Barton Gellman: Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency
I am early in reading this book, but so far Cheney comes across as the ultimate FU VP; at once highly aggressive in establishing his position, smart and thorough in setting up and vetting his conclusions and incredibly calculating at routing around people and process to secure his desired outcomes. This guy must have read Machiavelli more than once.
Douglas Preston: The Monster of Florence
Gripping true story of a serial killer who preys upon young couples in the throws of lovemaking in the hills of Tuscany (I'm not exaggerating), and the efforts to catch him/her. Lots of compelling backstories on Italy, Italian culture and the convoluted legal and policing system there. If you've visited these spots, it adds another dimension (albeit a very dark one) to an otherwise idyllic canvas.
Joe Simpson: Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man's Miraculous Survival
Gripping, jarring story of the power of the human spirit, and will to survive in the face of almost certain death. Into Thin Air meets Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
Anna Politkovskaya: Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy
A tragic picture of a Russia that was presented a glimmer of light following a long bout with communism. In the end, it was an Icarus, and proved too much for the government and the people to contend with. Something fractured, and Russia succumbed to moral corruption and organized criminal activity. That the author gave her life to tell the story (she was assassinated) only adds to the hardness of what's being chronicled. Very concrete stories bring to life the Chechen conflict, how influence is bought, how assets are accumulated and defended. Mostly sadly, they also show how completely the Russian people seem to be left with a sense of powerlessness, abandonment, and confusion on how things could be any different.
Burton G. Malkiel: A Random Walk Down Wall Street: Completely Revised and Updated Edition
Excellent, highly readable book that in layman's terms makes sense of stock market, from bubble logic and history of same to different models for analyzing stock valuation, etc. Largely concludes that index funds are best path for predictable, reasonably safe but meaningful, return on investment dollars.
Charles M. Madigan: -30-: The Collapse of the Great American Newspaper
As old media unravels, it gives rise to something else, something new that while on one level is a wonderful thing, on another represents a loss of our core fabric. Newspapers are the 'Exhibit A' example of the great unraveling of Old Media and this book does a good job in a readable fashion of articulating why.
Felix Dennis: How to Get Rich: One of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs Shares His Secrets
Sage, simple, clear and actionable truths. Poetic tone of an earnest pursuit to getting rich. Straight-up delivery, including decisions made, outcomes realized and lessons learned. A joy to read.
Dan Koeppel: Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World
Excellent, enjoyable read on the banana as a much loved fruit, the cultivation and growing science behind same and the true dark meanings behind the 'banana republic' moniker.
Philip A. Fisher: Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings (Wiley Investment Classics)
I am a Ken Fisher nut (read his columns in Forbes - GREAT!), and Phil was Ken's dad. This book was written in late 1950's, yet all of the concepts are timely, the antithesis of the get rich quick, trend-o-month finance books. Good constructs for thinking about business in general (in addition to investing). Somewhat dry writing style.
Marty Neumeier: Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands
If you have read classic business books like Crossing the Chasm, Innovator's Dilemma or Built to Last, you can probably skip this book, which is a reasonably well written consolidation of best practices around market segmentation, positioning and product delivery. Nice title, though, and some effective metaphors which are intuitive and specific.
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I recently finished reading ‘Valley Boy,’ the engaging and entertaining bio of Tom Perkins (founder of midas-touch VC firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), and found the following quote from Eugene Kleiner pretty darn sage:
"The more difficult the decision, the less it matters what you choose."
Think about it.
A definite addition to the ‘Lazy Wisdom’ list.
As first exemplified by Friendster, there emerged the concept of a social network where the fundamental goal was to connect with as many (pseudo) 'friends' as possible.
This, in turn, gave rise to contact networks like Plaxo and professional networks like LinkedIn, where the purpose was more explicit; namely to exchange specific information or facilitate qualified introductions.
MySpace and Facebook further extended these models by allowing people to build personal pages, exchange rich media (and virally spread it), interface with like minds via well-defined services, and create sub-networks where membership is bounded by affinity, affiliation, geography and the like.
The latest trend is to 'platform-enable' these networks, mostly so that third party applications can plug into and extend these environments, but also to enable content, conversations and contexts that are created within these spaces to be syndicated and/or virally distributed out to other web sites and web services.
Twitter, which is best described as a short message service built around answering the question, “What am I doing right now?” has generated 10X the traffic it receives on the actual Twitter.com site via third party services that plug into the Twitter API.
Which brings me to an interesting service that I stumbled upon the other day which seems to push the model forward. It is called Spock, and it has some noteworthy attributes. One is that by leveraging the power of algorithmic search, the Spock service automatically builds a personal profile of you (based solely on public web data).
You can “claim your page,” and the service makes it very easy to validate or invalidate information about you. It also makes it simple to further customize your profile in ways that are meaningful enough that as a user, you might habitually tend to your profile (on a daily or weekly basis) in the same way that some people manicure and water their gardens.
Similarly, friends of yours can discover your unclaimed profile and use this stumble upon moment as the trigger event to initiate contact with you, invite you into their network and/or encourage you to claim your profile page. Moreover, they can put their vote in about the accuracy or inaccuracy of a specific item of data on your profile, a sort of 'wisdom of crowds' informational amplifier and error-checking mechanism.
There are some implications of this approach that are interesting, to say the least. One is that privacy advocates will have alarms galore going off. The premise of a service aggregating your identity to a single page is troubling, inasmuch as it lowers the bar to someone stealing or compromising your identity.
The idea that a third party can theoretically claim your page by falsely claiming to be you is troubling. The concept that a third party can chime in and validate or invalidate information about you on your profile implies a loss of control, which is unsettling for some.
At the same time, the premise of a profiling and networking model that leverages both outside-in (algorithmically-generated data sourcing, categorization and linkage; crowd wisdom functions; discover/claim mechanisms) and inside-out functions (user-defined customization of content, context and connections; invitations to trusted sources; privacy controls), while making everything search-able feels like the right approach.
Moreover, the service introduces the concept of a Spock Power score, which is a rudimentary transparency mechanism that spotlights the level of engagement and participation that a given individual has made within the service vis-a-vis activities like customization, invitation, validation and the like.
Personally, I think that there is a gap in the market for reputation systems that provide an individual’s 'score' in areas like trust, knowledge, accuracy and activity levels, ala the Whuffie score concept in Cory Doctorow's sci-fi novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," and to be clear, the Spock Power score does not deliver that, but it is a start down a promising path.
In addition, the service does provide a Developer API, presaging a day when users can enable the rich data in their profile to be plugged into third-party services for things like:
Needless to say, there are already services in many of these areas, suggesting the potential to extend existing services (versus re-creating the wheel yet again) in a manner that does not require the individual to be locked into any one service.
To be clear, while Spock passed the initial sniff test for me personally, it is too early to tell if it will overcome the '1.0/3.0 Paradox' and solve enough problems in its 1.0 youth to build the needed audience and business required to survive and grow into maturity, robustness and ubiquity in its 3.0 stage of life (as Google did).
I would suggest that one path for Spock to add value is by providing greater transparency mechanisms in terms of what is new, popular, recently viewed or relevant on the network. Another is by the service playing the part of the Oracle and perennially asking questions of 'the network,' and then spotlighting popular responses or identifying forks in types of responses.
Lastly, I wonder if there is a game or marketplace concept that can be overlayed on top of the service that rewards users for levels of participation, either by giving them actual monetary consideration, formal recognition and/or greater access to governance controls within the network.
So many potential paths of interest, but obviously a tradeoff between near-term tactical focus and long-term strategic vision.
I would be remiss if I did not close by speaking a bit more about the topic of privacy and the very real and reasonable fears that we all have whenever the words ‘privacy’ and ‘online’ are interleaved in the same sentence.
Privacy is a paradox. One the one hand, there is no sugar-coating the fact that there are bad people out there that will do bad things if they have access to your personal data, and the easier it is for them to get their hands on that data, the more likely bad stuff will happen.
The counter to that reality is that the cow has left the barn already, and it ‘aint coming back so the best alternative is to embrace transparency. This logic is based on the premise that if we all have access to the same set of public data, better tools can be built to manage it, better laws can be crafted that legislate acceptable use and tougher penalties can be put on the books for criminal offenders.
After all, does anyone feel safer knowing that access to and control of this data is almost exclusively in the hands of credit card companies, governmental authorities, insurers and the like? I know that I don’t, being a believer that you can only protect and improve what you can track and measure, whereas today we are at the mercy of self-interested parties that are self-policing themselves.
A great primer on the topic privacy is, “The Transparent Society” by David Brin. In this day and age, it should be a must-read.
Lately, my wife and I have gotten into watching Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, a show about how super chef Gordon Ramsay helps restaurant operators and their restaurants (re)gain heart.
There is unquestionably something romantic about the restaurant business. But, there is something tragic about it as well owing to high mortality rates.
So much of Ramsay’s show is about the price of pride and its offspring, willful ignorance. It’s a narrative drama around an interesting topic.
To see what I mean, here is a clip from one of the better episodes (from the original UK version of the show). If you are totally bored, check out a full show online right now.
Meanwhile, New York Magazine has a well researched article on the 'Rudy Giuliani, the leader' versus 'Rudy, the candidate.' Love or hate the guy, most of the article rings true.
As someone who feels forever connected to New York, I can also appreciate the invective many New Yorkers feel towards Rudy. Fortunately, there is a more consistently positive yin to Giuliani's yang, Michael Bloomberg.
Needless to say, the upcoming presidential election presents some interesting forks in the road, making, "The Good, the Bad and the Rudy" truly worth the read.
Here is a nice book-end set of quotes from the article:
“What has really enabled New York to be so resilient in the face of all these challenges—white flight, disinvestment, de-industrialization, global competition, 9/11?” asks John Mollenkopf, a CUNY professor of political science. “New York is trying to sail upwind against some fairly strong storms. Yet the population is going up, per capita income is going up in real terms. How did we do it? It’s kind of crass, but New York has continued to be a place where a lot of people can make a lot of money, which attracts one kind of talent.
“It’s insulting to every New Yorker that he (Rudy) goes around the country talking as if he thinks he was the animal tamer and we were the animals,” Ed Koch says.
It’s all about the narrative. My narrative is that in the year ahead, I plan to work and live in a manner that:
Oh, and I want to have fun and achieve of a bunch of pedestrian capitalistic goals within that timeframe as well.
The Thanksgiving document
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I spent some time thinking about where I want to be when Thanksgiving arrives again next year. I codified the particulars into a 1.5 page document that spells out what I want to accomplish within the 12-month horizon.
The end of year is a time for reflection. Why fight this gravity when you can embrace it in a meaningful and rewarding fashion?
As you get older, you gain the physicality of having traveled down a lot of roads. It is then that you start to understand the goodness of engaging in serious pursuits.
Each of us only has so much time on the planet. There are only so many paths that you can hope and strive to forge within a lifetime.
With specificity, however, things can become workable. Risk and gravity are what they are and must be factored realistically into the equation, but there is a sense of empowerment in embracing the full truth with your eyes wide open.
The document that I created for myself strives for clarity, it is specific and it anticipates a few different scenarios that could play out, the probability of their outcome, as well as best-case outcomes and what they mean for me. And the twelve month time threshold forces disciplined thinking.
Make your own
Disclaimer: I have no sense of a specific 'right path' for anyone other than myself. I believe, however, that everyone can benefit from codifying and documenting their personal truth.
File this in the bucket of 'know what you have to offer, know what you require,' but in spelling it out you can better build relationships with people around a shared definition of the situation.
Starting at the start, ask yourself, “Is there an area where I truly excel, where I truly deliver the end-to-end without 50 pound caveats? Where no one can (reasonably) accuse me of giving lip service?”
Where are you serious about your business and your life, where aren’t you and where would you would like to become more diligent?
Establish and seek out your own personal truth by creating a November document for yourself. Codify your specific 1-2 page plan and commit to living the particulars.
In Buddhism there is the concept that we can ‘become’ by becoming. This is a Koan that reverberates if you let it.
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