Books that I want to Read

Economist on Google

2007-09-01T23:00:00.001-07:00

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Economist on Google

via John Battelle's Searchblog on Aug 30, 2007

Huh. Seems they've done their, er, book reading.

Such an ascent is enough to evoke concerns--both paranoid and justified. The list of constituencies that hate or fear Google grows by the week. Television networks, book publishers and newspaper owners feel that Google has grown by using their content without paying for it. Telecoms firms such as America's AT&T and Verizon are miffed that Google prospers, in their eyes, by free-riding on the bandwidth that they provide; and it is about to bid against them in a forthcoming auction for radio spectrum. Many small firms hate Google because they relied on exploiting its search formulas to win prime positions in its rankings, but dropped to the internet's equivalent of Hades after Google tweaked these algorithms.

And now come the politicians. Libertarians dislike Google's deal with China's censors. Conservatives moan about its uncensored videos. But the big new fear is to do with the privacy of its users.

This from the cover opinion piece. More on Google in the issue here. The conclusions and coverage are, well, familiar.

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Late August Linkfest: Week-in-Review

2007-09-01T17:03:00.001-07:00

a book that i might want to read :
* How I Became a Quant: Insights from 25 of Wall Street's Elite: A timely book, given all of the quant funds that seem to be having some difficulty these days. Its reviewed here, and the WSJ online excerpts chapter 14, by Clifford S. Asness, Managing and Founding Principal, AQR Capital Management

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Late August Linkfest: Week-in-Review

via The Big Picture by ritholtz on Aug 25, 2007

Soothing words from the Fed, along with an active discount window, allowed investors to breathe a sigh of relief. Oh, and Bank of America throwing a $2B lifeline to Countrywide didn't hurt either. As markets stabilized, investor's jittery nerves were calmed (or perhaps that was vice-versa). Either way, following last week's reversal Thursday and rally Friday, the markets continued on this week taking back much of early August's losses with more gains.

The final tally is nearly a mirror image of the previous week's winners and losers. The biggest winner were emerging market stocks, popping a huge 8.5%. (They are up 35.7% over the past 52 weeks).

Global stocks gained 4.1%, while European issues tacked on 2.9%. The Nasdaq also grabbed 2.9% this week, as investors came to realize that Tech stocks have no sub-prime exposure or other credit issues. REITs, the S&P500 and the Dow Industrials managed a 3 way tie, all moving 2.3% ahead. Gold added 1.7%, while the small cap Russell2000 brought up the rear, gaining 1.6%.

Losers for the week were the trade weighted dollar (-0.5%) and Crude oil (-1.0%).

Barron's Trader column identified the key question on the mind of investors and the Fed:

"Its the central question driving stock trading these days: If the financial market manages to stave off a crippling credit crunch, will tighter lending nonetheless choke off the economy enough to kill companies' profits?"

We may find out the answers to that question in the coming weeks. But for today, we will review som e of the more interesting and important stories you may have overlooked amongst all the madness. Its linkfest time!

INVESTING & TRADING

* How a Panicky Day Led the Fed to Act: The Wall Street Journal goes into the details that ultimately led the Fed to cut the discount window rate by 50 bps. If you are interested at all in how Central Bankers operate, you will find this discussion and timeline fascinating.

* Our overconfidence in technology doomed us to this crisis: Brains, the flesh and blood kind, are back on Wall Street. Gray matter is the new silicon. In the wake of the credit crisis, there is a new premium placed on the kind of active management that's not a bunch of souped-up computers running algorithms and firing off trading orders. The high-profile collapses of funds that we've come to know as "quants" or quantitative funds has challenged what had been an arrogant confidence in the power of computers, models, formulas the efficiency of electrified trading. (MarketWatch)

* Fed Easings and Market Tops: There have now been 3 hair-raising instances in the past 20 years when the capital markets broke down badly enough to cause commercial and investment banks alike to stare into the abyss of total collapse. In each case, the stock market fell after hitting recent new highs and the Fed came riding to the rescue. Here are those periods, the amount of the decline in the S&P off the highs, and how many days after those highs were seen for the Fed to take action . . .

* My, How Fast Liquidity Disappeared: The Garden of Eden began to look like a perfect storm until the Fed acted last Friday.We experienced a host of "Black Swans" that spooked the equity markets. We are now experiencing a temporary reprieve that will enable the de-leveraging of credit to continue. (Forbes)

* How a Gulf Petro-State Invests Its Oil Riches: The Gulf petro-states control a vast hoard of investable funds, one that is sure to grow vaster. Combined, government investment arms in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar hold an estimated $1.5 trillion. That gives them the potential to sway the course of broad global financial markets, including exchange and interest rates, the now-slowed buyout boom and the global credit dislocations stemming from U.S. subprime mortgages. Yet for the most part, the operations of these funds are opaque. (Wall Street Journal)

* Beware Bailouts: For anyone with a 401(k), it was hard not to greet the Fed's move with relief. But the short-term relief comes with a long-term cost. Money managers created the current turmoil by failing to take risk seriously, enabling borrowers with sketchy credit records to borrow money nearly as cheaply as blue-chip companies. In the past weeks, managers had been paying for their folly. The Fed's decision to flood the system with cheap money will create a textbook case of what's usually called moral hazard: insulating fund managers from the consequences of their errors will encourage similarly risky bets in the future. (New Yorker)

* Wells Fargo Gorges on Mark-to-Make-Believe Gains: There's the kind of earnings investors can take to the bank. And then there's the kind the bank can show to investors. Word to Wells Fargo & Co. investors: Beware the second kind. Last quarter Wells Fargo reported record net income of $2.28 billion, up 9 percent from a year earlier. Read the footnotes to its latest quarterly report, though, and you will see a new term in accounting lingo called "Level 3'' gains. Without these, the financial-services company's earnings would have declined. (Bloomberg)

* Mixed views on the Bank of America (BAC) investment in Countrywide (CFC) which I suspect will be a profitable bet for BoA: The Wall Street Journal wrote Countrywide's Surge Was Sweet but Short; However, Dow Jones reported OCC: BOA Can't Convert Countrywide Secs Into Cmn Stock

* Commercial Paper Has Biggest Weekly Drop Since 2000: Outstanding U.S. commercial paper fell 4.2 percent, the biggest weekly drop in at least seven years, as investors fled asset-backed debt and opted for the safety of Treasuries. The retreat may indicate that the Fed's decision to lower the discount rate last week failed to instill enough calm to draw back investors. Commercial paper backed by assets led the fall as buyers fled debt linked to subprime mortgages. (Bloomberg)

* Bearish Bets Fall on the NYSE; Bearish Bets Fall on Nasdaq: Short-selling activity fell for the August reporting period at the Nasdaq Stock Market, in line with the recent decline at the competing New York Stock Exchange. (Wall Street Journal)

* Fed study: The Rise in U.S. Household Indebtedness: Causes and Consequences

ECONOMY

The Wall of worry continues to build:

* Credit Crunch Moves Beyond Mortgages: It's not just mortgages. As it gets tougher to land a home loan, some people are also finding it harder and more expensive to get other types of consumer credit. Some lenders, such as USAA, are nudging up credit-score requirements across their auto loans, credit cards and personal loans. Bank of America Corp. and Capital One Financial Corp. recently raised fees and interest rates for some of their credit-card customers. And this month, Citigroup Inc.'s CitiFinancial Auto started charging higher auto-loan rates for borrowers with less-than-perfect credit. (Wall Street Journal)

* Real Income Fails to Rise for most of the 2000s

* The one question you must never ask an economist: Orthodox economics assumes that people know roughly what they are doing, that they are rational, and that rationality is unambiguous. Such assumptions are often fair enough in everyday life - hence the justified success of [Economist/Authors] Levitt, Landsburg and Harford. But in financial markets, people often don't know what they are doing. Recognising this helps to solve our puzzles. (UK Times)

* Financial job cuts soar on housing woes: A deepening U.S. housing slump has caused an alarming surge in job losses at U.S. financial services companies, and the end is nowhere in sight, consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. said on Tuesday. The industry has announced 87,962 job cuts so far this year, 75 percent more than the 50,327 recorded for all of 2006, Challenger said. Nearly one-fourth of this year's cuts have been announced in August alone. (Reuters)

* Consumer Confidence Tanks in Sharpest Drop in 20 Years: Consumer confidence sustained its steepest one-week drop in more than 20 years of ongoing polls this week, falling to its lowest level since the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in late October 2005. (ABC)

FEDERAL RESERVE

* In First Crisis on the Job, Bernanke's About-Face Is Weighed: The way he has handled this is completely in character, said Mark Gertler, chairman of the economics department at Columbia University and a longtime colleague of Mr. Bernanke. What's going on is in many ways a textbook financial disturbance and nobody I know understands these things better than he does. (New York Times)

* The Central Banks are Worried, or at Least, They Should Be Worried

* Robert McTeer: Moral hazard at the Fed: Moral hazard, illustrated above, is another one of those things that's easier to recognize than to define. My definition is, when the cost of an action is borne by someone else or when mitigating the consequences of bad behavior encourages such behavior in the future. The Fed's reluctance to intervene in financial markets began as fear of inflation but soon became fear of moral hazard. The Fed didn't bail out the Long Term Capital hedge fund in 1998, but it's still haunted by the myth that it did. (The Dallas Morning News)

* Retracted Memos, Canceled Vacations: Fed Cut Shocks The S&P 500 surged as much as 2.8 percent, after tumbling 9.1 percent through yesterday from a July 19 record on concerns losses on mortgages will hurt bank earnings and cause borrowing costs to rise. Yields on three-month bills climbed as much as 23 basis points, or 0.23 percentage point, in the hour and 15 minutes after the Fed announcement, before paring the increase.
(Bloomberg)

WAR/MEDIA/POLITICS/ENERGY

* Jatropha Plant Gains Steam In Global Race for Biofuels: Jatropha, a lowly forest plant that grows wild in India, has suddenly found itself at the center of a new phase in the world's alternative energy boom. (Wall Street Journal)

* The journalism that bloggers actually do (Los Angeles Times)

* Report Offers Grim View of Iraqi Leaders; Doubt on Bush Tactics: A stark assessment released Thursday by the nation's intelligence agencies depicts a paralyzed Iraqi government unable to take advantage of the security gains achieved by the thousands of extra American troops dispatched to the country this year. (New York Times)

* US launches 'MySpace for spies' (FT)

* Congress Approval Rating Matches Historical Low: A new Gallup Poll finds Congress' approval rating the lowest it has been since Gallup first tracked public opinion of Congress with this measure in 1974. Just 18% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, while 76% disapprove, according to the August 13-16, 2007 (Gallup Poll).

TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE

* Dumb head line of the week: Apple's surprise weapon: Computers

* A torn rotator cuff, shorn cartlidge, and other wear & tear has me looking at Voice Recognition Software (Its not the years, its the miles). Any suggestions from readers as to what's better or worse?

* Henry Blodgett gets to indulge in a little schadenfreude at Mary Meeker's public arithmetic error: Mary Meeker's YouTube Math

* The Out-of-Body Electric Two teams of neuroscientists have made a breakthrough in the study of "out-of-body experiences," according to this week's issue of Science. About one in 10 people report having had the strange sensation of floating away from their bodies at some point in their lives. According to the new studies, it's now possible to induce that feeling of astral projection in the lab. (Slate)

* Have you driven a Fjord lately? (Business 2.0)

MUSIC BOOKS MOVIES TV FUN!

* How I Became a Quant: Insights from 25 of Wall Street's Elite: A timely book, given all of the quant funds that seem to be having some difficulty these days. Its reviewed here, and the WSJ online excerpts chapter 14, by Clifford S. Asness, Managing and Founding Principal, AQR Capital Management.

* The Stephen Colbert / Richard Branson splashdown (Video)

* Off the record: In recent years, the economics of pop music have been upended. The market for CDs has collapsed, and not even the rise of legal downloading can offset the damage to record companies. Meanwhile, demand for live performances has rocketed. There is a story doing the rounds in the US that says a lot about the state of the music business. It concerns a young rock band who decided to stop selling their CDs at concerts. Selling CDs has, for many years, been a good way for an act to reclaim the margin that would otherwise have been snaffled by a retailer. But it made no sense to this band once they discovered that by selling CDs for $10 they were cannibalising sales of their $20 T-shirts. (Prospect)

* Score From 'Brazil' Wildly Popular, For Some Reason (NY Mag)

* Hard To Tell If Wikipedia Entry On Dada Has Been Vandalized Or Not

Its threatening to get nice outside, and I need to go outside and enjoy it for a few hours. Have a good weekend!

~~~

Got a comment, suggestion, link idea? Or do you just have something on your mind? The linkfest loves to get email! If you've got something to say, then by all means please do .

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Book Recommendation: Demon of Our Own Design

2007-08-12T18:21:00.001-07:00

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Book Recommendation: Demon of Our Own Design

via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed by pk on Aug 12, 2007

I just finished reading Richard Bookstaber's well-done Demon of Our Own Design, the subtitle of which is "Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation". The gist: Bookstaber argues that financial innovations have markets more volatile and interlinked, not less, and that's a bad thing.

I have a few bones to pick with the author, but I still recommend it highly.

As a reminder in other recent reading, Peter Bernstein's Capital Ideas Evolving is also high on my recommended financial reading list.

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Business of Software Conference

2007-07-17T17:45:00.001-07:00

big names and book suggestions

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Business of Software Conference

via Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky on Jul 13, 2007

The Business of Software conference coming up at the end of October is new this year, but it's got a pretty phenomenal line-up of speakers:

Guy Kawasaki practically invented the field of high tech evangelism working at Apple in the 1980s, and has written some of the best books about marketing I've read (my personal favorite is The Macintosh Way.)
Rick Chapman wrote the encyclopedia of software marketing, The Product Marketing Handbook for Software, and the hilarious In Search of Stupidity, which makes the quite convincing argument that success in software is a matter of just not doing stupid things. (My foreword to In Search of Stupidity).
Hugh MacLeod does those great cartoons, which is reason enough to listen to him, but he's also the marketing strategist for the only Web 2.0 wine company.
Tim Lister needs no introduction to this crowd. He's the author of Peopleware, the first and last thing you have to read about managing software teams. That's really all you need to know.
Eric Sink, moderator of our own Business of Software forum, co-founder of SourceGear, the classic small software company success story.

Also speaking: Dan Nunan, Jennifer Aaker, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Bill Buxton, and me. Register here.

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The American Hedge Fund

2007-07-07T12:47:00.001-07:00

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The American Hedge Fund

via The Kirk Report by Charles E. Kirk on Jul 03, 2007

In case you're wondering, right now I'm reading an advance copy of "An American Hedge Fund" by Timothy Sykes. So far I've enjoyed it quite a bit and will be adding it to my recommended reading list when I'm finished....

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Management books

2007-07-01T21:40:00.001-07:00

i want to read these books

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Management books

via Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky on Jun 29, 2007

I'm reading two very good management books right now.

The first is a classic: Up the Organization, by Robert Townsend. Apparently this book first came out in 1970, was widely admired, and slowly fell off everyone's radar, until Wiley republished it last month. Townsend ran Avis back in the day, and when you start to read a management book written in the 1960s, you expect to find secretaries, two-martini lunches, executive golf club memberships, etc. What you find instead is rather refreshing even by today's standards. On Mergers:

If you have a good company don't sell out to a conglomerate.... Conglomerates will promise anything for your people... but once in the fold your company goes through the homogenizer along with all their other acquisitions of the week, and all the zeal and most of the good people leave.

PS for Y Combinator kids: Don't be smug because you think that conglomerates went the way of the dodo. "Conglomerate" is just an old word for what you call "Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google." Oh and Condé-Nast.

Anyway. Townsend on management consultants:

[They] waste time, cost money, demoralize and distract your best people, and don't solve problems. They are people who borrow your watch to tell you what time it is and then walk off with it.

It sounds like a cliché, right? Townsend probably invented that cliché, boychik. And it's still true, and the jibe at Booz Allen later on in the book is still 100% on the money.

Even better is his disdain for marketing departments:

Marketing... is the name of the game. So it had better be handled by the boss and his line, not by staff hecklers. Once or twice a year for three or four days the boss takes ten, twenty or thirty of his key people... away to some secluded spot. On average they spend twelve hours a day asking unaskable questions, rethinking the business (What are we selling? To whom? At what prices? How do we get it to him? In what form?), four hours a day relaxing and exercising, and eight hours a day sleeping. It's hard work. But more good marketing changes will come out of such meetings than out of any year-round staff department of "experts" with "marketing" signs on the door.

Boy, I sure wish I had learned that one a few months ago. Two years ago, Seth Godin wrote essentially the same thing.

Anyway, that's just a few of the M's. The whole book is full of great advice like that, albeit focused on larger corporations.

If you're looking for something a little more, er, contemporary, Michael Lopp and his alter-ego Rands have just published Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager, which originated with some essays on his excellent blog Rands in Repose. (You can do that?)

Lopp has worked at Netscape, Borland, and Apple. He's the quintessential Silicon Valley middle manager. I hope he doesn't find that term insulting: he's probably the best Silicon Valley middle manager there is. He's brilliant, charismatic, and a poet-philosopher, and I could imagine no better boss.

You'll find that an awful lot of his book is about managing managers, big company politics, and the human side of getting technical teams to work together. And he has a style quite his own. You can get a taste of it from his classic Incrementalists & Completionists:

What was intriguing about my email repartee with the co-worker was that we weren't disagreeing about whether or not we should do something about the problem. We're arguing about how much we should do. The disagreement reminded me there are two distinct personalities when it comes to devising solutions to problems: Incrementalists and Completionists.

Incrementalists are realists. They have a pretty good idea of what is achievable given a problem to solve, a product to ship. They're intimately aware of how many resources are available, where the political landscape is at any given moment, and they know who knows what. They tend to know all the secrets and they like to be recognized for that fact.

Completionists are dreamers. They have a very good idea of how to solve a given problem and that answer is SOLVE IT RIGHT. Their mantra is, "If you're going to spend the time to solve a problem, solve it in a manner that you aren't going to be solving it AGAIN in three months." I used to think that architects were the only real Completionists in an organization, but I was wrong. Architects are the only RECOGNIZED Completionists in the company, but the personality is hiding all over the place.

Finally. One more book.

The same publicist who sent me Up the Organization also included a copy of Ben Casnocha's new book My Start-Up Life. Ben is a charismatic, energetic, brilliant 19 year-old who founded a successful software company, Comcate, at age 14. It's all very adorable. He's the Doogie Howser, MD of software startups, except for the fact that he probably has no idea who Doogie Howser is, given that the show went off the air when he was 4 years old, and, frankly, at age 4 he was probably too busy working on his second IPO to watch much television.

Ben is a seriously cool 19 year old. He's very smart. He's quite a good writer.

But.

But but but.

His book, unfortunately, tells you almost nothing about starting a company. It's really, really thin on stories of what the actual company did and how things worked. Worse, the book is padded with really, really embarrassing sidebars in which Ben gives you jejune Great Thoughts about business management.

Great entrepreneurs show up, take small risks (and sometimes, large risks), raise their hand when they're confused, and try to figure out what's going on and how a situation could be made better.

When you show up and raise your hand, you've already outperformed 90 percent of the crowd.

And:

The person on the receiving end of the mentoring relationship should work hard to insure it's not totally a one-way street.

Ben Ben Ben.

Yes, you're smart and good looking. Yes, you know more about starting a software company than practically any other 19 year old. And sure, I'll be happy to invest in your next startup, or hire you, or adopt you, whatever.

But. Mark my words. You're going to reach the ripe old age of 23, and you're going to look back on this book you wrote, and you're going to say, "how on earth did anyone let me publish such self-important crap," and you're practically going to die of embarrassment. Trust me: I'm in my 40s, and I'm still morbidly embarrassed by the pompous, arrogant, self-important crap I write on this site here, up to and including this very sentence.

Feel free to skip this book.

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Just read: den of theives

2007-07-01T21:15:00.000-07:00

vasuki gave me this book , i think it was a typical masala book written to kind of sell. basically as i expected.

the only thing is i lost the saturday reading the book. which could be used for something better.

Current Bedside Reading

2007-06-22T21:33:00.001-07:00

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Current Bedside Reading

via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed by pk on Jun 20, 2007

In case some out there are interested, here is the current stack o' bedside books:

Why Most Things Fail, by Paul Ormerod
Fortune's Formula, by William Poundstone
Capital Ideas Evolving, by Peter Bernstein
The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Vol. 1, by Imre Lakatos

The first three are ones I hadn't yet got around to reading, but I'm a Lakatos junkie and am re-reading his classic collection for the umpteenth time.

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Some Wise Words for Entrepreneurs

2007-06-10T14:22:00.001-07:00

download and read the book mentioned in the article

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Some Wise Words for Entrepreneurs

via Sramana Mitra on Strategy by Calvin McElroy on May 19, 2007

By Cal McElroy, Guest Author

A friend and advisor of our company, Sean Wise just published a new book... "Wise Words - Lessons in Entrepreneurship & Venture Capital."

You can download or buy the printed book [here]

I have known Sean for many years and used his counsel on many occasions. He has been successful on both sides of the entrepreneur (5 startups) and VC equation, has practiced corporate law, advises most of Canada's VC firms, and most importantly to this audience - has run 75 bootcamps in Canada to train enterpreneurs in how to develop business plans, pitch and work with investors. Over 2500 founders have been through Sean's program and collectively raised over $890 million in venture capital - quite a track record. He is an entertaining speaker, writes a regular column for the national Globe & Mail and publishes a popular blog [here]. Most recently, Sean has been working on the second season of the hit realty TV show in Canada, called "The Dragons Den"... where entrepreneurs pitch 5 multi-millionairs on live TV, for the startup capital they need.

Sean has dedicated his professional career to helping entrepreneurs achieve their dreams. To quote one of his Canadian fans, John Pinsent, former Director with Ernst & Young LLP - "Sean is the guru of entrepreneurship in Canada. What Al Gore is to the environment, Sean is to entrepreneurism". Can it get any better than that? Read the book.

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Research on MicroFranchising

2007-06-10T14:14:00.001-07:00

i might wanna read the microfranchising book mentioned to learn about this entire paradigm

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Research on MicroFranchising

via Sramana Mitra on Strategy by DaveStoker on May 26, 2007

By David Stoker, Guest Author

While the concept of microfranchising sounds simple and exciting, and successful models are starting to emerge, there are endless opportunities for research in methodology and impact evaluation. One university that is dedicating specific resources to researching the field of microfranchising is Brigham Young University in Utah. Their business school houses a Center for Economic Self-Reliance which conducts research with partnering organizations to help families become economically self-reliant. They have a specific MicroFranchising Initiative and have published a series entitled "Where There Are No Jobs" which consist of handbooks for business training of microentrepreneurs and case studies of microfranchises.

They are also sponsoring the publication of a new book that is currently coming off the presses called, MicroFranchising: Creating Wealth at the Bottom of the Pyramid authored by Jason Fairbourne, Stephen Gibson, and W. Gibb Dyer. My copy is yet to arrive but I look forward to reading their outlook and forecast of the movement.

I am personally aware of a number of organizations that are experimenting with the concept and hopefully integrate monitoring and evaluation into their models to help all of us learn from their experiences.

In the last Post: My forecast of immediate needs

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does someone have these papers for free ?

2007-06-10T12:20:00.001-07:00

if yes, will you mind lending them to me ? i can buy you a coffee

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Central Bank Chairs, Fed Futures, Assassinations, and Rational Pessimism

via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed by pk on May 24, 2007

Four new investments-related NBER papers worth scanning/reading:

Fed funds futures contracts are excellent predictors of the fed funds rate (Hamilton)
Rational pessimism and rational exuberance in explaining the equity risk premium (Bansal, et al.)
Markets don't care who chairs a central banks, except when they do care (Kuttner, et al.)
The effect of assassination on war and institutions (Jones, et al.)

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2007-06-10T11:47:00.005-07:00

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Vacation Reading List

via The Stalwart by Joseph Weisenthal on May 25, 2007

Next week, The Stalwart will be on hiatus as a take a much-needed vacation to a tropical island. The last time I took any time off of work was when I got married last summer, which wasn't exactly a restful vacation. I'll still have my computer with me (to avoid going through intense withdrawal), but I'm actually going to try doing something very radical: reading books. Yes, real printed pages. Strange, I know.

Here's my vacation reading list

Moneyball I know, I should've read this years ago, but sometimes you just don't get around to it. I'm about a third of the way through, and it shouldn't be hard to finish it over the coming week. Full writeup when I'm done, although I wonder if the world needs another person to talk about this book.
Bumblebee Economics Also, been in the hopper for a long time. Given the bee shortage, it seems more pertinent than when I first ordered it.
Your Worst Poker Enemy Duh, your worst poker enemy is yourself. At least in my case it is. Gotta fix that loose cannon head of mine.
Rebirth of American Industry A study of lean management
Mother Night The Strand had a big pile of Kurt Vonnegut books out the last time I was there, presumably on account of his recent passing, so I picked this one up. I've liked just about every Vonnegut book I've read, and I doubt this will be different. But I have to be honest, this will probably be the last on my list, because, let's face it, life's too short to read fiction.

And there you have it.

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2007-06-10T11:47:00.003-07:00

d Beckstrom, co-author of the Spider and The Starfish, talked at length about the power of decentralized networks over centralized networks and drew comparisons between the Spanish and the Apache Indian, Napster and Kazaa, and of course the spider and the starfish. The analogy is an important one. Cut off a spider's head and he dies. Cut off a starfish's leg and he re-grows. He says decentralized business and networks will always win out. This is fascinating stuff. You need to read his book to get the full effect.
--
Regards,
Umesh Kumar

http://worthyarticles.blogspot.com/

2007-06-10T11:47:00.001-07:00

i shud read this book

Sent to you by Umesh via Google Reader:

Smart and Gets Things Done

via Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky on Jun 05, 2007

I wrote a book!

The title is Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky's Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent.

It is, as promised, concise. Even though it's hardback, it's about the size of a paperback romance novel, with wider margins, and about 180 pages, including some blank ones.

To pad it out, Apress hired my favorite illustrator, Terry Colon, to illustrate it. He did a fantastic job (the cover illustration at right will give you a feel for his style). His goofy, frantic, manically hilarious illustrations are reason enough to buy the book.

Here's what you get:

Introduction
Chapter 1: "Hitting the High Notes"
Chapter 2: "Finding Great Developers"
Chapter 3: "A Field Guide to Developers"
Chapter 4: "Sorting Resumes"
Chapter 5: "The Phone Screen"
Chapter 6: "The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing"
Chapter 7: "Fixing Suboptimal Teams"
Appendix: "The Joel Test"

As you know, I write first and foremost for the web, so most of this material originated as Joel on Software articles. As usual, I did a bunch of reorganizing, reformatting, and rewriting to make it into a book-quality thing that you can read from beginning to end, and, since it's such a short book, you should be able to do that during the commercials of a typical half-hour sitcom.

It's cheap, about $13 on Amazon right now, so get your copy now before they run out.

Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Things you can do from here:

Visit the original item on Joel on Software
Subscribe to Joel on Software using Google Reader
Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

2007-06-10T11:46:00.001-07:00

Dan Altman's new book on the economy "Connected: 24
Hours in the Global Economy " is getting good reviews
(NY Times)

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2007-06-10T10:47:00.001-07:00

--
Regards,
Umesh Kumar

http://worthyarticles.blogspot.com/

book to read

2007-06-10T09:43:00.001-07:00

Eventually the financial systems in China and India will improve, and a lot more of their capital will be used at home. That won't happen anytime soon, though. In a new book, The Next Great Globalization, Federal Reserve Governor Frederic S. Mishkin writes: "It takes a long time for any nation to achieve strong property rights and an effective financial system."

--
Regards,
Umesh Kumar

http://worthyarticles.blogspot.com/

Summer Investing & Entrepreneurship Reading List

2007-06-09T19:01:00.003-07:00

Sent to you by Umesh via Google Reader:

Summer Investing & Entrepreneurship Reading List

via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed by pk on May 11, 2007

My friend James at TheStreet has a good summer reading list of entrepreneurship and investing books:

Things you can do from here:

Visit the original item on Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
Subscribe to Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed using Google Reader
Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

Plenty of Fish

2007-06-09T19:01:00.001-07:00

Sent to you by Umesh via Google Reader:

Plenty of Fish

via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed by pk on Jun 09, 2007

Two interesting books reviewed in today's Times:

The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy (NYT/Amazon)
The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture (NYT/Amazon)

Things you can do from here:

Visit the original item on Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
Subscribe to Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed using Google Reader
Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

code complete by steve mcconell

2007-06-09T18:19:00.000-07:00