Category: Books

“The Origins of the Great War of 2007”

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Niall Ferguson:

With every passing year after the turn of the century, the instability of the Gulf region grew. By the beginning of 2006, nearly all the combustible ingredients for a conflict – far bigger in its scale and scope than the wars of 1991 or 2003 – were in place.

The first underlying cause of the war was the increase in the region’s relative importance as a source of petroleum. On the one hand, the rest of the world’s oil reserves were being rapidly exhausted. On the other, the breakneck growth of the Asian economies had caused a huge surge in global demand for energy. It is hard to believe today, but for most of the 1990s the price of oil had averaged less than $20 a barrel.

Sort of a bolt of lightning as I’ve been reading Shirer’s the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I’m now entering 1939 in this amazing 1960 work. The look back with respect to opportunities missed is simply astonishing. I hope Ferguson is dead wrong, but one can see the seeds of war…

Constant Innovation

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Geoffrey A. Moore:

The book’s central question is: How can companies innovate continuously? He writes: “Evolution requires us to continually refresh our competitive advantage, sometimes in dribs and drabs, sometimes in major cataclysms, but always with some part of our business portfolio at risk and in play. To innovate forever, in other words, is not an aspiration; it is a design specification. It is not a strategy; it is a requirement.”

Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution Author Geoffrey A. Moore

Bogle’s “The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism”

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Vanguard Founder and former CEO John Bogle has written a timely and useful book: The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism. Daniel Berninger posts a nice summary:

“The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism” argues most of the forces that produced the scandals among Enron, Worldcom, et al remain in place.

This means investors should expect another wave of scandals even as the bad
actors of the first wave go to trial.

The people running investment funds and corporations increasingly put their
short term interests ahead of the long term interests of the investing
public. The status quo has corporate CEO’s reaping a disproportionate share
of returns by finding ways to align the interests of the intermediaries with
their own. The link between executive compensation and stock options
produces more activities that boost short term stock price even as they
jeopardize long term prospects. Bogle makes the point “the more the managers
take, the less investors make.” By his calculations, investing owners take
100% of the risk while CEO’s, intermediary investment bankers, and portfolio
managers get 70% of the compounded return. The currently passive nature of
stock ownership follows the decline of direct ownership of stocks from 92%
in 1950 to 32% today. Portfolio managers do not hold corporate CEO’s
accountable because the average stock stays in a portfolio for less than a
year versus 15 years when Bogle got into the business in the 1960’s.

Well worth reading.

Getting Things Done

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The Guardian:

All must be corralled in one place and then processed using Allen’s core mantra of “Do it, delegate it, defer it”. If the action takes less than two minutes, do it there and then. If longer, you either hand off to someone else or defer it into your pending tray. Otherwise it is trashed or filed. The in-tray thereby becomes sacrosanct. You never put stuff back into “In”. Never.

On the web, for example, Getting Things Done (GTD) has gone supernova. Web and IT professionals have taken Allen’s core ideas and refined them into ever more effective tips called “life hacks”. Adherents swap these across a broad network of blogs, wikis and websites such as 43Folders.com – all amid a considerable amount of one-upmanship over who has the biggest and best system.

Getting Things Done by David Allen

Bogle’s New Book: The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism

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The Motley Fool:

Time magazine called him one of the world’s 100 most powerful and influential people. Now John Bogle weighs in on the current direction of America with his new book, The Battle for The Soul of Capitalism.
Bogle, who founded the Vanguard Group of mutual funds in 1974, was the company’s chairman until 2000. Vanguard, one of the largest fund groups in the world, holds accounts totaling more than $800 billion.

Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness Page

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Nassim Taleb publishes a useful website that includes a number of useful articles following up on his wonderful book, Fooled by Randomness. His latest is: The Scandal of Prediction (PDF):

“My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know….” (You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment & make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race).

Shadid: Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War

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The Economist reviews UW Madison grad and Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Shadid’s (“who speaks Arabic like a native and writes English like an angel”) new book: Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War

Much more than these bold facts, however, the average western newspaper reader will not know. It is not easy to understand fully what is going on; still less so to make any accurate predictions about how it will end. Targeted by head-chopping Muslim fanatics, most foreign journalists do not leave the generous, if inevitably jaundiced, embrace of American and British troops. And even those who do must rely heavily on official sources—mostly Americans who are out of touch with the complex and changing world outside their fortress compounds, and who, like their government, have tended also to invent good news where there is none.
Thank goodness, then, for those reporters, both western and Iraqi, who are prepared to take risks in search of a more nuanced reality, among them Anthony Shadid, a correspondent for the Washington Post, whose words begin this article. Mr Shadid, an American of Lebanese descent, who speaks Arabic like a native and writes English like an angel, has put his best reporting into this book. Even-handed and keenly observed, containing just enough (and no more) of the author to suggest a decent man worthy of our trust, it is written for the inexpert but has fresh material for scholars. Mr Shadid calls his work story-telling rather than serious criticism, and so it is. But stories this insightful—of dead Iraqi insurgents and their motivations; of a 14-year-old Iraqi Anne Frank, with extracts from her wartime diary—are more than journalism; they are valuable chronicles.

More on Shadid.

Best Insurgency Books

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T.X. Hammes:

The heaviest responsibility a commander will know is taking his soldiers to war. How can he arm their minds as well as their bodies? A former U.S. Marine Corps colonel and expert on insurgencies culls the best books from various military reading lists.
Thousands of years ago, the Chinese sage Sun Tzu wrote down one of the first known lessons on war, The Art of War. Somewhat more recently, Maj. Gen. James Mattis wrote in the Feb. 2004 Marine Corps Gazette, “We have been fighting on this planet for 5,000 years, and we should take advantage of the experience of those who have gone before us. . . . Those who must adapt to overcoming an independent enemy’s will are not allowed the luxury of ignorance of their profession.” The study of books is one antidote to that ignorance. What books are military leaders recommending that U.S. soldiers read to gird themselves for today’s struggle in Iraq?

(more…)

Tufte in Madison

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Presenting Data and Information: A One-Day Course Taught by Edward Tufte is in Madison August 8, 2005 ($320/person):

I attended his course in Chicago last year. Highly recommended. More on Edward Tufte.