When they bought Zappos it seems like they pretty much left the culture alone but helped streamline their backend. Maybe they're planning something similar? I can't see Whole Foods becoming the Wal-Mart of organic produce without completely killing their brand.
Loved The Life Changing Magic, and totally got rid of so much stuff. However, you should check out this year's Spark Joy by Marie Kondo is a lot more helpful because it has illustrations of how to fold things and so forth.
That's interesting - will check it out in 2017. I got rid off a lot as well, but now that the dust has settled down, I am finding it increasingly hard to remember to not accumulate. It's a constant battle in this on-your-face advertising and consumption oriented constructs prevalent in society.
1. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson - A history of technological progress and predictions about the future. Obviously a lot of repetitive jobs will be automated, but Brynjolfsson posits a few interesting potential solutions for the future, such as Negative Income Tax.
2. Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia Martinez - A first person memoir about an aqui-hire by Facebook / Twitter. Interesting to learn about the differences in corporate culture and how Ycombinator works behind the scenes.
3. Economics in One Lesson: by Henry Hazlitt - Explains classical economics in a way where I now can understand what politicians are talking about.
4. The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory
by John Seabrook - How pop music is made. It's surprising how assembly-line it actually is, and how many people work behind the scenes. Google "topline writer," for one.
5. Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton - A third-person account of Twitter's origin and subsequent CEO-shuffling. Wow, I can see why the board would want to replace Jack and Ev--they are not management material, which is why it's perplexing that Jack is back (unless it's board politics, again).
6. Disrupted by Dan Lyons - a memoir by a 50-something writer (who now writes for HBO's Startup - he wrote White Hat / Black Hat - the one where Ross had the tequila bottle incident) trying to deal with the culture of a young goofy startup culture in Boston. Another corporate culture book that was interesting, and made me glad I don't have to deal with office politics. Lyons is kind of jerk who doesn't realize it, though.
7. Steve Jobs - by Walter Isaacson. However, it's missing a lot from the "NeXT" time, surprisingly. If you're interested in Chrisann Brennan's perspective, check out her The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs--though be forewarned it's pretty whiney and I really just skimmed over most of it. Her perspective on why he was attracted to Laurene Powell is interesting, though.
8. Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance - It's an authorized biography, so there's that, but it's still an interesting read.
