Book Review: Reminiscences of A Stock Operator

This may be the best book ever written about trading stocks. Sure, it was written a hundred years or so ago, but the market behaves very similarly today. 

Jesse Livermore made millions in the glory years of early 20th century stock trading. He DID NOT use inside information either - just tape reading (the record of price movement).

Here's some major takeaways from the book:

1. Learn to read a chart (book doesn't discuss chart reading, just advises you to learn it)
2. Learn to trust your instincts, read the chart and ignore hot tips.
3. Learn that the market forms ideas that it is slow to abandon.
4. Learn to trade current events
5. Learn to recognize deceptive tricks (And this book has a lot of classic examples that still get used today!)

Wonderful writing really gives you a sense of early 20th century stock plungers: the bucket shops, the trips to Florida for fishing, catching the train, going broke in Boston and starting over in Cleveland, the crusty characters at the local stock brokerages and more. 

Book Review: Soft Sell

Soft Sell is the best book I've ever read about the art of sales. It contains both abstract and practical advice. Here is just some of the material you will find in the book:

*How to structure a telephone interview
*How to read people's personality and purchasing behavior by their dress and type of car
*How to keep your mind focused and motivated
*Dealing with sales resistance and reading people's unspoken priorities

The Two Business Books You Must Read

If I had to tell you which two business books to read it would be these two:

Michael Porter's Competitive Strategy will teach you everything you need to know about analyzing your business, coming up with opportunities and making a viable business model

And Chester Karass's book on negotiation - Give and Take - will cover the day today of making business deals.

And that's as quick and dirty as I can make it.

Getting Book Reviews

Don't forget book reviews! Most databases will allow you to select book reviews as a source type. Reason: find out a book's reputation, any hidden context, its significance among experts, and any problems with the book. Most authors are pretty persuasive and you need a second opinion.

Be sure to limit by document type check box

New York Times archives is a good option for nonacademic books published before 2006.

Your best bets for economics are:

Econlit, Business Source and JSTOR.

Be sure to limit results to "review" or "book review," depending on the interface. In Business Source Complete, you gotta click Show More types, and then choose doc types.





You can also use these databases:

InfoTrac Small Business Collection - focuses on less scholarly and practical titles - current management techniques and real world advice about business topics. You can search by book title or type your subject and then "book review."

Wilson OmniFile FullText. A good grabbag. You can limit it to search "book reviews" by a particular. discipline

These are not your only options but are some of the best. You can always check your favorite database to see if it has book reviews.

Peter Thiele Book Review: Zero to One: Notes On Startups Or How To Build The Future

Zero To One: Notes On Startups Or How To Build The Future

Peter Thiel was an early investor in Facebook and PayPal. This book represents his thinking: do something people say isn't possible.  

From This Review (you should read the whole thing):

Zero to One is based on the idea that there is doing more of the same (normal business), and there is creating something new. When you create a new way of doing things, that’s going from zero to one. Doing more of the same is additive, new stuff is what really grows the economy.

Book Review: Snakes And Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work

This is a mostly useful book about recognizing and dealing with psychopaths at work. If someone has good social skills - yet makes you feel uneasy -  they just might be a psychopath.  If someone has a work history of changing jobs quite frequently, they just might be a psychopath. 

Psychopaths operate by listening to serving people very closely, and then using people's deepest emotions to benefit the psychopath. The idea of moral ethics strikes a psychopath as actually wrong - might makes right in their world view.

I can do without the pointless fictionalized stories about psychopaths at work.  Other than that it's a very useful introduction to how psychopaths think, and how to identify a psychopath.  This book was also co-written by the preeminent theorist Robert Hare.

Book Review: Two Books By Frank Luntz (Recommended For Marketers)

What Americans Really Want 
Words That Work 

Frank Luntz is a political consultant who pioneered studying how people react to words - instead of actions. He was a master at calculating how people perceive a problem and packaging policies - both corporate and political -that met those expectations.  You didn't have to change your actual policy!

He's also very good at finding the gulf between people's stated values and their actual values and exploiting that.

We have two of his books here.  Interesting guy and a must read for marketers.

My Favorite Easy Statistics Book

Need a little refresher on standard deviation, median, mode, sampling error and more?

This is my favorite, easy to read book for the rest of us - The Joy of Stats.

Covers basic and advanced statistical topics. Other books on stats are in the same area.

Book Review: Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, And Future Of Rationing

This is a short, well-written interesting book that presents rationing in a favorable light. 

We live in an increasingly managed economy and technocratic age, so the notion of planned economies is an important one. There are really two reasons to ration.  One is actual shortage of a good (such as fuel or food in wartime) and the other is a desire to alter human behavior by making something expensive or rewarding behavior. 

Very often, the free market can produce pretty strange results and the book provides some examples of this . Case in point - the case of quinoa. Cultivated for centuries by Peruvian highlanders, Westerners now outbid natives for the grain.  The result is a change in diet to other foods for the natives - ironic that while surrounded by fields of quinoa. Another example is Egypt, where the author asserts that there's much organic agriculture that is exported to Europe while Egyptians are forced to import bread of low quality.

So do you ration the imported food, the native food, what? And what would be fair and moral? This book will help you think about these issues.

The book also discusses when people will accept rationing and when will they reject it. Another concept discussed here is dealing with underground economies.

The author does not really address situations where rationing has failed or produced tragic outcomes.

The ethics of an unelected technocracy (who in reality are often immune or exempt from rationing) deciding what behavior is to be altered is also not addressed. It is, after all, basically a pro-technocrat, pro-rationing book.

Book Review: Give and Take

Chester Karrass's Give and Take is a great book that tells you how to negotiate a business deal, contract, or purchase of a large product.

The book has pretty much any tactic that will ever be used on you and how to counter them.You can bet your opponent has read this book so be prepared!

You'll learn how to react when the other person changes the terms of the deal after an agreement has been reached, how to identify opportunities you otherwise would have missed, when to divulge information and when to keep silent, and how to get concessions from the other side, among many other tips.

Mandatory for business people negotiating a deal, or even if you're just buying a car at the local dealership.

Capital In The 21st Century

A recent book by French scholar Thomas Piketty is getting a lot of attention.  Everyone knows that the current system is producing very high levels of economic inequality.  This book deals further into the reasons why it provides an ultimate critique of capitalism itself. 

The author argues that extreme inequality is a system design of capitalism and the last few decades of relative equality are not representative.

Link to all Piketty books here.

Book Review: Nickel and Dimed

A few years ago, an investigative reporter goes under cover to see how the poor live on the minimum wage. Not very well is the answer in this classic book. 
 
Link to this review in Dissent Magazine

"Five jobs and three cities later, Ehrenreich concludes that many of today’s jobs don’t pay enough to support one person—much less a whole family. She works two jobs at a time and eats “chopped meat, beans, cheese and noodles.” But in all three cities, rent gets the better of her economy. “You don’t need a degree in economics,” she writes, “to see that wages are too low and rents too high.” But this is a mathematical conclusion, which could have been made with the aid of a calculator. By taking these jobs herself, Ehrenreich is able to capture the material details of workplace indignity."

There's also the random drug tests, mental drudgery and long hours. Recommended document from the deformed economy of the last twenty years.

All Barbara Ehrenreich books here.

Book Review: The Wisdom Of Psychopaths

OK, this is sort of a fun book review.  Would you be more successful if you were cooler under pressure, didn't worry about consequences, had unlimited faith in yourself, and could read people's minds? What if you were also a gifted conversationalist and were a master of romance?

Perhaps you should be more like a psychopath.  At least that's the amusing conceit of this book, which one imagines is written partly in jest.

But here's the serious idea: what if psychopaths aren't really evil, just hyper-intelligent people who don't believe in our hypocritical and illogical morality? 

Book Review: Debt: The First 5,000 Years

What is money? Does it represent debt or stored value? And your answer to these questions carries a lot of implications.

In Debt, the First 5,000 Years, David Graeber follows in a long line of people that argue that money is debt/obligation, all economies are centrally planned in fact and so let's make the economy work for us.  

One reviewer's take follows:

"In advancing his thesis, Graeber introduces a number of anthropological and philosophical themes alongside a historical narrative of change. While the early chapters of the book engage with such subject areas as ‘Primordial debts’, ‘A brief treatise on the moralgrounds of economic relations’, and ‘Games with sex and death’, the latter half of the book is given over to a discussion of the changing role and nature of money and debt from the Axial Age (800 BCE to 600 CE) to the present day.

Three themes emerge as noteworthy for the economic historian: the myth of barter; the link between the introduction of coin as money and military activity; and long-run swings in the use of bullion versus credit money.

His conclusion is that the gradual extension of commercial or market exchange, primarily as a result of military imperialism, succeeded in reducing all moral obligations to a financial value, and in the process destroyed the ‘baseline communism’ that Graeber believes to have been the foundation of all social relations."

And this boils down to: 

"Only when we realize that paying one’s debts ‘is not the essence of morality’, but merely our current human arrangement, can we agree to change that arrangement for the benefit of us all."

Well, that's one take on the nature of money, and one you'll see asserted from time to time.

Book Review: Krupp: A History of the Legendary German Firm

A short book review for you today. 

Krupp is a German Company famous for its high quality steel, armaments, appliances and other products.  It is a prototypical German company that follows the German model of higher wages, export led growth, and close cooperation with the government. 

Krupp: A History Of The Legendary German Firm is an informative and easy- to-read history.  German corporations are distinctly different from American ones: they are typically family-owned and prize quality instead of cost saving. A lot of this is made possible by the extreme emphasis on export led growth, and the book is very informative on this point.

Book Review: Francis Fukuyama Trust

Why are some societies more economically successful than others?  It is an age old question and Francis Fukuyama believes the issue is trust.

Find his book here. 

Trust allows larger scale economic enterprises beyond the immediate family.  But how does this occur? Fukuyama argues that large private organizations like guilds or church based civic Associations are key. If the state replaces these organizations, trust withers. Somewhat confusingly the author argues that individual rights taken to an extreme are also to blame. Perhaps the author is suggesting a return to paternalistic corporatism?

Read a review here.

Book Review: The Professional Fence

Book: The Professional Fence by Carl Klockars.

One of the best books about negotiation and small business management I have ever read.

And it's about professional fences - you know, the people that traffic in stolen goods!

Check out the negotiation tactics the fence uses in dealing with the thief. One of my favorite strategies is how the fence will often state something as a fact that is not true. Or how fences conspire to fix prices in the underworld.

You will see these tactics - misstatements, misdirection, intentionally misleading math, apples to oranges comparisons - time and time again in your business dealings even in the law-abiding world.

What about a business model? Check out the book's intro about famed London thief Jonathan Wild and how he organized the London underworld so that all goods would come to him.

Telling ya, check it out.

Book Review: The Presentation Secrets Of Steve Jobs

I can recommend wholeheartedly The Presentation Secrets Of Steve Jobs.

This book pretty much sums up the current cutting edge approach to presentations - honesty, passion and preparation.  External appearance doesn't matter so much as authenticity.

There are also tips on how to organize a presentation.  For example, define an enemy or problem and show the audience how your idea overcomes the problem.  Also create an a-ha moment that the audience can take home with them mentally.

Along the way, the book also discusses the correct use of slide images and text behind you and the correct use of props. Lots more in this one - check it out. 

Book Review: The Competitive Advantage of Nations

This is crucial reading for any student interested in international business.

This book by Michael Porter explores the reasons why any nation develops a competitive advantage in an industry. The answers often lie in national historical experiences, education, the nature of government regulation, access to capital, and geographic necessity.

Fascinating studies of why certain countries export chemicals, some excel in container ships, still others make the best appliances and more. Colorful analysis too of that elusive thing "national character" that will teach you how to approach this seemingly vague construct with analytical tools. The levels of trust, competitiveness (both good and bad), collaboration, openness to innovation and more traits are discussed.

After you identify and use an advantage, you must defend it! Author Michael Porter consistently stresses education as crucial in developing and maintaining competitive advantage. There are some case studies of some industries in Great Britain and United States losing their advantage, so pay attention!

Learn to analyze a country (including America) and then identify advantages.

Featured Book: Thinking Fast and Slow

Our copy here.

Should you think fast or slow? Some people say your Zen like first instinct reaction is the correct one. And that's a legitimate point of view.

Some people say no – saying that your first instinct is almost always wrong and you should stop and think carefully.

Thinking Fast and Slow is the title of this book by Daniel Kahnemann. He delights in pointing out how simple tricks like anchoring bias affect people's cognition. The book lists several other cognition failures that produce incorrect short-term judgment. It's worth reading to get an idea of these pitfalls.

Both schools of thought - be Zen, be cautious - probably have merit.