I am a few chapters into the book, so maybe this is answered later. Don’t most people who play a part in corrupting companies get away with it? You mention Jack Welch and James McNerney, but it feels like explicit examples of corruption are rare. I imagine that many of the perpetrators move on to other boards and profit off of the decline at the expense of others?
I have tons of different notebooks each designated for different purposes: notes on books I'm reading, my random thoughts, writing ideas, specific research projects, and many more. That leads to a lot of time spent trying to find and recall quotes, notes, and ideas, but with the system I laid out here, it's really no trouble at all.
This part takes the system beyond just needing ambient light to needing either to stay home or carry a backpack. Use perforated notebooks so you can tear out pages and sort them into binders. I prefer to categorize after filling a notebook for spaced repetition.
It was a typical attitude among my physicist and mathematician friends that memorizing was for suckers, even though it was often required to reproduce long proofs or derivations. These were people to whom mathematics came naturally; their understanding, memory, curiosity, and experience just compressed that knowledge until it was trivial to memorize. Unfortunately, many walked away with a sense of not needing to know things until they need them, but good luck with that in a systems design interview.