Narrates the birth of Marin’s slow-growth ethic in the 1960s and 70s, and halting progress toward similar values along Sonoma’s Russian River in the 1990s. Generally resisting the urge to pontificate about nature, biodiversity, etc., the author details key land purchases, public policy studies, political tactics, and courtroom engagements leading to the modern Bolinas Lagoon, Tomales Bay, and elsewhere. In the case of the Russian River, miners with firmer ties to local supervisors (rather than land developers) make the byproducts of gravel mining a more intractable problem. An essential piece of local history.
Month: April 2023
2. Porter, Competitive Strategy (13 Feb 2010)
Details techniques for analyzing industries and their component firms, for purposes of making capital-intensive decisions and achieving lasting advantage over industry rivals. Porter postulates five forces driving equilibrated competition: existing rivalries, potential entrants, substitutes, suppliers, and buyers. There are typical positions to take: cost leadership, differentiation, and industry (segment) specialization. Within this framework, the author then identifies ways to analyze market signalizing and competitor movements, dealings with buyers and suppliers, and industry subgroups and evolution. Written in 1980, the book focuses on old-line businesses (e.g., materials or manufacturing), often delving into industry classification by structure or lifecycle (fragmented, emerging, global, etc). The final chapters are more action-oriented, dealing with questions of vertical integration, capacity expansion, and entry into new business. The paradigmatic textbook has recently been challenged on the grounds that no strategy can deliver sustainable advantage.
3. Walsh, Web Startup Success Guide (16 Feb 2010)
A manual for software developers looking to launch entrepreneurial businesses. The environment has changed for the better, principally due to open source, online tools and platform options, and social networking / DIY marketing. The second main thrust is an introduction to fundraising, the third concerns managing productivity. The most important message appears at the outset: carefully choose the problem to be solved, and resolve so far as possible to use resources (i.e., code) you can muster yourself.
5. Friedman, Next 100 Years (27 Apr 2010)
Projects the major historical events of the 21st century using a determinist geopolitical framework. The US will benefit from centrifugal forces in China and the Russian-dominated Caucasus, and then see off a wartime alliance of Turkey and Japan, which along with US ally Poland will have emerged as major players. (The Islamist challenge will dissipate because it lacks geopolitical mass.) Key trends include population decline (which will vitiate global warming), the American-led militarization of space and its attendant civilian benefits (particularly in energy), new forms of warfare that pull back from the social mobilization of total war, and the impact of America’s 50-year cycles — due in 2030 and 2080. The rupture of 2030 will lead the US to encourage immigration; its space edge (and continued control of the seas) will carry the States through the midcentury war; but the cultural weakness of the Hispanic fifth column in the southwest ‘borderlands’ will prove a liability as the century ends. Strongly informed by a sharp reading of history, but at times almost Marxist in its faith in the inevitability of events. There is little here in the way of political thought.
6. Cagan, Inspired (14 May 2010)
Product development is the process of discovering valuable, useable, and feasible services. In a how-to format, the author touches on roles/responsibilities, emphasizing the purpose is to determine what (now how) to build; the importance of focusing on the problem that is being solved for the user; the value of high fidelity prototypes (essentially, frequent iterations of the product requirements document); and the implicitly changing nature of product development in consumer businesses. Much of the material is already online, and represents a distillation of consulting engagements.
7. Kotler, On Marketing (4 Jun 2010)
Outlines leading concepts in strategic, tactical, and operational (administrative) marketing. The author does not quite agree Drucker’s maxim that good marketing makes selling superfluous, but thinks instead that its task is to discover and satisfy unmet needs. The most useful (practical) chapters are 9 and 10: planning and evaluating performance. Also a useful review of the famous 4 Ps: product, prices, promotion, placement. Most of this material is probably now online.
8. Miller, Tradestreaming (12 Jul 2010)
Delineates a half dozen ways that retail investors can utilize online resources and services to improve investing practice, mainly idea generation. The success of financial bloggers has spawned businesses that enable retailers to piggyback, or ‘commune’, with pros. Simultaneously, one can crowdsource, scavenge chat boards, or leverage growing amounts of online data to qualify investment theses. While several chapters evaluate au courant vendors, the conclusion is further reaching in predicting online brokers will become platforms for service vendors (i.e., app stores), content providers will become virtual asset managers, and RIAs will gain ground on wirehouse brokers. But how will the latter (i.e., asset managers) respond?
5. Grattan, Australian Prime Ministers (10 Apr 2023)
Short sketches of Aussie heads of government from Federation through Kevin Rudd’s first term, nearly all by different biographers. Prime ministers up to World War I were builders; through World War II adapted Australia’s role in the changing British empire; through the early 1970s economic growth was balanced with social cohesion; and through the Howard era Australia was ‘reentering’ the global economy and engaging with Asia. Nearly all tenures ended in political failure; the Treasurer is frequently PM in waiting. Many of the biographers, notably McIntyre and Day, are Howard’s ‘black arm-banders’.
• Deakin was the outstanding early PM (despite similarities with Barton), enshrining pro-British views, White Australian immigration to quell labor unrest, the balancing of export-led economy and domestic protection – the ‘national mastery of material circumstances’. Oddly, none of the contributors identify Welsh’s observation that the Federation constitution contained virtually all elements of the welfare state
• Fisher is credited for irreversible integration of Labor Party as a governing party, by dint of pragmatism
• Hughes prioritized centralized control for national, economic efficiency – nevermore to be trust by Labor, never by business
• Menzies’ longevity inherently involved failings, but do not cast him as fossilized – he he had longstanding ability to express, guide the beliefs of common Australians and was a man of principle. It’s remarkable his successors weren’t Labor. The collection suffers from the decision to treat him only once, in the WWII years
• Curtin renounced revolution for responsibility. Chifley took advantage of wartime controls and postwar credit, but overstepped h in attempting to nationalize banking
• McEwen built up Trade to rival Treasury, was the apotheosis of protection
• The Labor Party’s success over 1980s-2000s was founded in Whitlam’s administrative and political reforms. His economic beliefs were founded in 1960s Keynesianism, however, and his budgets were unsuccessful
• Fraser was ultimately orthodox and therefore reliant on maneuver disguised by Olympian demeanor
• Hawke’s reforms make him the greatest PM since Menzies, notwithstanding his fallout with Keating. The latter was a brilliant Treasurer but more partisan as head of government, albeit (apparently) the first of the Asianists
• Howard’s biographer opines he changed the country economically for the better and socially for the worse. His challenging multiculturalism as concluding there’s no value in social cohesion is left unaddressed
9. Authers, Fearful Rise of Markets (21 Aug 2010)
A concise, effective overview of primary financial phenomena leading to 2008-09’s Global Financial Crisis. Short chapters outlining how index investing undermines diversification, for example, serve as object lessons in how the financial markets came to be dangerously correlated and newly sundered principals (investors) and agents. Many of the early topics (e.g., carry trading, decline of banks / rise of money market funds) benefit from the author’s writings in the
- Financial Times
; some of the latter efforts (e.g., quants or ‘politics and institutions’) are less satisfying. Wisely, the details of the subprime housing collapse and subsequent credit crunch are left to others. Mainly a very fine effort that falls down only in the (perhaps inevitable) diminished historical perspective of some latter parts.
10. Lewis, Big Short (24 Sep 2010)
A character-driven narrative of oddball investors who foresaw the subprime housing collapse and devastating consequences for investment banks. To benefit from the seizure, one had to divine how mortgage-backed credit default swaps and collateralized default obligations generated revenue, able to access the rarefied market, and be willing to wait out the gravity-defying origination of new home loans. The book is intended to (again) portray the ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ ethos of Wall Street, and generally succeeds too in favorably depicting the protagonists. But the coda, where Lewis looks to tie investment banking’s demise to the flotation of Salomon Brothers, seems the greatest overreach. Conflict preceded public listing, however questionable that mechanism. Ironically enough, the contemporary response to the crisis – more regulation – may get at the problem suggested by Lewis, which is that people are at the heart of the problem and rules can always be surmounted.