Who Says Elephants Can't Dance

I finally got around to reading the Warren Buffett recommended Who Says Elephants Can't Dance. I should have read it a long time ago; it is easily the best book by a former CEO that I've ever read.

Fooling Houdini

One genre of book I tend to enjoy is where the author starts out as somewhat of a layman in a particular subject area, but is very passionate about this subject and ends up becoming an expert. (Is there a name for this category of book?) Previous books of this ilk that I have previously enjoyed (and highly recommend) include The Game and Moonwalking with Einstein. Alex Stone's Fooling Houdini is just as good.

Grinding It Out

Ray Kroc didn't start McDonald's (MCD), but he recognized a winner when he saw one. Kroc was a paper cup and milkshake machine salesman who was so impressed by the McDonald brothers' restaurant he called upon one day, that he dropped everything (much to the dismay of his risk-averse wife, who thus got dropped in turn) to build the company more or less into what it is today. He shares his story in his book Grinding It Out.

Karsan Value Funds: 2014 Q1 Results

Karsan Value Funds (KVF) is a value-oriented fund, as described here. Due to securities regulations, the fund is not open to the public at this time. Should that change in the future, there will be an announcement on this site.

Thinking Strategically

If every decision we made were in a static environment, life would be relatively easy. But in real life, others (competitors, bystanders, teammates etc) react to our decisions, which changes the environment. Enter Game Theory, which is the study of strategic decision-making. In Thinking Strategically, retired Princeton professor and economist Avinash Dixit takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the field across a range of subjects, from business to sports to politics.

Creation

I recently read Creation, by Steve Grand, which came highly recommended by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Grand is an expert in artificial life, but he tries to remove the "artificial" as much as possible by modeling his creations on real life, including evolution, learning and other features of real life that aren't natural to the way computers are as we know them.

Only the Paranoid Survive

One of the largest moats in the tech sector over the decades has belonged to Intel. Despite operating in a field characterized by changing and improving technologies, the company has posted double-digit returns on assets for the better part of a few of decades. In Only the Paranoid Survive, Intel's 3rd employee, and its CEO from 1987 to 1998, Andy Grove, shares some ideas on how he did it.