Category Archives: Book Review

Unfinished Business – Anne-Marie Slaughter

“I want a society that opens the possibility for every one of us to have a fulfilling career, or simply a good job with good wages if that’s what we choose, along with a personal life that allows for the satisfactions of loving and caring for others.”

Ann-Marie Slaughter lit a fire with her publication of ‘Why Women Can’t Still Can’t Have It All’ in the Atlantic, arguing that women who manage to be mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. She suggested that there are limits – in time, energy, fertility, and desire – that are unavoidable, and that no one can do everything. She speaks from experience: she gave up a high-powered job under Hillary Clinton as secretary of state to return to a less demanding (though still very impressive) job as a professor at Princeton.

In her forthcoming book, she extends this argument, suggesting that though there are some unavoidable limits on humans, society also imposes a lot of artificial ones. She argues that most jobs can be sorted into caring or competitive roles: investment banking might be competitive, but sectors like healthcare and education are more about caring. Society underrates caring jobs, she argues, and those jobs have also traditionally been the responsibility of women. If we are to achieve a better society, we need to increase the value we place on those caring jobs, whether it is childcare or senior care, and also make the workforce more flexible to accomodate more mixing of options, allowing part-time work, more parental leave, and other arrangements. Society, she says, has unfinished business when it comes to workplace arrangements and to social norms.

It’s a solid point, and I quite like her almost Buddhist discussion of limits. Her analysis of the psychology of caring vs. competitive jobs can sometimes feel a bit trite, though: it’s well out of her area of expertise, and isn’t as strong as the similar discussion in Friend and Foe, for example. Still, she’s engaging with an important issue, and one that in the U.S. in particular is often dismissed. Things like parental leave programs can help give children that crucial good early start, and most countries could do with thinking it over a little more. In a sense, it’s a nice complement to Sandberg’s Lean In: Lean In describes how to do well in the world as is, whereas Unfinished Business seeks to suggest how the world should change.

Disclosure: I read Unfinished Business as an advance reader copy. You can read more reviews, or pre-order the book, on amazon: Unfinished Business. It is released September 29th.

Friend and Foe – Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer

“Whenever we use a hierarchy, we make a trade-off between coordination and voice. Hierarchy creates a fundamental tension between suppressing individuality to achieve synchrony and denying key insights from those below.”

Every recent American president has gotten a dog, even Obama, whose daughter is allergic. Basketball teams that are a point down at half-time are more likely to win than if they were a point ahead. Men gain weight when their wife is pregnant.

What do these three facts have in common? They stem from our existence as social animals, our innate tendency to compare ourselves to others and often to compete with them. Evolution suggests two different strategies for interacting with others: cooperation and competition. When we cooperate, we emphasize warmth and relatability, perhaps by getting a dog: when we compete, we try to outdo others and use them as a baseline for our own success, perhaps even judging whether we are overweight by comparing our weight to that of those closest to us. Which setting we believe we’re in can make a huge difference to our expectations and to how we behave.

The overall thesis of Friend and Foe, though they try for nuance, often seems to boil down to cooperating with your enemies until you have an advantage, then smiting them. Not exactly profound. It is in the details that the book gets fascinating, however. Chapters consider issues like bargaining, hierarchy, and corporate apologies, and how our experience of either competition or collaboration can push us in different directions. A company that cuts the CEO’s wage along with that of employees often sees much less strife, they suggest, because employees then experience the cut as a collaborative, not a competitive, situation.

The book is a fun read with a lot of great applications, and addresses an issue of core concern to all of us. Recommended.

Disclosure: I read this book as an advance reader copy. You can read more copies, and pre-order a copy, on amazon: Friend and Foe. It is released September 29th.

The Wild Ass’s Skin – Honore de Balzac

“What we want burns us up and what we can do destroys us; but knowing leaves our feeble constitution in a perpetual state of calm…I have placed my life not in the heart which breaks, nor in the senses which grow dull, but in the brain which does not wear out and which conquers everything.”

Imagine you are given a piece of skin that can grant your every desire, but shrinks every time it does so, eventually draining your life energy and killing you. What do you do? Burn out, focusing on hedonism and making ever more outlandish wishes? Make a few enormous wishes, hoping that will satiate you?

In The Wild Ass’s Skin, the protagonist, Raphael, finds that no wish can satisfy him, and that either option will inevitably lead to his death. Instead, he attempts to lead a life of total calm, shutting out the outside world so that he feels no desire for anything. In order to extend his life, he cripples it.

Regular readers of Balzac, used to his focus on realism, may be initially taken back by the introduction of magic, but in truth the story remains largely about the human condition. As usual, it is also rich, almost overwhelmingly so, with ideas, jokes, principles, infamous lines, and allusions. Jokes and puns are made by characters both intentionally and accidentally, sometimes not even noted by the others in the work and so left to the reader to decipher. It makes for a challenging style, but a rewarding one, with rapid fire dialogue and ripostes.

In the end, it is also a study of the limits to human imagination. Unlike Faust, who makes his deal and achieves much, Raphael, who could have any wish granted, wishes only for wealth – it seems not to occur to him to wish for anything else, until he realizes his life is in danger, and he wishes only for life, the one wish the skin will not grant. The book is a criticism of materialism, not just directly, but also in how it impoverishes the imagination.

What You Really Need to Lead – Robert Steven Kaplan

“Leadership is not about the position you hold; it’s about the actions you take. It’s about having an ownership mind set. Leadership is about what you do, rather than who you are.”

What is leadership? Many of us have some idea of what we mean by it, but we often have little idea at all of what others think. Should leaders be in front, clearing the way? Should they be behind, organizing? Should they drive themselves hard and act as a role model, or focus on bringing out the best in others? All of these can be useful in some situations, but as Kaplan points out, when we are discussing leadership, having different conceptions in mind can lead to confusion. The key factor for him, though, is that all leaders must act with an ownership mind-set, no matter their status or position in an organization.

Kaplan has just been appointed to head the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and has spent time as Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs, a professor of management practice at Harvard, and a philanthropist. There’s no question in my mind that he’s a capable, driven guy, and based on his stories of interaction with students in his book, I suspect he’s a compelling leader. His students return years afterwards to seek his advice, and clearly trust and value it.

Unfortunately, I found the book somewhat disappointing. He makes a number of interesting points that I would have liked to heard more about, such as the different conceptions of leadership or the isolation of millennials who, because they rely on technological communication, find it difficult to initiate deep or meaningful conversations, leading to a lot of weak ties but not many deep ones. His main thesis, though, I found a bit lacking. I wholeheartedly agree on the importance of an ownership mind-set, but for me that insight wasn’t enough to fill a book: I wanted to hear more, or have him develop the idea more deeply. I haven’t read his earlier books, but I wonder if they might feel a bit more fresh and rich with new ideas.

You can see more reviews, and order it on amazon, here: What You Really Need to Lead. Disclosure: I read this book as an advance reader copy.

The Geek Manifesto – Mark Henderson

“Precisely what politicians think is less important than how they think”

David Tredinnick, MP in the UK House of Commons, is concerned that the cycles of the moon affects surgeries, pregnancy, and hangovers (though he doesn’t mention werewolves). He has attempted to expense around 750 pounds on astrology software, and is a fan of homeopathy as a treatment for various conditions (including malaria), also known as medicine for which there is no evidence. Unfortunately, he also has a seat on the House of Commons Committee that oversees the Ministry of Health. Members on both sides of the aisle have expressed similar views, at best seeking to use what David Halpern calls ‘spray-on evidence’ to justify it, evidence that you pick after you’ve decided what you think.

The problem isn’t limited to the UK, of course. The Geek Manifesto argues that there is an opportunity to improve the situation: to force politicians to actually care about evidence and science, instead of ignoring it. Henderson doesn’t care what politicians think, or what side of the aisle they’re on: he cares that they use evidence to support their opinions, and base their judgments on facts and studies, not guesses and assumptions. The answer is to mobilize the geeks of the world, which he would define as those who care about evidence, and use them as a voting block to force evidence-based policy. Hence, Geek Manifesto.

Most of us would agree, I suspect. Unfortunately, he underplays how difficult it can be to rely on data even when it disagrees with our assumptions. He even falls into the trap on occasion, suggesting that teachers shouldn’t be accepted based on school performance, when the data does suggest teacher intelligence and ability does matter in student outcomes. Finding and using information that disagrees with us is something we all struggle with, potentially most of all intelligent people, because they are so good at convincing themselves why a study might be biased or wrong. I don’t know how to fix that, but I know it’s a challenge.

1493 – Charles C. Mann

“To the history of kings and queens most of us learned as students has been added a recognition of the remarkable role of exchange, both ecological and economic…Columbus’s voyage did not mark the discovery of a New World, but its creation.”

I found this book fascinating. I had no idea North America didn’t have earthworms before Columbus, and that soil was brought over as ballast for ships that would return full of tobacco, nor that much of the silver mined in the New World was actually sold to China, who had collapsed their currency repeatedly for several hundred years (they were the first to introduce paper currency, due to a lack of available  metals), and so were desperate for a precious metal they could use to stabilize it.

Mann’s thesis is that Columbus’ journey marked the beginning of true globalization, not because it marked the developed world discovering the new world (which isn’t really true anyway), but because it led to a worldwide mixing of ecologies and economies. Columbus himself may have been wrong about almost everything, but his voyage still had dramatic consequences, good and bad. The whole book is excellent, containing fascinating stories such as the evolution of potatoes from a poisonous plant that could only be safely consumed when eaten with clay (which bound the poison molecules to itself and could be excreted), to a worldwide phenomenon that allowed dramatic increases in population density across Europe and China and a (temporary?) escape from the Malthusian Trap. You can still buy the poisonous varieties in South America, complete with clay dust, by the way.

Ecological globalization wasn’t the only thing that happened around 1493, of course, and Mann is good about highlighting the complexity and agency of the peoples on both sides of the Atlantic before Columbus, something that is often neglected by European historians. In some ways he seems guided more by curiosity than anything else, omitting some things to focus on others he finds more interesting. Still, the ecological changes that resulted from the increased mixing have been dramatic, in ways we don’t notice because we don’t realize they could have been different. North American forests are very different with the presence of earthworms, because they decompose underbrush; today they are destroying terraces in Southeast Asia by making them spongy.

Highly recommended. Not perfect, and with such a wide scope details can sometimes suffer, but well worth the effort.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The narrator of Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a nameless 90 year old man, who meets a 14 year old girl in a brothel – the latest in a long series of women he has met in various locations (the titled melancholy whores, though the original Spanish is bit less formal). The narrator makes no attempt to charm the reader, telling us he is “the end of a line, without merit or brilliance”: indeed, he stands out almost exclusively for his lechery. The story, though, is one of rebirth – at ninety, he finds himself in the grip of a whole new emotion, a youthful passion about the girl he has met.

Regular readers will know I’m a big fan of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It hurts me, therefore, to say I wasn’t wild about MMMY. It had neither the substance nor the stunning imagery typically associated with Marquez, and though it wasn’t a bad read, I didn’t find it up to the standard of his other works. The self-centeredness of the narrator means the rest of the characters exist almost exclusively in relation to himself, rather than having personalities of their own. Appropriate for a character study, as the book in some ways is, but it also makes the interactions less compelling, because it portrays one star dimming its way out of the sky, not a constellation.

“The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.”

“Age isn’t how old you are but how old you feel.”

“I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.”

“I never had intimate friends, and the few who came close are in New York. By which I mean they’re dead, because that’s where I suppose condemned souls go in order not to endure the truth of their past lives.”

Elon Musk – Ashlee Vance

“Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to…well…save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.”

Anyone who has Tony Stark (of Iron Man fame) based on them has a pretty good story to tell. The world first met Elon Musk when a South Africa trade magazine published the source code to a video game he had written. It was only 167 lines of code, but then that is more than most 12 year olds manage. Since then, he has cut up logs in Vancouver, dropped out of a PhD program, binged on video games for days, told a venture capitalist that he was like a samurai because he would rather commit seppuku than fail, achieved what many thought was impossible in three different sectors – the internet with PayPal, space with SpaceX, and electric cars with Tesla – and is trying for a fourth.

He’s also a brutal boss, and sometimes seems to take credit for the work of others or shape narratives to his own advantage, not always truthfully. For that reason, he can be a controversial figure, despite his achievements. One of the first journalists to get full access, Vance aims to show the good with the bad: attempts to capture as much of the character and achievements of Musk as possible.

The biography is excellent: well written, insightful, and interesting. Despite his flaws, Musk comes across as an impressive figure: not perfect, but someone committed to serving humanity, with a towering intellect, tremendous drive, and a penchant for taking enormous risks and making them work through effort and focus.

My one complaint is something I’m not sure could be avoided, at least anytime soon. The fact that Elon Musk is not yet dead – indeed, is still middle-aged – means much of the final third of the book is based on speculation on what he will do, not what he has done. For the same reason the Ancient Greeks would judge no one happy until they were dead, it is still too soon to tell how some of Musk’s ventures will play out. Still, based only on what he has already done, he has played a major role in humanity’s development for generations to come. An amazing achievement, and one I hope others emulate.

The Procrastination Equation – Piers Steel

Procrastination = Expectancy*Value ⁄ Impulsiveness*Delay

As a loyal reader, I’m sure you never procrastinate anything. For those of us in less lucky circumstances, however (no more than 95% of the world, I’m sure), procrastination is ever-present. The average American employee sends 77 texts per day: the total cost of responding to those annoying pop-up email notifications while at work uses up – per person – about a month of productivity a year. Some distractions may be unavoidable, but good workspace design, careful planning, and removing access to easy temptations can make a big difference.

Piers Steel introduces what he calls the procrastination equation: the greater the expected value of the activity (probability of occurrence*value of the activity), the less likely we are to procrastinate, while the more impulsive we or our environment is, and the longer the delay until the results are felt, the more we do.

He makes a number of good points: he wisely differentiates laziness from procrastination, for example, pointing out that the lazy never want to get a task done, while procrastinators do plan to get it done, just not immediately. I’m not sure I find his central procrastination equation quite satisfying, though: it’s not structural, as an economist would say. Does value mean the reward from doing the activity, or how unpleasant the activity is to do? Does delay mean the delay in reward, or delay until the task needs to be completed? He fudges a number of concepts for the sake of simplicity.

He has some good suggestions, beyond just the usual turning off email notifications. Creating a separate computer user profile with a completely different background and icons for work, for example, can help you reduce access to tempting distractions and clearly delineate when you’re supposed to be working. You can also try to create success spirals, racking up small victories that can inspire you and lend you strength when you face harder tasks. Hardly revolutionary, but a solid addition to an extensive literature on procrastination.

Most Likely to Succeed – Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith

“Our bottom line? Our nation continues to plod away with incremental fixes to an obsolete education system, as innovation races ahead.”

When I lived in Tanzania, I used to visit a primary school where the children were taught by having them all stand and recite things aloud. Learning by rote used to be common everywhere, and still is in much of the world. The idea that students should be engaged and think critically, and not just some students but all students, remains a new and powerful one.

Wagner and Dintersmith argue that even where kids no longer chant in unison, we haven’t cracked it; that students are spending too much time on rote learning, and not enough on really learning how to innovate. Children are taught to name the parts of the car, in other words, rather than how to actually drive. Likely to Succeed places the blame on standardized testing and the drive to prepare kids for college instead of teach them.

Standardized tests certainly have disadvantages as well as advantages, but it seems extreme to place the blame for the poor results of the American educational system entirely on them. The authors have a strong ideological position, and there is some support for it, but claiming as they do that standardized testing is the single largest threat to national security feels a bit much. They also occasionally misuse statistics, such as when they discuss the returns to getting a university education. There’s an important question over whether university teaches valuable information or just adds a signal without teaching much, but the statistics are fairly clear the returns to going are large.

Most Likely to Succeed has some solid ideas, and readers may find themselves nodding their heads as they go along – I liked their point that allowing students to use computers in exams might actually makes more sense if students are to learn to problem solve with technology – but for me the book struggles because it isn’t adding much to the debate. Everyone agrees we should teach students to think critically, and that we don’t just want to create low level thinkers. In some, egregious, cases, how to fix that is clear, but in most it is not: to learn how to do math, some evidence suggests rote learning is an important first step. The book doesn’t really provide answers on how to resolve the hard questions, or where to go next, other than that we should be teaching students high level skills somehow. I suspect education is also not as monolithic as the authors suggest: I didn’t go to an American school, but my impression is that the variance between them is extremely wide. For that reason, I found something like College Disrupted, which accounts for this variance and uses data to explain how education should change, more satisfying.

You can see more reviews (and get your own copy) here: Most Likely to Succeed.