The Core Dump

The powers that be at work decided that all minions had to read Who Moved My Cheese?, and since I like to read anyway, and have been low-grade curious about this book for a long time, I was a good boy and plowed through it.

Which took all of 15 minutes. Really. Without skimming.

According to the blurbs on the book itself, Who Moved My Cheese has changed the lives of countless people, and has shook more people than there are stars in the galaxy to the very core of their beings. We’ll get to that in a moment.

The book is really divided into two parts, the Who Moved My Cheese parable itself about two mice and two little people looking for cheese in a maze, and a “discussion” at a high school reunion between what I can only judge to be four stroke victims.

The parable itself is not bad—it cuts to the chase† and provides some food for thought, even though it’s glib and breathlessly optimistic.

But the discussion! Oh, the discussion! It’s all on the level of “Hey, I had no idea what to do and my life was going to hell, and I had no idea what was going on until you shared this wonderful, wonderful story with me and now I totally know what I have to do!”

Seriously, if you read this book and it changes your whole outlook, good for you. Glad you got value out of it. That being said, how about you turn off the TV, stop reading mouth-breather management books, and start reading grownup books? Please.

Also, you probably shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

†It took a lot of restraint to not use the word cheese instead of chase.

Nicholas Carr is best known for his book Does IT Matter? which argues that the business advantages of Information Technology are becoming less prominent as the playing field is leveling between different businesses with regard to the amount of IT to which they have access.

With The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google Carr looks at how the IT landscape is changing with the increasing availability of cloud computing—moving IT functions away from local servers managed by a company’s employees to services accessed over the Internet. To make his case, Carr spends a sizable chunk of The Big Switch looking at the history of electric power, and how before the establishment of the power grid, providing enough power at a low enough cost was a huge competitive factor for manufacturing businesses, and how the advent of the power grid changed the business landscape.

It’s a compelling analog to the events currently taking place in IT.

Refreshingly enough, The Big Switch doesn’t succumb to Wired-style techno-utopianism, but instead spends time looking at some of the not-so-positive results the increasing power and ubiquitousness of computing will (and do) have on privacy and control of workers.

The Big Switch is clearly written and accessible to people in other fields than IT, and vividly paints the over-arching picture of business and societal change brought by cloud computing.

Highly recommended.

Disclaimer: I received a review copy of the book in exchange for a promise to post a review.

Den of Thieves is the exhaustively researched story of the junk bond traders of the 80s and the damage they wrought on the stock market.

The author, James B. Stewart, covered the story for the Wall Street Journal, and in this book he vastly expands on our understanding of the zeitgeist of the era, the perpetrators, and the means by which they committed their crimes. Stewart’s prose is low-key and fluid, allowing the characters of the traders and law enforcement officers to come to focus.

Den of Thieves can be a bit of a slog at times, mostly due to the sheer amount of information—deal after crooked deal is described in unrelenting detail. Coupled with the highly technical nature and purposefully byzantine nature of the deals, keeping things straight in your head can be a bit of a challenge.

Where the book really shines is in describing, through their deeds, the almost demonic avarice and callousness of some of the corporate raiders of the 80s.

Scary reading.

The Smartest Guys in the Room

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management is a business book that reads like a Greek tragedy, filled with the exceptional hubris of very smart and driven people who end up losing sight of their own weaknesses.

Roger Lowenstein’s writing is fast-paced and clean, with just the right amount of characterization of the main players. It could be argued that some more explanation of the complicated economic instruments used by Long-Term would be useful—unless the reader is well-versed in hedge fund lingo, some of the more esoteric instruments are difficult to understand.

When Genius Failed is well worth reading for anybody interested in how the markets work and sometimes spectacularly don’t work.

Related Core Dump reviews:

The Smartest Guys in the Room
Fooled by Randomness
Hard News
Moneyball

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets is, as Taleb says in the prologue “about luck disguised and perceived as nonluck (that is, skills) and, more generally, randomness disguised and perceived as non-randomness (that is, determinism).” At its core, it’s a meditation on how poor us humans are at discerning what events around us are influenced by luck and chance, and the often counter-intuitive way the financial markets—and life—work.

Anybody reading it for investment tips is likely to go away shaking their head, but the reader looking for an interesting perspective on life is likely to be enthralled.

Fooled by Randomness is one of those books you read a few pages of and then you have to stop and think for a while about what you just read. Well worth the time.

Addendum: Here’s the Wikipedia entry about Mr. Taleb. Black Swan, indeed.

The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron is an exhaustively researched and beautifully written indictment not only of a corrupt company, but also of a business climate that fostered and encouraged such companies.

The unethical, not to mention illegal, financial shenanigans undertaken by Enron and supported by accounting companies and banks are breathtaking in their scope, to the point where if this were a work of fiction instead of reporting, it would stretch suspension of disbelief so far as to be laughable. But unfortunately for all the people robbed of their life savings by Lay, Skilling, Fastow, et al., it is indeed reporting.

The books succeeds admirably in telling the tale of Enron’s rise and fall, and delivers especially well when it comes to painting the human side of the company. The greed and arrogance on display in the book is mind blowing.

The Smartest Guys in the Room is required reading.

One thing that’s constantly boggling my mind here in my Winter Olympics Coma is the amount of money Chevy, Budweiser, and Visa must be spending on advertising.

Seriously, those companies are engaged in the most massive advertising saturation bombing I’ve ever seen.

Sorry, Chevy, never buying one of your vehicles again—I’d like to go through the rest of my life without once again knowing my mechanic’s phone number by heart.

Sorry, Budweiser, your beer is repellent.

Sorry, Visa, already a customer.

How do you calculate return on investment on these sorts of things, anyway?

Soundtrack: Olympics on TV

Valentine’s day in the States today, a day for single people to binge on chocolate and sappy movies, and for men in relationships to fear the wrath of their significant others if they don’t kowtow to the Flower-Restaurant-Greeting Card Complex (FRGCC).

Naturally, I boycott the whole spectacle. I will not be given a date on the calendar when I am forced to be “romantic.”

My wife lets me get away with this, which ironically makes me love her even more…

Here’s the straight dope: Ladies, when your significant other shows up with roses or chocolate or a card or takes you out to dinner on Valentine’s Day, he is not being romantic. He just fears sleeping in a cold, lonely bed.

Don’t believe me? Head down to the grocery store or your nearest flower store and hang out for a little while. Look at the faces of the men paying exorbitant amounts for roses. Do those men look like they are in a romantic mood? Are their eyes dancing with happiness at the thought of a romantic dinner with their beloved, or are they flop sweating at the thought of the flowers having sold out?

I’ve long been curious about the iron grip the FRGCC has on the minds of America, and discovered to my horror today that the brainwashing actually begins in day care.

Went to pick up Andrea and she greeted me by yelling “Happy Valentine’s Day!” They’d made big paper hearts, some of the children brought Valentine’s Day cards, and one of the boys had even brought in candy in little paper bags decorated with hearts to share with everybody in the class.

I fear that unless decisive action is taken soon, her soul will be lost to the FRGCC…

Michael Lewis’s Moneyball is ostensibly a book about baseball, how the Oakland A’s and their general manager Billy Beane used statistical data and computer models to cut through the myths of the sport. This enabled them to purchase excellent players that other teams overlooked and to compete successfully on a shoestring budget.

But baseball is really incidental to the theme of the book, which is the importance of looking at performance objectively instead of through the sometimes distorting lenses of “What everybody knows,” and the stress on an existing system that is caused by a brand-new approach.

As a person whose knowledge of and interest in baseball is—to put it mildly—sketchy, the portions of the book that discuss so-and-sos bunting average and that-guys bases stolen, and that-other-guys walks, etc. are utterly snore-inducing, but Lewis deftly mixes up those pieces with personal stories that make any subject interesting.

Moneyball is tightly and economically written, and provides a brilliant view into a schismatic time in the history of a major enterprise.

Highly recommended.

azcentral is the web site for our local paper of record, The Arizona Republic. It’s a pretty decent site, fast to update throughout the day and not too garish. So it used to be one of my “I-have-a-minute-so-I’ll-see-what’s-happening” sites. Used to be.

As part of the general old media we-fear-the-web mentality, azcentral has been forcing you to take a short survey whenever you click from the front page to stories within the site. It then sets a cookie. Delete the cookie and you’re back to the demographic survey.

As somebody who uses a lot of different computers and browsers during my daily existence, I’ve seen that survey far too many times.

Most people probably just go through this once and forget about it, allowing azcentral to silently take note of their info whenever they check the news.

But whenever you force people to give up personal information over and over again to access ad-sponsored content, those people are going to get ticked off and start lying to you. So now the site has a lot of, ahem, interesting demographics in its database.

(As an aside, I guess this visitor-tracking fetish also does a great job of keeping the search engines out so the site doesn’t have to suffer the indignity of increased traffic for free.)

At this point, though, I’m conditioned to never click through from the front page. Can’t handle seeing that little survey again. So it’s just a quick scan to see if there’s anything breaking, and I’m gone.

But now, some brainiac over there has decided that a great way to annoy visitors is to run JavaScript-powered ads that move around the screen and obscure the content when you load the page.

Sigh. That’s right.

In your face, sucka!

Hello, CNN. I’m back. Did you miss me?

Soundtrack: Stream from Groove Salad