Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance

Near to the end of the book, Peter Thiel remark on Elon Musk summarizes Elon’s contribution to the world. He said – “Elon has gone so far as to give people hope and renewed their faith on what technology can do to their lives”. Musk, in more ways than one, is one of the makers of modern America, and the author Ashlee Vance does justice to this point with a free-flowing account of his exploits in making Tesla and SpaceX as a typical Silicon Valley Company – exciting, ambitious and far-fetching in its goals. Probably Elon Musk’s greatest contribution is bringing manufacturing back to America – SpaceX’s rockets are made mostly in America, and with the jumpstart of Gigafactory in Nevada – it does justice to this point. 

The book runs deep in Elon’s exploit of SpaceX and Tesla and with Paypal story playing a distant second fiddle. The author does well in keeping the reader engaged; he peppers the account with Musk’s remark on various issues. The reckless attitude to keep Tesla alive in the middle of the Financial Crisis well documented and it shows what Elon was willing to do to keep his vision alive. Like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk has shattered the cosy club of monopolies in big industries by introducing game changing products. The last successful American automobile company before Tesla was Chrysler – in 1928. By introducing electric cars, Musk is shaking every vertical of the automotive industry. Tesla’s success is a frightening prospect to the car industry – it turns the service of a car on its head. Tesla is rewriting the rules of the game and all the car industry is following it. The same can be said about SpaceX. 





Somewhere as a reader you get the feeling that the author is idolatry in his approach. “SpaceX is Elon Musk” moots this point. One of his other ventures – Solarcity doesn’t find the space in the book to a good extent. By far the golden account is the birth and the struggle of SpaceX which brings the reader a lot closer to Elon Musk - the book is unputtdownable. 

An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth - Chris Hadfield

"Early Success is a terrible teacher. You are essentially rewarded for a lack of preparation.So when you find yourself in a situation where you must prepare, you don't know how to" 

Sweat over the small stuff - this is the underlying theme of Chris Hadfield's biography (not explicitly mentioned) as he chronicles his major life of NASA days and small portion to his pre-NASA days. There are some gems along the way where the author speaks about "Destructiveness of Competitiveness" ,"Aim to be a Zero" and "Climbing down the ladder". The anecdotes are weaved in seamlessly and the usage of jargon is at a minimal. The passion and the childish enthusiasm bounces off you during the key moments in his life - the first day he reported @ NASA, the lift-off to space, the first few days @ ISS et al or whenever he talks about Human Space mission. 


The portion of the book from the time of lift-off from Baikonur,Russia in Spacecraft Soyuz, his subsequent stay of 5 months in ISS, and the touchdown in Kazakhstan is so vividly written that it is hard to put down the book. During his stay, the social media was coming off age and the author posted some stunning pictures from the space, and "mundane activities" of Astronaut keeping up with earthly behaviours. 

The initial portion of the book is on a lacklustre side, may be because of the absence of "happening" events in Astronaut's life. Part of the reason may be because of long sentences that tends to drift off the readers - otherwise the book by Chris H. rivals in many ways the book by Randy Pausch - The Last Lecture.

It is not about the Trophy, Stupid!

“The applause will die down, the trophy will gather dust, and the experience will fade away. What will remain with you forever is what you learnt out of it.”

It was a day before the Area Level Contest for International Speech 2015. I was in my mentor’s house, horsing around but duly ensured that my mind was under a pretext that I was present in his house to practice my speech.

At one point, I became silent. Sensing something amiss, my mentor asked me what happened. I said : “ I really want to win the Area Level Contest”.  The desire stemmed from the loss at Area Level Humorous Contest 2013.  Not winning the contest is one thing, but not making it to even top 3 was a disaster. Truth be told, I do not like losing.  In my formative years of childhood till adulthood, I was too much into sports – probably I get this attitude from those experiences.  I wanted to make a mark this time.  I now realize how wrong I was in my approach.

I was asked by the editor of this newsletter to write about the experience in participating in the contest. But experience doesn’t amount to much if you do not reflect on the learnings you derived out of the experience.  I thought it was best to share my learnings out of contesting in this year’s contest:

#Learning 1 – Play with your strength.

 This seems a very innocuous message to all of us. DTM Lalitha Giridhar told me this after my disastrous CC6 (and also my first speech in CTM) where I forgot my lines. With respect to all the different technicalities of a speech, there is always a quality (or more) that I believe we are gifted with- either it is body language, confidence, voice modulation, scripts; there is always something that will stand out, that comes natural to you.  How do you discover it ? Simply go through you CC’s and you will find it. I found mine in CC6. Remember to harness that quality to the fullest extent and you will go places.   

#Learning 2 – Learn to unlearn

I am a very wrong person to preach you about this but the inability to unlearn was probably the one of the reasons I did not go further.   I had shared my script with Noorain Nadim for review; and the grammar Nazi that she is, she pointed out a few ( I am being generous to myself)  grammatical errors. The speech was so ingrained in me, that I just couldn’t incorporate those incremental improvements. To go further, we should be at peace in incorporating significant changes in the script as we go along in the contest. I couldn’t get myself to incorporate minor ones.

#Learning 3 – Follow your message

Follow your dreams now because it comes with an expiry date – this was my message in the script. The first time I sat in front of my computer I didn’t intend to revolve my script around this message but this eventually came out. I recollect on how many dreams, wishes and desires I delayed because of some naïve reason. Some have died – for example Aishwarya is now dating someone else; some has still life in it. This is the biggest learning I got – I now embrace my message. 

Iacocca: An Autobiography

Lee Iacocca's autobiography is an appealing read if you belong to the automotive industry. The insiders view of the two of the big three automotive giants - Ford and Chrysler, is enough reason to pick up the book. 
The book has some amazing management nuggets on how to lead a productive ans a healthy work-life. The two golden nuggets I took away from the book was: 

1. In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits.
2. Divide and track your own professional goals in quarters as your company does. 

From a superficial level, the book is neatly divided into two segment: 

1. Journey at Ford 
2. Embattle Journey at Chrysler 


But then the golden goose lies in the last segment of his book - "The Straight Talk". The article on the Japanese challenge is an engaging read which poses a comprehending argument on 'Fair vs Free Trade". 
What the book fails in delivering is the following: 

1. The family of the protagonist makes only a fleeting presence throughout the book. One of the Lee Iacoccoa's quote says" The only rock, the only institution that stays is your family". The book falls short on revealing the personal side of Lee Iacocca.

2. The portrayal Henry Ford's eccentric behavior has an amazing parallel to a Bollywood antagonist. The little scoops of Henry Ford II keeps the "masala" factor on. But the criticism on HF2 doesn't seem entirely fair. HF2 recruited a band of young guns who were dubbed as "Whiz Kids". Currently Ford is regarded as one of the best Financial Institutions and it is because of the practices laid by one of the Whiz Kids. This is just one of the instance. 

3. The books looks preachy at lengths for several times. The protagonist cannot do any wrong and is the Superman of the book. Maybe that's why an autobio is written. But Steve Jobs was very forthcoming about this negativities  in his book. 

All in all the book is a fair and a straight talk from Lee Iacocca - he said it as he saw it. There are plenty of anecdotes in the book, This one takes the cake - at the height of the Mustang frenzy, Lee was flying transatlantic to Europe when two pilots of jets flying nearby and a Captain from a Ship in "radio wave vicinity" patched in to talk to Lee when they figured out he was in the plane!  

2014- The Election that Changed India by Rajdeep Sardesai

Rajdeep, one of the most trustworthy and professional journalist in India (please don't judge him from the vicious twitter attacks!), book on the 2014 election is not really a discourse on the Election but rather an omnibus of the 6 month account and what preceded it.

Why the book is titled "The Election that Changed India" is not clear in the book. The Election results defined India's expectations and the simmering anger against Congress was put to forth. May be the title would have more apt few years from now when actual change (positive side, hopefully!) is visible on the ground.



Any concerned and informed citizen would be well aware of the storyline and the prime characters, but what makes this book an very engaging read is the personal anecdotes of the author with the various colourful political characters across parties peppered right across the book. The account on what preceded the "Self Destruct" interview of Rahul Gandhi's interview with Times Now; and the author's incident relative to the "Cash for Votes" are some of the best pieces in the book. The section on the use of IT in Modi's Campaign is where the book meanders a lot - probably the absence of politicans in this front and virtually no resistance from Congress in this field lead to a bit of a drag.

The author really tries to just put the facts (incidents in this case) on the table and leave the judgement to the imagination of the readers, but fails to do so on some accounts. The photo-op of Amit Shah releasing the book was an endorsement that the accounts described in the book are true.