Economics or the dismal science was something I felt that I needed to include as it provides the context for business and consumption.
Prior to the 20th century, economics was the pursuit of gentleman scholars. The foundation of it is considered to be Adam Smith when he published is work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith outlined one of the core tenets of classical economics: each individual is driven by self-interest and can exert only a negligible influence on prices. And it was the start of assumptions that economists model around that don’t mirror real life all the time.
What really is a rational decision maker? Do consumers always make rational decisions? Do they make decisions that maximise their economic benefit?
The problem is that they might do actions that are rational to them:
Reducing choice when they are overwhelmed
Looking for a little luxury to comfort them over time. Which was the sales of Cadbury chocolate and Revlon lipstick were known to rise in a recession
Luxury goods in general make little sense from a ration decision point of view until you realise the value of what they signal
Having a smartphone yet buying watches. Japanese consumers were known to still buy watches to show that they care about the time to employers when they could easily check their smartphone screen
All of which makes the subject area of high interest to me as a marketer. It also explains the amount of focus now being done by economists on the behavioural aspect of things.
The recession has brought industrial action that we haven’t seen since the 1970s as union members blame foreign workers for taking British jobs. The flashpoint has been at Lindsey refinery operated by Total. Lindsey sits at the mouth of the Humber river. The inciting incident involved an Italian subcontractor doing maintenance on the refinery who brought in Italian and Portuguese workers, which there was high unemployment in the area. The underlying nationalism is the populist dark side of the globalisation boom.
My parents came to the UK when my Dad came over to work in the shipbuilding industry in the mid-1960s. Most of my friends have worked abroad: engineering in the Middle East, construction in Germany, web development and PR in North America and Asia Pacific.
First of all is the conflicted politics around the strike. Traditional left-wing allies of the strikers like the Socialist Workers Party are between a rock and a hard place as they can’t allign themselves with worker solidarity and a doctrine of protectionism that smacks of racism. Secondly this gives the far right yet another opportunity to get a hook into the angry disenfranchised white working-class. There is a large amount of government money already going into community engagement programmes to try and deal with this problem and other organisations have ongoing efforts to deal with the BNP head on, however the industrial action is like putting petrol on a fire. I could see this feeding into a broader anti-globalisation right wing populist fuelled reactionary politics focused on Euro-skepticism.
The second thing is the way worker politics has been extended and expanded via web 2.0 platforms. British Wildcats is a WordPress-based blog which seems to have far-right sympathies. It presents a professional looking face (even if the copy is hackneyed) to the movement using Google Maps integration, downloadable leaflets and blog posts to spread its message.
Over on Facebook I found 487 groups relating to British jobs for British workers. The top-ranked group: British Jobs for British Workers has 27,094 members. It used to be that the printing press and the xerox machine were tools of subversives. The CIA used to smuggle photocopiers into the Soviet Union for that very reason. Now it’s blogs and social networks.
50 books I can recommend was inspired to write this after having read Zen Habits 50 Amazing and Essential Novels To Enrich Your Library. However it would be presumptious of me to assume that your personal collection of books needed enriching through my intercession, so I decided to choice a more humble title. Some of the books I have picked aren’t novels but I found them influential in their own way. I tried to create the list with a couple of guiding principles – to make the list representative of my tastes and interests, to not overly represent one part of my life and not overly represent a particular author.
Tom Wolfe – The Right Stuff. I prefer the new journalism to fictional works of Tom Wolfe, mostly because the truth is usually more fantastic than the imaginary world. Wolfe honed his style in the counterculture of the 1960s with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or Radical Chic and the low/popular culture works featured in Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby. Going against the grain Wolfe painted a picture of heroism and goodness in science and engineering at a time in the late 1970s when hippy values had gone mainstream.
Michael Wolff – Burn Rate. Wolff was an early ‘Silicon Alley’ net entrepreneur who went through the trials and tribulations of start-up life. Ultimately the only riches it gave him was experience which he shared in this book published at the height of the dot.com boom in the UK.
Tim Pat Coogan – Michael Collins. Collins is the founding father of modern Ireland and died at the age of 32, he was was a complex polymath and military figure. His actions were subsequently studied by other countries leaders including Yatzik Shamir and Mao Zedong during their fight for independence. His life and death are still emotive issues in Ireland. Coogan provides a comprehensive, authoritative and independent biography of Collins.
Will Hutton – The State We’re In. Up until I went to college I wasn’t that interested in reading books about economics. Hutton was then an editor at The Observer and put together The State We’re In which was an analysis of British society from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s together with lessons learned from more successful economies. The book shaped early policy thinking of the 1997 Blair government. I still consider it to be a great read and would also recommend its sister books The State To Come and The World We’re In.
Michael Collins – The Path to Freedom. This is a collection of speeches and essays written by Michael Collins before and during the Irish struggle for independence. What comes out is the well-thought out words of a man who is self taught about the world and is highly literate. One can see a man who was both an idealist and a pragmatist and gain insight into how his views changed from his first essay in the book Freedom Within Grasp For Ourselves To Achieve It to his last published speech before his death.
John Gribbin – Deep Simplicity: Chaos Complexity and the Emergence of Life. I first came across Deep Simplicity from my interest in chaos theory and fractals that I developed in college. This book is one of a number of popular science books which are selling well, providing the answers to big questions for a society that has never been more divorced from both science and religion. I revisited Deep Simplicity because the book shows how small simple rules can develop into complex behaviour, the `unforeseen consequence’ that drives a lot of things that currently interest me like behavioural economics. Gribbin treads the line between sexing up science and explaining the mathematics behind it in a clear unambiguous way. The value of Gribbin’s book for me is that it helps me understand phenomena. Many of the unrelated mathematical principles that he discusses to explain physics-related phenomena provide great analogues for my own experience in our changing influence landscape.
Sun Tzu – The Art of War. The best and cheapest version to get is Wordsworth Classics. They picked a really good translation of The Art of War. Unlike many business books about The Art of War, this one works best because they have not tried to over analyse it or directly tie it into business strategy. I think that this book is powerful because it acts as a framework to think about problems rather than suggesting answers to business issues. Also for the money, you can’t argue. Probably ties for the most read book in my collection with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Don Tapscott – Paradigm Shift. Don Tapscott’s Paradigm Shift was required reading when I was in college in the mid-1990s, many of the important concepts such as enterprise collaboration and the co-opting of consumers in the production process are extended and expanded upon in Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything to include web 2.0 services and the latest iterations of open source software.
W.G. Beasley – The Japanese Experience: A Short History of Japan (History of Civilisation). Beasley manages to explain Japanese history from the sixth century to the economic miracle in a clear manner that belies the amount of information that he also gets over. Unlike many similar books this is easy to pick up and read without being well informed about the subject manner and has an excellent glossary at the end. A good start to find out about Japanese history.
M Mitchel Waldrop – The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal tells the story from the point-of-view of J C R Linklder, a polymath who was instrumental in putting in place a lot of the projects and infrastructure that was needed to make the necessary developments. Linklider was a psychologist by training who realised the power and potential of technology way before it was possible. Waldrop tells the story well, painting Licklider as a human being: a wonderful polymath, parent, researcher and a useless manager. He also paints the broader historical picture taking in ARPA, DEC, Xerox PARC, Al Gore and the Information Superhighway.
Graham McCann – The Essential Dave Allen. Irish comedian Dave Allen was a divisive figure in my house growing up. On one hand you had an Irish man on British television who was very urbane and had a dry sophisticated sense of humour. He was always immaculately turned out in his classic three-piece suits, at a time when Irish people in the UK cleaned up in hospitals and mended the roads for a living. On the other hand his image as a drinker (he did his act with a glass of whiskey in his hand and a cigarette on stage, during the early part of his career) and his strident rejection of Catholicism blinded my parents to the power of his wit. McCann’s book collates the best material from Allen’s act. Since Allen primarily discussed life’s absurdities, much of the material is still relevant now.
TimeOut Travel Guides. I have relied on TimeOut travel guides whenever I have spent a decent amount of time in-country for business or holiday purposes. There are few cities that are worthwhile and aren’t covered by TimeOut – Munich being the noticable exception that I have come across so far.
Steven Levy – Crypto. Steven Levy has written a number of books, Insanely Great was an interesting history of the original Macintosh, but I prefer Crypto which charted the development of civilian cryptography. If you’ve ever bought anything online you’ve benefited from cryptography. And the reason why you could do this is due to the determination of hackers, geeks and hippies that fought the government and the intelligence services (who felt that they should have a monopoly on it).
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward – All The President’s Men. Because of the events documented in this book, the authors names became by-words for investigative journalism. The book documents the mundane back-breaking work that broke the Watergate story. A second-volume to this book the much overlooked The Final Days which documents the agonising death of the Nixon administration makes an ideal reading companion as well.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca – Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales AD Lucilium. A kind of Zen guide book for Romans, his letters contain all the wisdom and the poise to enable any inquisitive soul to acquire self control, to endure with dignity the burdens of misfortune, to take success and fame with humbleness and cynicism.
David Pogue – Mac OS X: The Missing Manual. This isn’t a book that I read religiously, but since I don’t have a tech support person camped out in my kitchen its comforting to know that I have this book for reference. Apple support pages aren’t much use if you can’t boot up Safari.
Bryan Burrough and John Heylar – Barbarians At The Gate. This book is emblematic of the greed that fuelled leverage buyout deals in the 1980s. Heylar and Burroughs do a good job taking you inside of the financial mechanisms, explaining them clearly and keeping it simple enough for me to understand. Why is a 20-year-old deal important to someone like me? Well Carl Icahn and Motorola or Yahoo! springs to mind.
Wired magazine issues 6.03 – 6.05. These issues contained a series of articles called the Encyclopedia of The New Economy. These articles were written by Wired contributing editor John Browning and Wired senior editor Spencer Reiss. When you look at Chris Anderson’s books The Long Tail and Free, the lessons and knowledge he talks about can be found these articles over a decade before. Combine this with the Digital Citizen supplement that appeared in issue 5.12 and you can see that nothing is new.
Dale Carnegie – How To Win Friends And Influence People. This book is a guide to customer relationship management, community management and marketing decades before those terms came into existence. Its a well-written book but without the home-spun folksiness that you get with some modern business books.
Daniel Yergin – The Prize. Yergin’s book is the de-facto history of the oil industry. In order to understand the future, it helps to understand how we got there. I picked up this book when I was still working in the oil industry. Given the current economic and political position of oil, I would recommend this book as essential reading.
Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind – The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron. I used to work on the Enron account at my first agency that I worked at. They also used another agency in the UK called Gentle Persuasion and their head of PR (VP of marketing and communications) was a lady called Jackie Gentle. We were promoting Enron’s broadband exchange offering which made no sense; from the EIN (Enron Intelligent Network) technology underpinning which was reinventing the wheel of other technologies already out there like MPLS (multi-packet labelling system) and a market that didn’t exist yet. We got paid and did our job, but after reading this book it all started to make sense.
Mark Holt and Hamish Muir – 8vo On the Outside. 8vo was one of the trendsetting graphic design outfits of the 80s and 1990s. If you were an early Orange customer – they designed your bill. If you bought many of the releases on Factory Records, or the re-releases under London Records you probably have some of their work in your record or CD collection. If you read magazines like iD or other publications that took iD as their role model, then the typography usually owes a debt to 8vo. What is interesting about this book is the body of work catalogued in an unassuming manner together with the minutiae of running an agency and dealing with challenges before the technology was there to make them trivial (such as Adobe Photoshop, Quark Xpress or Adobe InDesign).
Andy Kessler – Wall Street Meat. I prefer Kessler’s book to Frank Partnoy’s F.I.A.S.C.O. and Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker. All are very good books, I found Kessler’s personally the most useful in my career. Kessler was a peer of Henry Blodget, Mary Meaker and Jack Grubman. Kessler tells the insanity of the original internet bubble from the finance side. As a young PR person I remember following a NASDAQ-listed telecoms clients business via the Stock Watchlist on My Excite page and noticing how the more business they got, the more expensive it came to service such that revenue and profitabilty were never going to meet and yet hearing analysts bang on about what a great buy the client was.
James Gleick – Faster. I was unsure which James Gleick to put in here. Both Faster and Chaos are good books, however in the end I went with Faster. Faster is about the concept of time, or more specifically the modern concept of time poverty. Our efforts to cram more into each day. What has this to do with PR and marketing? A lot, James Gleick’s book gives food for thought on the attention economy and the value of multi-tasked attention.
Simon Singh – Fermat’s Last Theorem. It’s not very often that a book can capture the drama and pain involved in scientific discovery. It’s hard to make mathematics sexy but Singh manages it.
Paul Stoneman (editor) – Handbook Of The Economics Of Innovation And Technological Change. Most of my text books that I used in college stay on the book shelf, but I like to dip into this one tnow and again. Nothing is ever really new and situations that come up usually have a precedent that you can derive some lessons from.
Cynthia Robbins-Roth – From Alchemy to IPO: The Business Of Biotechnology. I got given this book by an ex-colleague. Having no real understanding of the biotechnology sector, this book provided a good primer. Its style leads something to be desired, but the content is high quality.
Robert H. Reid – Architects Of The Web. Reid wrote up the profiles of many of the pioneer web companies including Netscape, Real Networks, Marimba, Yahoo! and Silicon Graphics (whose work on VRML was prescient when you think about metaverse services like Second Life.) It’s helpful to revisit the future the way it was envisaged a decade ago and see how close and yet how far we are from reaching those goals.
The Pentagram Papers. Design agency periodically published brochures covering esoteric subjects as a form of inspirational materials. It comes in handy when I am doing a one-man brainstorm: providing visually stimulating fodder when I am working from home.
Eric S. Raymond – The New Hackers Dictionary. This is pretty much essential for anybody involved in the technology space.
Alistair Cooke – America. I love this book not because Cooke’s history of the US is the best history of the country or that the book is particularly relevant given that it finishes around about 1973. I just like the way the book is written. If Cooke was alive now he would have made the most engaging blogger. This book is a relatively early example of multimedia as it was designed to go with a documentary television series of the same name (I can recommend the DVD set of the TV series which is beautifully shot – the series had its own helicopter pilot!).
Fiction
Cory Doctorow – Down and out in the magic kingdom. Two of the key things that people struggle with in understanding the social web is the currency of kudos and the trusted nature of the social web. Doctorow’s science fiction story is an allegory that explains it in an elegant manner through the concept of Whuffie.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – The Complete Sherlock Holmes. I picked this book up when I used to work shifts. It looked like good value a door stop of a book available for the then tiny sum of 3.99 in the ASDA supermarket. This was before the Net Book Agreement was killed off by an Office of Fair Trading investigation. Conan Doyle had created immaculately constructed stories like the literary equivalent of a Swiss watch movement, that were both compelling and easy to read.
Robert Pirsig – Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Zen was a central point of discussion during my last year at college with my friend and landlord Ian. Its a story about how a brilliant man was broken by the system as he wrestled with understanding the fundamental truths of our world. It is an exploration of the metaphysics of quality and and it is a book that I return to for inspiration when things get out of kilter. I have put this book in fiction as its written as a novel. However it does need to be acknowledged that this autobiographical by Pirsig and reflects on his own life and a difficult time in the childhood of his son Christopher. I would also recommend that you read the follow-up book Lilawhere Pirsig expands on this subject further.
Neal Stephenson – Cryptonomicon. I don’t like some of Stephenson’s first works like The Big U and much of the baroque cycles left me cold. I think it would be overkill to put several books from the same author into this list, but if I did you would have Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and tCryptonomicon all in this list. If I have to chose one its Cryptonomicon. Its a mix of action adventure, modern asian history and primer on cryptography that makes this book my choice for the list.
Frank Delaney – Ireland. Film director Frederico Fellini said that ‘All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography’. Delaney’s book is the biography of a nation, he captures the Irish condition really well and brings to life the history, the culture and the tradition of storytelling against a background of progress.
Douglas Coupland – Generation X. Coupland is more than a novelist he is a zeitgeist meter, his books happen to capture the moment. I have a range of his books in my collection including jPod, Girlfriend In A Coma, Hey Nostradamus!, Shampoo Planet and Microserfs. But if I had to recommend a definitive Coupland book to a reader it would be Generation X which captured the dark humour used by X-ers to escape the suckfest that was their early adulthood.
Matt Beaumont – e. e is a book that portrayed the inner workings of an advertising agency. I read it whilst working during the internet boom times in a PR agency which shared much of the craziness of the advertising world. Large budgets, prima-donna clients and pharmaceutically assisted creative thinkers. An ex-copywriter, Beaumont had a good eye for characters and the book was sometimes not very funny precisely because the satire was so close to the truth I was living in at the time. e. was also groundbreaking for its device of storytelling, through email trails rather than a straight narrative.
Brett Easton Ellis – American Psycho. Being able to read through the gory bits of this book without putting it down was something of a right of passage amongst my friends and I. Ellis accurately captured how shallow the early and mid-1980s really were, I am sure historians and sociologists will understand that acid house culture was needed by society just to remove us from the banality of 80’s materialism. The books portrayal of Bateman’s psychotic hallucinations make the banal analysis of Huey Lewis and The News and the early works of Whitney Houston even more horrific than they really are. After this book the bland 80s soundtrack of Sade and Whitney will sound strangely sinister.
Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill – League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume one. Moore and O’Neill have created a strong interpretation of a ficitonal world based on fictional characters co-existing in the same era, a Wold Newton-type technique. Despite the shocking film adaptation, the three volumes of the graphic novel are amazing.
Thomas Kinsella – The Tain. The book is is a translation of the Irish epic Tain Bo Cuailnge (in English known as the Cattle Raid of Cooley) which is a centre part of the Ulster Cycle. Kinsella’s translation is widely considered to be an accessible version of the tale. In addition to Kinsella’s translation there are ink prints throughout the book by Louis Le Brocquy add perfectly complement the text.
JJ Connolly – The Layer Cake. I read this book and was impressed how the plot unfolded. Many of the characters reminded me of the of the town personalities, door staff and management that I knew back in Liverpool. It was uncanny. If you want an intelligent novel to read on the plane, pick this one up at the airport.
Geoff Ryman – 253. Most books tell a story in a broadly linear style, 253 covers a story that is about five minutes in long but tells it through the eyes of the passengers on a tube train. Its a massively parallel story instead of a linear one. 253 is about a Bakerloo tube train with no-one standing and no empty seats can carry 252 passengers. The driver makes 253. Each one has a page devoted to them, divided into three sections – what they look like, what they are thinking and inside information. This structure makes the book very to easy to read during a commute. For its structure and ease of reading alone makes it worthwhile to put on your bookshelf. The fact that its well written is a bonus.
Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore – The Watchmen. I originally discovered The Watchmen through a roundabout way. The comedian’s smiley logo was co-opted by Bomb The Bass for the cover of Beat Dis and then by the wider acid house movement. When I first read The Watchmen I was stunned by the complexity and depth of the story. I was also stunned at the kind of issues that the story addressed. This book played a major role in making comics be taken more seriously as a literary art from.
Jostein Gaarder – Sophie’s World. I read this during the summer holidays from my first year in university. I was working in an undemanding PR role for an oil exploration company where I was prized by my PR colleagues for having an oil industry background. It was an engaging story that provided a great introduction to philosophy.
Christopher Brookmyre – Quite Ugly One Morning. Brookmyre’s tales of investigative journalist Jack Parlabane investigating wrong-doers in the establishment from corrupt mandarins to murderous spooks are great light reading. Quite Ugly One Morning is the first book in the series, which makes it a good entry point into the works of Brookmyre.
William Gibson – Neuromancer. clichéd though the cyberpunk thing is now, Gibson’s book is an excellent read in its own right. Reading it is now a rite-of-passage.
John Buchan – The Thirty-Nine Steps. I loved this book as a child, it was the archetypal thriller and Buchan manages to keep the tempo up throughout the book.
Congratulations! You’ve made it to the bottom! If you enjoyed 50 Books I Can Recommend, you can keep up to date with books that I have read here, I update my blog regularly with reviews and my outtakes from them.
James Earl Jones has one of the most distinctive voices in the entertainment industry as you can hear in this Sesame Street clip. You might recognise from his appearance in Conan the Barbarian film, but James Earl Jones has a surprising variety in his career across film, television and stage performance. James Earl Jones has done voiceover work for everything from Disney’s The Lion King to CNN station idents.
Hollow Spy Coins – talk about niche businesses, this is definitely on the long tail. You have to admire their dedication to engineering this.
Economics
Boomtown of Dubai feels effects of global crisis – International Herald Tribune – Until recently, credit in Dubai was growing by 49 percent a year, according to the Emirates’ Central Bank — a rate almost double that of bank deposits’ growth. That unnerved some bankers here, who felt it could lead to a collapse. “In the U.S., the challenge is about keeping the banks going,” said Marios Maratheftis, chief economist for Standard Chartered Bank. “Here, the economy has been overheated, a correction is needed, and it’s about making sure the slowdown happens in a smooth, orderly manner.”
Klein Verzet: Freaking doomed – the premise is that the demand for shipping of raw materials like coal, bauxite and iron ore have ground to a stand still and soon even the factories of China will be a lot quieter – so the economic outlook is nothing short of ammegeddon
P&G to launch washing gel that cleans at 15 degrees – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic – “According to P&G, Ariel’s Cool Clean campaign encouraged more than five times as many customers than normal to switch to low-energy washing programmes, with Ariel customers twice as likely as the average consumer to wash at a lower 30 degrees temperature (28% of Ariel customers in 2007 versus 13% of those using other brands). P&G has a partnership with the Energy Saving Trust, which encourages people to use energy efficiently and reduce their carbon footprints.”
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Data Debasement | PBS – cloud computing versus DBMS, interesting reading, I need to go back and look at it a few more times to understand it fully. But initial take is that parallel computing as well as parallel processing changes how computing works and databases have to be adapted (like Oracle’s Grid database concept from the tail end of the dot com era and cloud computing. It’s the failings of Moore’s law rather than progress that is driving this change
Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman – while I have sympathy for some of what Mr Stallman says, his argument misses the point about the benefits of social software. Open formats and APIs allow you to move from one service to another as needs must.
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Collateral Damage | PBS – interesting take on the mobile market, not one that I necessarily agree with, but interesting none the less. Cringely expect that Microsoft Windows Mobile software will fail and has some interesting ideas around the why. I think Microsoft has everything to play for with enterprise users and can leverage items like security authentication and Outlook email access – they might not be dominant but they could still be in with a shout
Beginning of end of megapixel marathon – Pixel count gives phones and cameras the ‘Dixons Factor’ – being able to be sold easily by some pimple-faced oik; but doesn’t mean you will have better quality pictures. I have a digital SLR which takes pictures at 5.1 megapixels and a phone camera that will do the same – no prize for which one takes the better pictures.
Japanese Women Shy From Dual Mommy Role – washingtonpost.com – “The stakes are high here in the world’s second-largest economy, which now has the world’s highest proportion of people over 65 and lowest proportion of children under 15. According to a recent forecast, population loss will strip Japan of 70 percent of its workforce by 2050.”
Rob Enderle does not know the meaning of surrender. Or disclosure. – MacUser – industry analyst gets called out on astroturfing. Rod Enderle is old school Silicon Valley, he worked in finance, and IT business analysis roles at Rolm. Rolm sold military specification computers to the US armed services and for other applications like oil exploration and various telecoms products. Rod Enderle would have worked with partners like IBM and Data General – in their time big enterprise technology firms. (Data General would be later bought out by EMC, now part of Dell). These connections probably helped Rob Enderle throughout his analyst career. He started as an analyst in the mid 1990s, which was a golden time. Rob Enderle was meeting large corporates rolling out ERP and CRM software, his opinions and research at Dataquest and Giga helped sway multi-million dollar deals around the world.
WordPress for iPhone – this is going to get a lot of hype, whats wrong with using the update by email option? I think this is brand over requirement. You are not a credible digerati brand unless you support the iPhone platform.
