Way back in 1981, I think it was, a business book literally kept me up all night reading.* It was Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, about a rogue team building a pioneer mini-computer at Data General. Well, it’s happened again, with one of the trip-reading picks I mentioned the other day. Namely, The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth. Hate to use the hackneyed term, but it’s a real page turner, and among other things it gives the best description of “business strategy” unfolding in a world changing at warp speed. (*The only other biz book that caused an all-nighter was Henry Mintzberg’s The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning—which I read on my first trip to Dubai ever so long ago.)
