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.

  • The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

    It’s been nine years since Taleb wrote The Black Swan. Like Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man before it, The Black Swan is widely cited and paid lip service to.

    The timing of publication for Taleb was particularly pertinent as the book became popular as the financial system broke down in 2008. Some eight years later, the economy has limped along as financial issues were punted into the future, rather like a child kicking a can down an alley. Like the can, the financial issues are still here to be ran into. I thought it was time to re-read Taleb’s book.

    Taleb’s work is philosophical rather than scientific in its method. Although he avoids the talk show friendly cliches of Malcolm Gladwell or Seth Godin. Much of our world is based around the normal distribution, it is used by insurance companies and pension funds to access risk and longevity. Taleb points out that the really big changes that rock the boat often don’t fit neatly within these models.

    Taleb’s solution boils down to two things

    1. A defensive skepticism that would encourage the average person to question common wisdom and ask ‘what if’
    2. For those that can afford it, an offensive posture that asks ‘what if’ and has a mix of savings or investments most of which is put in very safe vehicles and 15 per cent or so on high risk speculative investments to take advantage of change

    Taleb’s work doesn’t seem to have had the impact that one would have expected just five years ago when it was quoted as a touchstone to modern life.

    Much of the excess and risk that had happened previously is happening again, despite a plethora of disruptive forces laid out in the media.

    Audiences are paying too much attention to listicles that go something along the line of ‘5 habits you need have to be like Bill Gates’. Where is the critical filter? More books reviewed here.

    More information

    McMansions Are Back And Are Bigger Than Ever – There was a small ray of hope just after the Lehman collapse that one of the most lamentable characteristics of US society – the relentless urge to build massive McMansions (funding questions aside) would have subsided
    The market’s most crowded trades could be causing dangerous bubbles – Business Insider
    Many Middle-Class Americans Are Living Paycheck to Paycheck – The Atlantic
    Economic Conditions Snapshot, March 2016: McKinsey Global Survey results | McKinsey & Company
    Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley – The New York Times – Mr. Grove contrasted the start-up phase of a business, when uses for new technologies are identified, with the scale-up phase, when technology goes from prototype to mass production. Both are important. But only scale-up is an engine for job growth — and scale-up, in general, no longer occurs in the United States. “Without scaling,” he wrote, “we don’t just lose jobs — we lose our hold on new technologies” and “ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.
    Crap IT means stats crew don’t really know how UK economy’s doing • The Register – and people make accusations about Chinese economic data…
    Return of ‘100% mortgages’ ease burden on Bank of Mum and Dad | FT

  • Heavens Bankers by Harris Irfan

    I was given Heavens Bankers to read as a friend. I can’t say I had thought that much about Islamic finance before. I knew that it had a couple of patches of ‘heat’ behind it in the banking sector. One was in the late 1990s. It then took a back seat post-911 and took off again as Dubai boomed.

    It helps that Harris was not only an insider, but passionate about banking in its widest sense. He’s also sickening polymath who is a top flight racing driver.

    History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends. – Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

    Irfan delves into the intricacies of how modern Islamic finance grew and contracted. The industry he provides us an inside view of is now worth a trilliion dollars.  The start of history like most things were pretty straight forward. As the industry grew more arcane and complex financial instruments became the norm. This reminded me of a lot of Mark Lewis’ Liar’s Poker. Lewis dealt with bonds and modern derivatives became so complex customers didn’t understand them. The Savings and Loans debacle of 1985-1996 foreshadowed subprime mortgages.

    Where Irfan really excels for the non-banker as reader is in his ability to break down the basics. He takes the concepts many of us learned in business or economics classes back into pre-medieval history. He provides a historical perspective on modern capitalism as we know it. So the book becomes invaluable regardless of how you feel about the current economic system. The background gives you a more informed perspective. More on Heavens Bankers here. More book reviews here.

  • Chinas Coming War With Asia

    Chinas coming war with Asia – provocative title

    Chinas Coming War With Asia: where do I start with a book title this inflammatory? I went to the trouble of reading the book twice before starting this review. In the end, the only conclusion I can come to is ‘Policy Faultlines in East Asia’ doesn’t have the same ring to it.

    Chinas coming war with Asia is one of those books that you shouldn’t judge too harshly by its cover, but by Jonathan Holsag’s writings.
    Untitled

    About the book

    Holsag marshals a huge range of facts and opinions within the book. If you want to have a basic understanding of the modern Chinese state, then this book is a good primer.

    He provides insight into the Chinese Communist’s Party’s policy cornerstone of territory maximisation. They were happy to put off their agenda for tactical advantage, but never gave up on their goals. China’s neighbours have similar inflexible policy goals. There is is no win-win solution. This is very interesting given the treaty

    Time has brought increased pressures. A fight for resources to fuel further growth and water rights conflicts. Relative declines in economic growth also fuels nationalistic politics. In China, nationalistic sentiments in citizens grew with prosperity. It has become convenient for politicians to tap into nationalistic sentiments.

    Holsag doesn’t attempt to provide a solution for de-escalation of these edges. His book only provides a macro-level understanding of the countries involved. For the reader who wants to understand Asia, Holsag’s book is an excellent primer.  More on Chinas Coming War With Asia by Jonathan Holsag. More book reviews here.

  • Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte

    Strictly speaking this is a bit different from when I have written about books. This is the second time that I read Being Digital, the first time was during my final year in college.
    iss045e034659
    I was curious to know how the book would hold up in the space of 20 years since it was first published. In twenty years we’ve seen televisions shrink as we moved from cathode ray tubes to plasma and LCD displays. The cost of telephone calls has declined, cellphones are really no longer phones but a type of mobile computer that happens to do voice calls poorly. The dominant form of personal computing is Android rather than Windows. The internet has facilitated a raft of services that used to exist in the real world or didn’t exist previously.

    In the subsequent 20 years Negroponte has gone from being one of digital’s poster children with a column in Wired and his leading role at MIT Media Lab to a more obscure position in digital history. His biography over at MIT has him listed as sitting on the board of Motorola Inc.

    It is easy to dismiss his showmanship and bluster, but the Negroponte did work that foreshadowed in-car sat navigation devices, Google Street View and the modern stylus-less touch screen.

    The book first of all emphasises how far we have come when it talks about 9600 baud connections, I am writing this post sat on the end of an internet connection that provides 50mbps download and 10mbps upload – and that’s slow compared to the speeds that I enjoyed in Hong Kong. Negroponte envisioned that satellites would have a greater role in internet access than it seems to currently have, cellular networks seem to have brought that disruption instead.

    It has the tone of boundless optimism that seemed to exemplify technology writing in the mid-to-late 1990s but with not quite the messianic feel of peer George Gilder. Negroponte smartly hedges his bets for where the ‘rubber hits the road’ as society brings some odd effects in on technology usage.

    Online media

    Negroponte grasped the importance of digital and the internet as a medium for the provision of media content. That sounds like a no brainer but back in the day the record industry didn’t get it. In fact record industry went on to make blockbuster profits for another five years, N’Sync was the best selling artist of the year in 2000 with No Strings Attached selling 9.94 million copies. Over the next decade or so profits halved in the face of determined record label countermeasures including suing their customers.

    OTT and cord cutting

    Negroponte was dismissive of high definition video and television considering it wasteful of bandwidth. On this I get the sense that he is both right and wrong. We are surrounded by high definition screens (even 4K mobile screens – where their size doesn’t allow you to appreciate the full clarity of the image). But this doesn’t mean that our entertainment has to come in high definition, much YouTube isn’t watched on full screen for instance.

    Disruption of publishing

    Negroponte grasped that it would also shake up the book industry and Being Digital has been published in a number of e-book reader formats, but at the moment the experience of digital books leaves something to be desired compared to traditional books.

    Tablets

    Negroponte labours a surprising amount of copy on tablet devices. At the time that he published his book GO was in competition with Microsoft with pen computing devices and software, EO had launched their personal communicator – a phablet sized cellular network connected pen tablet and the first Apple Newton had launched in 1993. Negroponte goes on to insist that the finger is the best stylus. MIT Media Lab had done research on the stylus-less touch experience, but reading the article reminded me of the points Steve Jobs had made about touch on the original iPhone and iPad.  It is also mirrored in the Ron Arad concepts I mentioned in an earlier blog post.

    Agents

    Negroponte considered that we would be supported in our online lives with agents that would provide contextual content and do tasks, which is where Google Now, Siri and Cortana have tried to go. However his writing implies an agent that is less ‘visible’ and in the face of the user.

    Negroponte’s critique of virtual reality at the time provides good insight as to how much progress Oculus Rift and other similar products have made. He points out the technical and user experience challenges really well. If anyone is thinking about immersive experiences, it is well worth a read.

    Going back and reading the book provided me an opportunity reflect on where we have come to in the past twenty years and Negroponte’s instincts where mostly right.

    More information

    Nicholas Negroponte – biography | MIT Media Lab

  • Cultural Strategy

    I was recommended Cultural Strategy by a client to ‘better help understand their business’. The book is an accessible easy read as business books go. Cultural Strategy is written as a mix of theory and illustrative case studies. In the book, it’s authors Holt and Cameron propose that culture can be a key defining factor in business success:

    • An organisation culture can make it more resilient or innovative providing a clearly differentiated experience between a brand and its competitors in the eyes of consumers. Their concept of cultural orthodoxy is similar to the red ocean strategy, where companies in mature sectors tend to look alike.
    • By understanding consumers and the cultural context of the product or service, a market opportunity can be found. This is essentially what a good planner does in an advertising agency, but the Doug’s look to bake this into the organisation rather than having it as a wrapper at the end of the product process

    This meshes in quite neatly with work by marketers like Byron Sharp, Les Binet and Peter Fields that show a distinctive differentiated brand is key to success. It would make sense for the company culture to be part of the brand. An example of this would be someone like Patagonia. But it could also be applied to the B2B space. Salesforce would be a good exemplar.

    Where is might fall down is when you have a ‘house of brands’ company; like usually happen in the FMCG sector. And this is why there has been so much focus on brand purpose.

    After reading the book, I am still no wiser about my client was trying to say about their business; but that was more about them than my reading material. This story however emphasises an important point, what may be perceived as a cultural innovation internally in a company may not manifest itself as brand innovation or even a differentiated position. More related book reviews here.

    More information

    Cultural Strategy by Holt and Cameron
    Cultural Strategy Group