All posts by john.lipp@lippaudio.org

What the Dog Saw

Financial, Just Plain Interesting

This book is not an original creation by Gladwell.  Instead, it is a collection of articles he had written before.  There really isn’t a common theme like his previous books.

I bought the audio CD strictly so I could listen on my way to work.  If you want to read the written word, note that all of the stories can be found online.  Here is the list, in what I thought was the order of interest.

The Talent Myth – Are Smart People Overrated?  Story about Enron and the talent they hired.

Million-Dollar Murray – Why Problems like Homelessness May Be Easier to Solve Than to Manage.  A tale of strange economics.

The Pitchman – Ron Popeil and the Conquest of the American Kitchen.  Do you know how to sell?  Ron Popeil is the amazing

Most Likely to Succeed – How Do We Hire When We Can’t Tell Who’s Right for the Job?  A powerful tale about the challenge of hiring – most of us are terrible interviewers.

Open Secrets – Enron, Intelligence, and the Perils of Too Much Information.  A claim that Skilling and others at Enron are not guilty of deliberately deceiving the world.

Dangerous Minds – Criminal Profiling Made Easy.  A commentary that profiling does not work as well as we may have been lead to believe.

What the Dog Saw – Cesar Millan and the Movements of Mastery

Connecting the Dots – The Paradoxes of Intelligence Reform

The Art of Failure – Why Some People Choke and Others Panic

Blowup – Who Can Be Blamed for a Disaster like the Challenger Explosion?  No One, and We’d Better Get Used to It

Blowing Up – How Nassim Taleb Turned the Inevitability of Disaster into an Investment Strategy

John Rock’s Error – What the Inventor of the Birth Control Pill Didn’t Know About Women’s Health

The Ketchup Conudrum – Mustard Now Comes in Dozens of Varieties.  Why has Ketchup Stayed the Same?

True Colors – Hair Dye and the Hidden History of Postwar America

The Picture Problem – Mammography, Air Power, and the Limits of Looking

Something Borrowed – Should a Charge of Plagiarism Ruin Your Life?

Late Bloomers – Why Do We Equate Genius with Precocity?

The New-Boy Network – What Do Job Interviews Really Tell Us?

The Agile Organization and 2008 Financial Meltdown

Financial, Management

The author’s talk about organizations having two networks, a formal network based on the rules and regulations, and an informal network based on trusth that gets things done.  The author’s argue both are necessary for a healthy organization.

I couldn’t help thinking of the housing financial meltdown here in 2008.  It seems that the informal networks ran over the formal networks, which destroyed checks and balances.  When this caught up with the market, investors were stuck.  They couldn’t trust anyone at the investment banks.  Since the informal network is based on trust, they died, and the financial markets collapsed.  The injection of money from TARP didn’t accomplish anything.  The real problem was trust, which money doesn’t fix.  Likewise, the money injection would be exactly what the formal organization would propose because that is what they control.  Washington is still struggling to reestablish trust – the balance between reporting rules and restrictions on conflicts of interest (proprietary trading).  If the rules are too restrictive, then everyone learns to work around them, and tries to capture their regulators.