Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success
Ron Friedman
Simon & Schuster (June 2021)
How to reverse engineer success, however you define it
As I began to read this book, I was again reminded of how Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger achieved the great success with their investments: they reverse engineered it. Their company is Berkshire Hathaway. When Buffett gained control, a share of its stock was worth$15; today, it is worth $440,000. Their investment strategy was influenced by Carl Gustav Jacobi, a nineteenth century algebraist, who famously said, “Invert, always invert.’” That is, think of everything you could do to guarantee failure and then reverse it, do the opposite. Yes, it’s counterintuitive but it really helps you to reverse the given issues and actions. It’s a more complete way of making investment decisions.
Ron Friedman extends the concept of reverse engineering into a wide range of applications that include but are not limited to investing. Jacobi calls it “inversion” but the process is perhaps better viewed as “deconstruction.” In his exceptionally informative introduction, Friedman notes that the laptop on which he is typing the manuscript “would not exist had Compaq not reverse engineered an IBM personal computer and applied their learnings to develop portable computers.”
He goes on to point out that the practice of reverse engineering , “of systematically taking things apart to explore their inner workings and extract important insights, is more than an intriguing feature of the tech industry. For a surprising number of innovators, it’s a tendency that appears to have emerged organically, as something of a natural inclination.”
These are among the passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the scope of Friedman’s coverage:
o Steve Jobs’s rivalry with Bill Gates (xi-xiii)
o Reverse engineering in computer technology (Pages xi-xvii)
o Apple’s innovative technology advancements (xix-xxi)
o Mastery through reverse engineering (3-24)
o Operational functions of algorithms (29-34)
o Determining the hidden structure of patterns (29-50)
o Pattern detection through metrics (37-47)
o Metric analysis of Ken Robinson’s “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” TED Talk (41-47)
o “The Curse of Creativity” (51-76)
o “The Magic of ‘Inexperienced experience'” (61-66)
o The Vision-Ability Gap: When Weakness Becomes a Strength (73-76)
o Reverse engineering of crime/criminals (79-83)
o The Scoreboard Principle (89-115)
o How to Take the Risk Out of Risk Taking (116-137)
o Expertise in prediction (138-144)
o Michael Phelps: “The Case for Thinking More and Doing Less”: (152-153, 157-158, & 166-167)
o The power of “automaticiity” (160-172 & 175-177)
o “The Curse of Knowledge”: Doing vs. teaching of skills (169-172)
o Techniques for questioning experts: Process Questions (178-183)
o When and why feedback is most useful (189-192)
Sheer curiosity is one motivator for reverse engineering. “Another, more practical reason developers in tech use the practice is that in many cases, the only way to write software that’s compatible with an existing operating system is to decode its underlying functionality.” That is the key to success when decoding greatness: constant, real-time learning.
In the concluding chapter, Friedman stresses these lessons to be learned:
1. Become a collector of others’ successes.
2. Determine what makes each unique.
3. Think in blueprints.
4. Don’t mimic, evolve.
5. Embrace the vision-ability gap.
6. Keep score selectively by measuring the key elements that drive success.
7. Take the risk out of risk taking with diversification of potential applications.
8. Distrust comfort.
9. Harness the future with reflection and illuminate the past with analysis.
10. Ask wisely with questions that elicit both elaboration and clarification.
Ron Friedman: “By applying these lessons, we all have the potential for building our skills, elevating our performance, and making lasting contributions.”
Decoding Greatness is a brilliant achievement. Bravo!