If you enjoy identifying the ways the current economic situation is reminiscent of past event in recent history (say, the Reagan era and the recessions between the late 1960s and early 1980s), The Great Inflation and its Aftermath will deliver all-too-familiar reminders of economic instability, federal intervention, and renewed faith in the American system of innovation and reconstruction. Samuelson's book focuses, too, on the shifting influences of pessimism and optimism on economic security.

From the (somewhat tired-sounding) review:

Samuelson believes in the power of ideas, but he doesn't put much stock in the thoughts of economists. He says they peddle optimism instead of hard-nosed realism to an entitlement-besotted populace. Take the experience of the '50s through the '70s. Then, he says, economists sold the Keynesian notion that the business cycle could be fine-tuned into insignificance, wrongly assuring the populace and policymakers that the problem of unemployment could be solved. Instead, the country ended up with roaring inflation. The same over-optimism, many observers believe, characterizes the profession's embrace of deregulation and free markets. Want to see the effects of free-market prescriptions? Read today's headlines, they say.

But Samuelson regards economists as having more power than they really do. Hence his worries about the reform ideas now gaining currency, including notions of how to bolster the economic security of the middle class, provide universal health coverage, and curb global warming. The fervor bothers him because it fails to account for the rising cost of the welfare state, enormous household debt burdens, and the "twilight of Pax Americana."

Samuelson's book, as the reviewer says, "draws parallels between the Reagan era and today, but underestimates the power of U.S. innovation and resilience." Perhaps readers are feeling saturated by the clamor of economic woe and constant analysis. It's hard to say. What do you think?

...Buffett himself has attributed his success to "focus." Schroeder writes: "He ruled out paying attention to almost anything but business--art, literature, science, travel, architecture--so that he could focus on his passion." As a child, Schroeder relates, Warren carried around a coin-changer as his prized possession, and when his dad offered him a trip at age 10, he asked to go to the New York Stock Exchange (NYX). Not long after, Buffett read a book called One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000 and announced to a friend that he was going to be a millionaire by the time he was 35. "That was an audacious, almost silly-sounding statement for a child to make in the depressed world of 1941," Schroeder writes. "But...he was sure he could do it."

...However, at 838 pages not counting footnotes and index, the book itself would have benefited from some focus. And a good editor might have cut a few of Schroeder's pet phrases, such as "elephant bumping," which she uses to refer to gatherings of the rich and powerful. But despite these quibbles, The Snowball is an astute, and at times riveting, read--especially now.

It's a very favorable review and will give you a good idea of the book's content and tone. I know Jack is working his way through it right now and will likely have thoughts to offer soon.

I am surprise no one has connected some aspect of the 777 drop in the Dow Jones Industrial yesterday to the release of The Snowball, the new biography about Warren Buffet.

In writing about the new book, Marketwatch did manage to call out Buffet's Goldman Sachs investment as an example of his prowess for finding bargains.

Should you have any attention left to devote to the coverage of the 976 page biography, The Financial Times and The New York Times both ran reviews over the weekend, complimentary of author Alice Schroeder and the work she did creating a portrait of the "Oracle of Omaha".

I got my copy today (thanks John!) and will have more to say after I get done checking the latest from AP.

On Friday, they ran the piece under the heading Meltdown Lit: Recommended Books for the Wall Street Debacle. Please go check out the whole piece. There are great suggestions.

Below is our original submission, which they used extensively for the article:

--The Subprime Solution by Robert Shiller

Shiller's work on housing values is well-known and originally established in Irrational Exuberance. His latest book just released in August describes pretty clearly the mortgage crisis we are in and offers some solutions to get out.

--Essays on the Great Depression by Ben Bernanke

You want some insight into what the current Fed chairman is thinking, reading his perspective on the last event of this magnitude may help understand what he does in this one.

--The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan

Hearing from the latest Fed Chairman might also be useful. Many are laying the blame at Mr. Greenspan's feet. The paperback that was released on September 9th has a new chapter with his thoughts on the current credit crisis.

--When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein

This from a review I wrote:

"Throughout When Genius Failed, financial journalist Roger Lowenstein foreshadows the coming doom and so there is no surprise in how the story of Long-Term Capital Management ends. But what Lowenstein does best is show how blind arrogance brought down the company and almost the entire financial system. Building on the work of two Nobel Laureates and growing capabilities of computer technology, Long-Term Capital Management pushed academic theory further into real-world practice than had ever been done before, and becomes a case study for how markets defy formulaic explanation. Lowenstein’s narrative, while set in the complicated financial market of today, tells an ages-old story many will recognize." (P.S. This was peanuts compared to the current crisis.)

--Smartest Guys In The Room by By Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind

This from a review Jack wrote:

"In my research, I have not found any evidence that anybody colluded to rob the place. Smart, rich, influential men do not deliberately destroy the source of their wealth and influence. Instead, they got trapped in a nightmare of their own creation, or perhaps their own ego. Enron's failure was not deliberate; it was the result of a series of interconnected events. Can this happen again? Sure, when you have hubris at the CEO level, sales peoples’ compensation based on short term success, upper level people totally focused on growth to satisfy short term Wall Street success, an accounting system that supports this concept, and finally an accounting firm that doesn’t do a good job of oversight. Add to this a deregulated industry and watch what happens." (this sounds familiar too).

The blogger is going through the book's 62 chapters and posting their favorite quote. The quote comes with a photo of the page its on. You can find the flickr slideshow here.

As of this posting, they are four chapters into the book.

Jeffreys, author of Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug, details the journey this once highly esteemed company took once it made a deal with the devil. Part corporate biography, part history, and part moral tale, Hell's Cartel is, as the reviewer puts it, "not a pretty history. But it is gripping, full of warnings about the potential of corporations to mutate into criminal enterprises."

Here's a snippet from the review:

"IG Farben and Hitler: A Fateful Chemistry
How a company whose Nobel-winning scientists discovered vital medicines became a Nazi collaborator"

IG Farben traced its origins to the efforts of men such as Carl Bosch of BASF Group, who led the effort to mass-produce synthetic ammonia. The work was crucial to solving a worldwide shortage of fertilizer and preventing mass starvation. He and other scientist-managers made Germany the dominant producer of drugs and chemicals in the years before World War I. Bosch was a man of conscience but also deeply patriotic. During World War I he became a national hero after leading a crash effort to develop synthetic nitric acid, essential to producing explosives. Most notoriously, BASF chemist Fritz Haber, who had developed the processes used to make ammonia, came up with the idea of using chlorine gas as a weapon.

Read the entire article here: businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_34/b4097098922518.htm?chan=magazine+channel_opinion

If you like books in this vein, also check out The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug by Thomas Hager.

• Call Me Ted by Ted Turner was the splash at BEA in June, which included a party hosted by Larry King.
• Richard Branson follows Losing My Virginity and Screw It, Let's Do It with Business Stripped Bare.
• There is a new Warren Buffet book called The Snowball written by Alice Schroeder, who got a $7 million advance for the book.
• T. Boone Pickens' The First Billion Is The Hardest arrives as he promotes his plan for how the U.S. can become energy independent, an idea reflected in the subtitle: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future.
• Historian Steven Watts delivers a Hugh Hefner biography, titled Mr. Playboy.

Tall tales
The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company

A number of interesting things about Disney emerge in this excellent, readable account of Pixar's early years. David Price claims, for instance, that Disney's chief executive, Michael Eisner, considered shutting down the company's animation unit after he took over as chief executive in 1984, an astonishing fact given the subsequent success of cartoon films such as "The Lion King". Mr Price also makes clear just how much Pixar owes to Disney: it was the larger company's marketing for "Toy Story", for instance, that gave Mr Jobs the confidence to launch an initial public offering of shares in Pixar in 2005. Go to the review.

and

Marketing maestros
Alpha Dogs: The Americans Who Turned Political Spin into a Global Business

James Harding, who is now the editor of the London Times but used to report on American politics for the Financial Times, has written a punchy book about spin. Its title, "Alpha Dogs", refers to an American company, the Sawyer Miller Group, which for a while shaped and polished political campaigns all around the world. Go to the review.

It feels a bit timely, then, that Julia Flynn Siler's biography of this family and its business, The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, has just been released in paperback. This book is considered both a family saga and a dramatic tale of America's foothold in a competitive global industry.

Miller began writing back in 2005 long before Delphi's fate had been determined. From the WSJ: "The book was intended to outline the wisdom he has gained over the years as a turnaround artist, and to tell the inside story of how he rushed into Delphi, used Chapter 11 to force tough medicine on its unions and whipped the giant auto supplier into shape."

The somewhat ironic and, imaginably, awkward situation is The Turnaround Kid was written from the perspective that Miller had already turned Delphi around. As it turns out, that prediction (and the book release) is a bit premature as presently Delphi is still fighting it's way through bankruptcy court.

Nonetheless, yesterday the 40,000 printed copies went out into the world for the public to buy.

The new biography, Robber Baron, is about the streetcar magnet, Charles Tyson Yerkes, who was instrumental in Chicago's Loop Elevated and the London Underground. Check out the life of one of the most interesting entrepreneur's of the nineteenth century in this new book. It was put out earlier this year and promises to by quite a read! Personally, I always think by going forward in life and business, we do need to look back on occasion to get perspective and insight from those who have led the way before us. The life of Mr. Yerkes is a great one and well worth some attention paid to him.

Here's what was said about the book by John Franch so far:

"A superb biography: The research is thorough, the prose is clear, the narrative is compelling and the judgments are fair."
- Wall Street Journal


"Robber Brown is a welcome addition to the surprisingly small shelf of full-length biographies of Chicago's storied entrepreneurs and can be read for profit by anyone intrigues by one of the most notorious of the men to have built the material foundations on which the city's prosperity has come to rest."
- Chicago Tribune

Book Excerpt from: Myself and Other More Important Matters by Charles Handy:

Tom Peters was the first management teacher to turn public performer in a serious way. Fortune called him the 'Ur-guru' or original guru. The Economist described him as the 'Ober-guru'. Peter Drucker had written more and for longer (he died aged ninety-five in 2005, writing to the end) and was probably the wisest of all, but he preferred to describe himself as a writer and was, in truth, a poor performer on a platform. Who first coined the word 'guru' to describe Peters and his like is unclear, and the word is not in any case particularly appropriate. Peter Drucker once quipped that journalists only came up with the word because 'charlatan' was too long for a headline. These management gurus do not cultivate groups of acolytes nor do they hold forth in any sort of management ashrams, but they do lay claim to certain truths about organizations and how they should be manged, and they are certainly not shy about their beliefs and ideas. There are now guru tables that rank the top fifty or so performers according to their popularity among managers, and there is a recognized core of people on the 'guru circuit' rather like professional tennis players. Some of these gurus reckon to do at least one hundred performances a year, usually at opera-star fees with the same sort of billing.

It is unclear how one comes to be a guru. You cannot apply to join the club, for there is in fact no formal club. Nor can you nominate yourself as a guru. It is a title that is given to you by the media or the speaker agencies that manage these folk. Most of them are American, because the circuit of conferences mostly exists in America, although it is now expanding alongside the spread of the global marketplace...]]> History and Biographies 2008-01-24T10:55:11-06:00 http://800ceoread.com/blog/archives/007367.html There's a new excerpt up on the Excerpts Blog. It's from the book Guinness: The 250 Year Quest for the Perfect Pint. The first thought I had when I saw the book was, "Wow, I think my dad would like... 7367@http://800ceoread.com/blog/ There's a new excerpt up on the Excerpts Blog. It's from the book Guinness: The 250 Year Quest for the Perfect Pint. The first thought I had when I saw the book was, "Wow, I think my dad would like this book." How ironic, given the excerpt below:

Waldron observed that in Ireland, Guinness has been so ingrained in the culture for so many years, that it presents an interesting marketing challenge. This challenge is to market a beer to younger people who may perceive it as being their "father's beer."

We have seen a lot of good industry books over the past year or so. Here are a few we've enjoyed:

Flower Confidential
The Sushi Economy
The Cigarette Century
Travels Of A T-shirt In The Global Economy

But also be sure to check out the excerpt: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/

]]> 2007-10-05T09:00:38-06:00 http://800ceoread.com/blog/archives/007351.html Publisher's Lunch reports today that Alan Greenspan's The Age of Turbulence had sales of 128,000 copies in its opening week, according to Neilsen's Bookscan. That is a great start for the book, but people will be watching closely to... 7351@http://800ceoread.com/blog/ Publisher's Lunch reports today that Alan Greenspan's The Age of Turbulence had sales of 128,000 copies in its opening week, according to Neilsen's Bookscan.

That is a great start for the book, but people will be watching closely to see if the book can keeping that momentum into the next three or four weeks.

]]> General Business 2007-09-26T12:40:00-06:00