Five Stars summary

Meet Haseeb Qureshi, a software engineer from Texas who is in high demand in Silicon Valley. When he began looking for a job, he only had one year of experience in coding, was significantly older than other applicants and did not have a degree in computer science.

On paper he had little chance of securing a great job; so how did he end up with offers from prestigious tech companies like Google, Airbnb, Yelp and Uber? It was all thanks to the power of communication – and specifically his incredible interview skills.

The leaders of NASA are on a mission: to investigate outer space and use the insights gleaned to improve life here on earth. But in order to achieve this, NASA needs to also ensure that the American people support its space programme. Otherwise, the funding for their projects will dry up and they’ll have to shut down.

To make sure this never happens, NASA has developed an additional mission: to get the public excited about space, and inspire all Americans to want to explore the universe.

Many people in the tech sector would kill to work at Google; thousands apply to the search giant every year, and only the best make the cut. But if the Google workforce is already the elite, what do the elite teams at Google look like?

In 2012, Google themselves set out to answer this question. They asked a team of researchers to find out the habits of the company’s most effective teams, and planned to use this information to assemble even better teams in the future.

The story of how Nike got started is undoubtedly one of the most well-known business origin stories around. It began when their cofounder Bill Bowerman, an athletics coach at the University of Oregon, found that his runners’ training shoes couldn’t properly grip the university’s new polyurethane running track.

Frustrated, Bill set about trying to design a new running shoe with improved grip, famously using a waffle iron as a mold for his prototype soles. Bill’s early attempts may have destroyed a lot of waffle irons, but this origin story is one of the most powerful tools that Nike has at its disposal today, serving as a metaphor for the brand’s innovative spirit.

Ernest Hemingway is one of the twentieth century’s most famous writers. He won the Nobel prize, among many other awards, and several of his works are considered literary classics. But what was the secret of his world-famous writing?

He kept things simple.