DennisDemori.com

As I look back on all the books I intended to read in 2011 and didn’t, it feels very frustrating that I didn’t make more progress. Enter DailyLit, a site I had heard of a while back, but didn’t take seriously.

The basic idea is very simple: you subscribe to a book either by email or RSS and it’s sent to you as installments. You can set it up to deliver daily, every other day, etc. And it’s free.

I don’t think it works well for Fiction since Fiction has a flow and momentum you lose if read too sporadically, but I think it might work well for Non-Fiction.

I’ve decided to test it out with The 50th Law, by 50 Cent and Robert Greene (before you laugh, Greene in an incredible researcher and writer and the reviews are excellent), which is broken up into 85 installments, so I’ll finish the book in less than 3 months (at my current setting of one installment per day).

DailyLit isn’t going to be my only source for Literature – I’ll keep reading books the traditional way, but I think it could be a nice supplement to encourage myself to read more.

I was already impressed with Michael Lewis after reading “Moneyball,” but “Liar’s Poker” is even better. Lewis is a masterful storyteller, and this book provides an excellent first-hand account of what it was like to be an Investment Banker on Wall Street in the 1970s and ’80s while taking us behind the scenes of the events leading up to Black Monday.

I. Some choice quotes

“I have this theory,” says Andy Stone, seated in his office at Prudential-Bache securities. “Wall Street makes its best producers into managers. The reward for being a good producer is to be made a manager. The best producers are cutthroat, competitive, and often neurotic and paranoid. You turn those people into managers, and they go after each other. They no longer have the outlet for their instincts that producing gave them. They usually aren’t well-suited to be managers. Half of them get thrown out because they are bad. Another quarter get muscled out because of politics. The guys left behind are just the most ruthless of the bunch. That’s why there are cycles on Wall Street — why Salomon Brothers is getting crunched now — because the ruthless people are bad for the business but can only be washed out by proven failure.” — pg.141

“No one ever cried on the trading floor. No one ever showed weakness or vulnerability or need for human kindness. Early on Alexander taught me the importance of a strong exterior. “I learned a while ago that there was no point to showing weakness,” he said. “When you arrive at six-thirty A.M., having had no sleep the night before, and having lost your best friend in a car accident and some Big Swinging Dick walks over to your desk, slaps you on the back, and says, ‘How the hell are you?’ you don’t say, ‘I’m really tired and really upset.’ You say, ‘I’m great, how the hell are you?’ ” pg.237

II. Key Takeaways

This book reminded me that when reading non-fiction, you don’t need to spend too much time focusing on the finer details. There are many parts of “Liar’s Poker” that get into the minutiae of economics and finance. Some of it I understood, while other parts were over my head.

That’s OK.

The most important thing, to me, is understanding the key themes and points. How did these people think? What were their motivations? How did their involvement in Wall Street during this time period foreshadow the recent economic turmoil in the U.S. and worldwide?

“Liar’s Poker” is about a lot of things: greed, ego, money, corruption, extravagance, management, opportunism, etc. These themes overlap throughout the book. As I read, I couldn’t help but think of the many ways it paralleled my experience in the mortgage industry just a few years ago.

“Men in general judge more by the sense of sight than by the sense of touch, because everyone can see but only a few can test by feeling. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are; and those few do not dare take a stand against the general opinion.” — Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

III. Should You Read It?

Absolutely. Liar’s Poker is excellent: Lewis is an incredible writer and it will help you understand 1) what goes on behind closed doors on Wall Street and 2) how the U.S. got into it’s current economic mess.

Buy it on Amazon.com Liar’s Poker

“Leaving Microsoft To Change the World” by John Wood, founder of Room To Read, is easily the most inspirational book I’ve read all year. I found it fast-paced and very readable. It’s the story of a Microsoft employee who decides to leave his position as a technology executive to help under-resourced Third World children gain access to education through libraries, schools and books.

I’m going to share a passage about the madrassa schools in Afghanistan (these schools are also present in neighboring countries like Pakistan). I never heard about this story until I read this book. It’s a strong argument for supporting education, especially abroad:

“Afghanistan has been invaded by the Soviet Union in 1979. The United States, fearful of a further expansion of Soviet influence, provided weapons and large amounts of cash to the Afghan resistance fighters. After tens of thousands of deaths and years of warfare, the Soviets realized that they were not going to win control of this fiercely independent country. It marked the end of eight decades of Soviet expansion, and the beginning of the implosion of an empire that had reached to far and stretched itself to thin.

The United States watched the withdrawal and decided that with the Soviets vanquished, America’s job was done. The U.S. could pull out immediately and leave the Afghani people, amongst the poorest in the world, to live amongst their piles of bombed rubble. The American government did not so much as buy them some brooms to help start the cleaning.

This was such a major strategic error on the part of our government. Because guess what came next? There was the need to rebuild the destroyed buildings, including the hospitals and the schools. The Soviets has been merciless in their attempts to intimidate the Afghani people by bombing them back to the Stone Age. The U.S. did not stick around long enough to help in the rebuilding, because our reason for there was not pro-Afghani, but rather Anti-Soviet. So the Afghan government needed help in rebuilding, and the Iranians and the Saudis were only to eager to help.

Both countries, neighbors to Afghanistan, wanted to fill the vacuum that had been left by the departure of the two superpowers. They each made a big commitment to constructing schools. The only problem is that these were not secular schools. They were madrassas, or religious schools, that taught a very hate-filled version of Islam (NOTE: not every madrassa has a political, religious or radical affiliation). The Saudi schools taught their own anti-Western Wahhabi version, while the Iranians built schools that taught their students to curse ‘the Great Satan’ of America. The only difference between the Saudi schools and the Iranian ones was the degree of anti-Westernism in their curriculum.

The CIA estimates that between them, the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia sponsored the opening of over ten thousand madrassas in Afghanistan. And you know the rest of the story, because we’ve been living it for the last two weeks. A large percentage of the terrorists at large today were trained in these schools. Can you imagine how different the world would look today if those students had been more focused on one-two-threes and ABCs instead of being taught to chant ‘Death to America?’ We lost our opportunity to rebuild those schools, and we will be paying the price for decades to come.”

I’ve spent a number of years looking for a cause I can support. Take one look at CharityNavigator.org and the options are both limitless and overwhelming.  “Leaving Microsoft…” has made the choice much easier.

The challenge many would-be donors face is knowing where their money is going. One of the main things that makes Room to Read stand out is that they do a good job of being transparent and providing tangible results: X dollars builds Y schools/libraries, etc. I encourage everyone to visit the Room To Read website (and read the book) to get involved and learn more about this great organization.

BUY IT ON AMAZON Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur’s Odyssey to Educate the World’s Children

I love Moneyball. It was listed on “The 100 Best Business Books of All Time” and totally deserved its spot. Wikipedia says, “Its focus is the team’s modernized, analytical, sabermetric approach to assembling a competitive baseball team, despite Oakland’s disadvantaged revenue situation. The central premise of Moneyball is that the collected wisdom of baseball insiders (including players, managers, coaches, scouts, and the front office) over the past century is subjective and often flawed.”

On a large scale, Moneyball is about Old thinking vs. New thinking. It’s about mass egos, herd mentality and the flat out rejection of new ideas. And everything comes unhinged when one person asks the simple question “Why?” There’s lots of parallels I can draw to other industries:

• music
• advertising
• auto
• newspapers + publishing
• and of course, the government

Major league baseball is apparently run by a bunch of idiots. These people have been using the same antiquated methods to analyze baseball players for years and never seem to try to find a better way to recruit and evaluate ballplayers. They’re stubborn and close-minded. What’s worse is that when presented with fresh ideas they don’t want to hear it. Most of the league, from the Managers to the Owners to the Sportscasters are completely clueless. Lewis, a talented storyteller, has created a book about baseball statistics that is an engaging page-turner. It’s not just for baseball fans – I also think it’s a great read for Planners. Lewis knows how to craft a compelling story with mundane data while the story shows what can happen when you question strongly-held beliefs.

On the 3 outs rule: “Analyzing baseball yields many numbers of interest and value. Yet far and away — far, far and away — the most critical number in all of baseball is 3: the three outs that define an inning. Until the third out, anything is possible; after it, nothing is. Anything that increases the offense’s chances of making an out is bad; anything that decreases it is good. And what is on-base percentage? Simply yet exactly put, it is the probability that the batter will not make an out. When we state it that way, it becomes, or should become, crystal clear that the most important isolated (one-dimensional) offensive statistic is the on-base percentage. It measures the probability that the batter will not be another step toward the end of the inning.” pg. 58

On errors: “The manner in which baseball people evaluate players’ fielding performance — adding up their errors, and applauding the guy with the fewest — struck him as an outrage. ‘What is an error?’ he asked. ‘It is, without exception, the only major statistic in sports which is a record of what an observer thinks should have been accomplished. It’s a moral judgment, really, in the peculiar quasi-morality of the locker room….But the fact of a baseball error is that no play has been made but that the scorer thinks it should have. It is, uniquely, a record of opinions.” pg.66

On stats: “The problem,”‘ wrote James, “is that baseball statistics are not pure accomplishments of men against other men, which is what we are in the habit of seeing them as. They are accomplishments of men in combination with their circumstances.” pg.71

Further reading:

More “Moneyball” quotes

The Ad Contrarian – “Not Following The Herd“

If This Is a Blog Then What’s Christmas? – “What Can ‘Moneyball’ Teach Advertising?“

Amazon Reviews for Moneyball

Finally Joining the Revolution by Bill Simmons on ESPN.com

###

Buy it on Amazon Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

A few good quotes & passages that I wanted to share:

On classifying people: “Cliches and stereotypes such as ‘beatnik’ or ‘hippie’ have been invented for the antitechnologists, the antisystem people, and will continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of  a mass term.” (emphasis mine) Pg.16

On over-analyzing: “When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts. Mark Twain’s experience comes to mind, in which, after he had mastered the analytic knowledge needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its beauty. Something is always killed. But what is less noticed in the arts — something is always created too. And instead of just dwelling on what is killed it’s important also to see what’s created and to see the process as a kind of death-birth continuity that is neither good nor bad, but just is.” (emphasis mine) Pgs.70-71

On systems: “To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as ‘the system’ is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There’s no villain, no ‘mean guy’ who wants them to live meaningless lives, it’s just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it’s meaningless.

But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible (emphasis mine). The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.” Pgs.87-88

Wow – this book came out in 1974 but that last passage could have been written this year. General Motors, Microsoft and most recently BP are all good examples of institutions that will fail to change until they integrate new people with fresh ideas.

Innovation always has to come from the top and it doesn’t matter how smart, creative or talented a company’s employees are if they’re in an environment that stifles change.

BUY IT ON AMAZON Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (P.S.)

###

Speaking of poor corporate culture, “Light Touch Key to Product Innovation” on WARC points to a Nielsen study that “…found that greater involvement among senior managers in the ideation and creation processes generally leads to launches that enjoy lower success rates.” Nice.

On the flip side, here’s Ed Cotton’s post on Amazon’s acquisition of Zappos, a company that champions culture: “Zappos and the Power of Soft Intangibles“

Image Mount Everest Climbing Photos

I wrote about “Into Thin Air” last month and finally got around to finishing it the other day. There’s a few things I learned that I wanted to share:

1) It’s cold as hell

The summit of Everest is 29, 028 feet. To give you an idea how high that is, most commercial planes fly around 30,000-40,000 feet (the air is thinner, therefore, more fuel efficient).

“…searched for a protected place to escape the wind, but there was nowhere to hide. Everyone’s oxygen had long since run out, making the group more vulnerable to the windchill, which exceeded a hundred below zero.”

100 degrees below zero!! Unreal. I felt -7 one time in Boston and I couldn’t imagine being outside when it’s an extra 100 degrees colder.

2) You climb at night

I never thought of this before, but time is a major issue. Your body needs to get acclimated to the different altitude levels and it needs to do so periodically but quickly. If you stay at a high altitude for too long, your body can’t handle it, kind of like deep sea diving but on a massive mountain.

These mountaineers climb at night with headlamps (with severe storms your visibility can be reduced to just a few feet) in order to keep moving.

3) Getting to the summit is the easy part

“Reaching the top of Everest is supposed to trigger a surge of intense elation; against all odds, after all, I had just attained a goal I’d coveted since childhood. But the summit was really only the halfway point. Any impulse I might have felt toward self-congratulation was extinguished by overwhelming apprehension about the long, dangerous descent that lay ahead.”

I know this may sound obvious, but before reading this book I thought of climbing to the top of the mountain as the end goal — it’s not. Getting back down is even more difficult: you’re incredibly fatigued, you run the risk of running out of oxygen in your tank (most people carry oxygen tanks because it’s so hard to breathe in the high altitude) and the cold temperature creates all sorts of problems. Once you get to the top it’s basically a race against time.

Mountaineering, in some ways reminds me of martial arts. It’s a small club of people and it’s hard to explain to outsiders exactly why you do it; why you put yourself through the physical pain time and time again.

Krakauer’s got a nice take on it:

“I’d always known that climbing mountains was a high-risk pursuit. I accepted that danger was an essential component of the game — without it, climbing would be little different from a hundred other trifling diversions. It was titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier. Climbing was a magnificent activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them.”

I’ll say it again: this is a great adventure book. Totally worth your time.

UPDATE: 4/23/10

LINKS: HistoryShots Conquest of Mount Everest

Mount Everest Climbing Photos

BUY IT ON AMAZON Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster

Image 1x.com

I started reading Jon Krakauer’s book “Into Thin Air” on my flight to LA last week. Apparently there was a TV movie made about this story back in 1997, but I don’t remember ever seeing it.

I’m about halfway through the book now. It’s just a really, really good story. I like how Krakauer starts off each chapter with a quote from another book on mountaineering. Here’s one from Chapter 7:

“But there are men for whom the unattainable has a special attraction. Usually they are not experts; their ambitions and fantasies are strong enough to brush aside the doubts which more cautious men might have. Determination and faith are their strongest weapons. At best such men are regarded as eccentric; at worst, mad…

Everest has attracted its share of men like these. Their mountaineering experience varied from none at all to very slight — certainly none of them had the kind of experience which would make an ascent of Everest a reasonable goal. Three things they all had in common: faith in themselves, great determination, and endurance.” —Walt Unsworth, Everest

“Into Thin Air” has a lot of elements that make it a great adventure story. For me, it’s about the strength of the human spirit and persistence; moving forward one step at a time as you get incrementally closer to your goal.

BUY IT ON AMAZON

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster

via stephmcg

I read constantly. If I was to sum up why in three words, I’d say:

1. Information
2. Inspiration
3. Ideas

I’ve gotten a lot more studious about my reading over the last couple years. I make diligent use of my highlighter and write notes in the margins, and flag useful pages so I can reference them quickly. I’ve also been writing summaries for each book to make sure I have a thorough understanding of the subject – this is a great tool to find certain concepts and quotes that I may want to locate later on.  Plus everything is saved online so I always have access to my notes.

As structured as I am with my reading, I still tend to get backed up here and there. As of today, I’ve got about 356 articles bookmarked on Delicious that I haven’t been able to get to yet. I also read about 50 different blogs.

In the meantime I’ve been accumulating a number of unread books on my nightstand. Here’s what next in my literary queue:

The ones I’ve got next to my bed are basically a mix of evolutionary biology/psychology, sports and marketing.

You can’t see the name on the really skinny one on top – it’s called “Zig Ziglar’s Little Book of Big Quotes.” I usually carry it in my book bag. It has lots of inspirational, pithy quotes like,

“Positive thinking won’t let you do anything but it will you do everything better than negative thinking will”

and

“The chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what you want most for what you want now.”

Right now I’m finishing up “Bringing Down The House” (which is what the movie “21″ was based on) and getting started on “Perfect Pitch: The Art of Selling Ideas and Winning New Business” by Jon Steel. I try to alternate what I read since I believe there’s a lot we can learn from other industries, subjects and even fiction.

Thanks Libby Ander ( @libbyander ) for the original idea for this post.

What’s on your nightstand? Share some pics!

Further reading:

Ryan Holiday – Read to Lead: How to Digest Books Above Your “Level”

I’m currently reading a great book on Branding called, “The Culting of Brands: When Customers Become True Believers” by Douglas Atkin.

Atkin provides evidence and case studies that illustrate how religious cults and brands are very similar, and outlines the strategies marketers can use to build cult-like followings for their brands.

Most of us, when we think of the word “cult,” envision obsessive, socially inept and desperate people with serious psychological problems.

Atkin argues that the reality of cult members is actually quite the opposite: they are intelligent and educated social-connectors. He also says that, “..people become addicted to ‘cult brands’ like jetBlue, Apple, eBay or Mary Kay for more or less the same reasons that people become committed to cults like the Hare Krishna.”

According to Atkin, “A cult is normally a group that embraces new or fundamentally different ideas. Its ideology departs significantly from the prevailing beliefs of the surrounding culture. It is therefore progressive.”

A few key points:

• “People in significant numbers are not going to join an organization populated by social failures. They will be drawn to a religion such as the Mormon church, and a brand such as Saturn, through word of mouth. That mouth has to belong to someone whom potential recruiters will trust and respect.”
• Most of the public think people join cults to conform. They actually join to become more individual. Atkin interviewed a writer and Mac user who said, ” ‘..a Mac made me creative. No, actually, I was creative to begin with, and in some ways, they made me more creative.’ It had taken that part of his identity that he considers his most defining characteristic, his creativity, and accelerated it. That’s a pretty important role he has ascribed to a mere brand.”
• Cults/brands must exist outside of social norms in order to be embraced by their target audience. In other words, you can’t be all things to all people. For marketers, this is a perfect example of the importance of niche marketing. By separating yourself from the mainstream, you appeal to the alienated group who will become loyal advocates of your brand. Harley-Davidson is a great case study: they have a repeat purchase rate of 95%!

Overall, this book provides an interesting viewpoint on how brands are built. I felt it was a little repetitive and could have been about 50 pages shorter, but I found the sections on jetBlue and Saturn especially interesting.

There are so many products and services out there with little to differentiate them in the eyes of the consumer. The most important concept a marketer needs to understand is that consumers are looking for an emotional connection in “cult” or “brand” communities, and the individual’s need to become a part of these puzzles gives marketers an excellent hot-button to push.

BUY IT ON AMAZON The Culting of Brands : When Customers Become True Believers