Catalyst: Chandramouli Venkatesan

Non Fiction

Verdict: Read it

This book was given to me by a colleague I both enjoy working with and admire professionally. It's always heartening when people give me books because I very very much enjoy them. 

Catalyst I guess could fall into the self help or business advice catagory - the line is a bit grey. I'm not a huge fan of self help types, but that depends on how it's done. This book is a collection of advices on things that people should do to get ahead, and then twisting those decisions/actions slightly to get much more output for what is essentially the same idea. As with most self help/business books, it isn't rocket science. But books like this are valuable becaues they reiterate and re center ideas that you know you should be acting upon but don't for a variety of reasons. The hard part of these advices isn't reading them. You'll probably think yes, of course, that makes sense while reading. Actually implementing them and turning them into habitual behaviors is a lot harder and takes discipline.

For this reason, I'll be reading this book again. There are very few books that I read twice. But continually re-centering valuable ideas helps enact them and remind you about priorities. This book is valuable to anyone in the corporate world - or anyone in any sector looking to get their shit together and maximize the resources and opportunities in front of them. 

Read it!

~Becky~

The Phoenix Project - Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford

Non Fiction

Read It

This book was recommended to me by my ex husband, who also happens to be my boss, and the founder of the company we both worked for - a tech start up in Bangalore. I was a little unsure if I should read it as he told me that it was an IT book and I'm almost completely non technical. I'm also not a big self help/management lessons book kind of person. If they're good, sure, I'll give it a shot, but not something I look out for. 

The book opens to a company in chaos with many bad habits and indisciplines. The author takes us through his learnings over the course of time as he is shoved into a high pressure position and project with very little support and very high stakes. 

As I work to transition a 100 person company to a 200 person company, there are always lessons to be learned. While I won't spell them all out, this book provided many important lessons that I will definitely remember and am trying to implement before it leads to bigger problems. 

Business lessons are always fascinating to me - I think more so than personal lessons - because businesses are very complex organizations and there are endless factors to whether they suceed or fail. Coming into the opportunity that I did later in life, I'm very invested the the business continuing to thrive and grow, so that I can continue to thrive and grow with it. 

I'd recommend this book to anyone in the IT industry with even the least bit of interest in managment or growing a business. Overall a good read to contemplate and digest in bits as you consider how to implement some of these things in your own business. It's not a quick read, and whether the "lesson teacher" was real or not, he was obnoxious and patrionizing. People should not be shamed due to not knowing something as long as they are willing to learn. 

~Becky~