The Pixar Touch by David Price.
In-N-Out Burger by Stacy Perlman.

These two books outlined the development of Pixar and In-N-Out. If you don't know what Pixar is, where have you been for the last 15 years? If you don't know what In-N-Out is and you like hamburgers, check it out next time you come out west.

The Pixar book was far more interesting to me, because it was better written, a more interesting story, and more up my alley. Both of them, though, are stories about people succeeding by simply doing something very well. Pixar, of course, is a triumph of geeks -- it was interesting how much of the advent of Pixar is really a story of computing power. (That said, the reason Pixar did so well was that it was also artistically superior to its competitors, and this was not solely a function of their technology.)

Both books had a lot of details about the growth of the relevant industries and businesses, but, well, how interesting really is fast food? Advantage Pixar book. That said, the In-N-Out people made an interesting call decades ago when they opted not to sacrifice quality for world dominance the way McDonalds did. Simply put, In-N-Out's emphasis on freshness makes it a very hard business to scale. It's also the reason In-N-Out is the only fast food place I'll go to (albeit very rarely).

As for the business end of Pixar, two things stood out. First, the key people at Pixar had a vision of computer-generated feature films for decades and didn't get dissuaded. They stayed with that vision even though it was clear it would be decades before the computing power allowed them to do what they now do. (Those movies are not simply Microsoft Paint! They are complex computer models that require a staggering amount of computing power -- single frames sometimes take dozens of hours to produce from the models.) Second, the author had a white shining hate for Steve Jobs. Nearly everything I've ever read about Jobs has been a hagiographic puff piece or a total hatchet job.

Speaking of puff piece, one big drawback of the In-N-Out book was that it was essentially a long puff piece about In-N-Out food. It was also a cautionary tale about succession in family businesses. Money can really bring out the ugly in people...