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Posted Sept. 23, 2011 11:41 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ Only one of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time has been made into a movie before—The Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, and that was a documentary. That all changes this weekend with the movie release of Moneyball. And while Brad Pitt, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jonah Hill certainly don't need my help promoting it here, I'm just too excited about this not to mention it. To get a good grasp of the movie outside of all the web ads, commercials and talk show appearances, I'll turn you over to Joe Posnanski, a man who practices sports writing as a fine art. After he wrote about Moneyball and The Ballad of Bill James, ("What would a formula for Bill James’ career look like? I’ve thought quite a lot about this and have finally came up with one:
(Cu * D) / (CoW) = Bill James") he moved onto Moneyball the Movie, writing:
[T]this, I think, was the great challenge of Moneyball—perhaps even the unwinnable challenge. They were making a movie largely about baseball statistics, for crying out loud, but they were making it with a star-studded Hollywood cast (Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Chris Pratt and Robin Wright ... ), a terrific director (Bennett Miller, who did Capote), and an incredible writing team (Aaron Sorkin wrote The Social Network and Steven Zaillian wrote Schindler’s List, among others). They were making a Brad Pitt movie without a love interest, a baseball movie without a climactic home run, a buddy movie about on-base percentage and a big Hollywood movie about a general manager who has never led his team to the World Series.
It’s no wonder that Michael Lewis himself never thought that Moneyball the movie could be made. “With The Blind Side,” he says about his last book-to-movie, “it was a no-brainer. I would say to the Hollywood people: ‘What took you so long?’ But I really never thought they could find a way to turn Moneyball into a movie.”
They did. And, I have to admit, seeing it was one of the strangest movie experiences of my life.
[...]
There’s [a] scene in Moneyball that I am quite sure is unlike anything that has ever appeared on screen, and in many ways encapsulates everything I think about the movie. In the scene, David Justice is at the plate. ... Justice plays a fairly substantial role in the movie—he is the old guy brought in to help the 2002 A’s replace Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon. And the scene is an artistic at-bat, with music playing in the background, with a voiceover—it is quite an impressive bit of moviemaking. There is some slow motion, the camera angle is striking, everything about the scene is as drawn out and carefully crafted as the light-crashing scene in The Natural or the final shot of Hoosiers.
Except this: In the scene, David Justice walks.
Yes: An ultra-dramatic movie scene in which our hero takes four balls, one a close pitch, and walks.
I'm really looking forward to this movie.
➻ Michael Lewis's Moneyball, the book the movie is based on, is all about innovation and the business of baseball, about taking the reevaluation of the basic metrics of baseball that people like Bill James had been working on for years and bringing that into the front office to determine what kind of a team to put on the field.
Publishing is going through a similar transition, with people like Richard Nash at Red Lemonade blowing up the status quo, reevaluating the metrics of the business and putting a new model into play. Seth Godin is trying something new with his Domino Project, as well. With his latest release, We Are All Weird, he's messing with the traditional print run. He explained the print run this week on the Domino Project Blog.
We only have 11,000 hardcover copies on sale at Amazon, with no plans to print more. ... Why limit the number printed?
Conventional publishing wisdom says that the first 10,000 copies are the hardest. In fact, you don’t make money until after that. The goal is to prime the pump and then, if you get lucky, sell millions and millions of hardcovers, day after day, year after year. That’s what pays the bills at all the large publishing houses.
The thing is, digital is better at infinity than paper ever will be. Digital is easy to keep in stock, easy to replenish, easy to connect with. Paper, on the other hand, benefits from scarcity. If you know that there are only a few books and then they’re gone, you’re more likely to hurry up, more likely to grab yours now, more likely to treasure it once you get it. And in a digital world, a book that’s not worth treasuring is not worth owning, is it?
So the bet I’m making is that the scarcity of the hardcover will help you decide to read it right now.
Now, There's obviously nothing to stop Seth from printing more hardcovers if there's enough demand and dollar signs in Amazon's eyes, but he's not planning any additional print runs and I think creating scarcity in this way while letting the digital release do the job of spreading the ideas more widely is an interesting idea to consider. Independent record labels have been doing small vinyl pressings like this for years, and while they'll never make billions doing so, it does seem to keep many of those enterprises going.
➻ strategy + business recently ran an excerpt from The Method Method, which is a book that tells a similar story in yet another old and sometimes dusty industry.
Method is one of those delightfully quirky entrepreneurial stories. In the late 1990s, two 24-year-old guys—an ad man and a climate researcher—take off on a ski weekend and decide that the home cleaning products industry is ripe for a shakeup. Never mind that it’s a mature, relatively stagnant market dominated by powerful brand names like Procter & Gamble and the Clorox Company. Never mind that everybody else is starting e-businesses. Never mind that they are two 24-year-old guys on a ski weekend talking about cleaning products. By 2010, their privately held company is generating annual revenues somewhere north of US$200 million; it counts major retailers, including Target, Whole Foods, and Auchan, among its accounts; and the big dogs are tracking it.
The book was chosen by Theodore Kinni, coauthor of Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service, as part of s + b's Author's Choice series. To learn more, continue with the story about how method is Bottling Customer Experience.
➻ Caleb Melby posted an exclusive preview of Four Pages From The Zen Of Steve Jobs this week.
The Forbes-written, JESS3-designed book re-imagines Steve’s relationship with his friend and mentor, Kobun Chino Otogawa, a Japanese Soto Zen Buddhist priest.
The full 60-page book is scheduled to be released digitally later this year. Judging by the previews, it looks like something to look forward to.
➻ In honor of banned books week, a Mark Twain story was formally 'unbanned' at the Charlton Library in Massachusetts. Alison Flood of The Guardian explains:
Twain's comic short story told from the perspective of Eve was banned from Charlton Library in Massachusetts in 1906 after its trustees objected to illustrations of a naked Eve – or as the New York Times put it at the time, "her dresses are all cut Garden of Eden style". When Richard Whitehead became a trustee of the library in 2008, he stumbled across the century-old controversy and decided to track down a copy of the banned book, complete with illustrations.
"Knowing that Banned Book Week was coming up in September [he] proposed the idea of having an official 'unbanning' of the book," said the library's director Cheryl Hansen. "On Tuesday, September 20, 2011 the board of library trustees unanimously voted to unban Eve's Diary. I think that Mark Twain would be very pleased and I'm sure that he would have something humorous to say about it." At the time, Twain wrote in a letter that "the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me".
The article also tells the story of two other books that were unbanned this week, and provides a list of the most challenged books of 2010.
➻ Why? Innovation is A Sky for Shoeing Horses Under.
Joe Nocera Interview
Posted Sept. 22, 2011 4:16 a.m. by jon
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
The following post and Q&A was written and submitted by Tom Ehrenfeld.
“Here was the ultimate consequence of the delinking of borrower and lender, which securitization had made possible: no one in the chain, from broker to subprime originator to Wall Street, cared that the loans they were making and selling were likely to go bad. In truth, they were all taking on huge risks in granting these terrible loans. But they were all making too much money to see it. Everyone assumed that someone else would be left holding the bag.” (p. 228)
“All over Wall Street, an immense amount of risk was building up in the system. It wasn’t just that firms were taking on risk when they bought subprime mortgages and bundled them into securities, or when they kept some of the leftover pieces themselves, or when they bought whole subprime mortgage originators. Over the course of a decade, subprime mortgages had managed to seep into Wall Street’s bloodstream, as firms used products created out of them to increase leverage, reduce capital, generate profits, and, more generally, game the risk-based rules that were originally intended to give firms the flexibility to deal with the modern world. All of which also meant that the increasing risk was masked by layer upon layer of complexity, hidden where few on the outside could see it.” (p. 240)
Joe recently took time to answer a few questions:
Other crisis chronicles have gone out of their way to personalize the story—they characterize the events as outcomes of the greed of power brokers like Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson, or dramatize the tenacious efforts of a prescient short to get the world to listen to his insights. But your book ratchets down the “you are there” reconstruction of dramatic events, choosing instead to reveal how systematic forces inexorably caused the meltdown. Was this a conscious decision? If so, why?
Joe Nocera: We absolutely made a conscious decision to report and write it this way. We always knew we wanted to write about the underlying causes. We didn’t know where that would take us. Bethany had grounding with Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac—she had written about them for Vanity Fair and Fortune. I had grounding in issues surrounding Wall Street. From there we dove in without precisely knowing where we were going. I was thinking about subprime in terms of Wall Street. But Bethany saw very early on that the subprime issues began on Main Street. And so that was where you had to start. You had to start by examining where subprime mortgage lending came from, how it became popular, and how it became predatory. Tracing the rise of subprime lending was critical. Bethany figured that out very quickly and it turned out to be genius. I was tracking Lou Ranieri and the rise of mortgage-backed securities. She was writing about the rise of subprime. She stumbled upon Roland Arnault at Ameriquest and figured out that he was ground zero for shitty subprime mortgages.
And so we basically started to see this as a story that had a chronology that moved back and forth from Main Street to Wall Street to Washington with side trips to the ratings agencies. And at a certain point we realized we were putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and it would be an accomplishment to put the pieces together and not see the individual pieces. That was not what we had at day one but at the end we did so because that was where our strengths lie—in analytical skills and writing ability.
Does your approach shift some of the blame from individual behavior, focusing instead on ways that the system was rigged to fail?
JN: We were living in a bubble mentality and not just the last few years—a bubble mentality that let Washington think deregulation made sense, that let Countryside think it made sense to give out subprime, that let rating agencies bundle subprime into tranches and have seventy percent be triple A. These were mass delusions. Like tulips. But within that mass delusion people did things they knew they shouldn’t have been doing. Credit agencies knew they were selling their soul to the devil by rating these tranches as AAA. And you can go down the line with this: the guy at Merrill Lynch who took a $5 billion exposure and turned it into a $55 billion at the end of the year. Lots of people at Merrill Lynch knew this was not going to end well and they did not care.
There seems to be a striking contrast in the tone of your first book, A Piece of the Action, which you have said is about “the democratization of money” through the growth in individuals investing in stocks more than 25 years ago. It seems quaint today to think about, say, Peter Lynch advising individuals to buy stock in companies whose products they like. That represents a far simpler, and more old-fashioned approach than the way Wall Street operates today.
JN: A Piece of the Action came out in early 1994. Nine months later Netscape had its IPO. I remember that stretch of time between the publication of the book and that particular IPO. And the truth is that my book became quaint on that very day. Netscape’s IPO was the day that everything changed: everybody wanted to get rich quick, individual investors got hooked on the market in a fundamentally new way. That was the day that the modern Wall Street, for better or worse, was created.
One of the most discouraging threads in this book has to do with the failure of any regulatory agency to identify common industry practices as predatory, unsustainable, and potentially catastrophic to the economy. In a new afterword, for the paperback edition, you are unconvinced that the new regulations have sufficient power to correct the underlying causes of the crisis. Are you any more sanguine about the ability of Washington to prevent the recent crisis from recurring?
JN: I don’t know if the new regulations are sufficient or not. It seems to me that Dodd- Frank fiddled with the world as it existed in 2008 rather than trying to radically change that world in ways that would make us feel safe. And since the House Republicans have taken over, the pushback has been incredible. It’s been like the eighth season of Dallas where what happened was like a dream. It’s like the crisis never happened, and it’s absurd. They’re fighting capital requirements, fighting everything. And it’s infuriating to watch this.
I think you have to go back to the response in the 1930s. Its incredible that at the time Congress went to Morgan Bank and said, we are splitting you in two. It’s incredible that that the country had the wherewithal to do that, and that they went ahead and did do it. We did not have another major financial crisis for 80 years. And that is the best you can hope for with financial regulation.
Jack Covert Selects – All the Devils are Here
Posted Dec. 10, 2010 10:23 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
I know you might be thinking, “Another book on the financial crisis… really?” But this is the one that many have been waiting for, and after reading it for myself, I can safely say that Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera have delivered the most comprehensive documentation to-date of the many pieces that built the puzzle of our financial system over the decades. And from CEOs to politicians, government officials to mortgage lenders, borrowers, ratings agencies and traders, all the devils are truly in there.
The authors are a dream-team of reportage. A contributing editor to Vanity Fair, Bethany McLean may be most well known for coauthoring The Smartest Guys in the Room, which is the definitive work on the Enron scandal and an easy choice for us when picking The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. And Joe Nocera, a columnist for The New York Times, ranks with Michael Lewis as one of the best pure writers on business working today. His 2008 book, Good Guys and Bad Guys, is one of the best collections of business journalism—and study of American business personalities—ever put together.
Their new effort, All the Devils is Here, is a complex tale, almost dizzying in scope, but is handled with such skill and so chock-full of magnificent and memorable stories that you’ll know the full story inside-out by the time you put the book down. The tale of John Breit in the book’s prologue will give you an idea of what I’m talking about.
Breit had once been the head of market risk management at Merrill Lynch, with easy access to the company’s directors. But, over the past decade, Breit and all other significant risk management was basically relegated to a broom closet—which is why it was a surprise when Merrill CEO Stan O’Neal asked to see him in September of 2007 to get his calculations of Merrill’s exposure to risk. McLean and Nocera recount the end of that meeting beautifully:
Listening to him, Breit realized that O’Neal seemed to have no idea that Merrill’s risk management function had been sidelined.
The meeting finally came to an end; Breit shook O’Neal’s hand and wished him luck. “I hope we talk again,” he said.
“I don’t know,” replied O’Neal. “I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be around.”
O’Neal went back to his desk to contemplate the disaster he now knew was unavoidable—not just for Merrill Lynch but for all of Wall Street. John Briet walked back to his office with a strange realization that he—a midlevel employee utterly out of the loop—had just informed one of the most powerful men on Wall Street that the party was over.
I would never use the words “if you’re going to read one book on the financial crisis,” because there are just too many must-reads in the category. And because its attention is so all encompassing, this book requires a good deal more patience than others. But McLean and Nocera have done something important, special and singular in All the Devils are Here, and I really hope you all read it.
Friday Links
Posted Oct. 22, 2010 11:29 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ Vanity Fair has an excerpt up about The Blundering Herd at Merrill Lynch from one of this year's most anticipated books, All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis. From that excerpt:
In the years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, there was no more infectious disease on Wall Street than Goldman envy. Goldman Sachs, perhaps the most storied name in all of American finance, had gone public only in 1999, the last of the big firms to do so. After the I.P.O., Goldman’s mind-boggling profits were on full display. Starting in 2003, Goldman went on a run the likes of which had rarely been seen in American business. In just three years, its revenues more than doubled, to $38 billion, as its profits skyrocketed. In 2007, C.E.O. Lloyd Blankfein received a bonus of more than $68 million. Even junior traders made millions. Who wouldn’t be jealous of numbers like those? UBS, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Lehman Brothers, Deutsche Bank—they were all stricken, to varying degrees, with Goldman envy.
No firm, though, had it worse than Merrill Lynch. And once the crisis struck, there was no firm for whom the disease would prove to be more fatal.
The authors of the book are Bethany McLean, a writer for Vanity Fair and the coauthor of The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (one of the 100 Best Business Books of All Time), and Joe Nocera, a business columnist for The New York Times and author of Good Guys and Bad Guys: Behind the Scenes with the Saints and Scoundrels of American Business (and Everything in Between). It is due to be released next month.
➻ Scott Belsky (author of Making Ideas Happen), Daniel Pink (author of Drive and many other fine books), and Laura Vanderkam (author of 168 Hours) were chosen for GOOD magazine's GOOD Guide to Making Work Better about "productivity, procrastination, and getting off your butt and back to work." Here are each of their productivity mantras:
Scott Belsky: "Less ideas, more action."
Dan Pink: "Get to work."
Laura Vanderkam: "Do more of what matters. Do less of what doesn’t."
To get more tips from each of them and find out what each of them has to say about technology's effects on productivity, head on over to the GOOD slide show. (hat tip to the good people of Portfolio.)
➻ The New Yorker's Jenny Hendrix wrote a great review of a book I've been looking forward to for some time—Marcus Boon's In Praise of Copying.
In Praise of Copying is not an investigation of the ethical dilemmas of copying but a Stein-like affirmation of the mimesis that happens everywhere and everyday. Boon sees copying as fundamental to existence, part of "how the universe functions and manifests." Even on a molecular level, he writes on his blog, "all objects are made up of other objects." We cannot learn without mimicking (whether it’s learning to write a paper or learning how to catch a football)—but the way copying is defined in legal terms obscures this fact. Boon encourages us to rethink terms like "subject," "object," "different," and "the other," in order to "account for our fear of and fascination with copying."
If this book is anywhere near as illuminating as David Kord Murray's Borrowing Brilliance, it's worth picking up. And if you're interested in the topic from a purely business perspective, you may want to check out Oded Shenkar's Copycats.
➻ Richard Florida, author of The Great Reset and a slew of other books on the creative class—the man who, in fact, coined the term creative class—posted a gallery of the 20 Most Innovative States on The Daily Beast. He tells us in the introduction to the gallery how he defined them:
Though some argue that the rate of American innovation has declined recently, our economic recovery depends on a renewed investment in and commitment to innovation. The rate of innovation is likely to accelerate in coming years, as capital shifts back to invention and entrepreneurship in the real economy.
Our ranking of the most innovative states is based on two metrics: (1) the number of patented innovations per capita, and (2) the share of high-tech companies.
Unfortunately, Wisconsin did not make the cut. Apparently cheese curds aren't innovative.
➻ Stewart Quealy recently interviewed Aaron Goldman, author of Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned From Google about, well... Marketing Lessons From Google. From that interview:
SQ: When it comes to consumer mindshare, you claim it's a zero sum game. What does that mean for the Facebook vs. Google rivalry as these two giants cross into each others' domains?AG: It means all-out war. There are only so many hours in the day and attention span in the hours. The company that can help people make better, faster decisions will win. To be sure, those decisions can be related to information, commerce, and/or entertainment. Help me find quick answers, buy stuff I want, and connect with cool people and content, and I'll give you the lion's share of my time and attention.
I would give you a list of more books on Google, but that would take days to get through. Just check out Ken Auletta's Googled and Jeff Jarvis's What Would Google Do?
➻ Rebeca D. Costa, author of The Watchman's Rattle, did a fantastic job of Reframing the Issue over at The Powell's Books blog, asking one simple question:
So the central issue we must now face is this: what happens when the complexity of the problems we need to solve exceed the cognitive capabilities we have evolved to this point?
Read on to find the answer.
➻ With a thousand kisses...
Jack Covert Selects - The Match King
Posted Oct. 26, 2009 5:00 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, the Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals by Frank Partnoy, PublicAffairs, 272 Pages, $26.95, Hardcover, April 2009, ISBN 9781586487430
When reading The Smartest Guys in the Room, the outstanding book by Bethany McLean that looks into the Enron debacle, you will learn about an accounting term called “mark to market.” Not being an accountant, my simplified understanding of the concept is that when you purchase a product for $100 and you believe you can sell the product for $200 in five years, you put the sale price on your books at the expected selling price instead of the actual purchase price. Enron didn’t create this approach to record keeping. In the roaring ‘20s, a gentleman named Ivar Kreuger used it, made tons of money, and ultimately bankrupted millions around the globe. The Match King is his story.
Kreuger became known as the “The Match King” because, in his native Sweden, he had cornered the market on matches—monopolies were allowed then. He moved and acquired companies that made the machines used in his factories; ultimately he got involved in the forestry industry. During the reconstruction after WWI, his company loaned the equal of billions of dollars to European countries.
Using esoteric financial instruments like debentures and more common instruments like shares—which were much easier to sell in the days before the federal regulations brought on by the crash—Kreuger was able to fund his global acquisitions. His numbers were sketchy, but the banks valued him as a client too much to look too closely at his books. Then, October 1929 happened, and his pipeline of cash started to dry up. He was able to last longer than most business people who were nothing but glorified “snake oil” salesmen, but in 1932 the banks started to want their money back. Kreuger returned to Europe to face his European bankers and committed suicide the night before the meeting.
In The Match King, Frank Partnoy brings this fascinating person and exciting (though terrifying) time to life. So brilliant is Partnoy’s portrayal that I wanted to keep reading the book even as I walked to my car from the office at night. A great story, told well—there is nothing better.
