Why am I passionate about this?
I have spent my career in rooms where the better answer lost because it had no tribe. Skype, Microsoft, Google, and now the work I do on quantitative models. The pattern does not change. Biology, language, then the incentive to keep the story intact. I got obsessed with that stack because I am tired of watching honest people get trained out of honesty. The leader I care about is a polymath orchestrator: someone who can hold science, people, and a P&L without turning the room into politics. These books are how I built that frame.
Yuval's book list on the polymath orchestrator, not the political one
Why Yuval loves this book
I recommend Sapiens because it gave me the universal timeline I still use.
Harari starts from first principles and describes the human species without the usual tribal flattery. After I read it, I stopped treating every company crisis as a unique drama.
It sits inside a much longer pattern of how we invent stories, then live inside them. That context is what I reach for when I have to hold science, people, and a P&L in the same room.
34 authors picked Sapiens as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?
In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the…
