Invent & Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos - Amazon’s annual shareholder letters are great examples of business writing. This book collects Bezos’ shareholder letters, speeches, and interviews. Note that most of the content is available for free online.
No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention - Deep dive on Netflix’s culture by Reed Hastings that’s a good companion to the culture deck. The culture itself is well-designed and thought through. What’s most striking to me is the idea that the culture is a product of iterative steps towards talent density, candor, and pushing responsibility to employees. The dependencies among those three factors make it seem like the culture would be difficult to replicate elsewhere.
Weapons of Math Distruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy - A good introduction to algorithmic (and human) biases in process, statistical analysis, and model design that can cause systemic failures. This book also highlights the fact that these failures tend to split along class/caste lines: white glove for the top, algorithmic for the rest.
Caste: The Origins of our Discontents - A brutal and necessary look at the cruelty and horror of the racial caste system in the United States. As someone who grew up in Richmond, Virginia, a reckoning with the past is long overdue. Monuments to the Confederate secessionists belong in museums, not on public land.