At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Title: At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Author: Bill Bryson

Publisher: Doubleday

Pages: 512

ISBN: 0767919386

We study history at a grand level. It is a story of epic events. The rise and fall of empires and kingdoms. The rule and misrule of kings and emperors; their achievements and foibles. Tales of gallantry and treachery. Yet for the vast majority, history is not composed of epic events and struggles. It is personal and intimate. It is a story of parents and grand parents struggles and lessons learned. And it is a story of the personal things that families accrue over a lifetime.

After a grand overview of the history of the universe, Mr. Bryson turns his attention to the other end of the scale: a history of personal life and the things that we take for granted. This story is much more fascinating than the epic tales of rulers and wars because it has a personal resonance. This is a story of origins. A tale of how we came to live in the fashion that we did. It is also a story of people struggling to understand and incorporate new trends, discoveries and things into their lives. Mr. Bryson takes his own house as a representative example and then proceeds from room to room explaining the history behind each room. Not only do we learn how various rooms got the functions that we use them for today, we also learn about the various items that are used in these rooms (and sometimes in the house overall).

Take tea as an example. How should tea be used? It is blindingly obvious to us today but things were a lot murkier for our ancestors who first encountered these strange looking and smelling leaves. There is an endearing tale in the book of a hostess who spread tea leaves on toast and offered it to her guests. Here we see a person struggling to make sense of something strange and exciting.

Electricity is another example. People relied on candle power for thousands of years. The pre-modern lighting world was a lot dimmer than our times. But that apparently did not prevent people from staying up late and having a good time. It seems that many of our ancestors were just as determined party goers as many of us today.

At Home is full of these little intimate details. It turns out that history at the small scale is just as interesting as epic tales of valor and glory. Infact in my view, the small stuff history is more interesting because it is closer to us and hence more intimate, personal and understanding. The book is a great read. Definitely recommended. There are however a few caveats. This book spans several centuries and talks about trends that affected personal life; trends that were spread out over long periods of time. As a result, the book has a tendency to lose focus. At times I started wondering what the relevancy of some of the material was to the concerned chapter. This does not detract from the book which remains a smashing good read.

Infectious Greed

Title: Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets
Author: Frank Partnoy
Publisher: PublicAffairs

Pages: 496
ISBN: 978-1586487843

Much has been written about the spectacular financial meltdown of 2007 - 2008. Much will continue to be written about it. We are still experiencing the repercussions of this panic and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. These events have generally been presented to the public as being from a bolt out of the blue. The argument goes that no one could have predicted the meltdown beforehand. It is like a force of nature that appeared suddenly to wreak havoc. Needless to say, these arguments are total nonsense.

An event of this magnitude does not appear out of the blue. There is a build up period which can often be long. Mr. Partnoy's book casts an eye on this build up period by tracing the roots of the current crisis. The financial system plays a critical role in an economy. Under controlled conditions, it helps the economy to grow strongly. However, what happens when the controls are removed?

This experiment has been carried out since Ronald Reagan's presidency. There are two definite consequences to controlling the financial markets (or any other type of market for that matter). One is that there is great stability. The other is that innovation is exceedingly slow. The basic idea behind removing the controls on the financial markets was to increase the pace of innovation in the sector. Under the influence of the Chicago School economists (specially Milton Friedman), it was thought that the sector would police itself effectively since no player can afford loss of reputation since any financial company which loses the confidence of its customers faces the very real possibility of a sudden collapse.


Infectious greed traces what happened when this idea was put into practice. As the book highlights, the pace of innovation amongst financial firms increased dramatically. Radically new financial products and new forms of financial organizations quickly appeared on the scene. Many (but not all) of these products and organizations gave superior returns to their clients. At the same time, greed played a major part both amongst the financial market players and among the clients. Vast bonuses attracted the best minds away from other sectors into a sector whose basic role is that of an intermediary.

While all of this was going on, many "experts" specially among the academia were cheering on these new innovations. The general public which included the business community was assured that these new products made for a better, safer, stronger, less risky financial system. So what if the new products required literally a PhD in Physics and Maths to understand? That just indicated how effective they were in reducing and indeed even eliminating risk. However, unbeknownst to nearly everybody including the financial participants themselves, these new innovations ended up vastly increasing systemic risk. The few dissenting voices were dismissed contemptuously and ignored.


All this is traced out in painstaking detail by Mr. Partnoy. The book highlights the role that greed, hubris, stupidity and arrogance played in creating conditions that inevitably led to the meltdown. The book does not simply trace the contours of the brave new financial world as it was being created. It also makes recommendations to prevent another, perhaps even worse meltdown in the future. The tragedy is that despite the clear warning that this book represents, no lessons seem to have been learned. Definitely a must read if you want to understand the origins of the current financial malaise.

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Accidental Branding

Title: Accidental Branding

Author: David Vinjamuri

Publisher: Wiley

Pages: 212

ISBN: 978-0-470-16506-5

Brands are extremely important. We are all agreed on this. Brands give companies higher margins and help to avoid a possibly ruinous price war. Nor are the benefits of brands restricted to companies alone. For consumers, brands are a promise of quality. They don't have to worry about getting ripped off. Brands are also a status symbol and part of personal identity. But the question remains, how are brands formed?

There have been many attempts to answer this question. Business books are full of recommendations on how to create brands. Accidental branding takes a somewhat different tack. It takes a look at brands that have become so fortuitously and tries to identifies the factors that made these brands successful. In a vicious marketplace in which most brands fail, what caused these brands to succeed specially when you consider that they did not follow the usually prescribed methods of branding. A noble objective which unfortunately falls flat on its face. Its as if you think you are going to have a rich dessert but are instead presented with a thin souffle.

Mr. Vinjamuri distills the lessons of these brands early in the book specifically the second chapter. Afterwards case histories of the selected accidental brands are presented. Sadly these histories prove to be insipid and uninspiring. After reading them you realize that you know a little bit about the person involved but you know nothing about what helped him or her develop the brand like they did. Its a eulogy to a personality. Basically a biography. My advice: read the second chapter and ignore the rest. You will get to know the lessons of the book and not waste any time.

Why The West Rules -- For Now

Title: Why The West Rules -- For Now
Author: Ian Morris
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Pages: 768
ISBN: 978-0374290023

Was the rise of the West inevitable or is a historical accident? This has been a question ever since industrialization enabled Western Europe and its American offshoot to dominate the globe on an unprecedented scale and level. Many attempts have been made to answer this question and many more will be made in the future.

Ian Morris' book addresses this question from a different angle. Instead of seeking proximate causes, Mr. Morris takes a sweeping look at history. Nor does he confine his vision to one area of the globe. In order to properly understand the rise of the West and place it in its proper historical perspective, we need to examine other major cultural areas as well and examine what developments were taking place at the same time over there. Apart from politics, other factors like culture, economy and geography also play a role their part and their role needs to be examined as well.

However, there is a problem that needs to be addressed. The major cultural areas of the world had many similarities but also major differences. In order to understand the current dominance of the West, we need to be able to properly compare them. To do that, we need some common bases. This is where Mr. Morris makes his most valuable contribution to the debate. He proposes using an index to compare development between major cultural areas. Admittedly any index proposed is not going to be perfect. But it can always be improved on. And an index no matter what its flaws at least allows for a like to like comparison between very different areas.

So was the rise of the West inevitable? Not really according to the author. Geography gave the West early advantages but many other factors also came into play. Also the East was not necessarily a laggard. As Mr. Morris' index shows, the East and the West developed at roughly the same pace and in approximately the same time frames. Industrialization gave the West an abrupt and massive boost but then the East started to catch up with it. As he points out, in large masses and over long time frames, people in different parts of the world tend to develop at approximately the same rates.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with Mr. Morris' detailed analysis, his attempt to construct a development index does help to push the debate forward. Regardless of how one views the merits of the book, this I believe is an important step forward in this debate.

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Title: Life of Pi
Author: Yann Martel
Publisher: Mariner BooksPages: 326
ISBN: 978-0156027328

An unexpected treat in a well worn category, Life of Pi is a delightful treasure to savor and enjoy. This is the story of a castaway; a genre that has been extensively exploited in books and movies. In a field crowded with masterpieces like Robinson Crusoe and others of the ilk, the question for authors is how to distinguish their particular castaway story.

The author puts our protagonist with a tiger and sets him off on an epic journey across the Pacific. The book is a bit hard to classify. It starts off as something along the lines of Gerald Durrell and then morphs into something else entirely.


This is a story of survival. A story of coping with the unexpected. A journey in adversity. It explores themes of despair interspersed with wonder and joy. In many respects a spiritual journey taking place along with a physical one. An unexpectedly gripping book, it is well worth reading.

Review: The Smartest Guys in the Room

Title: The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron
Authors:
Publisher:
Pages:
ISBN:

This is a story of amazing arrogance, hubris and corruption. Enron was a poster child of capitalism. Voted the most innovative company in America for six years in a row, this company was a darling of Wall Street. For a long time, it could seemingly do no wrong. Year after year, the company announced steadily rising earnings which were rewarded by a steadily rising share price. Shareholders, many of whom were Enron employees, made millions.

The company played a major role in transforming a sleepy industry like natural gas into a more dynamic and innovative market. However, right from the beginning, the pressures that were later to lead people to engage in outright fraud were beginning to be felt. These pressures were initially contained. The company engaged in financial manipulations from the get go but these manipulations were not allowed to escalate. At a later stage, Enron became heavily dependent on financial irregularities in an effort to keep its share price up. Not that the company acted alone. Fraud on this massive a scale requires the tacit (and sometimes explicit) cooperation of other parties. Enron could get away with playing fast and loose on its balance sheet and income statement because its auditors signed off on those statements. Who were these gullible dupes? None other than the venerable firm of Arthur Anderson! Similarly, the analysts employed by many Wall Street firms played their part in hyping Enron's story. Even after they no longer believed that Enron was a good buy, they still kept hyping it to the larger public. What was the motive behind these deceitful acts? Fat consulting fees. Enron was one of the largest consumers of consultancy and underwriting services in the US and if companies did not play ball, they got locked out of these lucrative fees. We are talking tens of millions of dollars here.

The tale of Enron shows the corporate world at its worst. It shows people willing to do anything in order to make a quick buck. Enron's employees even acted against the long term best interests of their organization. This was highlighted by the California energy scandal. For a long time, Enron had argued in favor of deregulating the electricity market saying that the private sector would be more efficient and would result in lower electricity costs to businesses and consumers. California went the furthest in deregulating electricity. Enron's traders discovered that the spot price of electricity could be manipulated for increased revenues. The result? Rolling blackouts in California and massive profit for the firm. However, there was also a backlash against electricity deregulation that permanently foreclosed Enron's efforts to deregulate the national market. What happened to the traders who had manipulated the market and thereby doomed Enron's larger efforts? They got promoted. There is story after story of short term tactics being used at the expense of the long term. This manipulation even extended to the firm itself. Everyone from the chairman down treated Enron as their own piggy bank. No one considered controlling expenses until 2000 when the company had been in existence for almost 15 years.

All in all, The Smartest Guy in the Room is a cautionary tale of extraordinary greed, arrogance and hubris. A feeling that people working in Enron were masters of the universe; that they could do no wrong and an apparently unshakable belief that they could do whatever they liked without having to worry about a day of reckoning.

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Review: The Long Tail

Title: The Long Tail: Why The Future of Business is Selling More of Less
Author: Chris Anderson
Publisher: Hyperion
Pages: 267
ISBN: 978-1-4013-0966-4

Business books are a dime a dozen. Each purports to show the reader the path to business nirvana. Ever increasing earnings! Ever stronger competitive position! Yet there are very few which provide a genuine insight. A new way of looking at our business environment and the ways in which companies can interact with customers. The Long Tail by Chris Anderson is one such book. It examines the impact of the Internet on consumer choice and how companies can take advantage of this medium which has been in widespread commercial domain for more than 10 years now but whose impact is still being explored by both businesses and consumers alike.

Every transaction has an associated information flow. When I say transaction, I mean the give and take of objects or services of value between atleast 2 parties. It does not really matter whether the transaction has a monetary aspect or not. What matters is that a transaction has taken place. In this situation, there is also an associated information flow. Before the advent of computers and definitely before the Internet came in widespread use, there was generally a high cost of tracking and utilizing this information flow. One of the most important things that computers have done is that they have progressively reduced the cost of tracking and utilizing the information flow associated with transactions. However, while this gradually became clear on the business side (and there is still confusion amongst companies about this particular aspect and how best to utilize it), to-date, there has been confusion about the impact of the Internet on the consumer side. What has been clear is that the Internet is a great enabler of information to consumers and that it has potential to dramatically increase consumer choice.

What The Long Tail does is that it provides a framework to more properly address these two issues. Exactly how does the Net increase consumer choice and how do companies go about delivering that choice is specially addressed in this book. Mr. Anderson's basic thesis is that the offline world has a limited capacity to carry products. Thus a typical music store can only hold a certain number of titles no matter how large it may be. This hard physical limitation compels companies with an offline presence to make hard choices as to which products they will carry. As a result, only those products are chosen which have the potential to become blockbusters or at the very least perform at a certain minimum level. What the Internet does is that it removes this limitations and allows companies to carry a much wider choice of products. This is where the Long Tail concept comes in. While individually the products at the long tail may not sell much, collectively these products can sell as much as or perhaps even outsell the blockbuster products and who knows that a long tail product may end up as a blockbuster!

However, there is a note of concern that Mr. Anderson does not properly address. While it may be true that offering long tail products will enable consumers to choose products that they may prefer over the more mainstream ones, they do need a starting point from which to start their exploration. For unlike mainstream blockbuster products, long tail products require a much greater degree of exploration from the consumer. Companies can alleviate this aspect to some extent by tracking past purchases and offering recommendations much as Amazon does. However, this is still very much a field where there is a large degree of trial and error. The algorithms used to make such recommendations still need to be fine-tuned.

With this caveat aside, this is an important book. One that should be read by executives and entrepreneurs alike.