How Big Things Get Done: A Reading Strategy #
The focus of this reading strategy is “How Big Things Get Done” - both on an individual and an organizational level. Like with my previous reading strategy, the first rule was to come up with a simple list of questions to answer:
- How hard vs. smart did people who got big things done work?
- Were most of them innately smart, or was there something else? What subsets of traits did a lot of them share?
- How did they interact with other people?
- Did they go wide or deep?
- What were values they had? What values did they share?
- What were key organizational principles to getting people to work together on large projects?
- How large/ unrealistic were the visions of big projects when they started? Did they have to tone it down, or did they just achieve it?
- What were key reasons large projects failed?
This is a fairly broad category and I don’t expect to get definitive answers to everything here. Again, as before, I have a curriculum of books. This being a fairly wide topic, the books are also fairly wide (and a bit random), but the benefit of that is I’ve already read quite a few of them (marked with ✓)
- How Big Things Get Done
- The NASA paper on why Apollo was a success
- The Art of Doing Science and Engineering (reread You and Your Research) ✓
- Read technical plans for {insert major project here}
- Biographies/ history of people who got “big things done”
- A Mind At Play (Claude Shannon) ✓
- Elon Musk biography
- Creativity Inc. ✓
- The Power Broker
- Read Founders (on Paypal founders)?
- Jon Von Neumann ?
- Masters of Doom ✓
- Jobs ?