat …”, Clayton Christensen

John Lamparski/Getty Images