Books Recommended by Alison Alvarez
Read the interview: Alison Alvarez
6 books recommended by Alison Alvarez
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
This book changed how I think about negotiation. Instead of seeing it as an adversarial “me vs. them” process that was all about winning, it made me think about getting what I really wanted in a way that would preserve and grow relationships. One of… Read the full quote
This book changed how I think about negotiation. Instead of seeing it as an adversarial “me vs. them” process that was all about winning, it made me think about getting what I really wanted in a way that would preserve and grow relationships. One of the most important pieces of advice was the need to understand your counterpart and what their needs are. When you have that in mind there are often alternate paths to consider that would cost you little and would make everyone happy.
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
The book is stark and an emotional gut-punch in a lot of ways, but it revealed a perspective on housing that I’d been blind to. It also changed my thinking about how data can benefit communities. Evictions live in the public record, but are largely… Read the full quote
The book is stark and an emotional gut-punch in a lot of ways, but it revealed a perspective on housing that I’d been blind to.
It also changed my thinking about how data can benefit communities. Evictions live in the public record, but are largely invisible in aggregate. Would people be more likely to recognize the problem if they could see it?
I found the real value of the book to be in the endnotes. The book itself is largely dispassionate, but if you look in the endnotes for each chapter they reveal where the author was for all of the incidents in the book and shows how much he witnessed first-hand. I learned a lot about good ethnography, but also about how he established trust with the people he followed and got them to speak honestly about their situation. It was a good lesson for me because we spend a lot of time with customers and getting them to share feedback honestly is a skill that leads directly to us being better. And sometimes that means investing time in people so that they trust you with the truth.
Kindred
I have one friend who unfailingly recommends books that I love. She is a high school English teacher. She recommended Kindred by Octavia Butler, which is just an amazing work of science fiction. I don’t want to ruin it for anyone, but just trust me that it’s a good read.
Microserfs
Prior to reading the book I had never considered that a career in software development would be an option for me. My parents both grew up poor and chose career paths that would get them to a middle-class salary with the least amount of training.… Read the full quote
Prior to reading the book I had never considered that a career in software development would be an option for me. My parents both grew up poor and chose career paths that would get them to a middle-class salary with the least amount of training. I lived on the outer edge of the suburbs in Georgia and I don’t think I’d met a single computer programmer prior to college. We had an old Packard Bell computer capable of running the original Sim City that eventually caught on fire around the time I read this book. [...] I don’t think I would have picked computer science as my major without the familiarity that I’d had with my own laptop and from the familiarity of the lifestyle outlined in Microserfs.
The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
I read the Ghost Map, a book about 1854 London Cholera outbreak. The outbreak was stopped because of a map created by Dr. John Snow. You can see hints of this map in some of our customer discovery tools because it was such an effective way of pinpointing a solution to a seemingly insurmountable problem.
The Hiding Place
What I really took with me from the book were the descriptions of how she dealt with the stress of solitary confinement and eventually the Ravensbruck concentration camp. I adapted some of her techniques for keeping her mind occupied to deal with my own problems… Read the full quote
What I really took with me from the book were the descriptions of how she dealt with the stress of solitary confinement and eventually the Ravensbruck concentration camp. I adapted some of her techniques for keeping her mind occupied to deal with my own problems with anxiety and worry. Also, it’s a book with a surprising amount of joy in it for subject matter that is so dark.