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If this were a nonfiction essay, it would be about the concept of understanding consciousness not our own. What stands in the way: much of consciousness is language, but language is dependent on culture and context---what would it mean to have the upper hand if you didn't have hands? Thomas Nagel is cited in this book as asking "What is it like to be a bat?", to make the point that putting ourselves in the shoes of a bat is impossible when we don't have wings, we have nothing like sonar, but we do have feet and wear shoes.

The book is from 2023 because there is now artificial intelligence in everything. A key character in the book is a boat, and some characters have a key problem of determining how to communicate and influence it (see below). We haven't been able to understand octopodes---even other people---so how are we to understand the more sci-fi personalities like robots or aliens, the book asks.

It draws no solid conclusions, which is good because there aren't really conclusions to be drawn, beyond noting all the traps we need to avoid.

Fiction-wise, this is what cyberpunk looks like in 2023, with the usual characters: the hacker who enters a colorful, structured abstract world via terminal, the mega-corporation with sinister intent, the sentient robot, the criminal enterprises taking slaves and destroying the planet. Some but not all of the characters were interesting to me, and I wanted to know what the author was going to do with them. Others were there to teach us about octopodes and sentience, and that's OK.

What does a boat want? There's a jump here, from a robot being able to make decisions via optimization algorithms and a robot wanting. Like the rest of us, the characters readily make the jump without thinking about it. But for fiction, the question is essential! A story is driven by conflict between what characters want, so every character has to have motivation and need. For a few of the characters (we recognize the boat is not really a character), including both a robot and the researcher (Ha) who is more-or-less the lead character, what they want is somewhat amorphous. She wants to learn and protect the environment, but her more social needs are never fully explained beyond a generalized desire for human connection.

The cover explains the thesis very well: start with a vision of what you want your company to look like (this book is entirely about corporations, with no mention of nonprofits or any other type of org), and never let go of or forget that vision.

If this were an academic book, the core problem would be how to observe or measure the extent to which the leaders of a corp maintain a vision. We can't hold a pop press book to high rigor, but because that's an unsolved problem, Sinek instead simply asserts that the winners of the world have maintained their vision and the others haven't. Apple is a core example in this book. If you're not from the USA, parts of Europe, or Japan, you won't necessarily recognize Apple as a major player, but in those regions it has a definite success history, especially at the level of retail (as opposed to bulk sales of thousands of PCs to buisness drones). Sinek says this is because they maintained their vision, while competitors in the personal computing world corps like Dell or Microsoft, failed to do so.

Later, there's a chapter on succession in corporate leadership, and whether the next leader can maintain the vision. He notes that Dell had a strong vision until a brief period when a successor lost it, then the original CEO, Michael Dell, came back. Microsoft also maintained a strong vision in this chapter during the period when, in the Apple chapter, Apple's competitors were clueless.

It's the job of the CEO to maintain that WHY, then the people around the CEO to work out the HOW (like the core advantages for your corp over the next), then those closer to whatever the product is to work out the WHAT (as in the product details). Think Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. So yes, focus on the WHY, unless you're not the CEO, in which case, no, you should be focusing on other things. I do appreciate his acknowledgement that somehow the vision has to become an actual thing.

To give one last just-so example:

In the late 1800s, the railroads were the biggest companies in the country. Having achieved such monumental success, even changing the landscape of America, remembering WHY stopped being important to them. Instead they became obsessed with WHAT they did— they were in the railroad business. This narrowing of perspective influenced their decision-making—they invested all their money in tracks and crossties and engines. But at the beginning of the twentieth century, a new technology was introduced: the airplane. And all those big railroad companies eventually went out of business.

This sounds very truthy. On the retail level, Amtrak passenger service carries a tiny fraction of moving bodies relative to airlines. But...outside of consumer-facing retail, how do you think every object you touch today got to you?

American Airlines market capitalization: $9.75 billion Southwest market cap: $21.8B United Airlines: $16.7 B CSX rail: $67.6 B Union Pacific rail: $130.2 B

Once you get past the brief intuition you have reading this from your business class airplane seat, you realize that it's a story based on a perspective stated as a fact. I'm giving you this rail line story because it's easy to verify (as are other claims; I'm not just trying to 'gotcha' on one vigorously unchecked point), but when we get back to the unverifiable question of what a leader's vision is, it compounds the problem.

Music albums and short story collections should have some items that don't work. If they don't then the artist isn't reaching enough.

That said, I won't remark further on the stories that were unremarkable. You can read his finest short piece where it was first published---on Craigslist: www.craigslist.org/about/best/nyc/3985247459.html [Bonus for me: I was on the Q train when I first read it.]

The longer stories that worked best were the ones that were BoJack-ish, with an absurd world where little comic surprises happen. More of the You that You Already Are is primarily set in a theme park, where you can already picture a BoJack or SImpson's episode happening, and the author gets real comic and emotional depth out of it. If your copy is due back at the library soon, skip to this one. We men of science also invented a new world, and throws in a few poignant bonus lines. "The opposite of silence is silence." I'll slot A most auspicious occasion here at #3, parodying wedding planning, which often parodies itself anyway.