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.
Haidt is a social psychologist by training and currently serves as professor of ethical leadership at New York University Stern School of Business. I heard an interview with Haidt on the the dark psychology of social networks and this book came up which was the key reason why I bought it.
Greg Lukianoff
Lukianoff is a lawyer by training and president of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a US based group that free speech rights on college campuses. If it was Lukianoff on his own I would likely dismiss this book as partisan.
Premise of The Coddling of the American Minds
In The Coddling of the American Mind Haidt and Lukianoff discuss factors that are affecting the resilience of young people emerging from colleges in the US.
They suggest a number of factors for the increasing intolerance and threats to American life from the left and the right.
Intimidation and violence on campus – the book highlights examples on both the left and right of the political spectrum. Violence by left wing protestors at Berkeley was particularly disturbing due to the lack of action by law enforcement
Witch hunts against academics
Self reinforcing cycle of political polarisation
Paranoid parenting compared to the latch-key parenting that older people would have been used to growing up
The decline of outdoor play
Safetyism – the move of safety culture from improving physical safety promoted by the likes of Ralph Nader (safer workplaces, no lead paint on toys etc) to encompass mental and emotional safety as a priority
The quest for justice. The complexity of how you define justice is important
Haidt and Lukianoff are of the opinion that you need to prepare people for life and to be resilient. That this approach doesn’t detract from the desire to change the world seems to be ignored by advocates of the status quo.
How the book has been received?
The Financial Times generally praised the book and it ended up on the New York Times bestsellers list.
The book was perceived as an attack on progressive liberal values by some reviewers, whereas I think it wasn’t attack on those values, but the means by which they are being pursued. It confronts the hard truth that there is intolerance at both ends of the political spectrum and a lack of dialogue.
It has been five years since The rise and fall of American growth was written by Robert J Gordon. When it was first published it was a New York Times bestseller and won awards from the FT and McKinsey. I felt that it was particularly interesting to go back and visit now, given current economic circumstances and the view that its data provides on the techno-optimism versus techno-pessimism that is currently raging on.
Understanding the author’s perspective
Robert J Gordon developed his career as an economist in a crucible. He started his career during a time of battle between Keynesian and the monetarist supporting economists. Keynesian ideas had reached their peak in the 1950s. It was challenged by economists such as Milton Friedman and George Stigler. Both of whom were from the Chicago School. The Chicago School was the University of Chicago. It became a centre for economic conservativism. The Chicago School At his time, drew on the likes of Hayek for its ideas.
Gordon became a ‘New Keynesian’. They assume that there is imperfect competition in price and wage setting to help explain why prices and wages can become “sticky”. They do not adjust instantaneously to changes in economic conditions. Wage and price stickiness, and the other market failures present in their models, imply that the economy may fail to achieve full employment. They argue that macroeconomic stabilisation by the government and the central bank leads to a more efficient macroeconomic outcome than a laissez faire policy would.
American growth and techno-optimism
The techno-optimism viewpoint is that continuing technology innovation is going to bring about a new golden age. There are essays trading perspectives on this back-and-forth.
Gordon’s research suggests that the kind of growth suggested by techno-optimists as an outcome is usually because of very special circumstances.
When he looked at American growth through the 19th century; growth had occurred in short spurts and much of it wasn’t driven by technology, but was multiple factors coming together. He further posits that those factors that drove American growth are unlikely to be repeated in the future.
The last spurt of this growth was during the irrational exuberance of the dot com era.
As you’d expect from an economist, Gordon pulls together to support his ideas very carefully and it is based on empirical analysis. IT has driven little economic growth, which makes one wonder about the benefits of digital transformation as touted by management consultancies.
Gordon’s work is also an argument against globalisation, at least for the American economy. It brings into question the American dream.
Finally, with technology unlikely to drive the kind of stellar growth promised, it brings into question the massive premium set on growth stocks over the long term and venture capital investments in the technology sector and the current Silicon Valley model.
Gordon’s current research is focused on looking at European and American growth so it will be interesting to see commonalities and differences. I expect to see a spurt of growth from second generation mobile devices that freed up small businesses by providing an instantaneous connection with the customer. Rather than relying on an answer machines or a member of their family as receptionist.
Get Tough is a book on hand-to-hand fighting originally published in 1942. It is important for what it represents as much as it is with regards its content.
Fairbairn as an author
By the time Get Tough was written in 1942; Fairbairn was an experienced published author. In 1926, Fairbairn wrote the book Defendu. This was a step-by-step guide to Fairbairn’s fighting system that distilled his experience in street fights, alongside the jujuitsu he learned from early Japanese teachers that went abroad. In this respect Fairbairn, was similar to the Gracie family in Brazil, Imi Lichtenfeld’s Krav Maga and the Soviet founders of SAMBO. Globalisation drove hybrid fighting styles. Something we’d later see with mixed martial arts in general.
Defendu as a title didn’t catch on that well as a title so it was republished as Scientific Self-Defence in 1931.
The second world war resulted in Fairbairn’s most prolific period as an author. He wrote Shooting to Live with a colleague and firearms expert Eric Sykes. All-In Fighting was written by Fairbairn as a manual in close quarters combat. Though a section on using firearms in a close up situation was contributed by P.N. Walbridge.
Get Tough was an American and Australian edition of All-in Fighting, but without the section by P.N. Walbridge. Where All-in Fighting was aimed at the soldiers Fairbairn and his colleagues taught, Get Tough looked to appeal to a wider audience.
Fairbairn provided an edited version of his work called Self Defence For Women and Girls, which is about a quarter of the pages of Get Tough. There was also an American edition retitled Hands-Off!
Fairbairn managed to write the book whilst training British commandos. Fairbairn and Sykes had a falling out sometime in 1942 and were never reconciled. Fairbairn took his expertise to to the US and Canada. Sykes carried on teaching in the UK.
Get Tough and colonialism
Get Tough was a distillation of experience that Fairbairn had in Korea and then later in Shanghai. As a member of the Shanghai Municipal Police he had been involved in hundreds of fights with local and international residents of the port city.
The experience led to Fairbairn to play a role in developing:
Anti-riot techniques
Police sniping techniques with Eric Sykes
The Defendu fighting style
Two types of knives. The Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife. A slender but sharp double sided stiletto blade designed the weapon to strike at the vulnerable parts of an opponent’s body, especially the vital organs. The original version was known as the Shanghai knife and had a 6 inch blade. It was likely part of the cache of illegal weapons that Fairbairn and Sykes brought back to the UK from Shanghai during the war. The military versions were 1.5 inches longer, to get through winter clothing. The Smachet, a large broad knife almost like a machete or a Roman sword
Fairbairn’s work was based on the health and lives of colonial subjects. Fairbairn often enjoys exclusive credit for this work, but the reality was that it was a collaborative effort from several officers in the Shanghai Municipal Police including Eric Sykes and Dermot O’Neill. The Shanghai Municipal Police was what modern organisational theorists would have termed a ‘learning organisation’.
Part of this learning culture was forced upon them by events. The Shanghai Municipal Police killed four members of a protest in May 1925 because they didn’t have enough police on duty to manage a demonstration. This felt rather similar to the Amritsar shootings of 1919, which shattered support for British rule in India by both Indians and people in the UK.
This led to the Shanghai Municipal Police founding the first modern SWAT team called the reserve unit; this unit was also responsible for modern methods of policing riots.
The Get Tough legacy
Defendu had been taught to hundreds of policemen who rotated through Shanghai before the second world war. They then went on to work in other outposts of the British Empire in a policing or military capacity.
When Sykes and Fairbairn brought their particular set of skills back to the UK in 1940. They were put to work training commandos and and secret agents in their skills. These skills were taught to military age men and women, the women were predominantly going to be dropped by parachute into occupied Europe.
Again hundreds, if not thousands of people passed through the schools that they ran in Scotland and the south coast of England. Some of the people who went through those schools were from overseas. When they eventually went home, the ideas and training that they learned went with them and were put to use. At first trying to retain colonial rule. Then later, building up nascent special forces units including units from the US, Belgium, Holland, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.
Over time these countries evolved their techniques to match modern war, but the principles where still there.
After the second world war, the colonial policemen of the Shanghai Municipal Police who survived scattered across the British empire. Fairbairn went to Cyprus to train police in his techniques. He then ran two sessions in Singapore for the newly formed riot squad unit.
The contents of Get Tough
Fairbairn wrote Get Tough for a wide range of readers, not just the military as Fairbairn himself said:
It is not the armed forces of the United Nations alone who can profit by learning about how to win in hand-to-hand fighting. Every civilian, man or woman, who ever walks a deserted road at mid-night, or goes in fear of his life in the dark places of a city, should acquaint himself with these methods.
Releases – how to get out of holds by an assailant
Holds
Throws
Miscellaneous advice – mostly covering improvised weapons from things at hands
Use of the knife – Fairbairn talks about using the Sykes-Fairbairn fighting knife
The Smatchet – use of a short machete type weapon designed by Fairbairn
Disarming an opponent of his pistol
If you’ve trained in a martial art, you’ll have done drills of some sort like katas in karate. Fairbairn’s work doesn’t have drills per se. The idea is that if you do the hold or the blow, you are unlikely to need follow up.
I was recommended Measure What Matters by my friend and fellow ex-Yahoo Cathy Ma. Cathy found the book useful in her way through managing teams. In Measure What Matters, John Doerr explains the idea of objectives and key results or OKRs.
About John Doerr
If you’ve worked in or around the Silicon Valley technology space from the PC age through to the 2010s Doerr’s name will have a passing familiarity to you. Doerr was a salesman at Intel in the 1970s, realised that there were too many good people ahead of him and took an over in venture capital instead. Doerr was involved in funding:
Compaq – Compaq kicked off the market for ‘IBM compatible’ PCs and made the first portable ‘IBM compatible’ PC. Soon after IBM was no longer the dominant player in personal computing leading to the Wintel duopoly. Compaq eventually offered a full range of large servers, workstations and PC when it acquired Digital Equipment Corporation and Tandem Computing. Compaq was in turn bought by H-P
Netscape – Netscape Communications mainstreamed the internet browser, email client, web servers and email servers. The server software lives on in Oracle’s product line via the Netscape – Sun Microsystems alliance. The browser indirectly carried on through an open source project Mozilla
Symantec – Symantec started off as a natural language processing company in the early 1980s, it became famous for its Mac antivirus software and then went into the DOS and Windows market after merging with Peter Norton Computing. It now has a consumer facing business called NortonLifeLock and the business focused software part of the business was sold to Broadcom
Sun Microsystems – Sun Microsystems started off as a UNIX workstation manufacturer. Over time they built up a healthy server and software business that supported much of the infrastructure of the web. They were instrumental in the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix – which influenced parts of the macOS that I am typing this post on, RISC processors in your smartphone, thin client computing like Google Docs, and virtualised computing that is instrumental for cloud computing. Sun Microsystems workstations were popular with investment banks, telecoms companies and internet startups bought their servers. The company’s decline can be marked by the dot com crash. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and their technology lives on
drugstore.com – was a first generation e-tailer in health and beauty products. Walgreens bought the business in 2011, and shut down the website five years later.
Amazon.com – needs no introduction
Intuit – Intuit sells financial software in the US. TurboTax helps Americans do their tax returns, Mint provides a personal finance dashboard for consumers and QuickBooks is accounting software for small and medium sized businesses
Macromedia – Macromedia was a software company that developed tools for creatives and programmers. It was eventually acquired by Adobe. Macromedia products live on in the Adobe product range
Google – the search engine.
About OKRs
For all of the companies that Doerr has funded he has advocated OKRs. The idea of OKRs came from Doerr’s colleague at Intel Andy Grove. OKRs are a collaborative process. The idea is that it is used with teams and the individuals who make up the teams. Management seeks to set challenging, ambitious goals with measurable results. The key results in OKRs are how you track progress towards the objective, create alignment within the team, and encourage engagement around measurable goals. They are also supposed to flex with circumstance, which is one of the key points of separation from Peter Drucker’s management by objectives (MBO).
The first part of the book Measure What Matters explains the origin and process behind OKRs.
You can get everything that you need in the first two chapters covering 35 pages.
The Cult of OKR
The rest of the book is a series of self aggrandising endorsements of OK from senior executives who are OKR advocates:
Larry Page of Alphabet
Bill Davidow of Intel
Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook
Bill Gates on The Gates Foundation
It crosses the line for me and almost reads like a high water mark for Silicon Valley hubris; Doerr’s book was published in 2018. Three years later and:
Bill Gates is in the most trouble he has been in since the Judge Jackson ruling
Alphabet and Facebook are being assailed by regulators around the world
Intel looks like a shadow of its former self. Its fabrication process are three years behind competitors. Customers are designing their own chips and AMD is eating their lunch in high performance processors
Secondly, Doerr’s book, whilst acknowledging Andy Groves role of OKR creator; fails to acknowledge that Andy gave a good descriptor of OKRs in his 1983 book High Output Management.
I think one of the reasons that I am not that keen on Measure What Matters, is that the book doesn’t work for culturally as a non-American. Instead I would recommend Andy Grove’s own book High Output Management. More books that might be of interest here.
The Exponential Era is a business strategy book published by the IEEE Press as part of its series on technology, innovation and leadership. David Espindola and Michael Wright work at Intercepting Horizons and advise at the University of Minnesota.
The book is a concise 182 pages including its index. It has a satisfying hard cover about the height and width of a paperback book. The book proportions reminded of many of the books that we used to have my secondary school’s library. It felt right in my hand. Its a small thing, but it matters.
The secondary school analogy goes further; the book summarises knowledge and makes it relatively easily digestible.
The Exponential Era includes:
The threat of platforms and their ability to disrupt market sectors
Why people find it hard to grasp the change brought about by the future
The book consolidates the kind of reading that people in technology and marketing would likely have read anyway. Chances are if you’ve already read books like Saving Big Blue, Measure What Matters, The Lean Startup and Zero to One, then The Exponential Era isn’t written for you.
Who should read this book?
Instead this book seems to be an increasingly diminished audience. A company too small for it’s management to have been lectured on disruption by McKinsey, Bain, BCG or Accenture. But still large enough to be concerned. Like McKinsey et al Espindola and Wright are looking to create disruption fear and sell their SPX methodology to re-engineer their business. I would have thought the c suite in most businesses would have at least done enough reading to have a high level understanding of the content in the book.
The book’s relentless utopian optimism reminded me a lot of business works from the 1970s to the dot com era. I think that The Exponential Era will be of most use to junior people at the start of their career looking for a primer rather than its intended audience.
