Allen Cheng, Author at Allen Cheng

PDF + Summary: Sam Walton, Made in America (Wal-Mart Founder)

Wal-Mart is the largest retailer on the planet. It had $500 billion in sales in 2017 – almost 3x the size of Amazon – and runs 12,000 stores worldwide.

This retail titan began in 1945 with founder Sam Walton managing a single store in Newport, AR, a town of 7,000 people. In this small town, Walton learned the retail and management strategies that became the foundation of Wal-Mart’s staggering worldwide growth. (Amazing that Wal-Mart now has more than one store for every person in the town in which it was founded).

Sam Walton wrote his autobiography Sam Walton: Made in America in the last year before he died, as he struggled with cancer. Made in America is a candid, energetic retelling of the Wal-Mart story and the principles that led Walton and his partners to incredible success.

If you’ve ever read The Everything Store, a deep dive into Amazon, you’ll see Amazon’s core principles reflected in Wal-Mart, half a century before Amazon and the popular internet even existed. No surprise – Made in America is one of Jeff Bezos’s essential must-read books for his management team. If you want to understand the clash of retail titans Amazon and Wal-Mart in the coming years, you have to read these books.p>

In this Made in America summary, learn:

What Wal-Mart did in its early life that every major competitor ignored
How Wal-Mart borrowed its competitors’ best ideas – and did them better
Sam Walton’s favorite management tactics to motivate his team
Why Sam Walton always flew coach

Best Book Summary + PDF: Shoe Dog, by Phil Knight

Shoe Dog is the story of how Nike was founded, written by Nike’s founder, Phil Knight. Nike is now a global brand – go pretty much anywhere in the world, and you’ll see someone wearing Nikes.

But Shoe Dog starts you over 50 years ago in 1962, when Phil Knight is 24 years old, has just earned an MBA from Stanford, and doesn’t know what to do with his life. You travel the next 18 years with Phil Knight, through continuous adversity, self-doubt, and never-ending financial uncertainty.

Shoe Dog is a refreshingly candid entrepreneurial account. Phil is clear about his shortcomings and about how tough it was to keep Nike running year after year. Shoe Dog is also well-written, with poetic phrasings and philosophical musings, unlike the straightforward clip of most business biographies.

Read the Shoe Dog summary here for the main history of Nike and Phil Knight, but read the real book for a visceral account of how one of the world’s biggest companies got started.

Best Summary + PDF: 12 Rules for Life, by Jordan Peterson

12 Rules for Life is a collection of life principles that, if followed, are meant to improve your life. It reached the #1 spot on Amazon’s bestsellers list, and clearly it resonates with a lot of people.

Its author (Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist and U Toronto professor) argues that modern secularism and reliance on science has left a void in answers to important existential questions: What is the point of living? Why do bad things happen to good people? What am I supposed to do to make myself happier? Why does life have so much suffering?

Without a clear guiding structure, you might feel directionless. You may be prone to nihilism (“there’s no point to anything”), existential angst, and misery. You may blame the world for being unfair to you, while spending your time on things you know are counterproductive. You may feel stuck and unable to change.

12 Rules for Life is Jordan Peterson’s attempt to fill the void. It’s his prescription for how people should behave and how they should deal with the vagaries of life. It covers why you should stop telling lies to others and yourself, why you should stop doing things you know are bad for you, and how to pursue what is truly meaningful for you. If individuals can take charge of their lives, then society can cure its ills.

The general points in 12 Rules for Life are undoubtedly things you’ve heard vaguely in the past, even cliched – but for some reason, the way he articulates his prescriptions carries considerable power and gravity. It’ll remind you of what you didn’t know you knew. As comments a typically rational, data-driven writer: “I actually acted as a slightly better person during the week or so I read Jordan Peterson’s book…It certainly wasn’t because of anything new or non-cliched in his writing. But God help me, for some reason the cliches worked.”

In this 12 Rules for Life book summary, learn:

What good posture has to do with your social status
Why it doesn’t make sense to compare yourself with anyone else
The one tactic to become an effective listener and get people to tell you whatever’s on their mind
More explanations on the classic stereotype of women talking about their problems with men wanting to fix them too quickly
How to stop blaming the world for your misfortunes and take responsibility
A solution to nihilism

Best Summary: The Lessons of History, by Will & Ariel Durant

What can you learn from 5,000 years of history? Are we in truly novel times, or do we face the same problems that the Romans and Egyptians faced 2,000 years ago?

Will & Ariel Durant, Pulitzer Prize winning historians, are famed for writing The Story of Civilization, a massive 9766-page, 11-volume treatise of the entirety of Western history. Thankfully, they compiled the most important recurring patterns in history in this book, The Lessons of History.

Ray Dalio, founder of the world’s largest hedge fund Bridgewater, considers this one of his 3 must-read books. I’m not a history buff, but a bunch of smart thinkers (e.g. Dalio, Bill Gates, Marc Andreessen) are, partially because it builds pattern recognition and improves prediction accuracy.

In this Lessons of History summary, learn:

How human nature hasn’t changed over thousands of years
How freedom and equality are fundamentally opposed to one another
How societies cycle between wealth inequality and redistribution, like a heartbeat
What repeatedly threatens democracy to turn into tyranny
Why all civilizations, including ours, fall, and why we shouldn’t cry about it.

Book Summary: Why We Get Sick (Evolutionary Medicine)

Why DO we get sick? Why hasn’t natural selection, over millions of years, prevented us from getting cancer, heart disease, and depression?

Our bodies seem at times to be faulty designs, prone to error and calamity. Diseases seem like mere accidents of evolution (like the appendix). Or perhaps natural selection just isn’t powerful enough to get rid of some diseases?

The science of evolutionary medicine says this thinking is totally, utterly wrong. Instead, our bodies have evolved over millions of years as a set of compromises, largely in pursuit of reproductive fitness. Frankly put, whatever gets you to survive and have kids is going to persist in the gene pool, even if it causes you lots of disease and pain in adult life.

Why We Get Sick is one of the most insightful and profound books on disease I’ve ever read (including all of my medical school training). After reading this summary, I don’t think you’ll look at disease – and humans in general – the same way again.

In this Why We Get Sick summary, you’ll learn:

Why humans haven’t evolved to live for 200 years, and why we don’t regrow limbs
The evolutionary purpose of depression
Why females evolved to bear children, and why this has led to the classic male fear of commitment and all sorts of confusing sexual behaviors (it takes a few logical steps, but trust me)
How the fact that we evolved in small tribes in the Stone Age, combined with today’s mass media, may increase depression
Why we’ve evolved to dislike the sound of baby crying

Book Summary: An American Sickness, by Elisabeth Rosenthal

American healthcare is commonly known to be in a deplorable state, costing 18% of GDP while underperforming in quality among developed nations. Changing the situation systemically also seems intractable – Obamacare endured a torturous path of compromises and ended as a sliver of its original ambition. Costs continue to rise without a clear winning strategy.

American Sickness unpacks how US healthcare got to this state. It examines the competing interests of the major blocs in healthcare – hospitals and doctors, pharmaceuticals and devices, and insurers. It’s the most helpful book on US healthcare I’ve read thus far, clarifying how deeply entrenched the interests are and why it’s so difficult to change anything.

American Sickness is written by Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal, who trained at Harvard Medical School and served as a reporter at the New York Times for 21 years. It’s currently a top 5 Amazon bestseller in healthcare.

In this American Sickness book summary, you’ll learn:

Why healthcare systems have undergone massive consolidation
The incentives pushing hospitals and doctors to give you expensive, unnecessary care
How doctors have regularly protected their own interests at the cost of patients
How pharmaceutical companies manipulate patent and prescribing law to fight off cheaper generics
What you can do today to lower personal health costs

Summary: Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records, by Adam Tanner

Data privacy is the topic du jour, given Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica mishap and the ubiquitous tracking that follows you everywhere on the web.

You might want to know that your medical data is no safer. Your healthcare providers – pharmacy, hospital, health insurer, lab test provider, genome sequencers – are continuously selling your medical data to data brokers. Data brokers compile this information into a patient record, which is then resold with records of hundreds of millions of other patients for marketing and industry analysis purposes.

Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records, by Adam Tanner, is a useful survey of the medical data industry and its current worrisome capabilities. You’ll learn how the industry progressively sold more and more data, how patient records are compiled, and why there’s a market for this data.

In some sense, it’s already too late to opt out or take back your data. Data brokers say your records can’t be traced back to you, so even if you wanted to opt out, it claims to have no way to tell which data to delete. But at minimum, you should be aware of the extent to which your data is shared and be sensitive to future opportunities to opt out, should you so choose.

Summary: Essentials of the US Healthcare System (by Shi and Singh)

Much is said about the deplorable state of US healthcare: it costs 18% of GDP, shows low quality relative to comparable countries, and any major changes are high-friction and glacial in speed.

US healthcare is also incredibly complex, characterized by fragmentation; opposing incentives that are deeply entrenched; an opaque, inefficient market; and philosophical divides between people who believe in market justice vs social justice.

Essentials of the US Healthcare System, by Shi and Singh, is a useful high-level primer to the structure of US healthcare and the history behind its current state. This summary contains my takeaway notes from Essentials and open questions about US healthcare I’m still trying to answer.

This is part of a series on US healthcare as I try to find a problem tractable for a startup to work on. If you know of anyone working on compelling problems in healthcare or behavior change, please put them in touch!

Best Book Summary + PDF: Grit, by Angela Duckworth

Do you have problems finishing things? Do new ideas distract you from previous ones? Do you get derailed by setbacks more often than you would like?

Then you could use more grit. In Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance book, Angela Duckworth shows how grit – the combination of passion and perseverance – distinguishes high achievers, and why talent isn’t as important as most people think.

If you’re not as gritty as you like, don’t fret – this book teaches the 4 major components of grit, and how to develop grit in your kids and teammates.

Summary + PDF: The Road Ahead, by Bill Gates

Want to predict what the next technological revolution will be (eg cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, CRISPR, VR/AR), and how it will unfold? Want to envision the most valuable applications, startups, and business opportunities to arise in this new paradigm?

One way to get better at predicting the future is to study history and people who accurately predicted the future. In 1996, Bill Gates published The Road Ahead, his manifesto on how the Internet and PC will pervasively transform our lives and major industries.

To control for hindsight bias, remember that in the mid-90s:

the web was used only by a small minority niche – 0.4% of the world population, compared to 54% today
computers were glacial by modern standards, connected to the Internet by 28k/56k modems capable of transmitting 3-6kB/s (0.1% of a typical connection in 2018)
many critics felt the Internet was just a gimmick or a simple tool, incapable of upending people’s well-established habits

Within this context in The Road Ahead, Bill Gates is optimistic and remarkably prescient about how important the Internet will be. He predicts that the Internet is a revolutionary paradigm change in zero-cost information handling, that this will spur development of groundbreaking applications, and that virtuous cycles will kick off revolutions in many industries. Bill Gates predicts elements of today’s largest tech companies – Facebook, Netflix, Amazon – and top applications – mobile phones, social networking, ecommerce – years and even decades before they fully materialized.

In this summary of The Road Ahead, I’ll summarize major elements of Bill Gates’s vision for the future. I try to build a framework for evaluating a new technological paradigm and how it will transform our lives and industry. I also discuss where Gates’s predictions fell short and possible patterns to misprediction.