Ged Carroll

Category: oprah time | 書評 | 서평 : 文芸批評

Welcome! I guess the first question that you have is why oprah time? Well in my last year of college I used to sit in the house that I shared with my landlord and write my essays whilst watching cable TV.

There I would be sipping tea, writing away and referencing from text books spread around me on the couch and coffee table. One of the programmes on the in the background was Oprah Winfrey. A lot of the show was just background noise. But I was fascinated by Oprah’s book club.

She’d give her take on a book, maybe interview the author. And then it would be blasted up the New York Times bestsellers list. This list appears weekly in the New York Times Book Review. Oprah’s book club was later emulated by other talk show hosts, notably the UK’s Richard Madeley and Judy Finegan.

On the high end you had Melvyn Bragg‘s South Bank Show when they profiled an author of the moment.

When I came to writing my own review of books that I’d read, I was was brought back to that time working on a sofa. Apple laptop in hand. It made sense to go with Oprah time.

You might also notice a link called bookshelf. This is a list of non-fiction books that I have kept. And the reasons why I have kept them.

If you’ve gone through my reviews and think that you’d like to send me a book to review. Feel free to contact me. Click this link, prove that you’re human and you will have my email address.

  • Good To Great by Jim Collins

    Jim Collins

    Jim Collins, the author of Good To Great has been researching and writing about what makes companies successful since 1988, though there are points made about this and the similarity of the work done by Tom Peters at McKinsey. Peters eventually turned the outputs of that research into the book In Search of Excellence.

    From this research Collins has written a series of books:

    Good to Great was Collins’ sophomore book published in 2001. I was curious to see how it stands up in the 20 years since publication.

    What’s the book like?

    Amsterdam

    Collins has written a surprisingly accessible book that at the same time demonstrates an academic rigour to the underlying research. A good chunk of the book is an epilogue, frequently asked questions and referenceable materials at the back.

    Each chapter is comes with a summary page and Collins makes good use of visuals to convey his ideas.

    Synopsis

    Collins bases Good to Great around seven ideas.

    • ‘Level 5’ leadership. Collins had a management maturity capability model, the top level on ‘level 5’ was a leader who left their ego at the door with personal humility but professional will. They tend to be work horse rather than race horses. I found this particularly interesting as research that my first agency used to tout showed how a CEO’s visibility or fame had a positive correlation with rising share price, indicating that investors are probably buying on the wrong signals
    • Getting the right people on the bus. The right people comes before vision, strategy, tactics, structure. ‘Who’ before ‘what’. Rigor but not ruthlessness drives people decisions. All of this was based around three principles: 1/ If in doubt, don’t hire. Instead keep searching. 2/ Act when a people change is needed. 3/ Put the best people on the best opportunities. The right people thrive in a culture of vigorous debate in search of the best answers and then stand united behind the collective decisions, regardless of political or personal interests. The right people are your most important asset. You need self motivating people rather than having to work to motivate them
    • The Stockdale Paradox. Retain faith that you will succeed in the end. Regardless of the difficulties. And at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your current reality. Whatever they might be. An honest determined effort is required to find the truth of a situation. 1/ Leading with questions, not answers. 2/ Engage in a dialogue and debate, not coercion. 3/ Conduct autopsies, not blame. 4/ Build ‘red flag’ mechanisms that turn information into something that cannot be ignored. Dealing with problems head on. Leadership doesn’t begin with vision, it starts with confronting facts head on and dealing with their implications
    • The ‘hedgehog concept’. Focus at the interception point between: 1/ What you are deeply passionate about. 2/ What you can be the best in the world at. 3/ What drives your economic engine. It is an iterative process. This becomes the one big thing that you focus on.
    • A culture of self-discipline. Great results over the long term depends on a disciplined culture. It requires people who adhere to a consistent system, but also gives freedom and responsibility within the framework of the system. Discipline means focus, ignoring once in a lifetime opportunities that dont fit within the business focus. Stop doing lists are as important than to do lists. This reminds me of why Apple never put an FM radio in an iPod or iPhone.
    • Technology as accelerator. Technology isn’t a fad that they follow, but apply carefully selected technologies that meat their focus. A classic example of getting this wrong is the way Micro Focus pivoted to cryptocurrency and ended up being bought by rival Open Text. Instead the attitude to technology is down to thoughtfulness and creativity. Contrary to every marketing campaign I did during my first decade in agency life, technology by itself is never a primary cause of greatness (or decline).
    • Good practices are cumulative and compounded in nature. Collins talks about the flywheel effect, the momentum energy required to get it moving requires consistent pressure, but once it gets moving subsequent pressure means that it moves the flywheel at a much faster rate

    Where Good To Great didn’t age well

    The example of Wells Fargo standing out as an exemplar jarred with me. Wells Fargo is cited as a prime example of a great company, but there are examples of a number of cracks in its culture over years

    • Allegations of higher costs charged to African-American and Hispanic borrowers on sub-prime loans which resulted in fines and damages paid totalling 175 million dollars
    • Failure to monitor money laundering
    • Price gouging on overdraft fees
    • National mortgage settlement, the second largest civil settlement in U.S. history
    • Race discrimination in hiring practices

    Good to Great limitations

    Good to Great focuses on American companies, there doesn’t seem to be a consideration of how national culture may have an impact on the firm. Where does China’s wolf culture or Samsung’s punishing culture fit in the kind of model that Collin’s proposes in his book? I don’t know the answer but its a topic worth exploring in a more global business environment. I think that its particularly interesting because Collins’ work has been widely read by Chinese business people, yet their ‘great companies’ look very different to the corporates that Collins cites as good to great in nature.

    In conclusion

    Collins has created useful management book for departments as well as large corporates, which explains why it has been published in so many languages including Spanish and Chinese. What is less apparent in Chinese corporate culture is how influential the book has really been.

    You can find my updated list of professional reading materials here and further book reviews here. Lastly, more on Good to Great here.

  • The Visual MBA

    Jason Barron’s book The Visual MBA looks to distill down business principles into more easily understandable formats. The Visual MBA has been translated into a number of European languages since it was published in 2019, which is a good indicator of the book’s utility. So I thought I would take the time to review The Visual MBA and see how I got on with it and whether it lives up to its premise.

    The Visual MBA

    Areas covered in The Visual MBA

    The content of The Visual MBA is broken down into a number of areas including:

    • Leadership
    • Corporate financial reporting
    • Entrepreneurship (management and financial focus)
    • Management accounting
    • Business finance
    • Marketing
    • Operations management
    • HR
    • Strategy
    • Ethics
    • Decision making
    • Startups

    The book itself is a robust hardback book that would be fine in a daypack lugged around campus. As with any book there are things that could be put in and taken away. My impression of the content is that would be useful to someone studying business at A’level or in the first year of an undergraduate degree. I personally found the marketing section frustrating. Part of the reason for this is that the depth of the subject was barely scratched. Readers were not prompted to even ask the right kind of questions.

    There was nothing that would spur you to read more and read widely. I suspect that this would be the case with the other areas covered by the book as well. It creates the false confidence that would appeal to a surface player. I think that is dangerous for readers and the businesses that they work for.

    Do I think the premise of the book works?

    The book neatly summarises many of the key concepts that would be taught in a general business course and it explains the points in a simple manner. For instance the idea of balance sheets reminded me of the first semester in the first year of my marketing degree in terms of its explanations.

    Where I am less sure of the book’s benefits was whether the illustrations would make me retain any better the content of the book? I will ignore the fact that for some pages the drawings weren’t illustrated but instead representations of the headlines in a hand drawn typography. I might the book beneficial if they were my diagrams that I was sketching in my notes. But I don’t think they have the same effect on a reader of the book.

    In summary I would recommend that one buys the book as a simple guide to business studies or commerce rather than the visual aide memoire that the book seems to promise. If this sounds of interest to you you can get more information here.

  • You Are Here by Phillips & Milner

    This is a book review of You Are Here which provides a critique on the current political media landscape from a predominantly US perspective. I decided to read the book given that it was endorsed by online media researcher and author danah boyd. danah is most famous for her long time researching the online lives of young people. I first came across her when she worked briefly at Yahoo! Research.

    Navigating polarised speech, conspiracy theories and media landscape

    You Are Here is written by two American academics: Whitney Phillips and Ryan M Milner. In the book they try to make sense of the current media landscape and what they consider to be the likely causes.

    You are here

    Ecology as metaphor

    You Are Here uses the metaphor of ecology to discuss a polluted landscape poisoning society. This has two effects:

    • It taps into the deep concerns of their readers who have a lot of anxiety around areas like climate change
    • It encourages system thinking in people who are otherwise not system thinkers

    The downside is that it might convey the kind of desperation and hopelessness that we see around climate change also affect the media landscape creating a kind of dark ennui among the readers.

    Conspiracy theories

    Phillips and Milner focus on conspiracy theories going back the satanist concerns of the 1980s and 1990s. While conspiracy theories are important and memetic in nature, there is a risk that focusing on them misses a wider truth. Why do people feel the way they do? Brexit research showed us that a good deal of concern was about the rate of change and being economically left behind. The role of class and the isolation of working class voices and issues in political discourse and the media left the door open for conspiracy theories.

    Strengths and weaknesses

    You Are Here does a good job at summarising much of the current media theory thinking about how platforms alter our collective perceptions.

    You Are Here describes itself as a field guide. A field guide is a book designed to help readers identify things or phenomena rather than offering solutions per se. The reality is that for most readers, their exposure to the content discussed in the book through the proverbial rear view mirror of coverage on MSNBC News, The New York Times or The Atlantic or conversations with friends and family members who live outside the major cities. There is an assumption that the interested reader is unaware of the current media landscape. In this respect the book is likely to raise anxiety, entrench beliefs and focus the reader on regulation as the sole solution to the current media landscape. I don’t think that this will necessarily move things forward. It will reinforce progressive readers own biases. I recognise and identify with Phillips and Milner’s world view, which is similar to my own – but I have some self awareness of my own viewpoint in a sea of opinions.

    Platforms

    A decade ago I worked with Amy Gershkoff. Amy had previously been involved in the media planning and analytics for the campaign to re-elect President Obama. At the time, the narrative being communicated was that media and social media platforms through the judicious use of data and optimising for algorithms offered the opportunity to help Obama to be re-elected.

    The reality of these things are somewhat different. Programmatic media is often correctly targeting half the time. But when it gets it right, it can be creepy.

    Amy took this story to large corporates in Hong Kong and China, which was where I was working at the time. The irony of ‘the power of modern political campaigning online’ being used as an example of omni-channel marketing for Chinese companies wasn’t lost on me. Phillips and Milner’s stance misses this wider picture.

    The Obama campaign built on pioneering work that has been done by the like of Joe Trippi for Howard Dean when he ran for consideration as the future Democrat presidential candidate eight years earlier.

    The point is that there is a case to be made paraphrasing Goldie Lookin’ Chain ‘Platforms doesn’t poison democracy, people do.’

    Conclusion

    You Are Here tries to articulate a route for individuals to navigate the media environment, rather than building a groundswell to try and change it for the better. I can’t help but feel that there’s an opportunity having been lost and the polarisation will continue.

  • Decoded by Phil Barden

    Decoded was originally written in 2013. I read this version. I know that there is a new edition being published in September 2022. Barden had been a marketer working at T-Mobile (now EE, BT’s mobile phone network), Diageo and Unilever.

    Decoded by Phil Barden

    His background and a foreword written by British marketing grandee Rory Sutherland give an indication of the book’s quality.

    Once more with emotion

    Barden’s background has skewed towards CRM, online marketing and consumer marketing. I disagree with Barden in one important way. Barden doesn’t think that emotion has any benefit in marketing. I agree with Barden to a point, beyond nostalgia, I won’t have an emotional connection with the brand of margarine spread that I buy. The nostalgia is largely out of control of the brand.

    However, both the IPA and WARC have shown that communications that provokes an emotional reaction can build long term awareness over time. Think about the adverts that get stuck in your memory, versus rational adverts. Emotional adverts make you feel something, even if they don’t change your opinion of the product they can build memory structures with enough exposure.

    The challenge as Barden points out, being able to do this consistently. The example that Barden cites is Cadbury’s inability to match the quality of its ‘Gorilla’ advert.

    Getting beyond emotion

    Beyond a difference of opinion on the effect of emotion in communications, I thought that the content in Decoded was very good. The book felt to me as if it was aimed at British junior inhouse brand marketers at the likes of Unilever and Diageo where Barden aimed his stripes. The book is full of British examples, this might limit its success in the US. The examples are already old enough that they might not resonate with marketers who recently left college; but they would leave US readers clueless. While British marketers are often exposed to US authors at the start of their careers like David Aaker and Philip Kotler; the same isn’t true for their American peers of British marketing thinkers.

    I also see it valuable for marketing undergraduate students, with its real world examples. He also does these summary pages at the end of each chapter that reminded me of ‘Dummies Guides‘ format books.

    Decoded covers behavioural science principles and is valuable for the quality of reading list that it provides the reader to delve into after they have read the book.

    Barden dives into the kind of concepts that brand marketers would come across in shopper marketing and ad testing from the likes of Kantar. He provides a sound basis on which marketers can rely to understand, if not, critique their agency’s efforts.

    Beside emotion, my biggest concern is that marketers might think that Decoded is the final step on their education journey, rather than the first step. It provides a useful primer that the engaged marketer can then delve into. Unfortunately for us all, there are a lot of surface player who would declare mission accomplished at this point.

    If like me, you wanted a follow on read from Decoded, my recommendation would be Phil Graves Consumerology, which I reviewed here. Graves’ work nicely fits in with the discussion Barden had on shopper marketing from an expert in the field.

    You can find out more about Decoded here.

  • The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby

    The Power Law lays out VC history

    The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Art of Disruption does for the technology venture capital industry what Accidental Empires and Where Wizards Stay Up Late did for the technologists that they financed.

    The Power Law

    About the author Sebastian Mallaby

    Prior to reading The Power Law Mallaby wasn’t a familiar name to me. Looking into his background I could see why, Mallaby is a Washington Post columnist and specialises in international economics for the Council of Foreign Relations. A perfect CV for a policy wonk. His previous works have included a biography of Alan Greenspan, the World Bank and a book on hedge funds.

    What the book doesn’t cover

    The origins of modern venture capital in the pre-second world war era was through the family offices of people like the Wallenbergs and the Rockefellers. The Power Law only picks up the story post-war and has a distinct US bias in its storytelling.

    Synopsis of The Power Law

    George Doriot

    Mallaby starts the story with Georges Frédéric Doriot and the American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC). What’s interesting Doriot is how he was different from today’s VCs with a focus on patriotism. Doriot is most famous for his funding of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), an enterprise computer company whose mini-computers facilitated the early internet and many business computer systems. At the time of DEC, the Boston area seriously rivalled the Bay Area as the technology centre.

    Treacherous eight

    As the book goes into the story of Arthur Rock and his relationship with the treacherous eight who left Bill Shockley’s lab, this is where many Silicon Valley histories start to coalesce with The Power Law. Mallaby adds a little more, such as the 600x return that both the eight and Rock enjoyed from their investment. At 96, Rock is still alive at the time of writing. He is more recently remembered for his involvement of firing of Steve Jobs from Apple in 1985, a good deal of this came down to his distaste for Jobs informal appearance.

    Sandhill Road

    Arthur Rock and former Doriot student Bill Draper benefited from being in the right place and at the right time. The US government looked to spur innovation as part of the cold war and the Bay Area was were much of this innovation would happen. Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins followed soon after, these names are now central to the Sandhill Road venture capital ecosystem, but in 1972 they were just starting off with businesses like Atari. Atari wasn’t started by experienced business professionals, but by a twenty something who thought meetings in the hot tub were a good idea. Atari marked a point in time when VCs had to become the adults in room, or as Mallaby put it ‘active investors’.

    What I didn’t realise at the time was how early in Kleiner Perkin’s history was their engagement with biotech pioneer Genentech. I didn’t realise that Genentech was funded before Apple and was more a peer of Tandem Computers. Much of the early networking was based on a two-way door between established venture funded firms that were descendants of the treacherous eight and early venture capital firms that employed experienced executives as partners.

    Apple was notable for two reasons. Firstly, venture capital firms operated for the first time rather like an insurance syndicate with several funding the business rather than one large investor. Secondly, the returns on Apple seems to have solidified the model and bought niche financing to a wider awareness beyond the geographic pockets of the technology industry. Where many books like Accidental Empires would use this as a jumping off point to tell the story of the PC industry. The Power Law instead talks about computer networking, this makes sense if one thinks of Metcalfe’s Law as the power law that matters the most in the internet age. The early east coast venture capital community were more cautious than their west coast counterparts, partly because the east coast technology corridor had less of a loose network of connections compared to the west coast. I think that the different business culture of the east coast also had an effect.

    Connectors

    Doerr connected Cypress Semiconductor and Sun Microsystems, two companies that Kleiner Perkins funded so that they would make the SPARC RISC microprocessor. You could put this as the starting point for the golden age of UNIX servers and workstations – which we can trace forward to today’s Mac range and modern Google servers.

    Doerr had attempted other alliances before and in this way we see a different way how Metcalfe’s Law was the power law of the title. VCs has access to several nodes that they could connect together to try and build a technical vision. This is different to the idea we’re usually sold of the tech visionary / company founder a la the Google founders, Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs.

    Meanwhile Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital usurped the founders of Cisco Systems and brought in a new team to run the business bilking the founders out of much of their money. Part of this was down to one of the original Cisco founders being a woman.

    Government money

    The VC industry of the early 1990s capitalised on government money. Netscape was a remake of Mosiac which was the first graphic internet browser software developed in the NCSA software design group. This was part of the government-funded National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. UUNET was a commercial ISP based on the back of the ARPANET email delivery system. As the dotcom boom took off it was the largest ISP and the fastest growing. UUNET eventually became part of MCI WorldCom and then Verizon, where UUNET remains a key part of the Verizon business offering. Both Netscape and UUNET were viewed at VC successes but as The Power Law shows, the reality was more complicated.

    Irrational behaviour

    I thought that the original dot.com boom was irrational behaviour, but I learned from the account of GO Computers a decade or so earlier that irrational behaviour is very much in the blood of venture capital, which explains how we had WeWork and Uber in the 2010s which is where The Power Law finishes its tale. The funny thing about the irrational behaviour is that both the dot com era and the 2010s Softbank appear to have been an accelerant with their late stage momentum approach to venture capital deals which blew valuations on businesses up far beyond what would be reasonably expected otherwise. Softbank gave birth to ‘growth equity’ as a business model that took in many existing and new VC businesses including Russian Israeli Yuri Milner and his DST Ventures business which invested in Facebook, Stripe and GroupOn.

    Paul Graham and Peter Thiel

    Paul Graham was a founder of an ad tech business who then moved over to investing and had a reputation for warning startup founders about the nature of VC funding. It fitted neatly into the ‘John Gaunt’ type narrative that played well with some of his peers like Peter Thiel. The impact of these people setting an ideological agenda of sorts for Silicon Valley founders, together with a plethora of other founders providing seed capital to businesses from Google onwards greatly impacted the freedom of VCs to operate using their previous models and left the industry open for the Softbanks of the world to inflate everything.

    China off-note

    The Power Law offers a largely truimphantist view of the role of VCs such as Sequoia Capital in China. However, this seems to ignore the impact of Chinese VC and angel investors. It also chooses to ignore the negative impact of Xi Jingping.

    Conclusion

    Mallaby illuminates part of Silicon Valley history that I wasn’t familiar with, in particular VCs strategic role in steering technological change during the 1990s. Time has somewhat outpaced the book. The rise of Xi Jingping and the change in attitude towards safety and innovation amongst young Chinese is likely to make the China section look overly optimistic. The end of easy money, at least for the time being will impact the VC industry globally and growth equity looks like a folly during the present time. But if you want to understand how things were The Power Law is the ideal book for you.