Review: What Made jack welch Jack Welch by Stephen Baum

Though I have not yet read Jack Welch’s Straight from the Gut, I picked up this book thinking this could make for a good starter before the main course. Stephen Baum has worked with Booz Allen Hamilton as a Management Consultant for years. Though, sadly, I had this fixated view in my head that management books, usually, are theoretical and useless in the real world. I don’t how I got that perception despite of the fact that years ago I had read Lee Iacocca’s An Autobiography and it had instilled a new desire inside me to look at things and my career in a different light. Somehow I never read more of them even during my post graduation in management studies! I regret that decision now.

jack welch wasn’t Jack Welch till he really applied his skill and intelligence at GE to make it bigger. Stephen Baum has written this book in the simplest of sentences but powerfully bringing out what makes a leader become a Leader. Apart from Welch, he also writes about Ted Turner, Shelly Lazarus, Jim Broadhead, Bernard Schwartz, Joe Uva, Arthur Martinez and many more.

Few of the key messages from the book are: Don’t think too much before taking a decision – take it with a presence of mind and then make sure you act to make it the correct one; use your own distinctive leadership style at work; consider the varied experiences you might have in your job as a great opportunity to learn and challenge the status-quo; ethics are very important as a base for your decisions; you won’t be alone in your company to do all the work – so motivate your peers and colleagues and have a buy-in from your superiors; stop just thinking and start acting now (tackle problems on the way); look at the big picture and not just your unit or team; have the confidence to take decisions without the fear of going wrong (backed by an immense thirst to read and keep yourself updated with what’s happening elsewhere); and finally – it is not important to be a leader as many employees are happy doing their own individual work throughout their career but if you are thrust or aspire to be in a leadership role then you must be a good one.

I would like to keep the review brisk and simple – apt because the book is such. I recommend it strongly, not just to a leader but to anyone who wants to look at his job in a new motivating way.

 

Review: The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The black and white cover page – the library didn’t have it – of this book had attracted my attention lot of times in book stores but after reading the back cover description I never bought it or cared to read it till yesterday when I stumbled upon it in my employer’s library. And without giving a second thought I picked it up and started reading it – and ten hours later I was done with it. Now, having read the book completely, I reflect upon what made me read it so lecherously and what’s in there to be applied in one’s own life. (Of course the author would be happy to know that I finished his book so quick because he himself advocates that more information doesn’t necessarily makes us more capable of taking a decision)

From the outset Taleb sets the tone by mentioning an incident in Lebanon during which he got put behind the bars. The mentioning of this event was purportedly done to prove to the readers that this is not going to be a regular economics book with great insights from a stock market trader. He moves on to Umberto Eco’s library and then to his (Taleb’s) ‘antilibrary‘ – a collection of unread books, pointing to the fact that what is not read (or not known) is rarely focused on. He starts with the ever failing predictions of when a war would end based on his own experience in Lebanon and otherwise across the world. He rightly asks who could have predicted the rise of Hitler after the First World War, the fall of the Soviet, 9/11 and other one-off events – he calls them black swans. The underlying stupidity of predicting global oil prices for the next decade and beyond when it can’t be done for the next year is highlighted often. He skeptically looks at all the jazz that is around statistics, mathematics, economics and forecasts. He annihilates lot of big shots on the way – Plato, Nietzsche, Gauss (the argument “if Gaussian is not to be used, then what should be?” does hold weight despite him not agreeing), Sharpe, Markowitz, Robert C Merton, and Heisenberg amongst many others.

The author wants us to focus on the events outside the realm of our equations – the ones which cause the maximum impact. He sweepingly chops with his sword the use of Gaussian bell curves, excel based forecasting, the blind following of economists, doctors, Nobel laureates, mathematicians and other ‘experts’. With Taleb calling the shots and his passionate detestation about newspapers assigning causes to a stock market’s rise and fall, I am surprised how praise by Financial Times got onto the front cover! – here he has fallen into his own fractal trap against which he warns philosophers later in the book. He gives the example of the later acclaimed writer Yevgenia Krasnova and how she had to release the draft of her book A Story of Recursion on the web because no publisher was ready – to illustrate how we fail, again, in predicting which will become popular and which will be just a lost bet. I was hugely annoyed when he says that Yevgenia is a character of his self-destructive doubting mind. (Italicized are my words).

A lot of his examples are thought provoking and, provocatively, true – scalable professions being not better, how a Turkey (more relevant that Thanksgiving is here) is surprised on the 1000th day as it incorrectly estimated that its going to be fed every day of its life just like the previous 999 days, how absence of being a criminal doesn’t mean that one is not a criminal, how our minds just can’t avoid interpreting all the time to avoid information overload, how we never and can never account for the unknown unknown, how we question the religious but never the social scientists, economists and statisticians and how we always have been really bad estimators. But at the same time, a lot of his ‘experiments’ cannot be trusted because they were created on the fly and are so ‘kindergartenly’ – like the predictions made by some MBA students, the “hardened by Gulag” case (hasn’t he heard of child soldiers?!). These seem to be so naive when contrasted against his incredulity. One of my biggest disagreements with him is about the use of the word ‘luck’ when explaining our existence or for Casanova’s success or for a restaurant business making it good in New York. Luck, to me, means being favored by some unknown force out there which chose you over the rest because of whatever reasons – ‘coincidence’ is a better word.

Towards the end, the author gets philosophical and urges the reader to stop living a life of others’ expectations. Well, its easy to be a monk when you own a Ferrari. It’s easy to be philosopher, which he still wants to be, when you have raked in the bounty. (Not that I totally disagree with what he preaches in these last four pages)

You have got to read this book only to be convinced that you shouldn’t be easily convinced by what you read. (Taleb, again, is caught unawares in his own psychedelic fractal). He convinces that the rare is rarely focused upon despite of it carrying the most weight with no scholarly books or theories prophesying about it and that is the biggest fallacy of our current systems (I myself will need one more reading to understand this book better). In the pyrrhic war of the worlds between Mediocristan and Extremistan with Mandelbrot as the hero and Gauss as the anti-hero, Taleb is nihilistic.

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Review: First, Break All The Rules by Marcus Buckingham

First, Break All The Rules (Image Source: Bookadda.com)

A couple of years ago a close friend of mine told me about this book and praised it, maybe in person or on mail. His own blog is a popular one and a fine example of the out-of-the-ordinary. Back then I tried finding the book but couldn’t until last week when I found it lying in my employer’s library. I hungrily issued it wanting to read it for two reasons – his high words for it and I was about to join a new project in the firm. Though I am not a manager, thought if a manager is going to implement techniques (such as presented in the book) on me, why not implement them proactively, wherever possible, on myself?

The tiny book begins with encouraging paragraphs about how to become a great manager. It details a short interview with a manager, with a masked name Michael, of a restaurant. Michael outlines his philosophy of managing people and how he treats them differently as he knows them in and out, his refusal to improve their weaknesses and his readiness to fire people if they do not fit. The authors say that Michael’s ideas are “revolutionary“. This was going overboard. What is so new in treating people differently? Do we not in our personal relationships, for example, behave with people differently based on our role and standing in the relationship? Being impartial doesn’t mean that you treat them the same. Michael’s idea of firing people at the earliest was, to put it mildly, insane – does he considers himself so well equipped that he can within a short period of time judge who fits and who doesn’t? That’s a sign of a bloated ego. Any which way I tugged along.

Gallup International, as mentioned often in the book, conducted interviews and surveys with over 80,000 managers across the globe and more than a million employees! That’s a commendable number for pulling out a detailed study. It then proceeds to give an example of a “strong, vibrant workplace – Lankford-Sysco” (by the way, Sysco, the parent firm is a $42 Billion giant). They describe how this is an inspiring organization with a “wall festooned with pictures of individual, smiling faces“. Which organization doesn’t put up happy pictures? The President of the firm adds that those pictures are of their delivery associates and by doing so they all “feel close to them, even though they’re out with our customers every day“. Well, any which way, I still tugged along.

Then they mention a list of twelve questions pulled out from their surveys and interviews, based on advanced statistics, which is an accurate way to measure the strength of a workplace. The questions seemed very simple but were definitely thought provoking. The first one still reverberates inside my mind – “Do I know what is expected of me at work?”. The answer to this plain question, I believe, lies at the core of satisfaction or the absence of it. Few questions focused on the bonding and relationship aspect while the others on the feeling of importance at work and the opportunities to learn and grow. Fairly grounded list but effective in driving home the point – that they form the basis in judging the effectiveness of a manager more so than the organization, for an employee works directly under a supervisor/manager and lot of the organizations’ policies, though clearly worded, are interpreted and implemented, in spirit and otherwise, by supervisors and managers. The twelve points are then divided and allocated to a Base-Camp, Camp-1, Camp-2 and Camp-3 of a mountain signifying various stages of one’s career with the ground rule that once you reach Camp-3, the highest, you don’t stagnate – for the winds are much stronger up there and constantly force the business to change or you being promoted or offered a role-change resulting in you starting from Base-Camp again. This was interesting and now there was no turning back hence I marched along!

Then the author(s) preach that “you must know how to select a person“, “must know how much of a person you can change“, “must know the difference between talent, skills, and knowledge“, “must know how to reveal a candidate’s true talents” and a never ending barrage of must-knows. One agreeable point they talk of is when they distinguish between managers and leaders – the former being focused inward and the latter outward. Then the ‘Four Keys’ are introduced: “select for talent; define the right outcomes; focus on strengths; find the right fit“. Personally, I have come to hate jargons and I hated that the term “keys” was introduced. Few such terms at the top of my mind which I detest: Strategy, Innovation, Leadership, Evangelize, Think, Leverage, Low Hanging Fruits, Big Picture and Pain Points. I don’t dislike these terms in their originality but for their abuse and overuse. Every other meeting I am in, every other presentation I go through, every other Webinar I attend and every other conversation I hear has at least a few of these terms. When used and applied in the right context they are effective but only confuse and mask the lack of purpose rest of the time. The next four chapters describe each of the keys in detail and how to apply them giving ample real life examples.

From then onwards the book gives lot of good ideas which can be and should be implemented by a manager – but none of these are new as they have been known from various articles, books, talks and management guru’s. It gives lot of advice which is theoretical – like, for example, that managers should give their employees what they want rather than what is best for them. I think managers are first for their companies, then for their employees (of course the circuitous argument can be raised here that happy employee results in better results, but not all what an employee wants is good for the company). Few examples of managers earning lesser than those who are managed by them are also good.

My takeaways from the book would be the important 12 questions and some advice from the last chapters where they coax those who are ‘managed’ to take charge if their managers are too busy. Apart from that, it’s a general management book which has boasted a little too much about its own achievements.

(My distrust of the authenticity of Amazon’s ratings has increased after reading reviews about this one. A total of 315 ratings averaging 4.4! My disbelief has not limits)

Review: From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra

From the Ruins of Empire

A ‘3 for 2’ offer in Landmark made me buy this and other two books much earlier than anticipated. When on the back cover I saw Pankaj Mishra’s photo I could clearly remember having seen him on either some debate on a news channel or on a talk show years ago and apart from that I knew nothing about him. A search on Amazon wasn’t useful for lack of a substantial number of reviews. However, the description on the interior of the front cover and a fleeting glance of the contents got me interested. It looks like apparently there are multiple sub titles being used for the book – one being “the revolt against the West and the remaking of Asia” and the second one being “the intellectuals who remade Asia“.

The author starts with The Battle of Tsushima between Russia and Japan in which “for the first time since the Middle Ages, a non-European country had vanquished a European power in a major war; and the news careened around a world“. He brilliantly captures the reactions this garnered around the world: in Calcutta of Lord Curzon, in South Africa of Gandhi, in Damascus of Mustafa Kemal, in England of Nehru and Sun Yat-sen, in United States of W.E.B. Du Bois and of Rabindranath Tagore. Reading the three paragraphs was like watching the beginning of a fast paced thriller movie with its contemporaries across different cities in different settings. Mishra stresses on the importance the Japanese victory as it reinvigorated non-white peoples and “seemed to negate the West’s racial hierarchies” and “infused Asian peoples with a ‘new hope’“.

A semi-biographical account of the life of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani takes the reader from Persia, his birth place, to India, then Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt and France. Each country’s political background is introduced in a welcoming way and other major players, though not many are there, are brought into the plot only after a substantial progression of the milieu. Jamal al-Afghani’s intellect and influence on later Islamic movements is written as much as about his shrewdness in his adopting the ‘Afghani’ part in his name to hide his Shia roots and using traditional religious interpretations to bring Muslims together to revolt against imperialism though he himself was a revisionist. The part where al-Afghani’s unmarked grave is found in Istanbul and disinterred and the remains taken to Kabul reveals the contradictions – he was born in Persia rather than Afghanistan; and the donation by the U.S. for repairs of the damaged tomb in Kabul because of strikes couldn’t have been more wry.

The story then moves to China, where “Western powers had begun to nibble at the edges of the Qing Empire“. The intellectuals like Sun Yat-sen, Li Hongzhang, Kang Youwei, Mao Zedong, Tan Sitong, Yan Fu amongst others and their philosophies. The roots of the current communist China can well be understood from the treacheries of the West it was long subjected to under the garb of modernisation, liberalism and equality. That democracy cannot be successfully implemented in toto around the world is proved by the efforts of Chinese to embrace modernization to match the West and to defeat it at its own game. Japan’s own contorted view of ‘Asia for Asians’ falls apart when its hunger for growth, limited by its small size, drives out the powerful out of most of the east of Asia and a ‘Yellow Peril’ stops just in time next to India’s borders.

The last figure to be covered in sequence of the three is Rabindranath Tagore; disappointingly though the author dedicates much lesser space to him than to others. The author brings out how “proximity of lives in Indian villages helped distinguish his worldview from that of the middle-class intellectuals in Calcutta“. Tagore’s visit to various countries after becoming a Nobel Laureate throw light on his reflections and the reactions which his views provoked, especially in Japan and China – where many were vying for an embrace of developmental philosophy against Tagore’s position of retrospection rooted in Eastern values and of “moral superiority over their colonial masters“.

In the concluding part titled ‘Asia Remade’, Mishra poignantly and masterfully rues about Asia’s own acceptance of a path to industrialization and the resulting contradictions in the Islamic world and the rest of Asia. He writes of how “White men, conscious of their burden, changed the world for ever, subjecting its great diversity to their own singular outlook” and how they “squandered much of their moral authority“. He also states that “globalization doesn’t not lead to a flat world marked by increasing integration, standardization despite wishful thinking” but rather “sharpens old antipathies, and incites new ones“. This was a dig at Thomas Friedman (the famous World-is-Flat(ter/test) fame) but is at the same time debatable.

This has been, for me, one of the best books in revisionist history by an Indian writer in recent times (nevertheless, its not a complete account of all historical events which have happened from the late nineteenth century till now and at points does skip important events and movements) (around half a dozen editing mistakes exist as well). When ideas as great as in this book are probed by a mere mortal like me it results into a tumultuous spark in thinking and in no way have I been able to grasp all of them. One of the most useful sections is towards the end: Bibliographic Essay which introduces to the general reader a hugely commendable list of books on each topic as covered in the book. Throughout the conflict between the Western thought of a nation-state and the Eastern one of a community is focused on, especially the latter half when covering China and Arab countries. The three thinkers: Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Liang Qichao and Rabindranath Tagore have been shown as powerful forces in the Eastern thought of anti-imperialism, the author also vividly covers, more than anything, the ideas and other men as the propounders in the rise of Asia. The tussle between the core centrals of Eastern philosophy of the spirit and Western philosophy of material “allows the reader to see the events of two centuries anew, through the eyes of the journalists, poets, radicals and charismatics who criss-crossed Europe and Asia“, and is a testimony to the fact that history is history only when not confined to a geography.

Review: Tinderbox by MJ Akbar

Tinderbox

I had almost bought this book but then I realized that my spending on books was becoming unmanageable. And luckily enough my own employer’s library had it on the shelves. In hindsight, it fit in perfectly because I would have had half of a regret if I had bought this book. On the cover page, as you can see, the color of ‘Tinderbox’ and ‘and Future’ is the same – turquoise, and makes them stand out. And this set the expectations for me.

The breadth of the book in terms of facts is praiseworthy and it disappointingly doesn’t make up for the lack of depth of analysis. The first two chapters seemed more like a chronicle of events rather than a commentary – too many people introduced within such a short span that I was
totally lost and left wondering whether to read the rest of the book or not! Akbar doesn’t go much into the details and the reasons of events and just skims through them. That, I believe, is a trait found in all history books written by journalists and the like. Chapter one begins with “an Arab invader, Muhammad bin Qasim, established the first Muslim dynasty, in 712, in Sind“. And then starts the melee – The Khiljis, Tughlaqs, Sayyids, Lodis, Suris and Mughals followed by the Britishers. The last phase, of the Britishers, marked the beginning for Indian Muslims of “an age of insecurity for which they sought a range of answers. One question fluctuated at many levels: what would be the geography of what might be called Muslim space in the post-Mughal dispensation?“. Akbar writes that the most “creative phase of Gnadhi’s career was between 1919 and 1922 when he fused Muslim and Hindu sentiment to mould a non-violent revolution called the Khilafat Movement.” The Portuguese and the Dutch are thrown in between. One criticism of this theory is that it totally ignores the equations of Arab Muslim traders who had first brought Islam to India on its southern shores through trading routes. For an understanding of the Indian Muslim identity this forms an important sub-part but definitely not as a part of the germination of the idea of creation of Pakistan because the traders were anyways in minority (in terms of numbers and power). Hence, for them, they never had felt any sense of loss of their right to a religious identity for their livelihood was the trade. While for the Muslim dynasties and the populace thereafter, British rule resulted, as Akbar says, in a sudden void of power, prestige, and the ensuing realization that in numbers as well (though numbers had never mattered earlier because they had the power to offset it by great margins). So, the criticism isn’t valid.

The book is full of stunning facts and quotable anecdotes. Few worth recalling: The conversion of the Muslim temple of Su-Manat to a Hindu Somnath; the creation of Aligarh Muslim University and its contribution in the idea of partition (I wish I was aware of this fact when I visited AMU a couple of times years ago); the earlier belief of Jinnah that Hindus & Muslims cannot be divided; Jinnah’s drinking and Ham-eating habits; Jinnah’s infatuation with a 16 year old Parsi girl and then marrying her just after she crossed the legal age of 18 when he was 42!; Jinnah’s ignorance of Islam and total avoidance of Muslim practices; the hugely distorted version of history being taught in Pakistani schools. The coverage of various renowned contributors to the Muslim identity and otherwise is, again, more broad than deep: Shah Waliullah, Sayyid Ahmad, Muhammad bin Abdul Wahab, Ahmed Raza Khan Barelvi, Syed Ahmad Khan, Aga Khan and many more.

Akbar traces the discontent which resulted in Muslims after the failure of Khilafat Movement. This made them wary of Gandhi’s principle of non-violence and the inherent contradiction in his support, in terms of men for the British Indian Army, for the British during World War-I (in the hope of extracting concessions in the future). On the contrary, Jinnah was always opposed to this war effort and “did not share such illusions“. He dissects the turbulence faced by the ideologists after the creation of Pakistan and the various multi-directional forces which pulled apart the core theme of a secular Muslim state as desired by Jinnah and the growth of a theocratic one. The power hungry and the religiously over fed,  from Maududi (Godfather of Pakistan), Bhutto, Zia, Ayub Khan, Yayha, Zardari, Taliban and the others are all thrown in the cauldron of the emergence of today’s Pakistan and its contradictions.

This book shatters the popular and ignorant belief that Jinnah alone was responsible for creation of Pakistan – for he was just an actor on the stage with the script having been written much before his arrival. Azad’s view, that minority should not be seen in terms of numbers but in terms of power, position and freedom – all three of them being present with the Muslims of undivided India and hence there should be no division, was grounded, well thought and ahead of its times. Akbar terms the Pakistani state as a Jelly State – which will “neither collapse nor stabilize“. The dependence of Pakistan on its army from saving itself from disintegration is ironical – since as long as its Army is the most powerful structure it will never be a democracy – which has resulted in a yet-never-ending-cycle. After setting expectations by putting ‘and Future’ in turquoise on the cover page, Akbar doesn’t write anything about the future except for a customary paragraph or two. He doesn’t cover anything at all about the state of Pakistan’s economy and its history – for the economy forms an important shaping force – in history and definitely for the future. The book lacks the clarity when compared to the ones written by historians, chronicles just important events and peoples hastily, analyses intelligently lot of topics of relevance but hugely misses out on the economy and the future. This is a book to be read, but not in isolation, for an introduction to, majorly, the dream of creation of Pakistan and its becoming a nightmare later on.