EclecticLip

For the book club, a decision was made to ease into the new year (at the time, 2011 was a then-new year) with a book on finances.  If for no other reason that a lot of people get stressed about money ’round the time Christmas bills arrive, and stressed employees aren’t productive employees.

J.D. Roth’s Your Money: the missing manual was chosen, because it seemed humbler (and correspondingly less hyperbolic) than other personal-finance books on the shelves.  One highlight of the book was the discussion about the hedonic treadmill, which explains why — unless you start off in abject poverty — more money doesn’t tend to make you happier.  It was refreshing to see this covered in a personal finance book, given that the book’s reading demographic probably consists of people who think having more money will, indeed, make them happier.    Another was the suggestion to make budgets simple enough that they can be followed — this spoke to me, as my own budgeting efforts have usually failed because they were so ambitiously detailed, they got too cumbersome to track.

As always, if you enjoyed the summary, please consider supporting the author by purchasing a copy of the book. 

- - - - -

Your Money - the missing manual

The Corporate Lattice was chosen as the book club’s thirtieth book, in recognition of the fact that the “corporate ladder” is a poor metaphor for a companies of relatively stable size.  The situation is different for rapidly growing companies, who might need an ever-enlarging cadre of managers or directors to oversee burgeoning work teams. 

It was also recommended by a colleague who found the book useful on her return from maternity leave on a part-time basis.  Her limited availability meant she had to find a role which didn’t build directly on her career to that point, so the lattice metaphor may have helped in showing that a career move couldn’t just be “up” or “down” but sideways as well.

As a soon-to-be-father, it was surprising to find that the authors’ research found more men reporting work-life conflict than women — perhaps because companies have come to accomodate mothers’ scheduling needs, but have not yet come to appreciate the impacts of children on fathers’ availability.  Some of the book’s conclusions seemed to overreach as well, as captured in the “side notes” at the end of each chapter summary. 

As always, if you enjoyed the summary, please consider supporting the authors by purchasing a copy of the book. 

- - - - -

The Corporate Lattice (summary)

Hmm… missed out a few weeks there.  Life’s busy-ness has only now returned to normalcy. 

Getting to Yes was chosen as the book club’s 26th volume because it deals with negotiations, which, like it or not, play a pivotal role in business.  It was expected that book club members’ careers would benefit from knowing a bit about negotiating, whether they were arranging supplier pricing, defining multi-firm partnerships, or in particular, agitating for higher pay & benefits. 

The book’s emphatic message that negotiators should focus on interests instead of positions, was probably the main takeaway — the one-sentence summary.  One book club member did offer that the BATNA concept was most pivotal in their own supplier dealings.  In short, he found it difficult working with suppliers who had a strong BATNA (Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement)… because the status quo worked well enough for them; they had no driving incentive to negotiate a new arrangement.

As always, if you enjoy the book summary, please consider supporting the authors by purchasing a copy of the book. 

- - - - - -

Getting to Yes (summary)

My brother forwarded me this article in the Financial Times recently.  Superficially about the fall of Rome and other civilizations, as chronicled by Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies, it links back to the fact that the complexity of the financial sector has increased far faster than the balance of the economy — the “real” economy.

The example of diminishing returns on increased complexity may also be observed in that the financial sector’s robustness in the recent past has relied on leverage, basically meaning that to make their money, they had to bet increasingly more. 

In this sense, complexity is a crippling strength — because it’s useful and produces great results at first, it continues to be turned to, even when the incremental benefits diminish and even dissipate away.  But because it once produced great results, there’s little impetus to try other ideas…

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

For the book club’s “silver anniversary” selection, it returned to the theme of human behaviour examined previously in Gut Feelings (#13) and to a lesser extent in The Tipping Point (#4) and First, Break All The Rules (#12).  As complexity theory has gained prominence over the past year, research for a book on that topic was made, with the club eventually deciding on The Perfect Swarm.

The volume’s treatment of group intelligence and the problems associated with consensus decision-making, are highly-relevant to business decisions – and R&D in particular.  When research teams push new boundaries, they tend to defer to the most-expert member when it comes to drawing conclusions or deciding on a path-forward; but the book cites work suggesting that diversity of opinion is key for selection the best options.

As always, if you enjoy the book summary, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

- - - - - -

The Perfect Swarm (summary)

As a preamble, let me note it’s not my normal manner to poke fun with a bayonet — this is a special little something I reserve for pompous commentators of such oracular conceit that they greet all others’ views with a dripping disdain. 

To be clear, I’m sure that — like George W. Bush — Dennis Gartman is a nice man.

I’m also confident that — like George W. Bush — Dennis Gartman is a victim of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which causes the cripplingly incompetent to think they’ve got exceeding expertise.  (To be fair, Dunning-Kruger is epidemic in the financial sector; how many “expert” mutual fund managers actually beat the index?  There is no cure.)

Lastly, I’m certain that — like George W. Bush — Dennis Gartman still has enough fans that this qualifies as “pricking the powerful” as opposed to “kicking the downtrodden”.

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

According to Wiki, Rorschach tests (inkblot tests) are used by some psychologists to:

“examine a person’s personality characteristics and emotional functioning”.

Given the diversity of opinion religious texts can engender, I wonder if these might also qualify.  Literalist Christians (”fundamentalists”) certainly derive different meaning from the Bible than progressive Christians (”liberals”) — on account of each group focusing on different portions of the scripture.  No doubt the same phenomenon occurs in other faiths.  And one can probably draw considerable inferences on a person’s tendencies, based on the category they fit in…

Joseph Heath’s economics primer Filthy Lucre was chosen as the club’s 23rd book summary.  This choice was spurred by the seemingly-unprecedented furore about the implementation of the HST in British Columbia.  In light of this, it was felt appropriate to do a book on economics; and this tome, which critiques fallacious right-wing and left-wing ideas, seemed a good, neutral choice.

The HST — which harmonized provincial and federal taxes (hence its initials, which stand for Harmonized Sales Tax) — seems to be sensible policy, from my reading; Canada’s most populous province, Ontario, implemented one at the same time without nearly as much rancour.  I imagine the backlash in BC stems from the governing Liberal Party (by Canadian standards a far-right-wing party, despite its name) committing during the recent election campaign that it wouldn’t implement an HST — then reversing its position several weeks after the election.

As always, if you enjoyed the book summary, please consider supporting the author by purchasing a copy of the book. 

- - - - - -

Filthy Lucre - summary 

Have been musing recently whether deliberate currency devaluation can be considered a “tragedy of the commons” situation.  In this case, the “commons” is the value of the unit of currency.

I don’t the analogy works perfectly, but it does seem to fit the theme that when times get tough, goverments which are loathe to cut back on spending rely instead on currency devaluation.  This creates a temporary competitive advantage — until the currency is debased enough to lose any meaningful value.

Admittedly, there are often reasons for not overtly cutting back on government spending, which we in the global north take for granted: Roman Emperors, for example, tended to die suddenly if they lost the support of the military.  And cutting social spending can cause extraordinary misery… so the slow bleeding of a currency gradually losing its value, may seem more palatable.  Especially if the diminished value of savings (primarily a concern of the wealthy) is countered by the arrival of new jobs, in light of the country’s newly-cheapened labour (primarily a concern of everyone else).

Douglas McGregor’s monumental volume, The Human Side of Enterprise, was the book club’s 22nd selection.  Penetratively insightful even for today’s readers (who have the added benefit of the recent “empowerment” fad) it must’ve been an astonishing read to his contemporaries.  One of them — W.L. Gore — famously ingrained this thinking into his company’s culture.  Even the name W.L. Gore & Associates (the firm’s employees all have the nominal title “Associate”) reflects McGregor’s advice to eschew titles.

Striking in McGregor’s tome is its implied criticism of Taylorism (or at least its excesses) — which tended to separate a workforce into “brains” (management) and “brawn” (labour).  While Taylor’s (followers’) dualism would have made Descartes proud, it prevented most of the workforce from reaching its potential.  Besides, power corrupts, and the concentration of power in management probably didn’t do the company much good.

The Starfish And The Spider (book 9) is a particularly complementary book club selection.

- - - - - -

The Human Side of Enterprise - summary