A phone a window seat and a beautiful planet
A phone, a window seat, and a beautiful planet.
2014
Negotiate With Confidence
As much as I am an avid reader of nonfiction, normally I try to steer clear of what appear to be “traditional” business/management books (yes, I sometimes judge books by their covers). Negotiate with Confidence was recommended by a colleague and I have to say, it exceeded my expectations. Isaacs’ perspective, as veteran of the AEC industry, results from firsthand experience dealing with the same type of clients that we work with regularly. His concrete, easy-to-implement strategies for improving negotiations when pursuing projects resonated with the challenges that we face ourselves. In particular, the discussion of doing anything, i.e. way too much, in the interest of maintaining the client relationship felt especially relevant. I also appreciated that his guidance is not intended to promote a win-at-all-costs negotiation strategy, but rather interest-based negotiation that seeks positive outcomes for all parties.
Overall a quick read and easy to recommend for those in this industry.
The Master Switch
I really enjoyed this book from Tim Wu. It worked especially well as a follow-up to The Idea Factory in that Wu presents a much darker side to Bell Telephone’s unprecedented monopoly. Wu recognizes that Bell was a source for an enormous amount of innovation, but is appropriately critical of the many instances where innovation was squelched in the interest of maintaining the Bell monopoly.
The Bell example is just one of several prominent “information empires,” industries built around products and services the control the creation and distribution of information. Movies, radio, and television are each discussed with strong examples showing how these businesses and technologies fit into Wu’s big idea: The Cycle. Wu explains that every technology built to distribute information goes through a cycle of great openness at the early stages that reverts to massive consolidation as the technology matures.
Wu’s discussion of the Internet and Net Neutrality is both timely and prescient. At the moment, the Internet appears to be at an inflection point in The Cycle: ahead lies more consolidation and control by the major ISPs like Comcast. If the history of information empires plays out again as it has in the past, the Internet of the next 20 years will be far different from what we know today.
Highly recommend.
(Amazon.com)
From Poverty to Prosperity
I’ve never given up on a book before. From Poverty to Prosperity brought me the closest I’ve ever come to doing that. I did, after many months, manage to slog through it, so I still haven’t given up on a book. Why didn’t I like this book?
First: it simply fails as a book. The authors present a very brief theory/vision/explanation for the future of the global economy and then proceed to fill the pages with loosely related interviews from prominent economists. The content just doesn’t suit the medium and it’s left to the reader to reassemble these disjointed opinions into a coherent narrative that supports the authors’ views.
Second: those views, the fundamental premise offered by the authors, that “Economics 2.0” will be built on the infinite availability of grand ideas and won’t be constrained by the inconveniences of limited resources, strikes me as overly simplistic and impressively naive. The tone of the entire book is one of academics who have never experienced the harsh realities of scarcity, corruption, and poverty (not that I have either, but I’m not writing a book that proposes solutions to all three). If it were as simple as the authors claim, to transition from “poverty to prosperity,” surely many more struggling countries would have already taken the necessary steps to do so.