Customer centricity is not serving every customer’s whim, but serving the best (i.e., most profitable) customers at every opportunity. This refinement is also an advantage over most product-driven businesses. The goal of data mining (as sometimes encapsulated in CRM) is to identify real, quantifiable differences in customers, in order to focus marketing so as to obtain more prime customers and also to know how much to spend on them.
Book abstracts
10. Warhoff, Well May We Say (2010)
A collection of outstanding and well-regarded Australian speeches, 1850-2010. If Aussie rhetoric is known as laconic, sparing in adverbs with frequent hints of hilarity or sarcastic mirth, this aggregation of primary material sheds little light on the worldview that produces such communication. The book is organized by topic — nationhood, war, political and sociocultural debate, etc. — with useful (but sometimes presumptive) intros. A memento of our recent trip there.
4. Scaramucci, Goodbye Gordon Gecko (31 March 2012)
Financial professionals can succeed even while behaving ethnically. The author illustrates his belief with his own success story.
3. Fitzgerald et al., Made in Queensland (11 Feb 2023)
Narrates politics and government from formation in 1859 to the early 2000s, lamenting the persistent, centrifugal influence of such industries as ranching, sugar, and mining while emphasizing education and the arts in a state not known for such disciplines. The book often reads as a historicist critique, for example failure to sooner adopt 20th-century voting standards – notwithstanding the Sunshine State and Australia being in the world’s vanguard. Left unexplored are such matters as how the Australian Labor Party’s assumption of party supremacy over parliamentarians became Peter Beattie-era ‘consultative government’ or why ‘primary industries’ and country regions have retained influence despite two-thirds of the citizens coming to live in the southeast portion of the state (‘imagined ruralism’ lacking explanatory rigor).
Of note:
• In the late 1800s, the bias toward inland rails, rather than coastal connections, evinced opposition to Brisbane interests
• Queensland uniquely favored importing islanders, running contrary to white Australian policy – notably favored by the ALP as a means of raising wages
• The period 1903-15 marked a political sea change, including such innovations as industrial wages arbitration, as the state reacted to 1893’s depression with ‘New Liberalism’ – the state fostering equality of opportunity – as well as Federation
• During the Depression, the Labor government funded infrastructure without upending the primary industries, in part because the ALP was strongest in the country districts. The party believed regionalization had helped sidestep some urban hardships of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia
• Queensland modernized in the postwar era: railway mileage exploded; suburbs were retrofitted for utilities and sewage; motels were popular as women’s holidays. Politically, the state was isolated from Australia by the reactionary, sleazy Bjelke-Petersen government (to 1988). More specifically, Brisbane’s 1987 Fitzgerald policy-corruption industry offset the 1982 Commonwealth Games and 1988’s World Expo
From the 1990s, globalization (as if international competition was a new economic phenomenon) changed public policy from regionalization to neoliberal rationalization, as evidenced in the closing of state schools in small towns. Fly-in, fly-out employment took root. At last a falsifiable thesis, if minimally unexplored. The book lacks an analytical structure to underpin the state’s character. (On the policy side, schools and the arts are perpetually underfunded, and reconciliation is always exacerbated, unfinished; there is no discussion of sport, especially rugby league.)
It seems the continuing role of primary industries as well as tourism reflect the scale of revenue and employment, which along with expansive landmass countervails Brisbane; the state has continuously attracted intranational migration; and citizens are consciously proud of their work and lifestyle.
See also: http://www.oeler.us/2021/07/07/19-gorman-heartland-30-oct-2020/
1. Doyle, French Revolution (7 Feb 2012)
Narrates the course of Europe’s first and probably greatest popular uprising, synthesizing political and social perspectives as well as competing interpretations. Making good use of illustrative facts amid the twists leading to Napoleon’s ascension in 1798, Doyle’s work reverts to the themes of political theory and faction, class and regional (especially Parisian) antagonisms, economic distortion and hardship, and international conflict borne of cynical French adventuring. Fueled by Enlightenment thought, the protagonists ‘failed to see … that reason and good intentions were not enough by themselves to transform the lot of their fellow men. Mistakes would be made when the accumulated experience of generations was pushed aside as so much routine, prejudice, fanaticism, and superstition’. The cost was millions of dead and as many or more lives wasted. Clearly written, worth re-reading.
2. Johnson, Napoleon (12 Feb 2012)
A concise biography of the world’s prototypical dictator, the first to embody Rousseau’s general will. Skillful at artillery and cartography, favoring speed and attack borne of interior lines, Bonaparte rode his 1796 Italian campaign to power, thereby ending France’s revolutionary era and creating the first 20th-century authoritarian government, replete with repressive state machinery and cultural propaganda. As a military leader, he squandered men and horses – though soldiers were permitted to pillage – while as head of state he roused nationalist resentment against France. Military failure in Spain and Russia, the British blockade, and resurgent German nationalism (newly shorn of the Holy Roman Empire), caused his downfall. Ironically, this period created, via the Congress of Vienna, an absolutist coda which survived until 1914. The short form diminished the tendency to glorify a monstrous figure.
3. Kamen, Spain 1492-1763 (26 Feb 2012)
Surveys Spain’s imperial era from the consolidation of Castilian power to the end of Anglo-French warfare. Not military conquest but adventurers, cooperative provincial elites, and Latin American coin fueled the global structure. Italy (Spanish Lombardy, based in Milan) provided crucial banking, armaments, and manpower. Spanish never became lingua franca; despite the civilizing mission of Catholicism, Castile’s elites remained intellectually and culturally insulated; and Europe did not look up to the peninsula. Power crested in 1635 and turned to France, which ‘took over’ in 1702 upon a Bourbon succeeding a Habsburg on the Spanish throne (prompting the War of Spanish Succession). Little interested in narrative politics and more attracted to sociocultural phenomena, the learned book grows dull in sections that dwell on Filipino and Ibero-American anthropology.
5. Brand, American Colossus (8 May 2012)
Surveys postbellum political economy, concluding capitalism outstripped democracy to the benefit of a few and disadvantage of many. Federal power was used to spur the development of railroads, settlement of the West (including Indian pacification), the growth of cities over agriculture, foreign trade (via tariff), and a national currency. The almost inevitable result was a series of financial crises (especially 1873 and 1895), the latter requiring the intervention of JP Morgan. Other titans such as Rockefeller and Carnegie lacked the influence on government (or fail to illustrate the thesis); incidents such as the Homestead riot or the Molly Maguires also are case in theme. Erudite and readable, the book nonetheless feels a bit freighted with ideology: it is not clear ‘capitalism’ triumphed at the expense of a still-burgeoning democracy. Indeed, by the first decade of the 20th century, Teddy Roosevelt embodied the rise of progressivism; the economy failed again in 1907 and then 1929; and what a murderous time was the century of communism and progressivism.
6. Greenwald, This Copyrighted Broadcast (10 May 2012)
An unusually structured narrative by a well-regarded San Francisco Giants baseball radio announcer. The book is only half devoted to baseball and rarely addresses the topic after midway, save for a coda. Other chapters treat feckless college life at Syracuse in the Jim Brown era, taking a punt on moving to Sydney, and the author’s fascination with Douglas MacArthur. Drily witty, the disjointed narrative makes it difficult to envision the less glamorous side of the business such as travel. It is believable, however, that the author wished to exit before soured by commercialization. Yet Greenwald might have offered perspective on other changes to the game (and craft).
8. Cohan, Money and Power (6 Jun 2012)
Narrates Goldman Sachs’ rise to national prominence in investment banking and charts its transformation into a prop-trading powerhouse as well as a ‘crony capitalist’. Through the first half of the 20th century, Syd Weinberg and Gus Levy dominated proceedings, even as the limited partnership developed corporate best practices (exemplified by John Whitehead’s famous 10 points). Though the author continues portraying the company’s leading lights through Jan Corzine, Hank Paulson, John Thain, and Lloyd Bankfein, the latter pages also seek to outline how the transformation to a public company and trading its own accounts put the bank at odds with its commercial clients. The tension prefigured by previous conflicts is illustrated by detailed review of Goldman’s derivatives trading in mortgage products (including the word of Mike Swenson ’89). An easy and sometimes engrossing read, the book is somehow not quite coherent. It goes some ways toward identifying a solution to conflicts of interest, without definitely making a case for modernizing Glass-Steagall. Perhaps it should have been two books.