How to win in a winner-takes-all world by Neil Irwin in 2019
1. Rise of the glue people
King Kong’s fur and the cost of complexity
The era of complexity and the quest for perfect fur
Why the world needs glue people
How glue people make an airplane fly
The risks of being a glue person (and how to avoid them)
Being a pareto-optimal employee
2. Becoming pareto optimal
How to be the person super-star firms need the most
Figuring out which skill mixes matter
Pareto optimality in the changing auto business
The path to the executive suite
Beam suntory and the pareto-optimal CEO
3. The power of mindset
The career lattice and making yourself pareto optimal
An accidental banker on the new wall street
The career lattice, tours of duty, and the growth mindset
Why mindset matters
The lily pad strategy
4. How big data can make you better
Inverted moneyball and the people analytics revolution
Moneyball and the market for talent
The difference between business and baseball
Listening to the data, from the ballpark to the office park
What we can (and can’t) learn from a few million emails
Sabermetrics in the executive suite
The mystery of the miserable employees
5. The economics of managing
What would you say you do here?
How Danny Meyer went from entrepreneur to CEO
A brief history of managerial capitalism
The strange math of productivity
Matt McDonald and the quest to leverage talent
Management as a technology and the big sort
6. Navigating the winner-take-all world
Do you work at a winner, an aspirant, or an afterthought
Five factors creating a positive-returns-to-scale world
How finding a job is like investing: growth, value, and venture
A career at a winner: Nick Caldwell at Microsoft
A career at an aspirant: Amy Bohutinsky at Zillow
The afterthoughts: Mark Mason and the art of the turnaround
7. When software ate the world
And how to make sure it doesn’t eat you
The software era and the new terms of competition
Sock hacking and blazer-making robots
An old-school fashion designer in the new world of business
The age of AI: The accounting clerk and the gardener
A programmer and a biologist walk into a lab…
8. Should I stay or should I go?
How to navigate the postloyalty world
The culture deck and the meaning of loyalty
The end of loyalty
The two principles that matter: honesty and reciprocity
Catriona Fallon and getting the pivots right
The price of honesty
9. What is a job, anyway?
How the contracting economy can fit in your career
The theory of the firm and the age of outsourcing
Rules arbitrage and other real-world reasons to outsource
GE, Geniuslink, and variable vs fixed work
A software engineer walks into a talent agency …
What happens when a Google engineer goes freelance
10. A quarter-million hours
And living a Pareto-optimal life
Widening the Bellows
The Pareto-optimal life
Appendix