The book has three parts: the author's history, his principles for life and his principles for work. The first reads well; the other two are numbered lists that repeat each other and that began as internal documentation for an investment fund.
What I took from it
The error log. The practice of writing down what turned out differently from what was expected and, beside it, the rule that stands for next time. Not a journal and not self-criticism: two lines and a rule. Keeping it, every engagement ends with that note, and the real effect is not to stop making mistakes, it is to stop making the same one twice, which is all anyone can ask.
The second idea I use is the distinction between a bad outcome and a bad decision. You can decide well and have it go badly; you can decide terribly and get lucky. Judge decisions by their outcomes and you learn the opposite of what you should. Reviewing the decision against the information available at the time is uncomfortable and it is the only fair way.
The third is minor: the notion that the weight of an opinion should depend on the track record of whoever offers it, on that specific subject. In a meeting with several vendors, that question — who here has done this before and how did it go — organises the conversation quickly.
What I left out
Radical transparency, the heart of the book, which means recording meetings, rating each other in public and arguing in front of everyone. It works in a firm that hires people who know that is the deal. Transplanted into a mid-sized Latin American company, where hierarchy and face matter, it would produce silence and resignations. I also left the length: the book would say the same in a third of the pages, and the biography is the only part that earns its extent.