Seeking recommendations for books about how hard things got done. I like the Acquired podcast, but am looking for reading deeper than it.
I’m reading The Big Rich about the oil boom in Texas and like it. I also liked Barbarians at the Gate about how private equity got created and how deals went down.
Less interested in people and character studies. More interested in the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like.
I like the kind of books recommended here, but please be aware of survivor's bias (there not many books about failures! Any great recommendations? "How we could NOT get back to the moon again", "Recall: Toyota hits the breaks", "Last fag: how big tobacco lost against a Minneapolis law firm" ;-) and the fact that the winner gets to write the history. For example, next month, Bill Gates new memoir "Source Code" will come out, the first of three planned autobiographical books, and I doubt he will share with us how he strongarmed PC manufacturers into shipping Windows pre-installed in order to get the OS monopoly and other important events.
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