Recommended Books

Drug Development Books

Aspirin Wars

Designing Clinical Research

Drug Discovery: A History

New Drug Development: A Regulatory Overview

Primer of Biostatistics

Vaccine Design: Innovative Approaches and Novel Strategies

Medicine, Science, and Merck – Written by the giant of pharmaceutical medicine and former CEO of Merck, Roy Vagelos

Galen: Method of Medicine – Understanding history of medicine is critical to good drug development

Avicenna’s Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon – Understanding history of medicine is critical to good drug development

 

Science/Medicine Related Books

The Medical Detective

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Omnivore’s Dilemma

Botany of Desire

Parasite Rex

Good Calories, Bad Calories

Lights Out – It’s not all correct, and makes some speculative claims, but Wiley’s prescient predictions about sleep, microbiome, etc. have often been borne out

We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific

Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

The Plant Paradox

 

Business Books

Lean Startup

Dead Companies Walking: How A Hedge Fund Manager Finds Opportunity in Unexpected Places

The Wide Lens – by Adler. A book about how your innovation can fail if it doesn’t fit with the entire business ecosystem. I like it because it uses case studies of failures. As Charlie Munger says, the best way to succeed is to know what not to do

Poor Charlie’s Almanack – Charlie Munger’s wisdoms, collected in a very. big. book.

1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline

The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life

DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation – A cautionary tale of rise and fall of a great American company

The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail – A classic by Clay Christensen

Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type Myers-Briggs personality typing is an essential, standard management tool

The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done – A classic by Peter Drucker

Managing the Non-profit Organization: Principles and Practices – Another classic by Peter Drucker

The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers – One of the few books written by a CEO for a CEO

A Man for All Markets – Written by the guy who 1) invented Black-Scholes Model, but instead of publishing it and winning a Nobel Prize, used it to make millions of dollars, 2) invented card counting

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy – Written by a polymath with expertise in science, engineering, business, academia, and military history.

Loonshots