Books – Page 149 – artdiamondblog.com

“If I Listened to Logical People I Would Never Have Succeeded”

We may never know if Gilder’s optimism about Takahashi’s DRAM initiative was prescient or misguided. Takahashi died of pneumonia at age 60 in 1989, the same year that Gilder’s Mircocosm book was published. (Takahashi’s successor abandoned the DRAM initiative.)

(p. 154) Many experts said it could not be done. DRAMs represent the most demanding feat of mass production in all world commerce. None of the complex procedures is easy to automate. Automation itself, moreover, is no final solution to the problems of dust and contamination. Machines collect and shed particles and toxic wastes nearly as much as people do. Chip experts derided the view that these ten-layered and multiply patterned electronic devices, requiring hundreds of process steps, resembled ball bearings in any significant way.

Takahashi knew all that. But experts had derided almost every decision he had made throughout his career. “Successful people,” he says, “surprise the world by doing things that ordinary logical people (p. 155) think are stupid.” The experts told him he could not compete in America with New Hampshire Ball Bearing. He ended up buying it. The experts and bankers had told him not to build his biggest ball-bearing plants in Singapore and Thailand. Those plants are now the world’s most productive. The experts told him not to buy two major facilities in the United States, full of obsolescent equipment and manned by high-priced workers. But those facilities now dominate the American market for precision ball bearings. Now the experts told him he couldn’t make DRAMs. He knew he could. “If I listened to logical people,” he says, “I would never have succeeded.”

Source:

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.

Replication Easier than “Sweat and Anguish” of First Discovery

(p. 137) No one will deny that Japan’s triumph in semiconductors depended on American inventions. But many analysts rush on to a further theory that the Japanese remained far behind the United States until the mid- 1970s and caught up only through a massive government program of industrial targeting of American inventions by MITI.
Perhaps the leading expert on the subject is Makoto Kikuchi, a twenty-six-year veteran of MITI laboratories, now director of the Sony Research Center. The creator of the first transistor made in Japan, he readily acknowledges the key role of American successes in fueling the advances in his own country: “Replicating someone else’s experiment, no matter how much painful effort it might take, is nothing compared with the sweat and anguish of the men who first made the discovery.”

Kikuchi explains: “No matter how many failures I had, I knew that somewhere in the world people had already succeeded in making a transistor. The first discoverers . . . had to continue their work, their long succession of failures, face-to-face with the despairing possibility that in the end they might never succeed. . . . As I fought my own battle with the transistor, I felt this lesson in my very bones.” Working at MITI’s labs, Kikuchi was deeply grateful for the technological targets offered by American inventors.

Source:

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.
(Note: ellipses in original.)

Entrepreneurial Innovation Comes from Diverse Outsiders Rather than Establishments

(p. 113) Firms that win by the curve of mind often abandon it when they establish themselves in the world of matter. They fight to preserve the value of their material investments in plant and equipment that embody the ideas and experience of their early years of success. They begin to exalt expertise and old knowledge, rights and reputation, over the constant learning and experience of innovative capitalism. They get fat.

A fat cat drifting off the curve, however, is a sitting duck for new nations and companies getting on it. The curve of mind thus tends to favor outsiders over establishments of all kinds. At the capitalist ball, the blood is seldom blue or the money rarely seasoned. Microcosmic technologies are no exception. Capitalism’s most lavish display, the microcosm, is no respecter of persons.
The United States did not enter the microcosm through the portals of the Ivy League, with Brooks Brothers suits, gentleman Cs, and warbling society wives. Few people who think they are in already can summon the energies to break in. From immigrants and outcasts, street toughs and science wonks, nerds and boffins, the bearded and the beer-bellied, the tacky and uptight, and sometimes weird, the born again and born yesterday, with Adam’s apples bobbing, psyches (p. 114) throbbing, and acne galore, the fraternity of the pizza breakfast, the Ferrari dream, the silicon truth, the midnight modem, and the seventy-hour week, from dirt farms and redneck shanties, trailer parks and Levittowns, in a rainbow parade of all colors and wavelengths, of the hyperneat and the sty high, the crewcut and khaki, the pony-tailed and punk, accented from Britain and Madras, from Israel and Malaya, from Paris and Parris Island, from Iowa and Havana, from Brooklyn and Boise and Belgrade and Vienna and Vietnam, from the coarse fanaticism and desperation, ambition and hunger, genius and sweat of the outsider, the downtrodden, the banished, and the bullied come most of the progress in the world and in Silicon Valley.

Source:

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.

Castro’s “Absolute Personal Dictatorship” Denounced By Former Member of Cuban Inner Circle

Source of book image:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2575/4095461227_09463c5680.jpg

(p. C1) The plethora of dictators, despots and revolutionaries-turned-authoritarians south of the border has spawned a genre of literature that might be called the Latin American Strongman Novel — a genre that includes harrowing novels based on real historical figures, like Mario Vargas Llosa’s dazzling “Feast of the Goat” (which depicted Rafael Trujillo’s devastating rule over the Dominican Republic) and more mythic creations, like Gabriel García Márquez’s “Autumn of the Patriarch,” that have employed the sorcery of magical realism to conjure larger-than-life fictional tyrants in a panoply of ruthlessness, audacity and corruption.

The latest in this tradition of books is Norberto Fuentes’s fascinating new novel, “The Autobiography of Fidel Castro,” which purports to tell the longtime Cuban leader’s story in his own words. The “self-portrait” that emerges from these pages is that of a Machiavellian survivor: an egomaniac who identifies himself with the revolution but who is loyal not to a cause, not to an ideology, not to his compatriots, but only to his own ambition.
This Fidel is narcissistically longwinded, like his real-life counterpart. He is also a self-mythologizing change agent who succeeds in making himself “the neurological center of an entire nation” — a wily Nietzschean operator who believes in the force of his own will, while sensing that “the chameleon is going to last longer under his rock than the lion, despite its roaring and lean muscles.” He is a cynical master of manipulation and strategic maneuvering, a skilled practitioner of the black arts of propaganda and gamesmanship who always wants “to keep people guessing.”
A journalist and Hemingway (p. C7) scholar, Mr. Fuentes was once a cheerleader of the revolution and part of Mr. Castro’s inner circle himself. He grew disillusioned with the Cuban leader, however, after two army officers were executed in 1989 on what many believe were trumped-up charges. Mr. Fuentes fell out of favor, came under government surveillance and was detained after a failed attempt to flee Cuba by boat. After a hunger strike and the intervention of Mr. García Márquez, he was allowed to leave the country in 1994, and has since denounced Mr. Castro for his “absolute personal dictatorship” and willingness “to do anything necessary to stay in power.”

For the full story, see:
MICHIKO KAKUTANI. “Books of The Times; Fiction Trying for Truth in Novel’s View of Dictator.” The New York Times (Tues., December 15, 2009): C1 & C7.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated Mon., December 14, 2009.)

“Norberto Fuentes” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Intel’s Computer-on-a-Chip “Was Achieved Largely by Immigrants from Hungary, Italy, Israel, and Japan”

(p. 111) By launching the computer-on-a-chip, Intel gave America an enduring advantage in this key product in information technology–an edge no less significant because it was achieved largely by immigrants from Hungary, Italy, Israel, and Japan. Intel’s three innovations of 1971–plus the silicon gate process that made them the smallest, fastest, and best-selling devices in the industry–nearly twenty years later remain in newer versions the most powerful force in electronics.

Source:

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.

Doctorow’s “Makers” Novel Paints Unrealistically Bleak View of Life with Creative Destruction

Source of book image: http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/makers.jpg

Awhile back I mentioned a science fiction book that made use of the process of creative destruction. Here’s a discussion of another one—called Makers, it apparently adopts the unlikely premise that a world of creative destruction would have a 20% unemployment rate. (I say “unlikely” because the evidence is that in a world of creative destruction, as many new jobs are created as old ones are destroyed.)

(p. A19) Consider the world of “Makers,” the latest by best-selling writer Cory Doctorow. This novel is set in a not-too distant future, when the creative destruction of technological change has created an economy so efficient, with profit margins so thin, that traditional companies can hardly stay in business.

The inventor-heroes of “Makers” take technology to its conclusion: They figure out a way to use three-dimensional printers to produce copies of machines and most anything else at close to no cost. This sparks “New Work,” with geeky investment bankers scouring the country to fund promising artisans who use the technology to build things cheaply. The heroes also run a series of entertainment rides across the country in abandoned Wal-Marts, until Disney unleashes its lawyers on them.
Mr. Doctorow, a Canadian living in London, has a keen eye for the pressures on contemporary business. In the novel, an M.B.A. brought in to work with the inventors explains, “The system makes it hard to sell anything above the marginal cost of goods, unless you have a really innovative idea, which can’t stay innovative for long, so you need continuous invention and reinvention, too.”
. . .
In the world of “Makers,” and perhaps in our own world, “we’re approaching a kind of pure and perfect state now, with competition and invention getting easier and easier–it’s producing a kind of superabundance.”
Mr. Doctorow paints a bleak picture of the process of getting there, even if many of us take a more benign view of increasingly efficient capitalism. “Makers” features widespread unemployment, with 20% of workers relocating to look for jobs. Even with scientific advances–obesity is solved, for example–life is brutal. There are squatter neighborhoods alongside abandoned strip malls.

For the full story, see:

L. GORDON CROVITZ. “Technology Is Stranger Than Fiction; Best-selling writer Cory Doctorow on change and its discontents.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., NOVEMBER 23, 2009): A19.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

After Lab Accident, Chip Innovator Shima Was Resilient

The incident recounted below is from the story of the development of the 4004 microprocessor (which was the first commercially available microprocessor). Hoff and Shima played important roles in the development of the chip.
I am not sure that the main “lesson” from the incident is about the importance of details. (After all, many entrepreneurs, including Simplot, embark on big projects without a clear idea of how to accomplish the details.) A bigger and sounder lesson may be the usefulness of resilience for successful inventors and entrepreneurs.

(p. 104) Hoff’s counterpart at Busicom was a young Japanese named Masatoshi Shima who also had been thinking about problems of computer architecture. An equally formidable intellect, Shima came to the project through a series of accidents, beginning with a misbegotten effort to launch a small rocket using gunpowder he made by hand in his high school chemistry laboratory. As he carefully followed the formula, he claims to have had the mixture exactly right, except for some details that he overlooked. The mixture exploded, and as he pulled away his right hand, it seemed a bloody stump. At the local hospital (p. 105) a doctor with wide experience treating combat wounds felt lucky to save the boy’s thumb alone,

This ordeal taught the teen-aged Shima that “details are very important.” In the future he should “pay attention to all the details.” But the loss of his fingers convinced his parents–and later several key Japanese companies–that the boy should not become a chemical engineer, even though he had won his degree in chemical engineering. Thus Shima ended up at Busicom chiefly because it was run by a friend of one of his professors.

Source:

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.

Heretics to the Religion of Global Warming

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

(p. A19) Suppose for a minute–. . . –that global warming poses an imminent threat to the survival of our species. Suppose, too, that the best solution involves a helium balloon, several miles of garden hose and a harmless stream of sulfur dioxide being pumped into the upper atmosphere, all at a cost of a single F-22 fighter jet.

. . .

The hose-in-the-sky approach to global warming is the brainchild of Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue, Wash.-based firm founded by former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold. The basic idea is to engineer effects similar to those of the 1991 mega-eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, which spewed so much sulfuric ash into the stratosphere that it cooled the earth by about one degree Fahrenheit for a couple of years.
Could it work? Mr. Myhrvold and his associates think it might, and they’re a smart bunch. Also smart are University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner, whose delightful “SuperFreakonomics”–the sequel to their runaway 2005 bestseller “Freakonomics”–gives Myhrvold and Co. pride of place in their lengthy chapter on global warming. Not surprisingly, global warming fanatics are experiencing a Pinatubo-like eruption of their own.
. . .

. . . , Messrs. Levitt and Dubner show every sign of being careful researchers, going so far as to send chapter drafts to their interviewees for comment prior to publication. Nor are they global warming “deniers,” insofar as they acknowledge that temperatures have risen by 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century.
But when it comes to the religion of global warming–the First Commandment of which is Thou Shalt Not Call It A Religion–Messrs. Levitt and Dubner are grievous sinners. They point out that belching, flatulent cows are adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than all SUVs combined. They note that sea levels will probably not rise much more than 18 inches by 2100, “less than the twice-daily tidal variation in most coastal locations.” They observe that “not only is carbon plainly not poisonous, but changes in carbon-dioxide levels don’t necessarily mirror human activity.” They quote Mr. Myhrvold as saying that Mr. Gore’s doomsday scenarios “don’t have any basis in physical reality in any reasonable time frame.”
More subversively, they suggest that climatologists, like everyone else, respond to incentives in a way that shapes their conclusions. “The economic reality of research funding, rather than a disinterested and uncoordinated scientific consensus, leads the [climate] models to approximately match one another.” In other words, the herd-of-independent-minds phenomenon happens to scientists too and isn’t the sole province of painters, politicians and news anchors

For the full commentary, see:
BRET STEPHENS. “Freaked Out Over SuperFreakonomics; Global warming might be solved with a helium balloon and a few miles of garden hose.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., OCTOBER 27, 2009): A19.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Packard Was Told, If He Wanted a Better Car “He Had Better Build It Himself”

The steering wheel of the 1954 Packard Panther. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 11) The company may have started on a dare, according to “Packard: A History of the Motor Car and the Company,” edited by Beverly Rae Kimes (Automobile Quarterly Publications, 2002).

After graduating from Lehigh University’s engineering school and returning home to Warren, Ohio, James Ward Packard considered buying his first car, a Winton. When Packard asked for some special features, he got this response from Alexander Winton: “The Winton waggon (sic) as it stands is the ripened and perfected product of many years of lofty thought … and could not be improved in any detail. If Mr. Packard wants any of his own cats and dogs worked into a waggon, he had better build it himself.”
Despite the rude reply, Packard bought the car, but it broke down often. Commiserating over dinner with George Weiss, a friend (and Winton stockholder), Packard decided to take Winton’s words seriously. It must have been an especially satisfying day for Packard on June 17, 1899, when Weiss sold his Winton stock and invested in Packard’s new business, soon to be named the Ohio Automobile Company.
Although its first cars looked conventional, they had some unusual features. It was one of a few cars with an accelerator pedal, and its H-gate gearshift pattern, a Packard patent, was widely used in later years.
Packard’s reputation for reliability and durability was established with its model A and B cars, but the company did not stop development there, even taking the lessons of early mishaps to improve subsequent vehicles.
During the summer of 1900, a model B swerved into a ditch after hitting a pothole — a hazard on cars with tiller steering, as the impact could jerk the steering lever from the driver’s grasp — injuring the passenger and damaging the car. Packard started work on a solution; when the model C was introduced later that year, it featured the industry’s first steering wheel.
. . .
After flirting with Nash in the early 1950s, Packard purchased Studebaker in 1954 (which explains why the Packard Predictor resides in the Studebaker Museum). Studebaker was larger but struggling. The merger hastened the end of both makes.
Still, Packard left its mark on the American auto industry.

For the full story, see:
ROBB MANDELBAUM. “Collecting; Packard’s Visions of the Future, When It Still Had One .” The New York Times, SportsSunday Section (Sun., September 10, 2009): 11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Did Fairchild Fail Due to Bad Management or Disruptive Technology?

Clayton Christensen has shown how good management, following respected practices, can fail in the face of disruptive technologies. It would be interesting to investigate whether Fairchild was an example of what Christensen is talking about, or whether it just did not have good management.

(p. 89) Andrew Grove . . . had played a central role in bringing Fairchild to the threshold of a new era. But Fairchild would not enjoy the fruits of his work. Following the path of venture capital pioneer Peter Sprague were scores of other venture capitalists seeking to exploit the new opportunities he had shown them. Collectively, they accelerated the pace of entrepreneurial change–splits and spinoffs, startups and staff shifts–to a level that might be termed California Business Time (“What do you mean, I left Motorola quickly?” asked Gordon Campbell with sincere indignation. “I was there eight months!”).

The venture capitalist focused on Fairchild: that extraordinary pool of electronic talent assembled by Noyce and Moore, but left essentially unattended, undervalued, and little understood by the executives of the company back in Syosset, New York. Fairchild leaders John Carter and Sherman Fairchild commanded the microcosm: the most important technology in the history of the human race. Noyce, Moore, Hoerni, Grove, Sporck, design genius Robert Widlar, and marketeer Jerry Sanders represented possibly the most potent management and technical team ever assembled in the history of world business. But, hey, you guys, don’t forget to report back to Syosset. Don’t forget who’s boss. Don’t give out any bonuses without clearing them through the folks at Camera and Instrument. You might upset some light-meter manager in Philadelphia.
They even made Charles Sporck, the manufacturing titan, feel like “a little kid pissing in his pants.” Good work, Sherman, don’t let the big lug put on airs, don’t let him feel important. He only controls 80 percent of the company’s growth. Widlar is leaving? Great, he never fit in with the corporate culture anyway. Sporck has gone off with Peter Sprague? There are plenty more where he came from.
“It was weird,” said Grove, “they had no idea about what the company or the industry was like, nor did they seem to care. . . . Fairchild was just crumbling. If you wish, the semiconductor division management consisted of twenty significant players: eight went to National, eight went into Intel, and four of them went to Alcoholics Anonymous or something.” Actually there were more than twenty and they went into startups all over the Valley; some twenty-six new semiconductor firms sprouted up between 1967 and 1970. “It got to the point,” recalled one man quoted in Dirk Hanson’s The New Alchemists, “where people were practically driving trucks over to Fairchild and loading up with employees.”

Source:

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.
(Note: the first ellipsis was added; the others were in the original. The italics were also in the original.)

Steve Perry’s Passion for Better Education

Source of book image: http://www.renegadebook.com/Man%20Up!.jpg

I have seen Steve Perry interviewed on education issues a couple of times on CNN, and have been impressed. He makes a credible case for vouchers.
I have not read either of the books pictured in this entry, but have put them on my “to read” list.

The books are:
Perry, Steve. Man Up! Nobody Is Coming to Save Us. Renegade Books, 2006.
Perry, Steve. Raggedy Schools: The Untold Truth. Renegade Books, 2009.

Source of book image: http://www.raggedyschools.com/images/bookstore_photo.jpg