Creating a technical business advantage through analysis, research and insight.
Book Reviews
Book Review: The End of Influence 2 May, 2012 Brad de Long and Stephen S. Cohen have a new book called The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money. It's an interesting, informative, provocative and relevant read, providing context for the economic position the US finds itself in now. Perhaps of more direct interest, the issues of currency manipulation (done to the US), foreign policy, industrial (and defence) policy, trade deficits and long-term structural problems within an economy are definitely relevant to South Africa.
It's not the traditional rip-roaring holiday read, but the style is light enough to enjoy and doesn't have the density of statistics and numerical proof offered by This Time is Different.
Book Review: Three Cups of Deceit 19 July, 2011 Three Cups of Deceit is the heartbreaking dissection of the lies, fiction and fraud of Chris Mortenson and his best-selling books "Three Cups of Tea", and "Stones into Schools".
Three Cups of Tea tells the supposedly true story of Greg Mortenson and th...
Book Review: This Time is Different 19 July, 2011 It's chock-full of analysis, numbers, tables and charts showing how as much as things change, the scope for financial crises changes very little. The comparison of Developed and Emerging Markets is particularly interesting in that the differences, while they do exist, are far smaller than stereotypical views. Emerging Markets do tend to have more ongoing sovereign defaults, but the frequency of banking crises is little different. Weirdly, some aspects of Emerging Market crises (such as employment impacts) are less than average for the Developed World.
Book Review: Purple Cow 6 December, 2010 Seth Godin's Purple Cow introduces a new P of marketing (to complement the product, price, place and promotion, or further expand the many Ps that have since been added to the marketing mix).
Why Purple Cow? Because it's extreme, it cuts through the ov...
Book Review: The Big Short 4 July, 2010 Michael Lewis, of Liar's Poker fame, has written an engaging account of the role that subprime lending played in the global financial crisis. The new book is called "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine".
The jargon that Lewis uses is generally...
Book Review: Socrates and the Fox 19 May, 2010 What an utter disappointment. Clem Sunter may (or may not) know something about strategy and scenario planning, but this book does nothing to excite me. The analogy of a fox is pushed and stretched and twisted to incorporate it into every few pages with n...
Book Review: The Halo Effect 2 May, 2010 I agree wholeheartedly with the basic premise; maybe that is the problem. As I read, I moved from nodding vigorously in agreement during the introduction to nodding off to sleep by the second chapter.
The general themes of critical thinking, caution ...
Book Review: Islamic Banking - A $300 Billion Deception 25 April, 2010 The book arrived shorter than I expected at around 60 pages, and was probably longer than it needed to be. The author outlines his major points early on and supplements them with some interesting real-world examples throughout the work. Unfortunately, ...
In the footsteps of the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz 22 April, 2010 Any company, person or country looking to invest in Africa must read Michela Wrong's book, "In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo" .
The book details the history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from ...
Book Review: How The Mighty Fall 7 April, 2010 Jim Collins set out to write an article on how successful companies fail. For some reason, probably commercial, he decided to turn it into a short book.
He should have stuck with the article idea.
The Taxi and the Tea Party 11 September, 2009 The Taxi
It's fair to say the South African taxi industry isn't besotted with the Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) system. It's understandable too. No matter what assurances are provided around newly jobless taxi drivers being placed within BRT, the reality is ...
Deja vu and the myopia of our spirit 14 August, 2007 Amongst the stormy seas of markets recently (off the back of a credit and liquidity crunch apparently initiated by ongoing and deepening problems with sub-prime loans in the US and the related CDOs), bobs the grey and bloated bodies of a clichéd failure.
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Fooled by the Black Swan 30 July, 2007 Is your organisation one black swan away from disaster? Are you taking hidden risks in the quest for success, and using hope as your only risk management tool?
Nassim Taleb's books should be required reading for life
Nassim Taleb is one of my new fa...
Practical optimisation 8 July, 2007 Optimisation is brilliant. It can turn increase profitability, reduce risk, increase output and even turn an non-viable project or factory into a viable one. It can save time, produce less waste and better utilise inputs so that costs are reduced.But it's...
Popular Economics 6 October, 2006 The book, "Freakonomics", has become something of a pop icon amongst certain groups. The Stevens (well, Steven and Stephen, Levitt and Dubner respectively) cleverly show how economic analysis can shed light on some interesting everyday (and not so everyd...
