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.

  • Beyond Disruption

    Beyond Disruption by W Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne moves their focus from general business strategy in their book Blue Ocean Strategy. You can read my review of Blue Ocean Strategy which I originally read a number of years ago. By contrast this book looks at the idea of non-disruptive innovation. Non-disruptive innovation as a topic makes sense within the blue ocean / red ocean model.

    Beyond Disruption
    Beyond Disruption book cover

    Success has its own challenges.

    Kim and Mauborgne face a Augean literary challenge. Blue Ocean Strategy was so successful at the time, that any subsequent book will look diminished in its success by comparison. Blue Ocean Strategy had something for everyone. To marketers it spoke of differentiation and salience, for business management types it was about differentiation and innovation. Beyond Disruption delves deeper into the nature of that innovation in a way that Blue Ocean Strategy didn’t.

    In Beyond Disruption the authors posit that their blue ocean strategy approach was a blend of disruptive and non-disruptive growth.

    Difficult narratives

    Disruptive innovation by its very nature means destruction of existing businesses as a new one is created. A classic example of this would be the battles between regulators and taxi drivers with Uber, or city governments looking to protect the needs of their citizens from AirBnB. The ideas of Joseph A. Schumpeter fit in with the innovation stories coming out of Silicon Valley. Apple and Google didn’t invent the smartphone, but they came up with a design that captured larger scale consumer interest than Nokia devices and captured the market.

    It is the predominant narrative in the media and business community at the moment around innovation. Disruptive innovation fits in with the conflict driven narrative of business. It is reinforced by adaption of military thinking in a literal manner to business strategy. The authors themselves point out about how much business decision-making is driven by aggression and fear.

    Approach of Beyond Disruption

    The approach of Kim & Mauborgne to ‘nondisruptive creation’ in Beyond Disruption is broken into two parts which cover

    • What it is and why it matters.
    • How to realise nondisruptive creation.

    What it is and why it matters

    Kim and Mauborgne focus a lot of time in the first part of the book explaining the economic and social impact of non-disruptive creation. The idea is that creating new markets doesn’t destroy existing marketplaces. In theory, value will be created on top of the existing economic order, rather than being substitutive in nature.That narrative is largely true, but there are exceptions to bear in mind.

    If we think about the smartphone as a device category, even prior to Apple and Google displacing Nokia, cell phones were displacing existing categories. Sales of answerphones dropped, as did the sales of chocolate to children and the incidence of children smoking. Instead the pocket money was spent on handsets and PAYG (pay as you go) mobile tariffs.

    Beyond Disruption outlines four sources of business advantage to non-disruptive creation:

    • Avoiding direct confrontations with established incumbents.
    • An effective way to respond to full-on disruption.
    • Support from internal stakeholders who will view non-disruptive innovation as less emotionally charged.
    • No evident backlash from external stakeholders.

    The authors see this approach as a way to address the challenges of ESG and the fourth industrial age of automation.

    How to realise non-disruptive creation

    The authors start with the idea of the right perspective. This involves:

    • Leaders moving away from the ‘startup story’ of an innovative founder or co-founder. Instead the problem to be solved needs to be recognised first.
    • Don’t confuse the means with the end.
    • Focus on the many, not the few. Have a product that is likely to be adopted by a range of customers.

    Identifying opportunities is considered in a separate section, the key point of which was the idea of empathetically observing newly emerging or unexplored problems. These ideas can then be explored further by understanding the scale of the challenge (amount of people affected etc) and understand the assumptions others have made that persuaded them to avoid the opportunity.

    In conclusion

    With Beyond Disruption, Kim and Mauborgne are looking to encourage a business more in keeping with the needs of stakeholder capitalism. More on Beyond Disruption here.

  • Tiny Habits

    Tiny Habits is an accessible book by behaviour change expert and academic BJ Fogg. Unlike like his first work Persuasive Technology, Fogg’s Tiny Habits is an easier read for the everyman.

    About BJ Fogg

    I was introduced to the work of BJ Fogg by my colleague Ray Short, who had gone on one of his courses in behaviour change for healthcare that he had run in the US. Fogg is a social scientist who started his research career focusing on ‘Captology’ – short hand for computers as persuasive technology. His courses on captology launched the careers of many of the most successful software product managers and UX designers – including a co-founder of Instagram.

    If you dislike ‘swipe right’, you can blame Fogg and his book Persuasive Technology. Fogg’s interests changed to focus on human behaviour change in general. Research at Stanford looks at how behaviour change can help climate change, health, mental health and reducing screen time.

    Tiny Habits

    Tiny Habits explains BJ Fogg’s lens for designing behaviour change. Rather than thinking about bias’ and how to counteract them, Fogg takes a different approach.

    He focuses on small, concrete change. The change is based on three elements:

    • Motivation
    • Ability
    • Prompt

    He captures this in a formula 

    B (behaviour) = MAP

    Motivation is contextual and varies in intensity, so can’t be necessarily relied upon

    Having a ‘tiny habit change’ reduces the required ability required. In the same way that a project manager would break a project down into much simpler customer elements

    Prompt is about timing the change into an existing habit. For example having your multi-vitamins in your bathroom cabinet, to reduce the difficulty of taking the tablet. And then taking the tablet each day after brushing your teeth in the morning.

    Tiny Habits breaks this process down so that customers and marketers can apply the process, and, also teach it to family members, colleagues or customers. In this respect, it’s much easier to manage than a counter-bias based approach.

    I could see this being particularly powerful wen combined with Phil Graves AFECT consumer research approach: 

    A – Analysis of behavioural data. Does the research look at consumer behaviour or not? If it doesn’t look at some aspect of consumer behaviour, it isn’t valuable.
    F – Where the consumers in the right frame of mind? Where they observed whilst in a retail experience, making a purchase?
    E – Environment. What is the context of the content. Research that isn’t observational / behavioural in nature should at least be done where retail decisions happen. Environment is bound together with frame of mind. 
    C – Covert study. Being aware of being observed affects behaviour. Think about the use of close circuit TV and fisheye mirrors to try and prevent casual shoplifting. 
    T – Timeframe. Did the timeframe of the study match the timeframe that consumers would typically use themselves?

    More on Tiny Habits here; and more book reviews here.

  • James A Micheners Writers Handbook

    Late on in his writing career a bestselling author created James A Micheners Writers Handbook. Now the stuff of thrift shops and the ‘for sale’ trolley in your local library, Michener was a bestselling author for over four decades. His paperback books were the size of doorstops, yet were sold in every airport for holiday reading.

    Writer’s handbook

    At the end of the first Gulf War, George W. Bush quoted one of Michener’s short stories in a celebration of the allied military effort. If you have ever watched the musical South Pacific, that was an adaption of Michener’s first book ‘Tales of the South Pacific‘. Ten of his works were adapted for film by Hollywood and there were a further five TV series or ‘mini-series’.

    Michener died in 1993, but during his life time his books sold an estimated 75 million copies worldwide. There was a distinctive Michener fingerprint to his books:

    • Geography was at the route of everything, the setting was the hero of his books
    • Deep research: Michener would research the culture, history and geology of the setting
    • A common narrative rhythm to his writing
    • Despite running to 1,000+ pages, Michener’s books were easy to read

    The writer’s handbook

    James A Micheners Writers Handbook talks through the process that Michener went through in writing a couple of his works. He talks about using a cut-and-paste methodology, where he physically cut and pasted in paragraphs on to typed sheets. He discusses the move from hot metal typesetting to phototypesetting and its effect on the editorial process.

    Michener’s career saw him move his writing process from mechanical typewriter to word processor and he discusses how this became beneficial to his writing style.

    Michener shows the feedback that he received from the publisher, the editor and even legal review – laying open how once the original draft is submitted to the publisher, creating a novel then becomes a team sport. And that’s even before marketing gets involved.

    This is all laid out including photographs of original manuscript pages and proofing copies in a coffee table book.

    Creating an easy-to-read books was deceptively hard work. The refining process that Michener went through reminded me of creating propositions for a creative brief in my day job.

    At the back of the book is his advice for future writers in terms of paths to getting published. He admitted that getting published had become much harder for a number of reasons:

    • The opportunities to showcase your writing had diminished due to the demise of short story publications
    • Publishers now relied on agents to filter manuscripts on their behalf
    • Writing courses were considered a par for the course
    • Michener recommended a number of careers to kickstart a writing career including working in public relations rather than journalism – which surprised me

    James A Micheners Writers Handbook won’t tell you how to create great stories, but it is a lesson in writing as a multi-stage process of creation, followed by refinement and further simplification of the language. Michener’s idea of simplification is still far more advanced than we write for today in business, in advertising copy or culture.

    The book itself is a bit of a curate’s egg. I would recommend it, but not too sure about who I should recommend it to. More on the book here.

    You can find more book reviews here.

  • Enquire Within + more things

    Enquire Within Upon Everything

    Enquire Within tends to appear in book collections for people of a certain age, or, where the book collector has inherited part of their collection. Spending time on the family farm in Ireland during my childhood, I used to see a copy of an early 20th century vintage sit next to a dog-eared copy of Old Moore’s Almanac (not to be mistaken for a separate UK publication: Old Moore’s Almanack), Old Moore’s was used for deciding what to plant in the garden besides potatoes.

    During the bank holiday weekend, staying with my parents, emergency works on a water main managed to take out the broadband and electricity along their road. I went back though my Dad’s boxes of books and leafed through my parents copy of Enquire Within. My Dad thinks he had received the copy as a gift from a the owner of a second hand book store in Birkenhead market right after he had moved into the first house that my parents had bought. But he can’t be certain. Given that the outer gloss paper wrap around the hardback inner cover uses a font that looks similar to Eurostile and the price is in decimal – I guess it’s from the early to mid-1970s.

    Enquire Within could be thought of as a primer for everyday life. Topics included how to play a variety of card games, basic first aid, the basics on taxation and education with the addresses of the UK government departments responsible. There was a travel section with a few paragraphs on every western European country, which had been written by the Financial Times travel correspondent. The gardening section went into much more depth explaining what a hardy annual and hardy perennial were, alongside the correct way to build a compost heap, how to dig drills and prune roses.

    At the back there is an exhaustive list of children’s names together with their meanings.

    Enquire within

    Enquire Within and the origins of the web

    What I didn’t find out until later on was that Tim Berners-Lee was partly inspired to create a predecessor to what would become the world wide web by a Victorian vintage copy of Enquire Within that was in his parents house when he was growing up. The system was called ENQUIRE and seemed to be similar conceptually to HyperCard or a Wiki. The World Wide Web came out of Berners-Lee’s efforts to integrate disparate systems including ENQUIRE together to facilitate better collaboration between CERN research projects.

    Beauty

    Digital culture is changing our face: How South Korea is inspiring new cosmetic trends | Culture | EL PAÍS English 

    Economics

    MIT Economist Daron Acemoglu Takes on Big Tech: “Our Future Will Be Very Dystopian” – DER SPIEGEL – The rich and powerful have hijacked progress throughout history, says Daron Acemoglu. They did so back in the Middle Ages and also now in the age of artificial intelligence.

    Decoupling isn’t phoney – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion

    Energy

    The Japanese Companies Pursuing a Hydrogen Economy – The Diplomat 

    Bosch starts production of 800V EV technology | EE News Europe 

    Finance

    This video on money laundering is as much of interest for the phenomenon of quality documentaries on YouTube as it is for recycling known truths about HSBC.

    Gadgets

    Global Smartphone Shipments Will Hit Lowest Point in a Decade, IDC Says – CNET – likely to be a mix of market maturity and indicative of inelastic pricing in the premium sector

    Hong Kong

    Language Log » Language and politics in Hong Kong: National Security and the promotion of topolect and Hong Kong national security police target Cantonese language | Quartz 

    Bigger, better, smoother? Hong Kong, Shenzhen border zone blueprint hopes to offer best of both worlds, as Beijing ‘exerts pressure’ to spur cooperation | South China Morning Post – Leonard Chan Tik-yuen, chairman of the Hong Kong Innovative Technology Development Association, said the blueprint amounted to directives from Beijing that told both cities to become more integrated.

    Innovation

    Startup uses MEMS ultrasound to improve audio speaker | EE News Europe 

    Japan

    The Japanese student dorm that governs itself – The Face 

    Marketing

    First-Party Data Is Retail’s Next Growth Engine | BCG and CPGs may have embraced data collaboration, but they need to take it further | LiveRamp | Open Mic | The Drum. Yet more from The Media Leader: Retail media: were we right to get so excited? – The Media Leader  

    Media

    Podcast: Why OOH audiences have not hit a ‘new normal’ yet – with Route’s Denise Turner – The Media Leader

    Changes in the nature of the music industry

    Goldman Sachs Exchange

    Online

    Yahoo, taken private by Apollo Global, finds a new renaissance 

    Retailing

    The Forrester Wave™: Commerce Search And Product Discovery, Q3 2023, Surfaces The Challenges Of AI Unchecked – Don’t let buzzwords distract you from what your customers — and your business — need. Vendors often use their own terminology, especially in a market that hasn’t had a Forrester Wave evaluation in place already. One will talk about how extremely relevant their results are, while another will scoff at “relevancy” as outdated methodology. You’ll hear semantic, vector, hybrid, ML, AI, and all sorts of branded names for products and functions

    Security

    The Cheap Radio Hack That Disrupted Poland’s Railway System | WIRED – the ability to send the command has been described in Polish radio and train forums and on YouTube for years. “Everybody could do this. Even teenagers trolling. The frequencies are known. The tones are known. The equipment is cheap. – This reminds me of the blue boxes used for phone phreaking decades ago.

    I Tracked an NYC Subway Rider’s Movements with an MTA ‘Feature’

    Software

    Adobe’s AI diversity auditor | Patent Drop – is seeking to patent a system for “diversity auditing” using computer vision. Essentially, this system uses facial detection and image classification to break down photos of employees and slot them into categories based on certain physical traits and characteristics. Adobe’s system looks through several images and detects faces in each one, then classifies each face based on a predicted “sensitive attribute” relating to “protected classes of individuals,” such as race, age or gender. For example, Adobe noted, this system may classify images from a company’s website, then compare its predictions to a “comparison population.”

    Technology

    Mexico’s Microchip Advantage | Foreign Affairs – there are significant hurdles to making Mexico a bigger player in supply chains for chips and advanced technologies. The country lacks its Asian rivals’ existing networks of high-technology firms. Until now, investments in the sphere have been sparse. To change this situation, Mexican political and business leaders need a clearer strategy for attracting semiconductor investment. The dividends, both for Mexican industry and for U.S. supply chain security, could be significant. Today’s large-scale shift away from China-focused assembly operations offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a more fully integrated North American semiconductor and electronics supply chain. Despite the United States’ major involvement in many segments of the chip industry, there is at present hardly any semiconductor packaging or assembly in the country and very little anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere. The United States maintains a leading role in R&D-intensive segments of the semiconductor industry, including chip design and manufacturing equipment. The CHIPS Act is intended to increase the amount of chip fabrication in the United States. Yet neither the United States nor any country in the Western Hemisphere plays a major role in the final stages of the chip manufacturing process—assembly, testing, and packaging (ATP)—in which semiconductors are tested and assembled into sophisticated packages. The Western Hemisphere also does relatively little assembly of advanced electronic systems that require a lot of chips, such as consumer electronics.

    Web of no web

    Surfings equivalent of a dive computer: Search GPS Test User Signup

  • Deluxe – how luxury lost it’s lustre

    I had this copy of Deluxe on my shelf for a while and finally managed got round to reading it. Deluxe – how luxury lost its lustre was written by Dana Thomas. Dana knows the subject that she’s talking about.

    Deluxe by Dana Thomas

    Dana Thomas

    Dana Thomas is a Paris-based journalist who covered the fashion industry. Thomas started her journalistic career writing for the ‘style’ section of The Washington Post. For a decade and a half Thomas was a cultural and fashion correspondent for Newsweek in Paris. She has contributed to The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Architectural Digest. Deluxe is one of three books that she has written, the other is Fashionopolis, which focuses on the fast fashion industry and Gods and Kings covered the career of fashion designers Alexander McQueen and John Galliano.

    Deluxe – How Luxury Lost its Lustre

    In the introduction starts with a scatter gun approach. She bemoans Gucci and Burberry factory seconds on sale in China, revealing the global supply chain used by luxury brands now. She also criticises that luxury goods are used as currency by some sex workers from compensated dating to ‘returning gifts’ and pocketing the difference minus a restocking fee.

    I get the sense that Thomas would like to see these companies remain small ‘secrets’ only known by a cosmopolitan cognoscenti, obviously including herself. What my younger peers would call ‘gatekeeping’ in a derogatory way.

    Parasite singles

    Most of Thomas’ ire focuses on Louis Vuitton early on. She describes Bernard Arnaud in unflattering terms and makes the globalisation of the brand sound like a mix of a happy accident and opportunity. Along the way she critiques the weakness of Japanese society’s love for luxury goods down to subtle social signalling and ‘parasite singles’ – young women living at home with their parents who spend their disposable income on luxury goods.

    (The reality is that could be young people with a job in Spain or Italy either as east Asians and Southern Europeans tend to only move out of home to marry or to follow work or education.)

    Japanese tourists took their luxury shopping abroad, taking advantage of duty-free shopping. It’s no coincidence that LVMH owns DFS (Duty Free Shopping) outlets across America and the Pacific rim. Some of the lessons that DFS and LVMH learned selling to Japanese luxury buyers, such last late closing, you can still see in showrooms across the Asia Pacific region.

    Jumping from Japanese duty free shoppers in Hawaii, Thomas moves on to the connection between a generation of Italian designers and Hollywood. Richard Gere’s star power was as much down to his styling making him look the part by Giorgio Armani as it was to his considerable acting prowess.

    From Hollywood, the book delves into the perfume operations of the design houses. It highlights how perfume formulation moved from being an in-house activity for design houses to being outsourced to a few specialists companies who work with a ‘creative brief’.

    Quality issues

    The area where I can agree most with Thomas is around the decline in quality of luxury goods. Deluxe approaches this from the different tactics that luxury companies have used to conceal their use of Chinese factories. However as Apple has shown, made in China doesn’t necessarily mean cheap or poorly made. Indeed, a decade and a half after Deluxe was written, we’re seeing local luxury brands displacing international luxury brands in the Chinese market for several reasons, usually explained using the term ‘guo chao‘.

    Thomas estimates that there at least four factories in China who manufacture most of the luxury industry’s handbags and leather goods – alongside private label brands for department stores and supermarkets. I was surprised that even back in 2004, manufacturing in China only saved 30 percent of the bill of materials.

    The book goes on to cover the cost cutting that has gone into luxury products, from clothes with cheap stitching, skipped tailoring such as no lining in jackets and dresses. Thomas highlights that these changes happened to allow luxury to go mass market. Luxury then followed customers out of the office or the salon into all aspects of their life including sportswear and ‘streetwear’. What my friend Jeremy calls the ‘Supremification’ of luxury.

    The reliance on the mass market bought about two challenges in Thomas’ eyes:

    • Counterfeit products that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing by experts
    • Rockier finances for the large luxury corporates who are no longer sheltered from economic cycles by the continued spending of ultra high net worth individuals.

    The future

    Thomas left us with two parts to what we saw the future of luxury looking like:

    • The continued pursuit of emerging markets with India replacing China due to demographics.
    • The new luxury of industry specialists spinning off and creating new houses, because they were jaded with the existing business practices and structures. The book highlights Tom Ford; who recently gave up his label and sold it on in November 2022 to cosmetics business Estée Lauder and fellow fashion house Ermenegildo Zegna.

    In summary

    Dana Thomas’ Deluxe is a book of its time in the early to mid 2000s. Thomas clearly has some bias’ due to history with some of the protagonists, which is worthwhile bearing in mind. The historical part of the book is useful; but the luxury industry has moved on and in some ways the problems are now much worse. With those provisos in mind, I can recommend the book as a background read on the luxury sector.

    More book reviews here.