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 reviewThe Visual MBA and see how I got on with it and whether it lives up to its premise.
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.
Before there were minivans, MPVs (multi-purpose vehicles) and people carriers there was the the Peugeot 505 estate. It had three rows of seats. As a child, I remember that the diesel version was used for private hire cars transporting families to the airport and similar uses. At the time, private hire companies used to have names like ‘Airport Express’ and other terms. This was decades before Addison Lee or Uber. The Peugeot 505 could still be seen in Africa and the middle east well into the 2010s, which gives you an idea of how robust the Peugeot 505 and the relative simplicity of repair. It was Peugeot’s last rear wheel drive vehicle. The Peugeot 505 could be found in turbo and GTi versions and was converted by Dangel to become a port-SUV. Four wheel drive, but a monocoque chassis rather than the frame-and-ladder structure still used by serious four wheel drive vehicles like the old model Land Rover Defender, and current Toyota Land Cruiser, Lexus LX and Toyota Hilux pick-ups.
Consumer behaviour
The Secret to Being Lucky | WIRED – we’re only as lucky as we think we are. We only find luck when we look for it. Better still—for those who like action items—luck begets luck. You look for sunny weather, you’re more likely to find it; you find it, you come to think you’re lucky; you try your luck looking for more sunny weather and you luck out again. In Aeon magazine, Hales wrote, “Luck might not be a genuine quality of the world at all.” Fine. But neither is beauty or justice. At the same time, the Bloomsburg researchers discovered “a significant positive correlation” between people’s temperaments and how lucky they thought others were. “One of the things this means is that the more optimistic you are, the more you think others are lucky.” For “optimistic,” I might substitute “happy-go-lucky.”
The airline lounge has arrived at destination undignified | Comment | The Sunday Times – It’s summer 2022, a weekday morning and at Heathrow terminal 2 the “fast track” is closed to premium travellers (lack of staff) and, over at terminal 5, passengers are confusing the BA lounge with a branch of M&S, an adult daycare centre and their living rooms. Buffets are raided and carry-ons filled with cans and bottles, grown men and women are wandering around in what they think is chic athleisure but is really just synthetic jammies, trainers are propped up on tables and every other passenger seems to be suffering from an overheating crotch as legs are splayed wide open. – nice summation of British consumer behaviour
Audi’s digital matrix headlights: do they work? | CAR Magazine – I would not of thought that DLP chips would find their way into car headlights to provide a MEMS powered version of the old swivelling headlights that I remember of Peugeots of the 1990s
Sony will work with Honda to build EVs | CAR Magazine – If I had the money and was in the market I would be happy buying a Sony branded car – a ‘Sony Driveman’ if you will. It makes sense that Honda would partner for electric vehicles. I think that this and Toyota and Hyundai‘s separate hydrogen programmes are a couple of the most exciting developments at the moment
Amazon acquires Roomba maker iRobot for $1.7bn | Financial Times – Amazon is in a tussle with the European Commission over the placement of its own-brand products on its platform. Antitrust regulators suggested Amazon was using its size, power and data to prioritise its own items over competing merchants on its ecommerce platform. The commission is seeking views by September 9 on concessions offered by the tech company that aim to address the issues raised – what will the iRobot purchase tell Amazon about the inside of our homes?
Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google. :: Reasonably Polymorphic – The primary purpose of the web today is “engagement,” which is Silicon Valley jargon for “how many ads can we push through someone’s optical nerve?” Under the purview of engagement, it makes sense to publish webpages on every topic imaginable, regardless of whether or not you know what you’re talking about. In fact, engagement goes up if you don’t know what you’re talking about; your poor reader might mistakenly believe that they’ll find the answer they’re looking for elsewhere on your site. That’s twice the advertising revenue, baby! But the spirit of the early web isn’t gone: the bookmarks I’ve kept these long decades mostly still work, and many of them still receive new content. There’s still weird, amateur, passion-project stuff out there. It’s just hard to find. Which brings us to our main topic: search. This fits in really interesting with The Founder of GeoCities on What Killed the ‘Old’ Internet | Gizmodo
Security
On cruise missiles and precision weapons. There is an interesting paradox between usage and the very slow replacement rates for missiles which affects Russia and western powers.
Software
Tracking the Faceless Killers who Mutilated and Executed a Ukrainian POW – bellingcat – Using the face of the main person of interest, the website search4faces returned a profile on Odnoklassniki, a Russian social network, which contained this individual’s name. This, in turn, allowed researchers to discover a Facebook profile linked to this individual which contained more photographs – these were useful, given that most images of this individual on his other social media profiles were at least six years old. A search on PimEyes using a photograph from this Facebook account returned frames from the aforementioned RIA and RT videos in which the person of interest was visible. As seen in the perils of widely-spread misidentification on Twitter, Russian-created facial recognition algorithms perform poorly with non-Caucasian faces. While the algorithms used by these tools are not openly accessible and verifiable, it is plausible that this poor performance is due to the ethnic and racial bias within the user bases of large Russian social networks such as VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. A 2020 Harvard study revealed facial recognition algorithms’ biased results when working with non-white faces, though most of these studies have focused on American examples and Black faces. – interesting points on facial recognition software used by western and Russian internet services. I imagine that would be different biases in Chinese machine learning algorithms
Saying out loud the quiet bit about work-life balance; tectonic plates of streaming move again – I’ve found myself thinking about one panel in particular – the participants in the session on advice for aspiring leaders went beyond the usual platitudes, and shared a couple of uncomfortable truths about an industry which is trying to rebrand itself as a gentler place to work. – I think that we’ll see more of this move away from a gentler place to work as companies look to cut staff. I entered the workforce in the middle of recession before I went to college, this was the time of micro serfs and mcjobs. The idea of a gentler place to work seemed to be a transient one to me – one that would come and go with economic growth. Zero hour contracts really grew during and after the 2008 financial crisis, which is as far away from a gentler place to work as you can get.
Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google. :: Reasonably Polymorphic – The primary purpose of the web today is “engagement,” which is Silicon Valley jargon for “how many ads can we push through someone’s optical nerve?” Under the purview of engagement, it makes sense to publish webpages on every topic imaginable, regardless of whether or not you know what you’re talking about. In fact, engagement goes up if you don’t know what you’re talking about; your poor reader might mistakenly believe that they’ll find the answer they’re looking for elsewhere on your site. That’s twice the advertising revenue, baby! But the spirit of the early web isn’t gone: the bookmarks I’ve kept these long decades mostly still work, and many of them still receive new content. There’s still weird, amateur, passion-project stuff out there. It’s just hard to find. Which brings us to our main topic: search. – It is more than search, there is also motivation and consumer behaviour change in the old web versus the new one – The Founder of GeoCities on What Killed the ‘Old’ Internet | Gizmodo
Innovation
How the American semiconductor industry claimed back technological and market leadership from the Japanese
Ocado, the online supermarket – is this a legitimate content partnership with Disney? Something feels a bit off about the Ocado | Disney inspired meals. The ‘inspired by Disney’ tagline and the Lion King themed ‘green grub pasta’ feels weird.
Government concerns over China-owned CCTV company embedded in UK – Channel 4 News – There are more than a million of Hikvision’s cameras installed across the UK – monitoring every aspect of our lives. But Channel 4 News has learned that there are growing concerns within the government about the Chinese state-owned tech company.
I didn’t expect to be writing the words objectified garlic in such close proximity, ever. The reason for this post is down to an advert put together by an area of South Korea to promote its high quality garlic to Korean city dwellers. The advert was full of double entendres and was accused by critics of having objectified garlic.
The house I grew up in
Hiscox home insurance did this TV advert that makes really good use of projection mapping to tell a story. I can’t believe that this is now eight years old as an execution.
Fuzzy logic versus cloud based AI
I have written a good deal before on the benefits of fuzzy logic which is a much more efficient technology than machine learning for a lot of challenges, particularly if the machine learning is based on cloud computing a la the internet of things (IoT).
E-mu Systems SP1200
Back in the 1980s E-mu Systems were known as one of the pioneers of sampling with their Emulator series of keyboards, alongside the likes of CMI with the Fairlight and New England Digital’s Synclavier. They were bought out in 1993 by Creative Techology like rival Ensoniq – eventually they were both merged together. The SP1200 was a sample based drum machine and sequencer that came out in 1987. It gets its distinctive sound from 12 bit sampling done at about 26 KHz. By comparison, a CD based on 16 bit sampling at 44.1 KHz. It was beloved of hip hop producers from the late 1980s though to the mid 1990s. It is still sought after now.
This video gives you a good idea of how it is operated and hints at the benefits of hardware controls over software interfaces on modern digital audio workstation applications.
Until watching this video on Heat I didn’t understand its link to Michael Mann’s earlier projects Crime Story and L.A. Takedown; which were basically attempts to make the same story for film. One of the reasons why Heat looks so realistic is that the film used a number of ex-special forces consultants including Steven Mitchel, who you might know better as Andy McNab. Heat is a legendary film for putting Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in the same scene at the same time.
Heat has fantastic dialogue and is used by the US military for training purposes.
Beauty
Is the BBL bubble about to burst? – The Face – BBL is Brazil Butt Lift – the big butt is going the way of oversized breast enhancement surgery. It will have its place, but it won’t be so extreme
‘Prison Gothic’: Hong Kong road signs reborn as new font – Hong Kong Free Press HKFP – “Responding to the social movements and changes is a big incentive for the fonts’ development,” said Brian Kwok, associate professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s design school. “In the past, symbols of Hong Kong local culture might be egg tarts, milk tea and the Lion Rock,” Kwok told AFP. “Now fonts have become a way for young people to explore their Hong Kong identity.”
