Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

There are 2 books that have fundamentally shifted my thinking: - The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics. This has been covered by CGP Grey and now has a Netflix adaptation, so I figure it lies well within the HN Zeitgeist already. There's a lot to debate in this book, but I fundamentally didn't understand political power before reading it. - Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men. I have a more complicated relationship with this one, in fact I never finished it. It's about men (mainly) who are abusive in relationships, and how they are able to manipulate their partners. It hits close to home because I've seen a lot of that growing up, and I've seen a lot of women close to me end up in abuse in a predictable but devastating cycle.…

Franz de Waal's "Chimpanzee Politics". It's nominally about the social relationships of a chimp colony in a Dutch zoo. But it made me see the extent to which humans are just another great ape, and a lot of human dynamics are really primate dynamics, especially around social power. Johnstone's "Impro". It's about improvisational theater, and mainly meant for people learning improv. But the section on status transactions helped me see a lot about how we express those primate dominance dynamics. There's also great material on the nature of creativity. "Getting to Yes" is a great book about business negotiation, but is lessons about shifting discussions from zero-sum to positive-sum are things I use a lot. Braitenberg's "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" is a way of thinking about psychology (and our inference of mind) by examining imaginary robots. "The Toyota Way" and other books on Lean Manufacturing are about running extremely effective manufacturing operations. But they have deeply changed how I think about systems of making software and running businesses. Other great books in this category include "Toyota Kata" and "Principles of Product Development Flow".…