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The Best Business Book I’ve Ever Read (2014)

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Re: The Best Business Book I’ve Ever Read (2014)

#41

Post by hnnewguy »

guiomie wrote: post #34
bko wrote: post #30

Everything I've read about this book, apart from comments by Bill Gates, prevented me from reading it. Does anyone have any recommendations of better business books? I was incredibly inspired by Isaacson's Jobs biography. To learn that someone so flawed can achieve such greatness is inspiring. I also read it almost like a mystery novel, trying to decipher what he was actually doing that was creating such value. I've…

If your looking for business entertainement books, check out Michael Lewis (the guy behind money ball). I really like The new new thing, flash boys and boomerang.

Pretty much everything he writes is a good read. He takes his liberties here and there (especially with Flash boys), but he is an intelligent man with a knack for story-telling. Very easy reading.

So add Moneyball, Liar's Poker, The Big Short (good telling of the 2007 financial crisis), Panic (contrasts before and after news articles around financial crises) and The Blind Side to the list.

(Don't let The Blind Side motion picture scare you off. The book has a lot of on-and-off-the field football strategy that I found interesting.)

Re: The Best Business Book I’ve Ever Read (2014)

#42

Post by diydsp »

sopooneo wrote: post #17
alimoeeny wrote: post #5

I feel very uncomfortable that I cannot see what is so brilliant about this book that Bill Gates goes on and on about it. I tried to read it and was bored and stopped half way through it. Anybody can shed some light? Share what you've learned, please.

In general, I have been horrified by the book recommendations about various fields, by experts in those fields. I used to teach, and the masters of the craft, folks who could silence a room with a glance, and inspired kids to harder work than they knew possible, used to recommend books that seemed embarrassingly trite. I attribute it to the fact that they were natural experts, and not necessarily book lovers. It woul…

I could see that.

Even if they weren't a natural, sparrow-like expert, they may have developed numerous skills... but one or two keystone skills lie hidden in an otherwise trite book that everyone else gets already and a long time...

that makes it seem like that trite book is the most important one.. but it's just the last one.. :)

Re: The Best Business Book I’ve Ever Read (2014)

#43

Post by freyr »

sopooneo wrote: post #17
alimoeeny wrote: post #5

I feel very uncomfortable that I cannot see what is so brilliant about this book that Bill Gates goes on and on about it. I tried to read it and was bored and stopped half way through it. Anybody can shed some light? Share what you've learned, please.

In general, I have been horrified by the book recommendations about various fields, by experts in those fields. I used to teach, and the masters of the craft, folks who could silence a room with a glance, and inspired kids to harder work than they knew possible, used to recommend books that seemed embarrassingly trite. I attribute it to the fact that they were natural experts, and not necessarily book lovers. It woul…

> I attribute it to the fact that they were natural experts

I agree that professors often choose books poorly, but disagree with the idea of a "natural expert." No human is born with a mathematical understanding of flight dynamics. There may be people who grasp it relatively quickly, although in my experience that's usually because they're relatively quick learners in general, and because they're building on a very strong foundation. Yes, there are people who are just smarter than the rest of us. But there are just as many people, if not more, who put in tremendous effort to become experts at which point they may appear as naturals. (Furthermore, some may downplay these effort and cultivate this idea that they're a "natural" to impress their colleagues and students.) It's not always obvious what sacrifices they made along the way.

Re: The Best Business Book I’ve Ever Read (2014)

#44

Post by freyr »

I bought and read the book a few months back. About half the book is about businesses (mainly large corporations), while the other half is about banking and the stock market. I think this disappointed readers who were expecting a directly applicable "how-to" book on business.

Here's a run-down of the book by chapter, with the chapters ostensibly related to business marked by asterisks:

    1. The Fluctuation -- on stock market volatility

    2. *The Fate of the Edsel* -- how Ford failed to find a product-market fit.

    3. The Federal Income Tax -- self-explanatory.

    4. A Reasonable Amount of Time -- on insider trader.

    5. *Xerox Xerox Xerox Xerox* -- read this online.

    6. Making the Customers Whole -- about how a large investment firm crumbled
       when a single large speculative investment fell through, and how the 
       stock exchange stepped in to repay the firm's customers.

    7. *The Impacted Philosophers* -- on an anti-trust investigation of General 
       Electric (perhaps Gates related personally to this).

    8. The Last Great Corner -- about stock price manipulation

    9. A Second Sort of Life -- about David Lilienthal, who went transitioned from
       a career in government to investment banking.

    10. *Stockholder Season* -- on what it's like, as an individual stockholder, 
        to attend a stockholder meeting.

    11. *One Free Bite* -- on intellectual property and non-compete agreements.

    12. In Defense of Sterling -- about how the central banks of the world 
        cooperate to maintain stability across currencies.
Many of these stories would be particularly relevant if you ran a multinational corporation or were one of the world's wealthiest investors. I think it's no accident that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet enjoyed this book so much.

I happened to enjoy the parts about Wall Street, so I enjoyed the book. The comparisons to Michael Lewis are apt. It was most interesting for me to see how many of the same economic issues being discussed today (income inequality, intellectual property, corporate misconduct, the extraordinary power and influence of the banking industry, etc.) were discussed in nearly the exact same terms 50+ years ago. It doesn't give you the sense that great progress has been made on these fronts, and perhaps we'll still be complaining about the exact same things in 2065.

Re: The Best Business Book I’ve Ever Read (2014)

#45

Post by matwood »

davemel37 wrote: post #40
bko wrote: post #30

Everything I've read about this book, apart from comments by Bill Gates, prevented me from reading it. Does anyone have any recommendations of better business books? I was incredibly inspired by Isaacson's Jobs biography. To learn that someone so flawed can achieve such greatness is inspiring. I also read it almost like a mystery novel, trying to decipher what he was actually doing that was creating such value. I've…

Some Iconic Business Books I loved and are Worth Reading IMHO. Use Your Noodle and Get The Boodle (aka Think and Grow Rich by Napolean Hill - that was his proposed but rejected title), Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, Be My Guest - Conrad Hilton Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, The Success System That Never Fails - W. Clement Stone, Winning Through Intimidation - Robert Rin…

> How to Win Friends and influence People - Dale Carnegie

Probably the most helpful book I ever read as a teenager, and I still read it every so often as a reminder. The lessons are simple but effective, not just in business but all relationships. Empathy, listening, and genuine interest will do more to 'win' people than anything else you can do.

Re: The Best Business Book I’ve Ever Read (2014)

#46

Post by alimoeeny »

Codhisattva wrote: post #12
alimoeeny wrote: post #5

I feel very uncomfortable that I cannot see what is so brilliant about this book that Bill Gates goes on and on about it. I tried to read it and was bored and stopped half way through it. Anybody can shed some light? Share what you've learned, please.

Serious question: what were you expecting to see from the best book about business?

Don't know. I expected some insights into how to build and run a business, how to deal with different forces that pull and push on you and your business, how to deal with your psychology when doing all of this, how to understand finance, .... I don't know, I know that I didn't expect to see what I saw in this book.

Re: The Best Business Book I’ve Ever Read (2014)

#47

Post by igonvalue »

guy_c wrote: post #2

A nice observation from the Xerox, Xerox, Xerox, Xerox chapter: "In any case, office reproduction began to grow very rapidly. (It may seem paradoxical that this growth coincided with the rise of the telephone, but perhaps it isn’t. All the evidence suggests that communication between people by whatever means, far from simply accomplishing its purpose, invariably breeds the need for more.) "

That reminds me of Edward Glaeser's point from Triumph of the City about the relationship between electronic communication and face-to-face meetings:

> Today, information technology is changing the world, making it more idea-intensive, better connected, and ultimately more urban. Improvements in information technology seem to have increased, rather than reduced, the value of face-to-face connections, which might be called Jevons’s Complementarity Corollary. The nineteenth-century English economist William Stanley Jevons noted that more fuel-efficient steam engines didn’t lead to less coal consumption. Better engines made energy use effectively less expensive, and helped move the world to an industrial era powered by coal. The term Jevons’s paradox has come to refer to any situation in which efficiency improvements lead to more, not less, consumption—one reason why low-calorie cookies can lead to larger waistlines and fuel-efficient cars can end up consuming more gas. Jevons’s paradox applied to information technology means that as we acquire more efficient means of transmitting information, like e-mail or Skype, we spend more, not less, time transmitting information.

> One might think that better information technology would reduce the need to learn from other sources, like face-to-face meetings in cities. But Jevons’s Complementarity Corollary, which follows naturally from Jevons’s paradox, predicts that improvements in information technology can lead to more demand for face-to-face contact, because face time complements time spent communicating electronically.

Re: The Best Business Book I’ve Ever Read (2014)

#48

Post by acchow »

guy_c wrote: post #2

A nice observation from the Xerox, Xerox, Xerox, Xerox chapter: "In any case, office reproduction began to grow very rapidly. (It may seem paradoxical that this growth coincided with the rise of the telephone, but perhaps it isn’t. All the evidence suggests that communication between people by whatever means, far from simply accomplishing its purpose, invariably breeds the need for more.) "

I think of code the same way - far from simply accomplishing its purpose, invariably breeds the need for more.
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