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.
Book abstracts
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.
12. Hagel et al, Pull (4 Nov 2010)
Articulates a theory for individual and enterprise participation in 21st-century knowledge development, to elaborate practices for personal excellence and sustainable competitive advantage. The predominant 20th-century paradigm, in which firms and governments controlled ‘stocks’ of information based on demand forecasting, resource allocation, and mastery of the experience curve, suffered from diminishing returns. The proposed model – here presented as an ugly rococo diagram – advocates collaborating with emerging experts ‘at the edge’; by attracting these experts to one’s endeavors; and by importing the fruits into the enterprise. The individual and the firm must clearly identify its aims (‘trajectory’) in order to benefit from participation. Building on the trio’s 2009 Shift Index of information technology, it is still a bit utopian and the theory lacks a governor / metric for evaluating effectiveness and also opportunity costs – especially dead ends. Even if influential, it is not clear enough to be the last word.
13. Wood, Revolutionary Characters (21 Nov 2010)
Sketches the moral and political sensibilities of the Founding Fathers: Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and Madison along with Burr and Paine. Each of the core six was conscious of belonging to a new meritocracy, of setting an example for the Revolutionary generation. Washington and Jefferson receive the fullest historiographical treatment; Franklin’s portrait is most revealing. Paine and Burr are present to serve as counterpoints, as well to illustrate the code: even as the Founding Fathers proved themselves a brilliant cohort of elites, the 18th-century American aristocracy was ending, sped along by the example of these (largely) self-made men and their rhetorical appeals to the common man. That essay, which treats the story of the Revolutionary- and Federalist-era newspapers, also makes a telling explanation of the overheated, lugubrious prose so often found in the century’s polemics: the elites were talking amongst themselves, above the proletariat.
14. Strozzi-Heckler, Leadership Dojo (25 Nov 2010)
Outlines a leadership model premised on physical presence that signals inner harmony and external empathy. The construct, drawing heavily on aikido, comprises centering, facing, extending, entering, and blending. The crux: ‘There’s an indispensable kind of person who cuts a path in the world not simply because of his or her own achievements but because of what he or she has enabled others to achieve. This is a leader who brings focus and energy to a community and helps define the purpose and meaning of living in a particularly place an time.’ A long article would have sufficed — otherwise forgettable.
***15. Rubin, In an Uncertain World (12 Dec 2010)
The autobiography of the former Goldman Sachs chief executive and Treasury secretary falls flat because it glosses the important events of his career while abundantly criticising (succeeding) Bush administration policies. The book begins briskly with the Mexican currency crisis and quickly outlines Rubin’s belief that complex situations are fundamentally uncertain, so effective risk management is vital. After a useful outline of risk arbitrage trading, however, the book breezes past his rise and rise at Goldman. Then Clinton-era policies and landmarks are presented disjointedly: the Asian crises are not well connected to domestic events, whether economic or political. There is no substantive mention of the Lewinsky scandal. Nearly 20 percent of the book is devoted to criticizing his successors: though Rubin refrains from personalized, ad hominem attacks of the kind he professes disdain for, it is the details of his own decisions that are important and wanting.