Books Recommended by Mehdi Kajbaf

Great book, and the main idea I got from that was cut the bullshit, focus on what actually matters, ie. “just because something takes a long time, doesn’t make it important” and “doing something well, doesn’t make it important”. Lots to learn from that book but that’s the jist of it I think. Be brutally honest with yourself about what matters.

Reading Freedom Inc. by Isaac Getz helped me understand more deeply what I always intuitively understood about business and people. The book opens up with a discussion on values, and how we view individuals. Essentially it boils down to, are humans innately motivated to do good work and be productive, or are they lazy and will take advantage of situations to their own selfish interests?

Seeing Systems takes a thoroughly analytical and rational approach to human systems and comes up with a model that can be used to understand all organizational systems. That’s incredibly powerful and I had not seen that approach before. Barry Oshry describes the patterns that repeat themselves in every business or large group, and helps us understand how to overcome what he calls System Blindness. This approach helped me step back and look at Matboard and More (my start up) in a new way. Instead of seeing issues between executives, middle management and frontline employees as personal issues I saw them as systemic ones. This fresh perspective has been amazingly effective!

It’s difficult for me to separate all the different things I was reading and learning about at that time but I think Socrates Apology is probably the best place to focus. If you aren’t familiar with Socrates, he’s considered by most to be the father of Philosophy (which means love of wisdom). He annoyed a lot of people though because he constantly challenged their world views and encouraged them to seek truth and wisdom. He questioned everything, and eventually created too much of a stir so he was sentenced to death. In the Apology he gives a powerful speech and defense which ultimately falls short.