Leadership & Management

“That's one of the best books ever. ... [It] unapologetically almost a how-to manual, but kind of deconstructs the world of business into first principles. It's like, 'Here's what matters. Here's how to think about it.' ... Basically, at the end of the day, making business is an engineering exercise, which is brilliant for me because that actually made the whole thing about becoming CEO significantly less scary to me.”

“In this super-candid book filled with revealing stories, Michael Dell shows how his development as a person was tightly intertwined with building the company he founded in his college dorm room. It's a fast-paced tale of launching a public company, taking it private, and then taking it public again, all while wrestling with colorful characters... The result is a book that is exciting, insightful, and valuable.”

“There's two takeaways that I had from that book that have drastically changed and kind of altered and even built the philosophy of how I run my teams. The first piece is that you always want to be asking people questions... curiosity over judgment. The second takeaway is that encouragement is always going to work better than criticism.”

“When I was younger and first started thinking about my future, I decided to either become a professor or start a company. I felt that either option would give me a lot of autonomy—the freedom to think from first principles and real-world physics rather than having to accept the prevailing 'wisdom.'”

“I love how Focus is a sustained look at our addiction to screens and devices and the countless external distractions that threaten to take us further from ourselves and the people we love. His lesson—that 'full attention is a form of love'—is something we can all learn from and take to heart.”