Posts Tagged “reading”
Ross • 9th Nov 2009 • Living • commuting, getting things done, reading, Thinking, work
Ben Casnocha blogs about the need for building thinking time into the daily routine. He suggests ensuring that you schedule in time for reading, driving and similarl activities where thinking can happen unprompted. I agree and it is for this reason that I lengthened my morning commute. I now take a less quick but less packed train to work. I have just the right amount of time to sit, read and think about the day ahead, and I still arrive on time. I lose only some fairly unproductive time between 08:20 and 08:50, when previously I would do a sift on the overnight emails to warm me up for the day.
Ross • 7th Nov 2009 • Learning • books, business, business school, education, harvard, MBA, reading
I have just finished reading Philip Delves Broughton’s book on the topic (called Ahead of the Curve in the US). I loved the book: it’s one of the best reads of my year. It has also made me want to go to HBS. I think that the school comes across as a place that teaches well and broadly, that strives for a balance of the academic and the social, and which, fundamentally, tries hard. It’s a shame that in his subsequent work, Broughton appears to blame MBAs for the failures of the world economic system. Taking such a position turns him from an interesting outsider with a fresh perspective to a caricature of a bitter critic peddling exposé. It’s not clever.
Ross • 27th Aug 2009 • Learning • advertising, books, reading
Over lunch today, I read ad man James Webb Young’s A Technique for Producing Ideas, from the office’s bookshelf. It’s not really a book; it is literally a technique, spread across forty widely-spaced pages. It boils down to this: do your research, think hard about lots of combinations of possibilities, then distract yourself for a while until you have your eureka moment. That this glorified pamphlet has sold millions of copies certainly tells you a lot about advertising, but not in a good way.
Ross • 26th Aug 2009 • Learning, Thinking • books, maths, reading
I have just stopped reading The Tiger that Isn’t by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot – and not because I’d completed it. The book is a primer about the use and abuse of numbers in policy-making and in reporting. While it contained some well-chosen quotations and made some fairly good generic points regarding the appropriate use of large and small numbers, it all seemed fairly obvious. I could imagine this being of value to schoolkids getting to grip with evidence usage in decision-making. For everyone else, it’s rather patronising – “depending on what you’re counting, six can be a really big number” [I paraphrase from memory, I haven’t got the book to hand]. The time I would have spent finishing this book off will now be invested in Marcus de Sautoy’s Finding Moonshine.
Ross • 6th May 2009 • Thinking • books, reading, technology
I heard Jeff Bezos discussing the Kindle on Newsnight the other night. Bezos is the archetypal web entrepreneur, spouting the typical web-era creed: ‘newer is better’, ‘most people don’t understand’, ‘the future is upon us’ and ‘this will be huge’. The Kindle, however, just looked like a big white brick.
I would like to use a Kindle, to see what it feels like to use. I am sure I would be impressed by the display – apparently the matt, still appearance makes it look unlike any LCD you’ve seen before. That’s cool. I hope it holds its high contrast in sunlight though – many displays don’t.
Obviously, Bezos wants to hype this device, but to ignore the drawbacks is moronic. What are those draw backs? Well, I think they’d include:
- Dependence on battery power. Okay, so it’s efficient, and it lasts a long time. But it does need charging occasionally, and when it’s not charged, you’re not able to read anything. I’d like to see a solar panel on the back of the device.
- Robustness of the device. I read in the bath, on the beach and laying in parks, among other places. I prop books on kitchen worktops, over the stove. Occasionally, I read in drizzle and rain. I read while planes I’m travelling on take off and land. Would I do this with a Kindle?
- Resale and lending. Part of the pleasure I get from books is in recommending and lending the ones I like to others. I sell books I don’t like. Maybe they’ll work for somebody else. Can’t do that on Kindle.
- Loss and breakage. It’s hard to break a book. Short of dropping it totally in the bath, or ocean, they’re robust. But more to the point, if you break a book, you’ve lost about £5, on average. Break a Kindle and you’re in for a few hundred quid. Plus – who steals other people’s books?
I think Kindle will find its niche – perhaps for technical manuals for the mechanic servicing 30 types of car. For the average reader, I’m not so sure. After the inital buzz, won’t you miss the unbreakable book?
Sometimes low-tech works. I think books are a case in point. After all, if the wonder that is email hasn’t yet created the paperless office, what hope has Kindle of ridding us of paper we hold more dear?
Ross • 4th May 2009 • Thinking • books, business, economics, reading, risk
Last night, over some fish and chips in their new house, I mentioned to some good friends that I was reading Peter L. Bernstein’s Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk. I am progressing slowly, but enjoying it a great deal. It has one of the best introductions that I have read for some time. And it has given me the word astragalus, which would make the ideal name for my second hedge fund… after Palomino.
Ross • 27th Apr 2009 • Learning • culture, literature, reading, shakespeare
As a little break in my financial reading and in an effort to become a little more cultured, I picked up Nicholas Royle’s How to Read Shakespeare. The idea of this paperback series is to introduce the language and the meaning of a series of great thinkers.
This book has reminded me of how much I hate literary interpretation. The first chapter, which focuses on The Merchant of Venice (my favourite Shakespeare play by some distance), makes some interesting observations. For example, that Shakespeare uses the word ‘corner’ as an metaphor to female genitalia throughout many of his plays, and that it this may have links to the cornu, or ‘horns of cuckoldry’. This is vaguely interesting, although it appears Shakespeare used many words as innuendo for female genitalia (Hamlet: Do you think I talk of country matters?)
What is frustrating about this book is that the scholarly interesting cross-referencing and sensible etymology is followed by examples of such utter tripe that the whole book is spoilt. For example, the author suggests that the Bard invented the word ‘witsnapper’ because it sounds a bit like his name – Wi[lliam] S[hakespe]ar[e]. It doesn’t. The idea is groundless and absurd, and stupidities like this cloud the book. I doubt I’ll bother with Chapter Two.
Ross • 24th Apr 2009 • Learning • business, economics, finance, reading
I’ve just finished John Kay’s The Long and the Short of It. In the terms of the analysts that the book derides, I’m upgrading my recommendation from a Hold to a Buy.The book does have some downsides: I think it over-promises on investment advice and, at times, it rehashes many ideas from the author’s regular columns in the Financial Times and elsewhere. For example, there is little in the chapter on future regulatory reform that isn’t said more succinctly in this Guardian piece. Perhaps this is a remnant of Kay’s working methods on his previous books The Hare and the Tortoise and Everlasting Lightbulbs, which were collections of columns by design. Still, this is only a problem for people who have read other John Kay books and articles. Readers new to his admirably direct and forthright style will not suffer this slightly disappointing déjà vu.
Despite these gripes, it’s still a good, and quick, read – a good deal better than Hugo Dixon’s Introduction to Finance, which I struggled through at the end of last year. In fact, I read Kay’s book so quickly that I’ve set aside half an hour this weekend to nip back through the investment advice sections and précis the advice. The big lesson I do remember (and it is a key theme through the book) is that holding many unrelated and diversified risks can reduce portfolio risk more than just holding supposedly safe blue chips. Frankly, the book was worth it for this advice alone.
It’s also worth mentioning that the book has a great ‘Bookshelves and bookmarks’ bibliography at the end, with some further reading recommendations. I’m now awaiting about six tomes from Amazon Marketplace to build up my investment library.
