Deliberate practice for business people is reading business history.
Ben Horowitz used to say that tech business is so complex, it's like playing 3D chess. "There's always a move."
Reading business history radically expands the space of possible moves in your head.
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One problem is a lot of business history or what passes for it is great man hagiography 😢
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Agreed. The Elon Musk book comes to mind. But my approach is to read as many books around the topic as is possible (balancing out authors against each other), while concurrently reading every annual report (if it's a public company) from the same period.
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I like to read things about macro trends (eg read about history of car technology instead of Elon musk biography) to get more context about a given business
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So, my reading program for that would be:
Start with Henry Ford's My Life and Work, then Taiichi Ohhno's Toyota Production Factory (which contains autobiography bits), and then Alfred P Sloan's My Years with General Motors, and then On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors.
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These are all 'source' material — meaning stories and events from the mouths of the key players. I'd then supplement that with third party accounts. e.g. Womack's Machine That Changed The World, and Competing Against Time, which explains the competitive dynamic against Toyota.
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But there’s few topics I would be interested enough in to dive so deeply so I just read one macro book and leave it at that lol
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So ... I would be interested in *your* reading list for Crypto and monetary theory!
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