I like to read a lot, a combination of fiction and non-fiction books.

One of my goals for this year is to read even more. The intention is to make reading my default activity, replacing the common tendency to check my phone or laptop to fill some short gaps.

I've also recently started what I'd like to become a new habit: writing book summaries for all the non-fiction books I'm reading, eventually building a knowledge database with the key ideas, my notes, and links between books and authors.

As a continuation of this work, I've decided to introduce a new segment in my newsletter: a monthly review of the books I've read the previous month. These will not be generic reviews though, but reflections aimed at distilling the key learnings that can apply to my life and career, and as such the lives and careers of many of my readers.

I do believe that having a broad set of interests as inspiration for one's life or career can come from many disparate, and sometimes surprising, directions.

As such, do not expect to find only books about software engineering or engineering leadership. Those will likely be a minority.

At the moment these articles won't include any affiliate link, something that might or might not change in the future.

As this is a new monthly segment, I'd love to hear your feedback on whether you find it interesting, and don't forget your reading recommendations too!

Let's start with the first book I finished in March 2024, DotCom Secrets by Russel Brunson.

📚 DotCom Secrets, by Russel Brunson

DotCom Secrets, by Russel Brunson

275 Pages, First published: January 1st, 2011

This is the kind of book I would have never imagined reading only a year ago. Yet, as I moved into solopreneurship, I saw that I needed to improve my marketing and sales skills. You don't do that as a CTO very often.

It's often hard to figure out where to start when you're a beginner in a new discipline. That's why I've recently started to work with a professional consultant in this area. They are helping me shape my offer and build my first online sales funnel.

One of the first things they recommended was to buy the Secrets Trilogy from Russel Brunson. DotCom Secrets is the first book.

This book focuses on the infrastructure and design of effective sales funnels.

My first observation is simple. If you sell online or are curious about sales and marketing, you will like this book. It's not for you otherwise.

These are the 3 most valuable insights I got from the book:

1. The Value Ladder

2. Finding Your Ideal Customers

3. The Attractive Character

🪜 The Value Ladder

This concept struck me for its ingenuity and simplicity. The basic idea is that you should design a sequence of offers that progressively increase in both value and price. Having a clearly defined value ladder is a prerequisite to designing any successful sales funnel.

The value ladder usually starts with something you give away for free and culminates with your highest value and most expensive product. Ideally, you will want to guide your user along the steps of the ladder.

Said this way this might sound just a fancier way to refer to the generic concept of “upselling”, but the key difference here is important. With the Value Ladder Brunson provides you with a strategic approach on how to design your offer in a way that is conducive to upselling. It forces you to be very intentional about how you design your offers and not be afraid to give away some value for free.

🤝 Finding Your Ideal Customers

Brunson talks about the concept of Dream Customer, the answer to the fundamental question Who do I actually want to work with?

I've made that mistake myself multiple times already - to start with an idea or a solution in mind. We spend a lot of time refining the service or the product, while we don't spend nearly enough time getting a real understanding of who the ideal clients should be.

Brunson's recommended approach is to start with identifying the clients as your first step. Who are they? What do they look like? What are they passionate about? etc.

The book includes instructions on how to define these Dream Customer avatars, where to find them, and how to design offers that will be attractive to them.

👨🏻‍🦲 The Attractive Character

Simply put, the Attractive Character (AC) is the persona you're sharing with your audience and how you communicate with your list. This should not be a made-up character that aligns with ideal archetypes.

Instead, it should be the persona that attracts clients and customers and helps you build your following and eventually make sales. In other words, it should be you, but a you that is presented in a very intentional way.

People who relate to your story are the most likely to buy products from you. Therefore it's important to invest in crafting - or should I say curating - that story. Brunson provides a set of detailed instructions to follow to curate your Attractive Character and use it consistently across your offering.

I don't agree with all the sales tactics and motivations put forward by Brunson in this book. Some of them fall into the gray zone of tricking people into buying something they don't need or want.

I have enough self-awareness and clarity of purpose to be able to take the good parts of the book - i.e. the tools that work - and deploy them to deliver real value to my clients. You could also deploy the same tactics just to take money from people who will fall for your tricks.

That's true with any tool, as they can be used for both positive and not-so-positive purposes.

You can emit a moral judgment on some of the practices recommended by Brunson, yet retain the key learnings and make them part of your toolbox.

In that sense, this book is also very instructive as a consumer, as it helps you be more in control of your reactions when presented with irresistible offers.

📚 The Goal by Eli Goldratt

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox

384 Pages, First published: January 1st, 1984

This book was first published in 1984, but for some reason, I only managed to read it in 2024. And this is what makes it a great read: it's still very relevant 40 years after its publication.

One interesting aspect of this book is that it is often credited with being the first to introduce the “Business Novel” genre. This is a genre of books that uses a fictitious novel to introduce theories, often around management practices.

A famous example that should be well-known among my readers is The Phoenix Project¹.

Reading The Goal made me realize how much it has inspired and influenced the authors of The Phoenix Project. The influence goes well beyond the format.

I'd go as far as to say that The Phoenix Project can be seen as an adaptation of the concepts from The Goal into the realm of IT operations and DevOps.

It's not a surprise that my copy of the book - the 30th-anniversary edition - was blurbed by Kevin Behr, one of the co-authors of The Phoenix Project.

Back to The Goal. The book uses a fictitious story to introduce the Theory of Constraints (TOC) as it applies primarily to the manufacturing industry.

The novel format makes it very easy to read. I went through it in less than a week.

The main character in the story is Alex Rogo, a young plant manager who is faced with the threat of his plant being shut down due to accumulated inefficiencies and losses.

As the drama unfolds, he accidentally re-establishes contact with his former Physics professor, Jonah, an intriguing character who seems to have a deep understanding of the laws of manufacturing and what Alex and many of his peers seem to be doing wrong.

As the history unfolds, Jonah ends up playing a key role. Though hard to reach and unwilling to unveil all his knowledge to Alex and his team, he becomes a guide that helps them eventually figure out how to turn the plant around and make it an example of productivity across the whole company.

Beyond being an enjoyable read, the book left me with 3 key insights.

1. The power of the Socratic Method. Jonah doesn't teach Alex and his team by simply giving them answers to their questions. Instead, he often offers them other questions in response, encouraging them to reflect and observe reality from certain angles or perspectives. By his use of the Socratic Method, he enables Alex to come up with his solutions, something that equips him with a deeper understanding of the system he's managing and its invisible rules.

2. The importance of identifying key bottlenecks in a system. This is the key concept in the Theory of Constraints. You need to identify your main bottleneck and focus on optimizing for it. To use the book's terminology, you should decide how to exploit the constraint, and then subordinate everything else to that decision. Then you will want to elevate the system constraint, i.e. finding ways to improve its capacity through various tactics. As changes to a bottleneck will have broad consequences, you should constantly iterate on the process as new system behaviors emerge.

3. The useless and often counterproductive effect of local optimizations. This is probably the most counter-intuitive idea at first, but once you get a grasp of how constraints affect the performance of a system it becomes self-evident. Unfortunately, this is a trap we often fall into. Driven by the desire to improve efficiencies in every part of a system, we often end up with local optimizations that do nothing to improve the performance of the bottleneck. Not only that, but they could end up choking the bottleneck even more. We need to overcome our aversion to idleness and focus on the overall system's productivity instead.

40 years after its initial publication, I think this book stands the test of time exceptionally well. Especially in the area of local optimization, I think we still have a lot of work to do as an industry.

This book made me reflect a lot on the topic of GenAI, and specifically many of the use cases where it's being deployed.

I'm wondering if these are just examples of local optimization that do little to improve overall productivity systems. Are we using these sophisticated tools to improve non-bottlenecks? Will this lead to overloading the real bottlenecks - human brains in the domain of knowledge work - even more as a consequence?

This is just an early thought at this stage, and I'll need to spend more time researching and mulling it over before forming a well-articulated view of the subject.

For now, take it as one more reason for reading this book. That's especially true if you are in a leadership role that has something to do with managing and optimizing a production flow.

🔭 Looking forward to…

I’ve already read 2 books in April and will be able to finish at least one if not two more before the end of the month. The next edition of this segment will be meatier than the first one!

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to two things:

1. Your feedback on whether you enjoy the idea of a monthly review of books I read.

2. Your reading recommendations. I already have a long list of books I want. to go through, but I take recommendations very seriously

Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

See you all next week!