As part of my business reading, I like to occasionally read a business biography. I’ve found it good for motivation, and there is usually some good business ideas and practices I can pull from it. A couple of my favorites are Jack: Straight from the Gut and Sam Walton: Made in America. It’s interesting to learn how others have handled adversity and overcome the challenges of building a business. Therefore, it’s not strange that I would be interested in Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company and Revolutionized an Industry by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler. Given that I’m bootstrapping my own software business, I figured there would be some good lessons and motivations I could draw from it.

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This past April, I had the opportunity to attend the REAL Trends Gathering of Eagles event in Dallas. Steve Murray and his team put together a great program, including a session with former President George W. Bush. I walked away impressed.

As an added bonus, all attendees were given a copy of the book Game Changers: The Unfounded Fears and Future Prosperity of the Residential Real Estate Industry. The book was a collaborative effort by Steve Murray of REAL Trends, Lorne Wallace of Lone Wolf Real Estate Technologies, and Lon Welsh of Your Castle Real Estate in Denver, CO.

After a few months of sitting on a shelf in my office, I finally got around to reading it over the past month. Here are my thoughts regarding the book.

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Another sub-genre of science fiction that keeps coming up in my recommendations is internet security, cyber-threat, and zero day attack novels. I’m sure it’s linked to my reading of Cyberstorm and Zero Day. Anyway, one of the books that appeared in the list and looked interesting was Counting from Zero by Alan B. Johnston. Johnston is an internet security specialist who has traveled the world speaking at events and conferences about the topic. He’s even spoken to governments about it as well. I figured that the book would be a good balance of fiction interspersed with nonfiction material covering the topic of internet security and online threats.

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While I’ve been enjoying my reading binge over the last two years, particularly the science fiction parts, I’ve made it a point to mix-in business, or educational, books every so often. The latest one to make it to the top of my reading list was Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience by Jeff Gothelf with Josh Seiden. I’m always interested in continuous improvement and Lean UX seemed like it could be very applicable, especially given how much time I spend on user experience and user interface design.

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