Book Review: Rework

This was one of the best, most fun, and inspiring books I've read in a long time.  It's written by a couple of guys who run a web-based business and it filled with their lessons on how to run a company.  But even though I work for the government and not a private company, I still found it great.  Much of what they have to say is just about how they way people work today is often ridiculous and counter-productive.  I think the "Don't Treat People Like 13 Year Olds" should be standard reading in every IT Department (why is it that so often something useful that's only a mild security risk gets disabled and people find themselves resorting to things that are bigger security risks?).

The book is short, but consciously so.  The authors cut the number of words in half between the second-to-last version and the final version.  Yet there's no chance that doubling the size would have made it any better.  And that's a pretty good summary of their advice.  Do what needs to be done and focus on making that part the best part.  You can have a hot dog stand without condiments or drinks or a colorful umbrella, but not without hot dogs.  Send people home at 5; fire the workaholics; resumes don't actually tell you anything (nor does GPA or school attended or years of experience).  Bottom line: there's a lot of truth in this book that almost everyone I know understands and yet somehow gets smothered in most of the institutions we work for.  I'd like to give this book to just about everyone I know who holds a job.

White Noise versus The National Security Strategy

This is an excerpt from President Obama's National Security Strategy:

Effectively Manage Emergencies: We are building our capability to prepare for disasters to reduce or eliminate long-term effects to people and their property from hazards and to respond to and recover from major incidents. To improve our preparedness, we are integrating domestic all hazards planning at all levels of government and building key capabilities to respond to emergencies. We continue to collaborate with communities to ensure preparedness efforts are integrated at all levels of government with the private and nonprofit sectors. We are investing in operational capabilities and equipment, and improving the reliability and interoperability of communications systems for first responders. We are encouraging domestic regional planning and integrated preparedness programs and will encourage government at all levels to engage in long-term recovery planning. It is critical that we continually test and improve plans using exercises that are realistic in scenario and consequences. 

This is an except from a book I loved, Don Dellilo's White Noise:

"That's quite an armband you've got there.  What does SIMUVAC mean?  Sounds important."

"Short for simulated evacuation.  A new state program they’re still battling over funds for."

"But this evacuation isn't simulated.  It's real."

"We know that.  But we thought we could use it as a model."

"A form of practice?  Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?"

"We took it right into the streets."

"How is it going?"  I said.

"The insertion curve isn't as smooth as we would like.  There's a probability excess.  Plus which we don't have our victims laid out where we'd want them if this was an actual simulation.  In other words we’re forced to take our victims as we find them.  We didn't get a jump on computer traffic.  Suddenly it just spilled out, three-dimensionally, all over the landscape.  You have to make allowances for the fact that everything we see tonight is real.  There's a lot of polishing we still have to do.  But that's what this exercise is all about."

Book Review: Hamlet's Blackberry

I tend to read a fair amount of news, and I pretty regularly read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. I've noticed that, after a decent interval, one of those newspapers will run a story that the other has already run. They're never completely the same, but they're pretty close. And I don't mean run-of-the-mill daily news, I mean the kind of feature stories that one would think ought to be unique. 


I bring that up because this weekend the Journal ripped off a feature from Wired magazine.  Both features offer a sort of debate between about whether the Internet is making us smarter (WSJ, Wired) or dumber (WSJ Wired).  Nicolas Carr, whose new book is about how the Internet is making us shallow thinkers, is on the "dumber" side.  For example, he says that studies show that the mere presence of links in an article degrades our ability to retain information--even if we don't actually click the links--because our brain is distracted by the need decide whether or not to click them (so, sorry about those links up there).  On the "smarter" side is Clay Shirky (in the Wired article he's joined by Dan Pink) who's noticed that we spend a lot of time watching TV (surprise!).   That TV time might be more productively spent, say, adding information to Wikipedia. For example, Shirky's Journal article cites a statistic that the total number of hours people have spent editing Wikipedia is about equal to the number of hours Americans spend watching TV ads over a weekend. (Makes the Wiki-geeks seem less geeky doesn't it?)


I bring these news stories up because they demonstrate a large theoretically debate going on about the promises and perils of the Internet and I recommend either feature, although the Journal articles are not free.  But those article don't do what William Powers' Hamlet's Blackberry does: offer some practical thoughts about how we are all living today with interruptive technology.  I wish everyone would read the book, especially the people who won't like it. For many of us, the constant mind-candy and threat of being always reachable is degrading our lives. Work never leaves us and we can develop the feelings of a "hunted mind." But we cannot blame just our employers, we spend our free time scratching at our smart-phones like crack(berry) addicts.  I am, after all, typing this on my shiny new iPad.


Powers' book is great and simple but not simplistic.  He reviews 7 philosophers from Plato to Seneca to Ben Franklin to Thoreau who lived in times of fast-paced technological change, and he pulls out practical wisdom from each. At the end of the book he details his family's habit of having an Internet Sabbath each weekend. No in-home Net access; they must walk to the library if they must get online. Powers finds this liberating and good for family togetherness. We plan to try it. 


So I highly recommend that people read the book and spend some time thinking about how well we are integrating technology into our lives (and letting our employers have more of our time than we'd often like). What's funny is that I heard about this book in an interview on the Monocle weekly podcast (#59). And a few weeks later the interviewer (and founder of the Monocle) Tyler Brûlé  wrote a column in the Financial Times about how he can't stand people who have out-of-office replies on their email.  He thinks they must only do that because they hate their jobs and so they should quit and be entrepreneurs like him. (And he thinks they're the sort of people who wear sweatpants.). But not everyone wants to be connected all the time and I really wish that Mr. Brûlé  would spend some more time pondering William Powers' excellent book.

Book Review: Born To Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

Pasted below is Nicole's review -- I couldn't have said it any better myself:
***
I am such a book evangelist. I go into it with the same verve: “You have to read this book. It is so amazing.” And away I go, telling the person in front of me how great this book I just read is. Ugh. So annoying.

But I am at it again. I just read Born to Run. Brent and I both read it. And loved it. Brent was a runner in college, for exercise sake. I have never been too good at running, but a few years ago I had this dream about running, where it was fun again, like when I was a kid. I jumped over things and ran under logs. It made me long to run again.

About six weeks ago I started running. Slowly. One Mile. I am up to 2 miles at a go. I run until I don’t feel good, then walk. I started running because every “weight loss” book/story of success I have seen, the person has begun running.

But the book was an after thought. And what an inspiration it is. The book just makes you want to get out there and do it...barefoot. Who needs Nike? Since the advent of the running shoe in the 1970’s running injuries have steadily increased. “Shoes block pain, not impact. Pain teaches us to run comfortably. From the moment you start going barefoot, you will change the way you run.”

Did you know the foot comprises one quarter of all bones in the body and more than 200,000 nerve endings? Over 2 million years has lead to a very well designed foot for running. Putting a shoe between your foot and the ground, means those nerve endings are deadened. We don’t need shoes; we need to get off the couch. Because we are wearing shoes, our feet muscles have atrophied. The book makes the argument that our evolutionary advantage was our ability to run, unlike other species near to ours.

“Heavier people are more likely to die from at least ten different kinds of cancer.” Who knew the exact numbers?

“When cancerous tumors are removed by surgery, they are 300 percent more likely to grow back in patients with a ‘traditional Western diet’ than they are in patients who eat lots of fruits and veggies, according to a 2007 report by The Journal of the American Medical Association.” To read the actual study, click this sentence.

I have started using my Vibram FiveFingers to run, and it is so much more fun. I am really enjoying feeling the ground, standing up straighter, and breathing better. It is really amazing.

The book talks about racing, and ultra-racing, and touching moments, and high drama. It makes you want to run. So run right out and get the book!

Book Review: White Noise

Don DeLillo is one of those authors whose name I kept seeing but didn't know much about.  But I'd seen my favorite author, David Foster Wallace, compared to him so I was intrigued.  From reading the book jacket of White Noise (I found the version that was the 1985 entry on the Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) it was clear that Foster Wallace must have been influenced by this book.

The book is about a professor of "Hitler studies" at a small college.  Not much happens in the book, except in a few powerful bursts.  The main one is the "Airborne Toxic Event" which consists of a black cloud of highly toxic gas released after a railroad car accident.  The end of the book has a somewhat gruesome scene too that I won't spoil.  The book it very funny, very biting, sometimes scary, sometimes sad.  I enjoyed it immensely and it makes me wish I knew how to write like this.  How does one fill 310 pages with, for the most part, small nonevents (a trip to the grocery store, say) and nothing but internal monologue and conversations.  Moreover, how does one do that in a way that is gripping and keeps the reader interested?  Where do you learn to write a novel that says something about life as it's lived today without anything much happening to otherwise uninteresting people?  I don't know but DeLillo does.  And for a book written in 1985 its seems very prescient to me.  His observations about modern culture may have seemed exaggerated then but have only become truer since.  But the best way to convince someone to read the book (or not to) is with the following passage which I loved.  If it speaks to you then so will the book, I think.  It occurs as the protagonist professor is getting attended to at a shelter during the Airborne Toxic Event:

"That's quite an armband you've got there.  What does SIMUVAC mean?  Sounds important."

"Short for simulated evacuation.  A new state program they’re still battling over funds for."

"But this evacuation isn't simulated.  It's real."

"We know that.  But we thought we could use it as a model."

"A form of practice?  Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?"

"We took it right into the streets."

"How is it going?"  I said.

"The insertion curve isn't as smooth as we would like.  There's a probability excess.  Plus which we don't have our victims laid out where we'd want them if this was an actual simulation.  In other words we’re forced to take our victims as we find them.  We didn't get a jump on computer traffic.  Suddenly it just spilled out, three-dimensionally, all over the landscape.  You have to make allowances for the fact that everything we see tonight is real.  There's a lot of polishing we still have to do.  But that's what this exercise is all about."

Book Review: Bursts

The nonfiction book world owes Malcolm Gladwell a beer. Or maybe a car. Or even a house. You see, as far as I can tell, Gladwell was the first one to make science-y concepts accessible by telling you a story about someone or something. He won't just explain, say, some new strategy for cancer research, he'll tell you about Bob the cancer patient and Joe the cancer doctor and how no one understood what was wrong with Bob until one day he met Joe and ....

Bursts tries to make the research of author Albert-Laszlo Barabasi accessible. And Barabasi really gives us a cast of characters: the globe-trotting artist who keeps getting harrassed by Homeland Security; a guy who corresponds with Einstein about the fifth dimension; a dude with an fake ear surgically implanted on his arm (really); and best of all, half the book tells the story of the Hungarian version of Braveheart.

These stories are generally great and very intersting. The story of the Hungarian Braveheart is worth buying and reading the book alone in my opinion. The chapters of the book actually alternative between the main narrative and the historical tale of a minor nobleman who starts a rebellion of the peasants in late Medieval/early Renaissance Hungary (for Freedom!). So you could just read the history and skip the rest. In fact, I'd almost recommend it because the rest of the book is a bit of muddle.

The book is called "Bursts" and it turns out that scientists, including Barabasi, have discovered a bursty pattern in nature, including human nature. For example, animals don't search for food using a truly random pattern. If they did, you see the same animal is all kinds of different places on any given day. Instead, animals stay in a particular area for a while, hunting someplace while the hunting is good. Once the hunting turns bad, then there's a 'burst' where they jump to a new hunting ground. Similarly, humans tend do to things like respond to emails in bursts during the day. We don't respond as every email comes in, but we prioritize. Some emails will get an immediate response. Some will wait hours, some days, some even weeks (or longer for me).

Great. So we burst. Animals burst. So what? Well, Barabasi is also trying to tell us that we're very predictable. If he knows your daily pattern he can tell you where you're likely to be on any given day at any given time. For a huge percentage of us 80% of our time is spent at home or at work. And we're very regular about it. We might show up in Australia once in a while, but that, too, happens in bursts. We don't wake up on random mornings and say "hey, why don't play hooky from work and fly to Paris instead!" (or if we do, we don't actually follow through).

Barabasi thinks that someday we'll find out that our future is totally predictable because he can predict (using our cellphone location records) where we spend most of our day. Or at least, the future might be predictable. Or it might not. Hmmm. Did I mention the part about the Hungarian Braveheart? I don't want to give anything away, but if you think Mel Gibson got tortured good at the end of that movie, wait until you find out how they did it in Hungary! Worth the price of admission alone.

Book Reviews: The Age of Turbulence and The Age of the Unthinkable

This is a review of two books by two authors each trying, grandly, to define an "Age." One is an 80 year old who has decades of experience in economics, business, and at the highest levels of government. The other is by younger man without the benefit of so much experience and so many lived-through crisis who is nevertheless attempting a revolutionary manifesto. One book demonstrates wisdom and nuance, and has an underlying current of thought that says that we can never be too sure of things. The other lays out a far-reaching and comprehensive global world-view that leaves no real room for doubt or second guessing.

Of course, it's probably not a surprise that the older man is not the one demonstrating wisdom, but rather the straightjacket of ideological precepts he faithfully served for 40 years. But it is still striking how it seems as though Alan Greenspan has written a book of anti-wisdom. His book is a faithful catalog of ideas that ruled the world for decades and now, still, lies shattered.

Greenspan's book, the Age of Turbulence, came out before the Great Recession. Even his prologue to the paperback edition came out before the worst hit. And so, his book is confident and breezy. This is a nice touch as he describes his life. I can confirm what all the reviews I read said: the first, biographical, half of the book is quite enjoyable. But the second half, his take on the world and his prescriptions for it, is like watching an particularly painful episode of Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm. Sure enough, right there on page 230, Greenspan mentions exotic mortgages. His take is that, "the typical American household ended up with a more valuable home and better access to the wealth it represented." Sure we took on more debt and there might be a bubble but hey, we'll all recover nicely. He does have one concern about the boom years though: all that income inequality. But never fear, better education will take care of that.

OK, at some level, this isn't really fair to Greenspan. He's been brutally honest about the failings of his ideology and the concerns he expresses are real and legitimate. From everything I can tell he's a decent guy who tried to serve his country well, and for 18 years at the Fed had no indication that he was doing less than a superb job. But sometimes, the messenger gets shot when the message is bad enough. The Age of "Turbulence" ended with a massive gust of wind shear that damn near took the whole country down. His book reads as if Mikhail Gorbachev had written a testament to the majesty of Communism in 1989.

Joshua Cooper Ramo, who, as a partner in Kissinger & Associates, ought to be kinder to 80-something ex-government types takes it to Alan Greenspan quite often in his book, The Age of the Unthinkable. And rightly so. Ramo, like Malcolm Gladwell, illustrates ideas with vignettes. He tells about the success of Hezbollah (which is quite remarkable considering the Israeli army and intelligence services they are up against); about drug-resistant tuberculosis; about a man who got a fundamental flaw in the internet fixed without revealing the problem (because it would have allowed the hackers to take things down before the patches could be applied). In short, he writes about all kinds of complex and unpredictable systems that take down men like Greenspan and Gorbachev. As he puts its, complex systems can, "demolish poor Alan Greenspan's hope that even 40 years of experience is a reliable guide to the future."

The best example Ramo gives in his book is an experiment done by dropping grains of sand onto a plate, one at a time. Slowly, without any human intervention, the grains of sand will form a pyramid. They form a structure that, for all the world, looks supremely well-managed and stable, even though no outside force is doing the managing or stabilizing (anyone else thinking of the Invisible Hand?). But then, suddenly and without warning, one single grain will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. It will send the whole pyramid crashing down. And here's the craziest part: no one can predict which grain of sand will be the one that causes the crash. Over and over scientists have done this experiment and we still cannot predict the future. Even 40 years of experience is not a reliable guide to the future.

Ramo's solution is to fight fire with fire. If Al Qaeda is using decentralized cells, then perhaps the State Department and intelligence community should be radically decentralized. He provides a fascinating example of a Brazilian company that gave so much power to its workers during the 1990 hyperinflation that its owner no longer even knows what all the company does or how many employees it has. Another example is that the South African government's resistance to handing out AIDS drugs led to a grass roots people-power movement that has succeeded remarkably at quelling AIDS, while the government's multimillion dollar tuberculosis program resulted in people stopping medication too early leading to drug resistant forms of the disease.

According to Ramo we need to be resilient not just defensive. The sandpile is coming down sooner or later and we'd better be ready for it. By contrast, Greenspan is trying to describe what keeps the sandpile up so we can continue to build it higher and higher. I don't know about you, but after this last decade I'm afraid I have to side with Ramo. And to highly recommend his book--the first three or four chapters get you there if you're in a hurry. But we all need to start thinking about the sandpile on which we're living.