Books I Read in 2023

The book builds the historical context on how generational changes happened in the United States and shows that there is an eighty year cycle: 1780–1860, 1860–1940, and 1940–2020 for every new system that adjusts to the changes. A period of crisis creates a slightly new system that adapts to the new social, economic, and political needs. The book ends on an optimistic note, saying America’s best years lay ahead.

This book almost reads like a conspiracy theorist finding the hand of the CIA in every global disturbance, regime change, and coup all over the world. It is an interesting read.

This book is less optimistic than his book on the American Crisis of 2020 (Storm before the calm, discussed above). It sets up the current situation in Europe and how the institutions of NATO, EU, and the Euro as a currency emerged out of the two world wars. Then, it sets up the current flashpoints: the Balkans, Azerbaijan-Armenia, the German question (once more), the buffer lands between Germany and Russia (that includes Ukraine), of course, the question of Russia, of Turkey and that of Islam in Europe. The book concludes with the short answer that Europe’s history of conflict is far from over.

This book almost continues from where George Friedman’s book concluded. Ivan Krastev is a Bulgarian political scientist. His other book, The Light that Failed, examined how the democratic euphoria after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991 is fading. In this book, very provocatively written, he examines the future of today’s European Union. With examples, he explains how the European meritocratic elites are disconnected from its masses. How democracy in some of the Eastern European countries is a tool of majoritarian led exclusion. He concludes that the disintegration of the EU is a likely possibility, by saying:

It’s less important that European leaders understand why the Habsburg Empire collapsed in 1918 than why it did not disintegrated earlier, in 1848, 1867, or any number of other occasions. Rather than seeking to ensure the EU’s survival by increasing its legitimacy, perhaps demonstrating its capacity to survive can become a major source of its future legitimacy. Ivan Krastev, After Europe

Without explicitly mentioning it, perhaps he wants us to learn from the Holy Roman Empire, that survived for over eight centuries?

This is a story of the rise and fall of RIM (Research in Motion), the makers of the Blackberry. A good book for someone who studies how companies that are earlier adopters of new technologies rise and get big, and then how the same big players get disrupted because of strategic mistakes and a new wave of technologies that they are unable to adapt to.

The author was a guest at the Empire Podcast and it was a nice refresher for me to go through the story of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

This is a book about Bronze Age civilization collapse when a number of civilizations from the Mediterranean to the Indus Valley collapsed almost simultaneously. The author reviews various reasons: pandemic, attack from Sea Peoples, economic collapse, political instability and concludes that it was a perfect storm of causes that collapsed a bunch of interlinked civilizations and ended the Bronze Age.

I bought this book after listening to Cat Jarman on the Empire Podcast. The story starts by investigating how a bead made in Gujarat, India ended up being found at the site of a Viking settlement in Northern England. I learned a lot about the Viking domination of Europe from the 8th to the 10th centuries and their trading links with the rest of the world.

This book introduced the concept of Psychological Safety and its role in managing teams and leaders. I liked the book so much that it became my next book club read with my leadership team.

This is a combination of my interest in exploring collapse, strategic mistakes, and psychological safety. The book goes through a case studies of failures and determines the role poor communication and hiding information plays in systemic failures. Didier Sornette has spent his entire life building the math and science behind failures, including rocket engine failures and the stock market collapse.

I have been a fan of Mark Blyth ever since I watched his talk “Why do people vote against their interests.” In this book, he analyzes the current economic, social, and political unrest and explains what’s behind it. The audiobook is a fun listen.

This book turned out to be very different from what I was expecting, in a good way. It started out almost like a psychology book, talking about biases, blind spots, framing, and loss aversion. It talked about things I learned as part of probability, like the Monty Hall problem. But then, it ended with a summary of strategies to improve decision making: using decision analysis tools, acquiring expertise, debiasing judgement, reasoning with analogies, taking an outsider’s view, understanding biases in others, and nudging ethical decision. It gives a good decision making framework in being right a lot.

I have found Hafiz to be very untranslatable and appreciate every scholarly endeavor to translate Hafiz’s ghazals. Elizabeth Gray picked fifty ghazals from his Diwan and translated them. All I can say is that the translations helped me in peeling a few more layers on some of the Ghazals that I am more familiar with. My favorite couplet, is the ma’aqta (the last couplet that has the poet’s name embedded in it):

The author serves as Professor of Strategic Studies and Political Economy at the US Marine Corps War College. This was a fascinating mix of history, politics, diplomacy, and military strategy. There is also an uncanny similarity how Rome maintained her Empire through her legions and how today’s United States maintains its global naval dominance through the carrier strike groups.

This book got recommended through Mark Blyth’s talks. I must admit, it is a heavy book and a slow read. But very thought provoking, perhaps because it challenged my own belief in self-regulating markets. Karl Polanyi was an Austro-Hungarian economist who fled from Hungary to (post WW-1) Austria to the UK and then to the US. The book has a Foreword by Joseph Stiglitz, who summarized:

Polanyi saw the market as part of the broader economy, and the broader economy as part of a still broader society. Joseph Stiglitz, Foreword

The tremendous social and political change that we are seeing now across the western liberal world as a response to neo-liberalism and globalization is perhaps a vindication of his theory.

The author was a guest at the Empire Podcast. This was a refresher on the first global superpower, the Persian Achaemenid Empire that extended from Greece and Egypt to Central Asia and Western India in the sixth century BCE. It is also a fascinating tale of rise and fall, ambition, power, as well as examples of good governance.

This was an account of Roman emperors, their private and public lives and how the Empire was governed and fought over.

This is a story of the making of my favorite TV show: Yes, Minister and Yes Prime Minister. The shows are very quotable and re-watchable. This book goes behind the scenes on the authors (Antony Jay and Jonthan Lynn), the actors and how they worked with career bureaucrats and historians to create their material.

I got the link to the book from the previous book on the inside story of Yes, Minister. I have been an avid student of Machiavelli’s writings as well as student and practitioner of modern management. I even remember saying:

To understand the human impulses driving a modern corporation, studying medieval history is a better alternative than just the last 70 years of modern management. Tapas Kanti Roy

But I did not realize that someone smarter and more eloquent had made the connection before me and even wrote about it. The book was a delight to read. Antony Jay was the older and more conservative leaning co-author of Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.

This book analyzes high-performing teams and through case studies, determines how they are formed and how they succeed. It starts by saying that six “team basics” define the discipline required for team performance: (1) Small number (less than 12), (2) complementary skills of members, (3) common purpose, (4) common performance goals, (5) common working approach, and (6) mutual accountability. They also non-intuitively conclude that the role of the team leader is not the primary determinant of team performance. The case studies and the conclusions are very insightful.