Tribes - We Need You to Lead Us

This is a very good book for all future leaders or ones who already practice leadership every day. The book was written by Seth Godin who has written so far ten books on various topics such as marketing, business and leadership.

Tribes - We Need You to Lead Us is not structured in chapters, it has a myriad of lessons, stories and ideas each having starting from a half of page to two pages. Even if through the book the same ideas are repeated it is not boring to read it because you are continuously fuelled energy and encouragement to take action and lead your tribe.

The book presents various channels of communication, it points out that heretics make up better leaders, it clearly explains differences between managers and leaders. The author also presents the skills of a good leader and emphasises that leading is a hard path and can be done only of you truly believe in the target goal.

Overall I strongly recommend this leadership book to everyone interested in becoming a leader or is already leading a tribe and wants to strengthen their skills or maybe just wants to get a boost of energy and morale.

The Jewel of Seven Stars - Bram Stoker

I cannot believe that I've kept this book on my shelve for more than 10 years and that only now I've decided to pick it up and read it! From my point of view this was an amazing book which kept me excited through the whole journey of the characters.

I will not spoil it for you but I'll give you some small insights. Bram Stoker tells a mystery story of a queen from ancient Egypt who made use of black magic to prepare her revival, 5000 years after death. The key to her revival is a Jewel of Seven Stars in the form of a beetle, jewel which is in the hands of the mummy queen. This world comes in contrast with the reality in which some egyptologists, a detective, a lawyer and a daughter of an egyptologist take place at some mysterious events.

The book was published in 1903 but Bram Stoker was forced by his publicist to change the ending because the book incited religious doubt and speculation, thus a revised version was published in 1912, right before author's death.

Overall The Jewel of Seven Stars was easy to read, the story kept me fully engaged and even if this book does not get as much attention as Dracula, I really recommend it to you.

Enjoy your next book!

MIT talk - The world is flat

"The world is flat" is an amazing talk held at MIT and made by Thomas Lauren Friedman who is an American journalist. He wrote many books from which one is “The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century“.


He starts how he accidentally decided to write the book. While he was doing some documentaries for Discovery channel, he got to travel to India to do some interviews for “getting the other side of outsourcing”. During one of his interview he discussed with a CEO of a technology company in India who stated that “The global economic field is being levelled”. After the interview and while he spent his time at the hotel room he was thinking about that statement and he discovered that while he was asleep the world was flattened. He decided to dig into this topic, he took several months leave from his job at The New York Times.


During his talk he started to describe the first three chapters of his book. In the first chapter he talked about how he started to work on this book, how he did the interviews in India, how he discovered that in North-Est China there are thousands of Japanese speaking Chinese are running the backrooms, running the software and doing the business processing for major Japanese multinationals and major American multinationals formally based in Tokyo. He also gives an example of Blue Airlines employee Betty who is getting calls from customers from home in her slippers. He enumerates which are in his opinion the 3 eras of globalisation. He considers that the first one is when countries started to expand their territory to become more powerful and get more natural resources. The second era is represented by companies which became multinational companies, employing people from multiple countries. And third era is represented by individual collaboration, getting mentorship online from a person who you never met and he is from the other side of the planet.


In the second chapter he enumerates the ten forces that flatten the world. First of them is when the Berlin wall was taken down, second one was the dot com bubble. When Netscape went public and people spent their money investing a lot of money in the company, money which Netscape used to connect via optical fiber America and China thus enabling the internet to be accessible over the globe. The third force is the improvement of workflow using applications like Microsoft products, Word, Excel and so on. Forth is uploading which enables persons to collaborate and work on the same files and projects. Fifth one is outsourcing, sixth is offshoring which means that a company moved its whole fabric to a country with cheaper labor. Seventh is the open sourcing which enabled the creation of linux as we know it today. Then next ones are of supply chaining used by Wallmart, insourcing which is something UPS does, basically many companies are only doing marketing and via insourcing they pay companies like UPS to create their products. Next force is informing enabled by companies like Google. And then there are the steroids like firesharing and others which are charging all the ways of collaboration.


In the third chapter, called the triple convergence, he talks about the way everything meets together and enables this flattening of the world. Afterwards he talks about how “we all have to learn how to horizontalize, and take advantage of this platform” to become the most productive. Friedman proclaimed that this shift, from vertical to horizontal, “is the most fundamental transformation in human interaction since Gutenberg invented the Printing press.”


In the end of his talk he answers some good questions like “What is the role of under developed countries?”, “What is the role of MIT in this event?”. During his talk he also emphasises that we need to educate people to use their imagination in a positive way because this transformations enables on one hand terrorist organisations to do more harm but on another hand it enables people, with positive thinking, to do amazing things.


Friedman’s talk was amazing and brought a lot of value into my way of thinking and understanding how the world works. I am looking forward to read his book “The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century“.

I hope that you enjoyed the summary and I strongly encourage you to watch the video and read the book.

How to read the best books

As our time to spare on reading is limited, we should always choose to read the best books. We should always spend a short amount of time to decide whether what we are going to read is worth the time. This applies both for technical books but also for fiction books.

My advice is to always check some stats about the book on Goodreads. I usually have a look over how many people read the book and shortly check some reviews.

Goodreads is also very useful when I have too choose which book to read on a certain topic. Which book I should read first from a list of recommended books. I usually pick the book which bought the most value to other readers.

Facebook traded the trust of its users for money

Lately it seems that the only things which appear on my facebook news feed are commercials and shares with censured sex scenes. I hate it! Posts which were previously showing me what my friends are doing became discarded to favor advertising posts.

As long as social networking websites will accept to fill the feeds of their users with useless commercials, these social engines will be abandoned in favor of new ones. Hopefully one of these social networking applications will realize this and abandon the advertising strategy.