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 the Central Asia Institute (CAI) building schools in Pakistan while on a rip-roaring adventure of Taliban kidnappings amongst other tales. I received it as a present and enjoyed the moving story.

Except that, as it turns out, much of the story is stretched, elaborated and in parts completely concocted.  Jon Krakauer writes, in Three Cups of Deceit, how the seemingly sociopathic Greg Mortenson not only fabricated key parts of the story (and in contradiction of earlier, published articles by his own hand) but also ran the organisation for personal gain.

It’s definitely worth a read, even if it is a little sad to realise that a hero is actually a charlatan.

A point many of Mortenson’s supporters make is that he still did good – he and his CAI did build schools, did educate children and did raise awareness of society building as key methods of improving living standards and understanding in troubled parts of the world.

The problem I have there is that many people who donate money to charities, NGOs and similar programmes will donate the money to a cause anyway. Therefore, a significant portion of  funds that went to the CAI would have gone to other causes if it weren’t for Mortenson’s lies.  Moreover, that money wouldn’t have been squandered on Mortenson, on promoting his book, or on the now-empty schools built in the wrong places without equipment or teachers.

Mortenson redirected money away from good, solid causes and into his own pocket.

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 oversaturated marketing and product appeals, which Seth describes as required to have an impact in the current competitive environment.

Light reading, thought-provoking and a great conversation piece, it’s a worthwhile read for those in marketing (who should probably have already read it by now) or anyone involved with growing a business again hordes of competitors. I read it a few chapters at a time, which I recommend as a way to absorb the ideas and ponder them before moving on to the next points.

Definitely worth reading.

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 no benefit. The structure and flow of the book make it difficult to read, there is a combination of too many detailed tactical points (particularly for a book on strategy) and superficial examples that demonstrate nothing.

We are expected to take almost everything as given and accepted, with almost no time spent showing, explaining or proving why these ideas work. Add to that some standard business analysis models reworded and renamed, but giving no better (or worse) insight than the original models makes me wonder what the point of reading the book is.

Mr Sunter would have done well to have a editor with a little more backbone who could counter this weak effort and ask him to try again.

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 and recognising complexity rather than being taken in by simplistic, post hoc, naive, flawed logic reasons for high performance are important. Authors from Tom Peters to Jim Collins have made a fortune, and entertained thousands, with their books on how to improve organisational performance. However, from the admission that much of the data for “In Search of Excellence” was fabricated to small samples and failed long-term predictive ability out of “Good to Great” the answers are imperfect.

The world of behavioural economics has discovered much about exactly how badly we typically think, especially when we don’t realise we should be in “logical analytical mode”. So much so that the book is now old news.

I don’t know whether the author is so impressed with his own ideas that he imagines the need to spell them out in excruciating detail with multiples too much evidence to allow mere mortal readers to understand, or whether the typical reader is so unfamiliar with the requirements of critical thinking that a ten page pamphlet needed to be expanded to several hundred pages. Maybe the publishers paid per word?

If you need convincing that much of what we are taught about success and the few or single simple drivers of it are, the book might be worthwhile as a tome of evidence. If you require a simple memory aid, there is none better than the 1917 quote of Mencken, “There is always an easy solution to every human problem–neat,
plausible, and wrong.”

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, he also repeats many of the key messages more times than is necessary.

Typos and grammatical errors are widespread. Seriously, get a decent editor and proofreader.

A key message from the book is that lending is not risk-free as some proponents of Islamic finance purport. Restricting interest-based lending means many transactions simply won’t take place. Somehow, the author misses the extension of this message when he recommends a cap on interest charged to prevent usury – nowhere does he consider that this will similarly restrict lending to high risk borrowers since at times higher interest rates are required to reflect the risk.

Overall, a good read, most importantly for those who have not yet understood the flaws of the adolescent Islamic finance industry