Three Great Reads for Business Lessons in 2025 (w/ Summary Notes)

Three of my favorite books I read in 2024 covered topics like customer service, challenging the status quo, and improvement by subtraction. If you’re interested in learning about them, I have my notes (long and short) linked below.

Three great reads I recommend for Business Lessons in 2025:

1. Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect, by Will Guidara. This was about putting the customer’s experience at the center of every part of your operation.
2. Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, by Leidy Klotz. Covered how humans tend to favor accumulation over subtraction, and often fail to consider the latter entirely.
3. The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football, by S.C. Gwynne. The story of two coaches who challenged everything about football and revolutionized the game.

Want some key takeaways? Here’s some options:

1. 📖 Have some time? Here’s my longer notes.
2. ⌚ Make it quick: Here’s my short notes.
3. 🎧 Short & easy audio summaries: Links to their Blinkist summaries.

I. Longer Notes: Three Great Reads for Business Lessons in 2025.

Unreasonable Hospitality

I started working in restaurants at 16, and kept at it during summers through college, eventually spending a few years bartending after graduation. I started out as a near-useless coworker, but left each job having learned a ton from my coworkers and the riddles of each day. Trying to give people what they wanted each day wasn’t always a success — I fell flat plenty of times: dropping plates, mixing up orders, forgetting to check on tables. But with every disappointed patron, I learned another strong lesson.

However, when I moved states, I got a job at a tall office building, with more coworkers than I’d ever had. The years I spent there were full of emails and meetings about projects, deadlines, metrics, and plans. We of course talked about the customer a fair amount, and management would send around anecdotes from happy or unhappy clients, but overall, my feeling was that I missed seeing the faces of the people I was serving. At that company, if you were not in a few select roles, you really did not interact with customers directly.

In the book Unreasonable Hospitality, Will Guidara tells the story of the NYC restaurant Eleven Madison Park working to climb the restaurant rankings amid early struggles to break through. Although there’s lots of restaurant-specifics, the work overall is a call to order for businesses in any industry. In their quest to find success, they faced early pressure to play the same game as established restaurants. That path was to garner critical praise by making dishes with ever-increasing complexity. Across the world, chefs were pushing every culinary style further and further, with each dish being a chance to show ever-deeper levels of mastery. At Eleven Madison Park, they tried this early on, but after struggling with it, they discovered another path to standing out: focusing everything they had on hospitality. “We were no longer in the business of running an extraordinary restaurant, we were in the business of human connection.”

Where that showed up most dramatically was in the ways they stretched to delight their customers every night. They put great thought into the experience every table had. For example, the staff used hand signals to share information about a table across the room. After seating them, the host would ask if they wanted sparkling or still water, and before she walked away, the water would arrive as if by magic. They also created a system where they would hand notes to each other discreetly in the dining room, so when a waiter heard a table mention something, they could start working on ways to delight them. One instance of this was a family lamenting to each other that they wouldn’t have a chance to have an authentic New York street hot dog before flying out. Later in their meal, the chef served them a beautifully plated dish featuring hot dogs from a nearby cart. The team at EMP put all of their energy into making every bit of a diner’s experience as close to magic as possible. They engaged the staff to be essential players in this too: “by letting our people imbue these transactions with thoughtfulness, salespeople became product designers.”

In their pursuit of these perfect experiences, they also worked to improve their processes. They focused on finding tiny improvements everywhere, starting with the most basic things like how they polished glassware. “Nothing is sacred…no aspect of your business should be off-limits to re-evaluation.” They pursued perfection because they believed that “precision in the smallest details translated to precision in bigger ones.” The result? Their restaurant took home massive accolades, but more importantly: diners from around the globe left each night feeling like they had escaped to a magical world.

My biggest takeaway from Unreasonable Hospitality was that our pursuits of success shouldn’t start by default with the hottest new technology or a grand new product idea. These are of course important for any business, but if you want to build an organization that gives customers unforgettable experiences, then everything needs to start with a goal of providing an unreasonable level of joy to your customers. Of course, no modern company can survive without investing in new technologies or building stand-out products, but the key here is to START every conversation with the customer metaphorically (or if possible, LITERALLY) in the room. Creating magic for your users must be central to every conversation.

Subtract

In thinking about how to build great businesses by providing extraordinary experiences, it’s important to be wary of the trap of ADDING new things by default. Although it may come from the best intentions, such as trying to create magic, we often add complexity when we jump to addition first. The book Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less by Leidy Kotz was a book I was happy I found in 2024 because it changes how you look at the problems facing you.

From our history as hunter-gatherers, humans have come to instinctively favor accumulation. It’s been shown that losing $100 actually feels WORSE to us than gaining $100 feels GOOD, which explains why we resist letting go. This is unfortunate because often the most impactful, elegant solutions to problems lie in the act of removal. The book explores this concept in depth, and starts by showing the scale of our defaulting to more.

One example: United States patents filed since 1976 were sorted into two groups, patents that included “adding” synonyms, and patents that included “subtracting” synonyms. The adding words showed up 3X more often. Another example was a university that was running a planning project for how to improve the school. The organizers solicited suggestions from staff, faculty, and students. Again, addition ruled the day: only 10% of the suggestions submitted involved subtraction.

Unfortunately, our addiction to addition can often lead to worse outcomes. Braess’s Paradox is a concept where adding more roads can actually make traffic worse. And even when addition isn’t necessarily worse, subtraction usually brings simplification with it, can make the process smoother overall. To that point, another example from the book was a father who wanted to teach his kid to ride a bike. Typically, that meant waiting until his kid turned four or so, but he wanted to move faster.

He spent a long time trying to find ways to update the design of a bicycle to make it easier to ride. The idea of adding training wheels came from the same goal of course. He eventually focused on the gears and pedals as the source of the most complexity for new riders. After running through all sorts of tweaks, he finally tried something radically simple: removing the gears and pedals completely. With that, Strider Bikes was born, and now kids around the world can start learning to ride at age two instead of four. Plus, once they get older, adding in pedaling is a breeze because they’ve already mastered balance. All thanks to subtraction.

The central theme of the book is not that we should ban addition. The key is that there’s a lot to gain if we simply look for opportunities to subtract as our first thought. When thinking about improving a restaurant’s operations, what can we remove that makes the experience less clunky? When a team is struggling to hit their key metrics, what noise can we remove to help them focus on the essentials? The idea is that we should explore subtraction first, and then pair it with thoughtful addition when it makes sense to. The author quoted Lao Tzu to sum it up: “To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day.”

The Perfect Pass

The third point in this reading triangle is ostensibly about American Football, but really, it’s a great example of how the takeaways we’ve covered already have worked in practice: challenging conventional thought (Unreasonable Hospitality), leveraging the power of subtraction (Subtract), and pursuing excellence in the details (Unreasonable Hospitality). These were some of the tactics that Hal Mumme and Mike Leach used to build their revolutionary “Air Raid” offense as football coaches.

In The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football, we learn the story of a coaching pair who coached at a time when conventional wisdom said throwing the ball too often was inviting disaster. For most coaches, the game was played in tight formations, with the goal being to hit and push them harder than they could you. It was American grit and will distilled into four quarters. Passing the football heavily was seen as embarrassing, even heretical. Hal and Mike couldn’t care less.

They rejected orthodoxy and poured all of their focus into perfecting the pass. They had to drive all over the country to find like-minded mentors, because most coaches would laugh in their faces. But just committing to passing wasn’t enough. They had to find a way to squeeze every second out of practice to perfect it. In their practices, there was constant motion, passes flying all over, and players shuffling through drills quickly and efficiently. Where other teams would spend hours grinding through countless drills, these practices were like a whirring machine of motion. With this approach, their quarterbacks routinely threw 250+ passes per session…way more than any other pass-first program.

Those tweaks to practice were like the small details the team at Eleven Madison Park became obsessed with. And all of them helped Hal and Mike build toward their ultimate goal: creating a pass-first, no huddle, blazingly fast offense named the “Air Raid”. But it wasn’t enough. The offense was clunky and inconsistent early on. They tried all sorts of things, but nothing worked until they remembered to subtract.

The idea of removing complexity was not new to Hal and Mike. They had always put a premium on less over more. Already they had cut down practice complexity, and had a set of plays that was laughably small compared to other teams. Most football teams had playbooks containing hundreds of plays, Hal & Mike had 20 or so. But trying to run a no-huddle offense at break-neck speeds demanded even more simplification. So, they cut their playbook even further. They made the system so simple that players could learn the whole thing without any homework, all it took was repetition in their normal practice blocks. They made it so lean that there was no need for players to stay up at night quizzing themselves on formations or adjustments. Why? Because “confused players cannot play fast.”

So, in pursuit of their perfect football offense, subtraction was an essential tool for them. And by embracing it while also rejecting orthodoxy, they were finally able to build a system that changed the sport of football forever.

Taken Together

These three books build on each other very well, and I would recommend adding them to your list for 2025.There is a dialogue among them, where the ideas of one are shown at work in another, as if each is a lab for testing the others’ hypotheses.

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When thinking about the business and leadership, whether at a small or large company, the takeaways I would most carry forward from these three great reads would be:

1. We must make sure the customer is placed at the heart of all our conversations and efforts. Though this sounds like a no-brainer, it needs to go way beyond what passes for “client centricity” at most businesses. We need to make human connection and customer delight the brightest lights in any meeting room, to the point that it’s hard to see anything else. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of building to build — building because we can. Instead, nothing is worthy of our focus unless it ultimately will enable or improve connections with our clients. Human connection above all. And in those connections, we shouldn’t just aim for meeting expectations, we need to aim for MAGIC. That’s what I took from Unreasonable Hospitality.
2. Next, we need to remember to use subtraction to bring fresh perspective to our pursuits. The big takeaway is that we need to fight against our own instincts as well as against the status quo to avoid defaulting to addition. It will not be easy, but if we can push ourselves and our colleagues to TRY subtraction before addition, or even use them in concert, then we have a good chance to reach better outcomes…all in the service of the clients we aim to make magic for.
3. Seeing it in practice: The Perfect Pass gives us a perfect sandbox for what the takeaways from Unreasonable Hospitality and Subtract can look like in practice. Where most of the coaches around them were driven to embrace the orthodox because of risk aversion, Hal and Mike were willing to gamble their win/loss record, as well as their reputations on a radical approach to offense. Where other teams had tomes for playbooks, they took an axe to theirs in favor of simplicity, just like the Strider Bikes founder. The hallmarks of the Air Raid offense were speed, and an obsession with perfect execution. To achieve these, they simplified, and then they poured their time into the fundamentals, just like Eleven Madison Park. This constant focus on improving the little things, whether polishing glassware or catching a football, were keys to the success of the Air Raid, and Will Guidara’s restaurant team.

Heading into a new year of challenges and opportunities means that we should all rethink what’s in our mental toolboxes. In business, 2025 will bring lots to think through as the world continues to change rapidly. How we face this next year will be driven in part by how we prepare today. If you’re a reader, I highly recommend working through the three books covered in this post:

• Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect, Will Guidara (Goodreads / Storygraph / Amazon)
• Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, Leidy Klotz (Goodreads / Storygraph / Amazon)
• The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football, S.C. Gwynne (Goodreads / Storygraph / Amazon)

If you’d rather get a summary, I’ve put together a shorter version of my notes below, as well as links to Blinkist summaries if you are a subscriber.

II. Short Notes: Three Great Reads for Business Lessons in 2025.

Summary: Unreasonable Hospitality

If you’ve watched the show The Bear, you might have noticed Richie reading this book in the Forks episode. It was written by Will Guidara, who made his mark with the restaurant Eleven Madison Park. I loved the book because it was all about putting hospitality at the center of your business, and how to pursue excellence and delight your customers.

Themes:

1. Human Connections: Where other restaurants were focused on the critics by making their dishes more complex, EMP focused everything on human connection.
   - “Hospitality is a dialogue, not a monologue”
   - “We were no longer in the business of running an extraordinary restaurant, we were in the business of human connection”
   - “We may not be saving people’s lives, but we have the ability to make their lives better by creating a magical world they can escape to”
2. Extraordinary Experiences: They blew people’s minds in small ways and big ways.
   - When someone told the host the type of water they wanted, the waiter showed up almost immediately while the host was still there. They used hand signals to make magic.
   - A waiter overheard a family lamenting they were leaving NYC in the morning and had never tried New York hot dogs. The chef then showed up at their table with beautifully plated hot dogs from a nearby street cart.
   - “By letting our people imbue these transactions with thoughtfulness, salespeople became product designers.”
3. Excellence is in the Details: To become great, they focused on the tiny things, starting with how they polished wine glasses. They were also constantly looking to improve how they operated at every level.
   - “Excellence is the culmination of thousands of details executed perfectly”
   - “No aspect of your business should be off-limits to re-evaluation. Nothing is sacred.
   - “Precision in the smallest details translated to precision in bigger ones”. Or, as Walt Disney said: “People can feel perfection.”

Summary: Subtract

Humans favor accumulation over subtraction, a nod to our history as hunter-gatherers. Losing $100 feels worse than gaining $100 feels good, which explains why we resist letting go. This book digs into our bias against “less.”

Themes:

1. We love adding:
   - Synonyms for “adding” appear 3x more often than “subtracting” in US patents since 1976.
   - Less than 10% of suggestions in a university planning project involved subtraction.
2. But adding isn’t always the way:
   - Braess’s Paradox: Adding roads can make traffic worse.
   - Strider Bikes: A father wanted to help his kid ride a bike sooner…After trying all sorts of things, he finally realized that subtracting might be the answer. By removing pedals from kids’ bikes, it meant kids could start riding at age 2 instead of age 4.
3. Steps to Embrace Subtraction:
   - Invert: Try subtracting before adding.
   - Expand: Consider both adding and subtracting to improve systems. “Think add AND subtract”.
   - Distill: Simplify by focusing on essentials — subtracting noise to gain clarity.

“To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day.” — Lao Tzu

Summary: The Perfect Pass

The book tells the story of Hal Mumme and Mike Leach, two unknown coaches who revolutionized football with their innovative “Air Raid” offense. Though focused on football, the lessons are relevant beyond the game:

Themes:

1. Reject Orthodoxy: While most teams ran the ball based on stats suggesting it was safer, Hal and Mike focused on passing, dedicating practice time to perfecting it and proving it could be effective.
2. Subtract to Simplify: Where other teams had hundreds of plays, they used just 15 pass plays and 6 runs, prioritizing mastery over complexity. This focus allowed players to execute plays with speed and confidence. “Confused players cannot play fast.”
3. Maximize Time: Their streamlined practices were much shorter than other teams, but highly efficient, with quarterbacks throwing 250+ passes per session. They valued focus and purpose over sheer time spent.

These principles enabled their fast-paced, “hurry-up, no-huddle” Air Raid offense, which overwhelmed defenses. Their success came from continually challenging conventional beliefs.

Three Great Reads for 2025: Overall Takeaways:

1. Focus on the Human Connection. Make it the center of gravity for every decision at work.
2. Don’t stop at good enough — aim for MAGIC. Question every part of your business and ask: how can we make this an extraordinary experience?
3. To break through, try subtraction first. It will be hard because the world and our own instincts push for addition, but if we can remove the complicated, we can often improve systems dramatically.
4. Reject the status quo: revolution requires this.
5. Put all of the above into practice ,and obsess over maximizing your time in the pursuit of perfecting the fundamentals.

III. Blinkist Links: Three Great Reads for Business Lessons in 2025

Want to get more takeaways during your commute? I recommend Blinkist. I was a subscriber for quite a while and really enjoyed it. I’ve included Blinkist links to each of the three reads below! (PS: This is not an ad!)

• Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect, Will Guidara (Blinkist)
• Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, Leidy Klotz (Blinkist)
• The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football, S.C. Gwynne (Blinkist)