Category: Books / Audiobooks

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Books / Audiobooks Kids

Dr. Seuss Books Read by Celebrities

Audible has a large number of Dr. Seuss Books read by Celebrities. Here’s a sampling.

Green Eggs and Ham and Other Servings of Dr. Seuss which includes my favorite — One Fish Two Fish read by David Hyde Pierce

  • “Green Eggs and Ham” read by Jason Alexander
  • “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” read by David Hyde Pierce
  • “Oh the Thinks You Can Think!” read by Michael McKean
  • “I’m Not Going to Get Up Today” read by Jason Alexander
  • “Oh Say Can You Say?” read by Michael McKean
  • “Fox in Socks” read by David Hyde Pierce
  • “I Can Read With My Eyes Shut” read by Michael McKean
  • “Hop on Pop” read by David Hyde Pierce
  • “Dr. Seuss’s ABC” read by Jason Alexander

The Cat in the Hat and Other Dr. Seuss Favorites

  • The Cat in the Hat read by Kelsey Grammer
  • Horton Hears a Who read by Dustin Hoffman
  • How the Grinch Stole Christmas read by Walter Matthau
  • Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? read by John Cleese
  • The Lorax read by Ted Danson
  • Yertle the Turtle, Gertrude McFuzz, and The Big Brag read by John Lithgow
  • Thidwick, the Big-Hearted Moose read by Mercedes McCambridge
  • Horton Hatches the Egg read by Billy Crystal
  • The Cat in the Hat Comes Back read by Kelsey Grammer
Categories
Books / Audiobooks Product Management

The Goal by Elihu Goldratt

The book The Goal by Elihu Goldratt is one of the best business books I’ve read. I was assigned the book in business school but it holds up even better in the real world. The key idea is that in a factory, the entire production of any part is limited by the machine with the least capacity. And similarly, the entire production of the factory is limited by the capacity bottlenecks. So you can have a whole factory at work, all the machines are working as fast as they can but they’re just piling up inventory in front of that key machine that has limited capacity. In a software development shop, it’s the IT operations group might be the bottleneck like in the book The Phoenix Project. In a strategy shop it’s the amount of time people want to devote to reading and implementing these projects. When looking at any knowledge business you see lots of people doing work but most of these people are creating work that prevents the constrained resource from getting its critical work done. Once you look for the constraints, you start to see the world in a very different way.

The other thing about The Goal is the way the book is produced:

  1. Goldratt hired a co-writer Jeff Cox, a novelist, who brings out the lessons of the book in a very easy to digest format. He even ties in some personal problems and office politics to make the book more engaging.
  2. The audio version of the book is dramatized as a play. There are a host of actors playing the different parts. When Alex is on the machine floor, you can even hear the machines at work. This is certainly the best produced business audiobook I’ve ever listened to.
  3. Apparently there’s also a movie that can be used for training purposes. It’s the most expensive DVD I’ve ever seen at $895 a copy! However, for those of you who are fans of the book, you can see an excerpt of the famous Herbie scene online for free!
Categories
Books / Audiobooks

A Man for All Markets by Edward Thorpe

I finished listening to A Man for All Markets. It’s an amazing book on a number of fronts.  Here’s a few of the impressive bits:

  1. There’s a lot of people who write memoirs like this that seem a bit over the top. But Thorpe is a bit of an over the top genius generally credited with the creation of card counting in blackjack, risk arbitrage and hedge funds and wearable computers.
  2. He might have won the Nobel prize but decided on a different path. Thorpe had to decide whether to be a businessman or a professor first. When he published his book Beat the Market he showed how to correctly price options. Instead of pushing this further, Thorpe decided to trade on his findings. Eventually others published what became known as the Black Scholes model for option pricing which eventually won the Nobel Prize..
  3. Thorpe seems to have known everyone in finance, from Warren Buffett to Bernie Madoff (who he knew was a fraud decades ago). He even talks about how Buffett used to challenge people to a game of dice with non-transitive dice.

Overall I really loved the audiobook. Thorpe narrates the book himself and does a pretty darn good job. This is from an 85 year old man worth about $800 million.

 

Categories
Books / Audiobooks

Inertia or “How Did I Get Here?”

This is one of my favorite quotes from Nick Hornby’s book High Fidelity:

You see those pictures of people in Pompeii and you think, how weird: one quick game of dice after your tea and you’re frozen, and that’s how people remember you for the next few thousand years. Suppose it was the first game of dice you’ve ever played? Suppose you were only doing it to keep your friend Augustus company? Suppose you’d just at that moment finished a brilliant poem or something? Wouldn’t it be annoying to be commemorated as a dice player? Sometimes I look at my shop (because I haven’t let the grass grow under my feet the last fourteen years! About ten years ago I borrowed the money to start my own!), and at my regular Saturday punters, and I know exactly how those inhabitants of Pompeii must feel, if they could feel anything (although the fact that they can’t is kind of the point of them). I’m stuck in this pose, this shop-managing pose, forever, because of a few short weeks in 1979 when I went a bit potty for a while. It could be worse, I guess; I could have walked into an army recruiting office, or the nearest abattoir.

In the past I totally know what he meant. These days, I’m feeling pretty good!