oh yes. #chocolate #cake

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The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I actually finished this book a month ago, but didn't know what I thought about the book until I went through it again. Now I know.

The Lean Startup helps startups go from idea to product through experiments that generate validated learning. How is this done? Through a repeated series of steps through the Build - Measure - Learn feedback loop. With the assumptions that are inherent in the product, decide how to test it, build something that tests it through the minimum viable product (MVP). The goal is to learn as quickly as possible, adjusting and moving along to experience growth. Eventually the next step becomes to accelerate and grow.

There is a lot of useful information in the book, but a lot of it has to be weeded out through the endless stories of Ries' experience. While it is great to be able to one's share experience and learning, in this case it gets to be a bit too much. Read it and be prepared to learn a lot, but you need to weed out a bunch too.



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David and Goliath

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Why did David beat Goliath? Why do seemingly smaller entities beat larger ones, in war or other situations? How can apparent disadvantages be turned into advantages?

I think that's the premise of the book. And there's some information about how the smaller ones can choose not to play by the rules of the other, and thus create advantages to their own. But then Malcom Gladwell goes on to tell a bunch of other stories that don't really seem to convey any sort of message, except for the unexpected things happening. They're interesting to read and quite capturing, but I always felt that it wasn't really adding much to the actual story...

The inverse U-curve, stories about discovering treatments for leukemia, the Three Strikes Law and Martin Luther King are good reads and well written, but it still feels like something is missing in the end. Should you read the book? Sure, but don't expect too much from it.



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so this just happened... #nachos #food #nomnom with @sahar009 @lidaalavi @mahs88

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mmm... cake.

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Brida

Brida by Paulo Coelho

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


A girl in search of her path in life, a man in search of his soul mate, a confused but supportive boyfriend, and a witch. The start of a bad joke? No, just the main protagonists in Paulo Coelho's book.

The scene is Dublin, Ireland, and Brida is a young girl who realizes that she has been a witch in her previous lives. Somewhere along the way there is the struggle to find your soul mate. To help her along the way are two teachers following different paths - the Tradition of the Sun and the Moon. It is a confusing read, with a lot of seemingly random things happening and Brida just following different suggestions by her teachers. Does she know what she wants to do? Not really, but somehow you get the feeling that she is at least moving forward in her quest.

In the end, it turns out that the teacher is the one who learns something new, Brida finds her way forward, and everyone ends up quite happy. There are some nice quotes and moments, but in the end, I wouldn't recommend this one. Read other books by Paulo Coelho instead.



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The Bahá’í Calendar

In a Message dated 10 July 2014 the Universal House of Justice “call[ed] upon the Bahá’ís of the East and West to adopt, on that auspicious occasion [21 March 2015], the provisions that will unite them in the common implementation of the Badí‘ calendar.”

Many questions have been raised about the upcoming changes; the answers to some have been put together in a presentation which you can download here.

The adoption of a new calendar in each dispensation is a symbol of the power of Divine Revelation to reshape human perception of material, social, and spiritual reality. Through it, sacred moments are distinguished, humanity’s place in time and space reimagined, and the rhythm of life recast. Next Naw-Rúz will mark yet another historic step in the manifestation of the unity of the people of Bahá and the unfoldment of Bahá’u’lláh’s World Order.

This presentation is neither complete nor exhaustive; it is only a beginning which I hope will be as useful for others to read as it was for me to put together.

Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty by Muhammad Yunus

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


If you think there is no good left in the world, you should read Banker to the Poor. Muhammad Yunus takes us through his experience, going from a university teacher to a worker at the grassroots level, lending money to the poorest of village people, to help them get started through offering microcredit loans.

It's a fascinating story, of how an initial $27 helped 42 people get their life back on track again, to break free from the vicious circle of poverty. The Grameen organization has now spread and grown to more than just a bank, and reading the book gives a lot of hope, of how one man desiring to do good can actually accomplish it despite everyone and even the system working against him.

The only thing that made me uncomfortable while reading the book was how everything seemed to flow and progress so smoothly. Setbacks and negative experiences were dealt with in one paragraph, and the following success was given much more space. It would have been interesting to read a bit more about the problems and reflections on those experiences. All in all though, it's a very good book and well worh reading.



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