Mark Gandy

Derek Lidow is a former business founder of a major global semiconductor company that he ultimately sold. Today, he’s a professor at Princeton, where he teaches entrepreneurship, the topic of his newest book, The Entrepreneurs. This book is rich with historical stories of entrepreneurs doing the same things in the past as they are doing today. Big ideas include swarming, unintended consequences, the role of outsiders, society’s impact on entrepreneurs, and Schumpeter’s observations.

While prepping for this episode, I started thinking about Walter Chrysler and John Jacob Raskob. With a great sense of urgency, both men built the tallest skyscrapers of their kind in the 1930s. But for what purpose? The author of The Birth of a Building first approaches the conception of a building from a philosophic point of view as he explains the idea, the financing, the design, and the construction of a real estate project.

Curiosity drives much of the content on this podcast, and when Erik Hanberg’s book, The Little Book of Boards, showed up in my email, I felt compelled to buy it for several reasons. Of the six or seven boards I’ve served on, some have been boring experiences, others have been exceptional. I was curious if this book would have been valuable to me during my first board experience, which wasn’t great–it definitely would have been.

Not only is Neil Dahlstrom the author of the business historical narrative Tractor Wars, but he’s also the Branded Properties and Heritage Manager at John Deere. Before that, he was Deere’s Corporate History and Archives Manager. Neil admits he wanted to be Indiana Jones when he grew up and even worked in a museum in high school. During this conversation, we learn what a corporate archivist does and how to start a company archive.

Consumers are familiar with the cola wars, the PC wars, the FedEx/UPS wars, and the fast-food wars. But the tractor wars? Neil Dahlstrom is a historian and archivist for John Deere, and he’s the author of Tractor Wars, a historical narrative of the race to be the top manufacturer of power farming at the turn of the twentieth century. Will it be International Harvester, Ford, or the much smaller player, John Deere?

Derek Sivers was an accidental business founder. He only wanted to sell his music online, which happened to be during the pre-PayPal era. His peers pushed him into the business because they wanted their music online too. This short story of ups and downs ends with a pitch-perfect score when he sells the business for $22 million. In this episode, I’m joined by Hannah Munro, the host of the CFO 4.0 podcast, to unpack Derek’s book, Anything You Like.

Dame Stephanie ‘Steve’ Shirley has repeatedly stated, “I want to live a life worth saving.” Those who adore her will quickly say she has lived multiple lives worth saving after being saved from the Holocaust and transported by her mother from Austria to her newly-adopted country in England. Steve later became a visionary entrepreneur and a passionate and ardent philanthropist giving away millions to noble causes. Our topic is her 5-star book, Let It Go.

We learned many linear frameworks in college to help us solve simple to complex problems. Yet, systems thinking was probably missing from that curriculum. The Fifth Discipline (Senge) and Systems Thinking (Meadows) are typical starting points for learning systems thinking. However, those books are not written from a business person’s perspective. Simple_Complexity, by Dr. William ‘Willy’ Donaldson, provides a very readable and practical overview of systems thinking, the topic of this podcast episode.