Book
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.
There’s lots of interesting content in Amazon.com’s launch page for “No One Would Listen”, a book by the main whistleblower in the Bernie Madoff saga. The timeline in particular is very impressive: it shows that it took ten years to uncover the mess – nine since the first contact with the SEC – by which time the problem was irreversible. And that’s far from the only case, which begs a question… How do we justify still having institutions supposed to keep watch so unready and unwilling to investigate red flags?
Free e-book organized by Seth Godin sounds a lot like the Red Balloon experience we just discussed on Dec. 6th: it’s less about advertising the authors’ work than it’s about discovering ways that content gets disseminated online – how does an e-book become “viral”? Interesting experiment, so-so book.