Book
Two follow-ups to recent posts: Not to be outdone by our recent post about reading lists, Booz & Co.’s Best Business Books 2011 feature is a sprawling selection of books covering Management, Economics, Marketing, Ethics and other business-oriented fields. And it appears that the speed of light is indeed in question, as recent studies were able to repeat the first experiment’s results.
Read more about Follow-up: reading lists and the speed of light
Always great to be able to catch up on reading, or almost, and here are a few articles that caught our attention – along with two book lists bound to make us fall behind in our reading again.
Roger Lowenstein (author of “When Genius Failed”) wrote a very favorable review of Sylvia Nasar’s “Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius” book. Now Booz & Co’s Strategy & Business magazine has published a “Thought Leader” interview with her, 10 pages strong. Sylvia Nasar is famous for her book on John Nash, “A Beautiful Mind” (yes, the one made into a blockbuster movie). We haven’t read the book yet and suspect both “heroes” in general (interestingly, each reviewer had a list of ‘heroes’ missing from the book!) and the ascribing of too much importance to Economics – and risk it looking like a “hard” science. We respect it and it belongs to our mental models/ toolkits, but we prefer to seek the high quality companies and business models, with great and aligned managers and controlling shareholders, trading at a price that allows for significant margin of safety.
The Farnam Street blog has a great post today on “great books” – what this used to mean to the author, what it does now, and how to deal with the unread – the things you realize you don’t know yet and probably should. We were immediately reminded of Umberto Eco’s Anti-Library, as described by Nassim Taleb in his book The Black Swan. Finally and while very different from the anti-library concept, we were also reminded of a post we wrote about anti-portfolios a while ago.
Books we want to read but haven’t yet: “Bismarck: A Life”, by Jonathan Steinberg, reviewed by Henry Kissinger in the New York Times. “The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution”, by Francis Fukuyama, reviewed in The Economist. Finally, this review about “Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule The World” by Willian Cohan actually made us want to revisit “The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs” by Charles Ellis.
That David Einhorn is a poker fan is not news, and his great book “Fooling Some of The People All of the Time” has been out for a while. But since there’s a new epilogue for the book, the DealBreaker blog did a fun interview with Einhorn over a few hands of heads-up poker – a game about which the reporter didn’t know the first thing. That’s a lesson in risk management right there. You won’t find brilliant investment insights or killer poker tips, but if you haven’t yet read the book and this post makes you finally do it, we’ll be happy.
We love it when readers send us great material, and when they’re 16 years old we’re even more impressed. This video is a very well-crafted summary of and ad for Steven Johnson’s new book (same name as our post). There’s also a TED talk that expands somewhat and exemplifies. In the TED video Mr. Johnson gets a bit more “pro-crowdsourcing”, in the sense that there’s an obvious trade-off between intellectual property protection vs. opening up to collaborative business models. As we’ve posted here almost a year ago, there are limits to crowdsourcing that should be minded before launching any type of “open” initiative.
Strategy & Business published a review for The Curse of The Mogul, which we’ve read recently. It’s a must-read for several reasons: media, capital allocation, competitive strategy and leadership. Not that we agree with Greenwald 100%. Chapter 2, on competitive strategy, is especially interesting because it assesses the competitive strategy framework from a specific industry’s standpoint (always better than ‘generic speeches’) and it was useful for thinking about other industries as well.
Update (April 6th, 2010): Please see inside for Mike Burry’s op-ed in the New York Times ranting on the Fed. On tour to promote his book “The Big Short”, Michael Lewis interviews have been popping up all over the Internet. Required reading is the excerpt from the book at Vanity Fair. We especially liked this bit: “I hated discussing ideas with investors,” (Mike Burry said), “because I then become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought process. Once you became an idea’s defender, you had a harder time changing your mind about it.”
Reader-suggested video in which James Surowiecki (author of “The Wisdom of Crowds”) interviews Michael Mauboussin from Legg Mason about “Think Twice”, Mauboussin’s book. It’s about mental traps we fall into and how to think better, and the video discusses many of the examples in the book. “Think Twice” has been out for a while and it’s a good “building block” read, a contrast to Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink”. Read them both and more.
