braxtonlewis: August 2011

Unwritten Laws of Engineering, W.J. King & James Skakoon

The unwritten Laws were first published in 1944 as three articles in Mechanical Engineering Magazine, but quickly became a classic of engineering literature. King observed that the chief obstacles to the success of engineers and students of engineering are of a personal and administrative rather than a technical nature. A wartime engineer with General Electric and later a UCLA engineering professor, he concludes that he and his associates were getting into much more trouble by violating the undocumented laws of professional conduct than by violating the well-documented laws of science. The spirit and effectiveness with which you tackle your first humble tasks as a young engineer (or as a student) will be carefully observed and is certain to affect your entire career.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

A problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment. Achieving control over experience requires a drastic change in attitude about what is important what is not. Our human kind collectively has increased its material powers a thousandfold, however it has not advanced very far in terms of improving the content of experience. Flow is the state in which a person becomes so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell

A look at why major changes in our society so often happen suddenly and unexpectedly. Ideas, behavior, messages, and products, often spread like outbreaks of infectious disease. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a few fare-beaters and graffiti artists fuel a subway crime wave, or a satisfied customer fill the empty tables of a new restaurant. These are social epidemics, and the moment when they take off, when they reach their critical mass, is the 'Tipping Point'.

Gladwell introduces us to the particular personality types who are natural pollinators of new ideas and trends, the people who create the phenomenon of word of mouth. He analyzes fashion trends, smoking, children's television, direct mail, and the early days of the American Revolution for clues about making ideas infectious, and visits a religious commune, a successful high-tech company, and one of the world's greatest salesmen to show how to start and sustain social epidemics.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell

The first time I read this book, I did not enjoy it. It surprised me greatly to have taken so much from it while reading a second time. Perhaps another year of maturation and experience helped to create this difference.

There are three goals of this text:
(1) to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately. (2) to recognize when we should trust our instincts, and when should we be wary of them. (3) to convince you that our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled. Simplification of entirely too much information often leads us to confuse the possession of that information for true understanding.

Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl

He who has a WHY to live for can bear almost any HOW. Between 1942 and 1945, a German-Jewish Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, endured Nazi war-camps while his while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife were gassed. The text is based on his own experience in the camp as witnessed through the eyes of a trained psychological researcher. Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose.

Persons facing difficult choices may not fully appreciate how much their own attitude interferes with the decision they need to make or the action they need to take. He describes that the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all can drive human thought toward an existential vacuum; which is described as the mental loss of both instinct and tradition. He concludes that what man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt.

The Secret History of the American Empire, John Perkins

An entertaining but disturbing account of the US governments manipulation around the world in support of American business. Presidents distributing foreign aid to corrupt Third World leaders who keep some and return the rest to US business in the form of unnecessary and unsustainable engineering projects. Leaving growing nations massively in debt, and requiring even more loans than what could possibly be paid back, these governments have no choice but to offer cheap resources and labor to US industries. Perkins' other titles include: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and Hoodwinked.

The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture, Frank R. Wilson

People are changed, significantly and irreversibly it seems, when movement, thought and feeling fuse during the active long term pursuit of personal goals. The brain keeps giving the hand new things to do and new ways of doing what it already knows how to do. In turn, the hand affords the brain new ways of approaching old tasks and the possibility of undertaking and mastering new tasks. That means the brain, for its part, can acquire new ways of representing and defining the world It is changed by active involvement; in that sense, it remembers, it learns. It is not content to limit its sampling of the observable world or the intermingling of its impressions.

Warmth Disperses and Time Passes: The History of Heat, Hans Christian Von Baeyer

A must read for the undergraduate about to enter or interested to take a course in thermodynamics. This text offers a background into the development of our modern understanding of Heat Energy, its transfer and dispersion throughout our environment. The author walks us through the evolution of our scientific understanding of thermodynamics, stopping to dwell on the intellectual and societal framework that allowed the physicists of the time to make their respective scientific leaps. From this book, I began to comprehend the concept of Entropy and how a "Demon" will always remain.

The Deming Management Method, Mary Walton

This was required reading during my time in graduate school. How fortunate I was to find it and be able to implement the concept of quality within my work and life. I will argue that Dr Edward Deming has had more impact on business and industry than any other engineer in history, worldwide. After WWII Japan was decimated; unable to develop an industry from which to begin rebuilding. They went from producing the world's worst products, to turning out some of the highest quality precision work, all while US firms ignored his philosophies. I will encourage you to also take a look at other Deming related titles, you will not be disappointed.

W. Edward Deming taught that by adopting appropriate principles of management, organizations can increase quality and simultaneously reduce costs by reducing waste, rework, staff attrition and litigation while increasing customer loyalty. The key is to practice continual improvement and think of manufacturing as a system, not as bits and pieces.

The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

One of the most influential political treatises of all time. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle and to both the historical and modern problems of capitalism, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms. The essential condition for the existence and rule of the bourgeois class is the accumulation of wealth in private hands, the formation and increase of capital; the essential condition of capital is wage-labor, which rests entirely on competition among workers. This work should be read not only as a great work of literature but that, 150 years later, it still has much to teach us for the next millennium.

Security Analysis, Benjamin Graham & David Dodd

This text is a timeless classic in Value Investing. The work was first published in 1934, following unprecedented losses on Wall Street. In summing up lessons learned, Graham and Dodd scolded Wall Street for its narrow-minded focus on a company's reported earnings per share, and were particularly harsh on the favored "earnings trends." They encourage investors to take an entirely different approach by gauging the rough value of the operating business that lay behind the security. Graham and Dodd enumerate multiple real examples of the market's tendency to act irrationally, undervalueing certain securities. A company may be worth more dead than alive.

The Intelligent Investor, Benjamin Graham & Jason Zweig

The hallmark of Graham's philosophy is not profit maximization but loss minimization. He provides guidance toward the adoption and execution of an investment policy. One inherently designed for the longer term and requiring a commitment of effort. Where the speculator follows market trends, the investor uses discipline, research, and his analytical ability to make unpopular but sound investments in bargains relative to current asset value. The Intelligent Investor is a layman's version of his earlier Security Analysis.

Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill

Originally published in 1848 along side of Karl Marx's - Communist Manifesto, Mill applies classical economic theory to policy questions of lasting concern: the desirability of sustained growth of national wealth and population, the merits of capitalism versus socialism, and the suitable scope of government intervention in the competitive market economy. His answers to those questions have profound relevance today, and they serve to illustrate the enduring power and imagination of his distinctive liberal utilitarian philosophy.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nicholas Taleb

Humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.” We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. "History does not crawl, it jumps." I would also recommend his 2008 book Fooled by Randomness or all of this 5-book series.

Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell

The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are. Creating extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity. Gladwell's text shows that success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed, but those 'Outliers' are ones who have been given opportunities - and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

Added below are more recommendations, only some of which I have read but have yet to formally review. Each of these have been recommended by personal mentors and colleagues that I greatly admire. I look forward to investing my time into these ideas in the near future, thanks go out to many for adding such great value to this list: