/edu/ - Education

Good to Great

The left often fails to realize the most important 'political implication' of business: it is competitive and forces those engaging in it to be practical. There are only two outcomes: growth and success; or losing market share and failing.

It's not like your average leftist circle. You can't spin your wheels for years or decades, talking a big game, yet ending up with little to show for it. For this reason, it's actually useful to read business books.

A lot of business books deal with organizational theory and practice. This is directly applicable to leftist organizing. The one business book that had the most impact on me is Good to Great by Jim Collins. He identifies a few factors which separate a company you like Google from a company like Yahoo. That is to say, he highlights the key things that make one company rise above its competitors.

These include:

1- Highly confident leaders who push the company's success rather than only looking after their own personal gains. Often they're very disciplined and a praise others before they praise himself.

2 - Having strong people. Collins emphasizes getting the right people on the bus and the right the wrong people off the bus early on. Think of this as Lenin's 'better fewer but Better' idea of the vanguard.

3 - Confronting brutal facts. As with all realms of life, an understanding that is the closer approximation to actual truth, rather than what you'd want the truth to be, is always going to be more advantageous.

4- Companies that rise above the others also tend to do one thing very well - not everything very well. They apply the 'hedgehog concept.' They're very niche and they understand exactly what their product offers customers (as other marketers/business writers explain, 'don't sell the product, sell a solution to a problem.')

5 - Within their company, they have a culture of discipline in which everyone is moving towards a common goal and understands the 'why' of the organization. If you look at highly successful companies, they tend to have a strong internal company culture, especially those ones that last for a long time.

6 - Finally, Collins admits the obvious. Standout companies apply technology in an innovative way which accelerates their business. This doesn't mean they venture down every single technological avenue. Instead, what they do, they do well.

In terms of business books, along with Good to Great, it's worth checking out Presuasion and 7 Habits for Highly Effective People. Presuasion offers an insight into the bourgeois science of social engineering and manipulation. Again, it is retarded to dismiss this, since it's precisely the bourgeoisie who do this so well. Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is admittedly cringey as fuck. But, it's also fairly practical. And, it's safe to say that it's the most read book in the business management and entrepreneurial world.

Incidentally, there is a old review of Good to Great posted by a Third Worldist group. Check it out if you want to laugh.

https://anti-imperialism.org/2013/08/26/review-good-to-great-why-some-companies-make-the-leap-and-others-dont/

48 Laws of Power

48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene is a fun book to read. An exceptional amount of care and work went into its design and layout. It's littered with quotes and anecdotes from history.

Power is interesting topic because leftists strive to seize power. Moreover, power relations govern everyday society and social interactions on all levels. Thus Greene's account offers an interesting insight into such power struggles as they played out on a micro level throughout history.

Biographies can also be interesting, especially when they are about people who were powerful or innovative. I'm not especially well read on biographies, but I'd recommend River of Doubt. It's about a specific short period in the life of Theodore Roosevelt after he was president. He participated in the first western exploration of a tributary of the Amazon River. The adventure which cost many lives, including almost his own. It unironically captures a vital spirit which is absent from much of the modern left.

Evolution of Desire

Author David Buss is one of the foremost experts in evolutionary psychology. His book, Evolution of Desire offers a highly interesting and accessible introduction into this field via a drawn out academic discussion on the sometimea taboo realities of human sexuality. Buss offers an evolutionary explanation of human sexual practices, noting how these behavioral traits were adaptive features of humans evolving in pre-agrarian times, long before people had compex verbal skills or written language.

For those critical of either the mainstream entitlement of Western women and woke anti-male feminism (or those just interesting in better understanding relationships), it's a useful book. It offers a window into human sexuality which avoids much of the red pill ideology while nonetheless providing a materialist account for some of the innate features of people driven to bang.

On the topic of human sexuality, there are several other interesting and useful titles. Sex at Dawn is another look into the origins of human sexuality. Thie book is admittedly more popular with women. Way of the Superior Man is an esoteric guide on not being a simp or incel. The Book of Pook is a humourous, old-school red pill practical guide for men written as a dialogue. The Sex God Method is immanently practical if you already have a girl you're banging. No More Mr. Nice Guy, though not a book on sexuality, is adjacent and within the sphere of books that would help out a lot of guys, both within the left and among the wider population.

Antifragile

Taleb Nassim is a weirdo with a lot of bad takes. But he's still worth reading. Antifragile, in particular, raises an interesting point. There are things which are fragile, things which are resilient, and things which are antifragile.

Imagine a glass statue as something that is fragile. A slight jostling could be enough to break it. It certainly wouldn't survive a fall. A brass statue would be resilient. It would survive a jostling or fall, but not amount of such would make it stronger. Finally, imagine a human body as antifragile. In that case, regular jostling, falls, and stress actually make it stronger, literally in the sense of muscle mass and bone density.

This principle of antifragility, i.e., being improved through minor disruption, is a feature of all natural systems, from forests, to the human body, to societies.

In either case, a disruption - a minor fire, exercise, or occasional minor fallback and failure - enable each to strengthen. Moreover, deprived of such stress, each of these systems weakens and grows vulnerable to castrophic shocks - a raging inferno, disease and accidental injury, major backslips and societal collapse or decay.

Nassim also introduces the concept of 'skin in the game.' His writing style is a bit more dense and laborious to read. But if you like it, Black Swan is interesting as well.

Bronze Age Mindset

Bronze Age Mindset is probably the funniest book I've ever read (the girls from Red Scare apparently agree). It's written in a style that could be called schizo-nonfiction.

If you read this book literally, you're retarded and missing the point. It's is a piece of fine creative art, a sort of parody of itself, penned by the appropriately named, Bronze Age Pervert.

The book is 'an exhortation.' It's been stylized as a neo fascist manifesto by some in the media. It's a book that's more widely read than people admit to, simply because of how off the wall it is.

For BAP, all of life is a competition, at the minimum for space. BAP valorizes the victors of this competition and those qualities which help them succeed. Conversely, he hates 'bugmen,' those mindless drones that wearily go along with 'globohomo.'

Bronze Age Mind is good to read before Nietzsche. BAP obviously takes inspiration from the German philosopher. Moreover, Nietzsche is best read in a similar manner to BAM: as a long shitpost.

>>7007
>The left often fails to realize the most important 'political implication' of business: it is competitive and forces those engaging in it to be practical. There are only two outcomes: growth and success; or losing market share and failing.
The most competitive companies in the capitalist system are not the ones that make the best product for the lowest price, the winning strategy is sabotaging the competition and entrenching a monopoly.

What do you want the left to learn from this?

>>7012

How about, stop making a virtue out of losing?

>>7013
Sure loosing as a virtue is bad, but the method of winning that monopolies use have the side effect of causing inefficient use of material resources and labor-power. Most monopolies make too expensive mediocre good enough products. We want an economy that operates as close as possible to an optimal cost-benefit ratio.

>>7014
>Sure losing isn't a virtue, but I'm still going to act like it is because I don't like the winners.

What you want is inconsequential so long as you lose.

>>7014
just get rid of interest rates bro. im serious btw