Books – Page 122 – artdiamondblog.com

Some Tasks Are Done Better in Private Offices

Source of book image: http://timeopinions.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/quiet-final-jacket.jpg

(p. 4) When the R.C. Hedreen Company, a real estate development firm based in Seattle, commissioned a renovation of a 10,800-square-foot floor in an old downtown office building five years ago, it specified a perimeter of private offices. Collaborative spaces are provided for creative teamwork, but the traditional offices remain the executives’ home ports.

”Individually, a lot of our workday is taken up with tasks that are better served by working alone in private offices,” says David Thyer, Hedreen’s president.
Susan Cain, author of ”Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking,” is skeptical of open-office environments — for introverts and extroverts alike, though she says the first group suffers much more amid noise and bustle.
Introverts are naturally more comfortable toiling alone, she says, so they will cope by negotiating time to work at home, or by isolating themselves with noise-canceling headphones — ”which is kind of an insane requirement for an office environment, when you think about it,” she says.
Ms. Cain also says humans have a fundamental need to claim and personalize space. ”It’s the room of one’s own,” she says. ”Your photographs are on the wall. It’s the same reason we have houses. These are emotional safety zones.”

For the full story, see:
LAWRENCE W. CHEEK. “Please, Just Give Me Some Space: In New Office Designs, Room to Roam and to Think.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., March 18, 2012): 1 & 4.

The book mentioned is:
Cain, Susan. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. New York: Crown, 2012.

Entrepreneur Sam Wyly Hard to Classify

Source of book image: http://www.charlesandsamwyly.com/images/1000-dollars-and-an-idea.jpg

I sometimes divide entrepreneurs into two broad types: free agent entrepreneurs and innovative entrepreneurs. Free agent entrepreneurs are the self-employed. Innovative entrepreneurs are the agents of Schumpeter’s process of creative destruction.
Then there are entrepreneurs like Sam Wyly who don’t fit very well in either category.
He built or improved businesses in ways that made the world better, but usually did not involve breakthrough innovations.
Like many of the entrepeneurs considered in Amar Bhidé’s main books, Wyly grew businesses that served consumers, enriched investors and created jobs. Some of his most important start-ups, especially early-on, involved computer services. And his efforts to compete with the government-backed AT&T monopoly, were heroic.
I read the 2008 version of his autobiography a few months ago, and found that it contained a few stories and observations that are worth pondering. In the next few weeks I will briefly quote a few of these.

The 2008 Wyly autobiography is:
Wyly, Sam. 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire. New York: Newmarket Press, 2008.

I have not read the 2011 version of Wyly’s autobiography:
Wyly, Sam. Beyond Tallulah: How Sam Wyly Became America’s Boldest Big-Time Entrepreneur. New York: Melcher Media, 2011.

The dominant examples in Bhidé’s two main books are entrepreneurs like Wyly. The two main Bhidé books are:
Bhidé, Amar. The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Bhidé, Amar. The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Steve Jobs Channels Ellis Wyatt

(p. 260) In 2007 Forbes magazine named Steve Jobs the highest-paid exec-(p. 261)utive of any of America’s five hundred largest companies, based on gains in the value of stock granted to him at Apple. He was on the board of directors of the Walt Disney Co. Yet his former residence in Woodside, where he had once met with Catmull and Smith and mused about buying Lucasfilm’s Computer Division, was now in a state of decay under his ownership.
He had wanted to demolish it; after a group of neighborhood residents opposed his plan to do so, he left the house open to the elements. The interior suffered damage from water and mold. Vines crept up the stucco walls and wandered inside.
The memories that haunted its hallways were those of Jobs’s darkest times. He had bought the house only months before the humiliation of his firing from Apple; he lived in it through that firing and through the hard, money-hemorrhaging years of Pixar and NeXT. He left it as his fortunes were about to change, as he was sending Microsoft away from Pixar, convinced that he had something he should hold on to.
When a judge ruled against his quest for a demolition permit, Jobs appealed in 2006 and 2007 all the way to the California Supreme Court, but he lost at every stage. He received proposals from property owners offering to cart the house away in sections and restore it elsewhere; he rejected them. One way or another, it seemed, he meant for the house to be destroyed.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: italics in original.)
(Note: The passage above is from the Epilogue and the pages given above are from the hardback edition (pp. 260-261). The identical passage also appears in the 2009 paperback edition, but on p. 265.

“There Was Never a Plan . . . Just a Series of Mistakes”

“Robert Caro in his Manhattan office. The later volumes of his L.B.J. biography have taken more years to write than it took the former president to live them.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 37) “There was never a plan,” Caro said to me, explaining how he had become a historian and biographer. “There was just a series of mistakes.”
. . .
(p. 38) Caro had a[n] . . . epiphany about power in the early ’60s. He had moved on to Newsday by then, where he discovered that he had a knack for investigative reporting, and was assigned to look into a plan by Robert Moses to build a bridge from Rye, N.Y., across Long Island Sound to Oyster Bay. “This was the world’s worst idea,” he told me. “The piers would have had to be so big that they’d disrupt the tides.” Caro wrote a series exposing the folly of this scheme, and it seemed to have persuaded just about everyone, including the governor, Nelson Rockefeller. But then, he recalled, he got a call from a friend in Albany saying, “Bob, I think you need to come up here.” Caro said: “I got there in time for a vote in the Assembly authorizing some preliminary step toward the bridge, and it passed by something like 138-4. That was one of the transformational moments of my life. I got in the car and drove home to Long Island, and I kept thinking to myself: ‘Everything you’ve been doing is baloney. You’ve been writing under the belief that power in a democracy comes from the ballot box. But here’s a guy who has never been elected to anything, who has enough power to turn the entire state around, and you don’t have the slightest idea how he got it.’ ”
The lesson was repeated in 1965, when Caro had a Nieman fellowship at Harvard and took a class in land use and urban planning. “They were talking one day about highways and where they got built,” he recalled, “and here were these mathematical formulas about traffic density and population density and so on, and all of a sudden I said to myself: ‘This is completely wrong. This isn’t why highways get built. Highways get built because Robert Moses wants them built there. If you don’t find out and explain to people where Robert Moses gets his power, then everything else you do is going to be dishonest.’ “

For the full story, see:
CHARLES McGRATH. “Robert Caro’s Big Dig.” The New York Times Magazine (Sun., April 15, 2012): 34-39 & 52.
(Note: ellipses and bracketed letter added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated April 12, 2012.)

Caro’s book on Robert Moses is:
Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1974.

Physicist Says “Financial Models Are Only Mediocre Metaphors”

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A19) Trained as a physicist, Emanuel Derman once served as the head of quantitative analysis at Goldman Sachs and is currently a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University. With “Models Behaving Badly” he offers a readable, even eloquent combination of personal history, philosophical musing and honest confession concerning the dangers of relying on numerical models not only on Wall Street but also in life.

Mr. Derman’s particular thesis can be stated simply: Although financial models employ the mathematics and style of physics, they are fundamentally different from the models that science produces. Physical models can provide an accurate description of reality. Financial models, despite their mathematical sophistication, can at best provide a vast oversimplification of reality. In the universe of finance, the behavior of individuals determines value–and, as he says, “people change their minds.”
In short, beware of physics envy. When we make models involving human beings, Mr. Derman notes, “we are trying to force the ugly stepsister’s foot into Cinderella’s pretty glass slipper. It doesn’t fit without cutting off some of the essential parts.” As the collapse of the subprime collateralized debt market in 2008 made clear, it is a terrible mistake to put too much faith in models purporting to value financial instruments. “In crises,” Mr. Derman writes, “the behavior of people changes and normal models fail. While quantum electrodynamics is a genuine theory of all reality, financial models are only mediocre metaphors for a part of it.”

For the full review, see:
BURTON G. MALKIEL. “BOOKSHELF; Physics Envy; Creating financial models involving human behavior is like forcing ‘the ugly stepsister’s foot into Cinderella’s pretty glass slipper.'” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., December 14, 2011): A19.

The book under review is:
Derman, Emanuel. Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life. New York: Free Press, 2011.

“In a Garage Pursuing a Dream”

(p. 257) The increase in computer-animated films . . . marked the dawning of a democratic moment in artistic expression and entrepreneurship. Just as technological developments in digital production were (p. 258) opening the door more widely in live-action filmmaking, technology was making computer animation more accessible every year.
Computer animation was still an art form that required talent and intense Commitment; it wasn’t within reach of Everyman. The accessibility of its tools, however, brought new possibilities. Where Pixar’s early years had required a succession of wealthy patrons–Alexander Schure, George Lucas, and Steve Jobs–an enterprising artist of the early twenty-first century was not so dependent. The hardware and software of an animator’s workstation, once the province of major studios and effects houses, could now be had for the cost of a good used car. As Pixar started its new life as a crown jewel of the Walt Disney Co., it was plausible that it would sooner or later have to jockey release dates with a new kind of rival. Or, rather, it would have to face a rival that looked much the way Pixar itself did thirty years earlier, as a group of men and women in a garage pursuing a dream.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

NGO Workers Are More Concerned with Following Plan than Achieving Mission

Source of book image: http://www.bibliovault.org/thumbs/978-0-8047-7672-1-frontcover.jpg

In the quote below, “NGO” means “Non-Government Organization,” for instance, a philanthropy.

(p. 17) As for the state’s representatives, their authority was what Coburn calls a “useful fiction.” The district governor wielded his connections to Kabul as best he could, but did not possess great influence, in part because — in keeping with the most sophisticated state-building methods — government aid was mainly distributed by locally elected committees. Istalif’s police were seen as hapless at best, predatory at worst; Coburn found that villagers were eager to protect him from a local officer. The French soldiers who periodically showed up in the bazaar had little impact, though their presence did become an excuse for keeping women out of the area. But Coburn observed that “no group was less effective at accumulating influence” than the NGO community. The best development experts accomplished little: their turnover was high, and they frequently bestowed their largess on deserving locals — women, refugees who’d returned from abroad with some education, victims of wartime injuries — who didn’t have the connections or ability to capitalize on their good fortune. NGO workers seemed less concerned with achieving a valuable outcome than with demonstrating to their backers that they had followed a mission plan to the letter.

For the full review, see:
ALEXANDER STAR. “Applied Anthropology.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., November 20, 2011): 16-17.
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated November 18, 2011, and has the title “Afghanistan: What the Anthropologists Say.”)

The book being discussed is:
Coburn, Noah. Bazaar Politics: Power and Pottery in an Afghan Market Town. Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011.

Intellectual Property Rights as Refined in Case Law

The questions and answers in court illustrate how case law would approach the issue of refining and reforming intellectual property issues based on concepts of justice, but also on practical issues. (This is from Disney and Pixar lawyer Steve Marenberg questioning Dick Cook in testimony before Judge Clarence Brimmer, Jr. on November 1, 2001, the day before Monsters, Inc. was scheduled to be released.)

(p. 193) Q : So obviously the delay of the film by injunction or otherwise would affect the first weekend and the ability to gain all of the benefits you’ve gotten by virtue of the tact that November second is the first weekend?

A : It would be a disaster.
Q : And that would affect, then, not only the theatrical performance of the film, but what other markets in the United Sates?
A : Well, it would completely be a snowball effect in a reverse way in that it would certainly put a damper on all of the home video activities, all the DVD activities; in fact, would influence international because international is greatly influenced on how well it does in the United States, and by taking that away, it would definitely, definitely, have a big, big impact on the success of the film.
And furthermore, going further, is that it would take away any of the other ancillary things that happen, you (p. 194) know, whether it would become a television series, whether or not it becomes a piece of an attraction at the parks, whether it becomes a land at the parks, or any of those kinds of things.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)
(Note: on p. 190 of the book, Price misspells Marenberg’s name as “Marenburg.”)

Workers Want to See Compensation Related to Contribution

This is a great example contra (or at least qualifying) Daniel Pink’s claim that all you need do for knowledge workers is provide them enough money so that they can provide for the basic needs of themselves and their family.

(p. 145) The public offering process brought details of the intended allocation of Pixar stock options into view. A registration statement and other documents with financial data had to be prepared for the Securities and Exchange Commission and a prospectus needed to be made ready for potential investors. These documents had to be reviewed and edited, and it was here that the word apparently leaked: A small number of people were to receive low-cost options on enormous blocks of stock. Catmull, Levy, and Lasseter were to get options on 1.6 million shares apiece; Guggenheim and Reeves were to get 1 million and 840,000, respectively. If the company’s shares sold at the then-planned price of fourteen dollars, the men would be instant multimillionaires.

The revelation was galling. Apart from the money, there was the symbolism: The options seemed to denigrate the years of work everyone else had put into the company. They gave a hollow feel to Pixar’s labor-of-love camaraderie, its spirit that everyone was there to do cool work together. Also, it was hard not to notice that Levy, one of the top recipients, had just walked in the door.
“There was a big scene about all that because some people got (p. 146) huge amounts more than other people who had come at the same time period and who had made pretty significant contributions to the development of Pixar and the ability to make Toy Story,” Kerwin said. “People like Tom Porter and Eben Ostby and Loren Carpenter–guys that had been there since the beginning and were part of the brain trust.”
Garden-variety employees would also get some options, but besides being far fewer, those options would vest over a four-year period. Even employees who had been with the organization since its Lucasfilm days a decade earlier–employees who had lost all their Pixar stock in the 1991 reorganization–would be starting their vesting clock at zero. In contrast, most of the options of Catmull, Lasseter, Guggenheim, and Reeves vested immediately–they could be turned into stock right away.
“I decided, ‘Well, gee, I’ve been at this company eight years, and I’ll have been here twelve years before I’m fully vested,’ ” one former employee remembered. ” ‘It doesn’t sound like these guys are interested in my well-being.’ A lot of this piled up and made me say, ‘What am I doing? I’m sitting around here trying to make Steve Jobs richer in ways he doesn’t even appreciate.’ ”

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: italics in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

For Daniel Pink’s views, see:
Pink, Daniel H. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009.

“Dematerialization” Means More Goods from Fewer Resources

(p. C4) Economic growth is a form of deflation. If the cost of, say, computing power goes down, then the users of computing power acquire more of it for less–and thus attain a higher standard of living. One thing that makes such deflation possible is dematerialization, the reduction in the quantity of stuff needed to produce a product. An iPhone, for example, weighs 1/100th and costs 1/10th as much as an Osborne Executive computer did in 1982, but it has 150 times the processing speed and 100,000 times the memory.
Dematerialization is occurring with all sorts of products. Banking has shrunk to a handful of electrons moving on a cellphone, as have maps, encyclopedias, cameras, books, card games, music, records and letters–none of which now need to occupy physical space of their own. And it’s happening to food, too. In recent decades, wheat straw has shrunk as grain production has grown, because breeders have persuaded the plant to devote more of its energy to making the thing that we value most. Future dematerialization includes the possibility of synthetic meat–produced in a lab without brains, legs or guts.
Dematerialization is one of the reasons that Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler give for the future’s being “better than you think” in their new book, “Abundance.”

For the full commentary, see:
MATT RIDLEY. “MIND & MATTER; The Future Is So Bright, it’s Dematerializing.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., February 25, 2012): C4.

The book mentioned by Ridley is:
Diamandis, Peter H., and Steven Kotler. Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. New York: Free Press, 2012.

“Scratch a White Liberal and You’ll Find a Bigot”

Source of book image: http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/files/2011/10/my-long-trip-home.jpg

(p. C1) As a social studies major in his junior year at Harvard, Mark Whitaker attended a debate on the subject of ethnicity. One participant was the chairman of the department. Mr. Whitaker stood up to raise some questions.

“What would you tell someone who didn’t have a clear ethnic identity?” he asked. “For example, what would you tell someone who had one parent who was black and another who was white? Who had one parent who was American and another who was European? Who had moved dozens of times as a child and didn’t have a specific place to call home?” Everyone in the room knew that Mr. Whitaker was talking about himself.
“I guess I would say that that’s too bad,” the professor answered. “In the future I hope we don’t have too many more people like you.”
Mr. Whitaker recounts this story in “My Long Trip Home,” a book filled with as much family tumult as Jeannette Walls described in “The Glass Castle” and a racial factor to boot. It’s a story that registers not only for its shock value but also for the perspective and wisdom with which it can now be told.
The episode did not anger him, he said. He saw it as his professor’s Freudian slip, “exposing a wish to hold on to a sense of certainty about his roots in the face of a gathering demographic storm that threatened to wash them away.” But Mr. Whitaker’s troubled and combative black father, who is the book’s central figure through sheer force of personality, had a more heated reaction. “As I always say, scratch a white liberal and you’ll find a bigot,” Cleophaus Sylvester Whitaker Jr. told his son.

For the full review, see:
JANET MASLIN. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Born Along the Racial Fault Line.” The New York Times (Mon., November 7, 2011): C1 & C4.
(Note: the online version of the review is dated November 6, 2011.)

The book under review is:
Whitaker, Mark. My Long Trip Home: A Family Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.