Category: Books

Amazon’s Culture “Asks a Lot of Questions”

(p. B2) John Mackey helped popularize organic food when he co-founded Whole Foods Market four decades ago. Over the past several months, his chain of more than 500 stores has scrambled to adapt to another major shift in how Americans buy groceries.

. . .

The pandemic has accelerated an online-grocery movement that Whole Foods was already seeking to capitalize on as part of Amazon.com Inc. Mr. Mackey sold Whole Foods to the online-retail juggernaut for $13.4 billion in 2017, one of the decisions he recounts in his new book out this month, “Conscious Leadership: Elevating Humanity Through Business.”

. . .

WSJ: What merger challenges have you’ve learned from?

Mr. Mackey: Amazon has a culture that asks a lot of questions. We took a little longer to get used to that, but that’s no big deal. That’s how you learn things. They’re trying to understand our business. They want to know everything. And I think that’s healthy.

WSJ: What’s the biggest leadership lesson you’ve adopted from Jeff Bezos?

Mr. Mackey: Amazon wants you to write up a document explaining your ideas, defending them, and then you can have discussions. That’s a practice Whole Foods has adopted. Amazon’s also very data-driven. As opposed to acting from the gut, Amazon says, “Show us the data.” That’s been a good discipline for us. We do it ourselves, even when we’re not talking to Amazon.

For the full interview, see:

Jaewon Kang, interviewer. “BOSS TALK; Rugged Individualism in the Grocery Aisle.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, September 12, 2020): B2.

(Note: ellipses added. In both the print and online versions, “WSJ” and “Mr. Mackey” are bolded, as are the questions asked by Jaewon Kang. The bolding is not visible in the theme used for this blog.)

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Sep. 11, 2020, and has the title “BOSS TALK; Whole Foods CEO John Mackey Says Many People Are Done With Grocery Stores.”)

The book co-authored by Mackey and mentioned above is:

Mackey, John, Steve Mcintosh, and Carter Phipps. Conscious Capitalism: Elevating Humanity Through Business. New York: Portfolio, 2020.

Boeotia Was “an Early Model of Democratic Federalism”

(p. C12) Mr. Cartledge, a professor emeritus at Cambridge and author of popular history books such as “The Spartans,” “Thermopylae,” “Alexander the Great” and “Democracy: A Life,” has picked an opportune time to look afresh at Thebes and Boeotia. The modern city of Thebes, an uninspiring market town, would not normally attract tourists, but is home to a glittering new museum, among the most up-to-date in Greece, featuring exhibits of archaeological finds (many unique in type) and historical objects from prehistory to the present. (One exhibit is titled, provocatively, “The Intellectual Radiance of Boeotia.”) There is a book forthcoming, from scholar James Romm, about Thebes’s “Sacred Band,” its elite unit of soldiers, made up of pairs of devoted homosexual lovers. Thebes is in the spotlight.

. . .

The biography of the Theban leader Epaminondas (418 B.C.-362 B.C.) written by Plutarch is, unfortunately, lost. Even so, his reputation shines. Admired by figures from Cicero and Montaigne to Sir Walter Raleigh (who called him “the worthiest man that ever was bred by the nation of Greece”), Epaminondas seems to have had a philosophical bent as well as a brilliant military mind.

. . .

Perhaps his greatest act, . . ., even if it might have been intended more to inconvenience the Spartans than as a benevolent deed, was freeing the helots of Messenia, a people that had been enslaved by the Spartans for 300 years. He helped found a new capital city for the Arcadian federation (Megalopolis), and also for the ex-helots (Messene). Maybe Epaminondas was not only the Nelson of his age, but the Lincoln as well. He died in battle and was buried alongside his male beloved, Caphisodorus, with an epitaph that listed his children (daughters, being female) as the cities Messene and Megalopolis; it ended “Greece is free.”

Mr. Cartledge’s command of the historical material is effortless and exhaustive, and his appreciation of Thebes is persuasive. Between the radical but self-destructive democracy of Athens and Sparta’s totalitarian oligarchy (both imperialist), Thebes and Boeotia stand in the middle as an early model of democratic federalism—the “united states” of Boeotia, for instance, shared a currency. It was Thebes that dealt a critical blow to Spartan domination, and a Theban leader who freed a long-enslaved people. Alexander the Great himself adopted military tactics from Epaminondas. If Thebes’s period of hegemony was brief—barely a decade—it also changed the course of the ancient world.

For the full review, see:

A.E. Stallings. “Greece’s Mythic Heartland.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, September 12, 2020): C12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sep. 11, 2020, and has the title “‘Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece’ Review: Mythic Roots.”)

The book under review is:

Cartledge, Paul. Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece. New York: Abrams Press, 2020.

A Forgotten Language Will Be Easier to Re-Learn

(p. 12) What makes sociolinguistics a subject worth engaging with are the surprises, and Kinzler’s book is full of them. She reveals the extent to which language imprints our brains and how we are neurologically programmed to be sensitive to it. Even if we lose a language after early childhood and no longer speak it in adulthood, learning it will be easier because of deep-seated neural settings permanently etched by that first language.

For the full review, see:

John McWhorter. “Fuggedaboutit!” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, August 2, 2020): 12.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 21 [sic], 2020, and has the title “The Biases We Hold Against the Way People Speak.”)

The book under review is:

Kinzler, Katherine D. How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do―and What It Says About You. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.

”There Was a Great Marxist Called Lenin”

(p. C11) Robert Conquest (1917-2015) was what used to be called a Renaissance man. He was so good at everything he did—soldier, diplomat, historian and poet—that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he also left behind a few sonatas and paintings in oil. His histories of the Soviet Union’s failures and atrocities include “The Great Terror” (1968) and “The Harvest of Sorrow” (1986), meticulously researched and humane investigations of a criminal state, surely among the major historical achievements of the 20th century. His television documentary series, “Red Empire” (1990), distills this work and makes grimly compelling viewing.

But Conquest first came to readers’ attention as a poet of sophistication and grace, . . .

. . .

”There was a great Marxist called Lenin,
Who did two or three million men in;
That’s a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.”

For the full review, see:

David Mason. “The Impervious Dream.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Aug. 22, 2020): C11.

(Note: ellipses added; the limerick in quotation marks is by Robert Conquest.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. 21, 2020, and has the title “‘Robert Conquest: Collected Poems’ Review: The Impervious Dream.”)

The book under review is:

Conquest, Robert. Collected Poems. New York: The Waywiser Press, 2020.

“Biology’s Many Unanswered Questions”

Unanswered questions in science provide grounds for thinking that future scientific advances may provide grist for the innovation mill. Some argue innovation has slowed because we have picked all the low-hanging fruit. I doubt it. But if so, the fruit can grow back.

(p. C9) The irresistible enthusiasm of “Great Adaptations” couldn’t come at a better time—science is under assault not merely by know-nothing deniers but in how it is taught and presented to the general public. It’s dispensed as a collection of facts, recitations of what past research has uncovered, findings to be understood, which all too often means just “memorized.” By contrast, as Mr. Catania clearly understands, and demonstrates beautifully in his book, science offers adventures in trying to decode the mysteries of the natural world.

This open-minded, openhearted attitude toward biology’s many unanswered questions is the organizing principle of “Great Adaptations”: how to recognize those mysteries, how to go about solving them, and most important, how to appreciate them. In science, working out the solutions to a puzzle inevitably raises new questions in a process not unlike nuclear fission, in which splitting one nucleus generates the energy to split more—except in this case, the energy released isn’t dangerous but illuminating.

For the full review, see:

David P. Barash. “Biology’s Unanswered Questions.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, September 5, 2020): C9.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sep. 4, 2020, and has the title “‘Great Adaptations’ Review: Survival of the Weirdest.”)

The book under review is:

Catania, Kenneth. Great Adaptations: Star-Nosed Moles, Electric Eels, and Other Tales of Evolution’s Mysteries Solved. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020.

At Netflix “Adequate Performance Gets a Generous Severance Package”

Note that Netflix practices what Clayton Christensen called “emergent” strategic planning. Experimental responding to opportunities; no five year plans.

(p. B5) As a founder and co-chief executive of Netflix Inc., Reed Hastings has reshaped both the way people watch television and how the entertainment industry operates.

. . .

In his new book “No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention,” Mr. Hastings likens being employed at the streaming giant to being part of a sports team: Getting cut is disappointing but carries no shame. “Unlike many companies, we practice: Adequate performance gets a generous severance package,” reads one of Netflix’s mottos.

. . .

WSJ: In the book you say, “It’s impossible to know where a business like ours will be in five years.” What kind of prognosticating do you do?

Mr. Hastings: We keep trying experiments. The business model will be pretty similar in five years. Can we figure out animation? Can we catch Disney in family animation?

WSJ: You’ve said you want Netflix to be able to pounce on unanticipated opportunities. What’s an example of one you didn’t see coming?

Mr. Hastings: Nonfiction programming is a pretty good one. We started as superpremium TV, and the expansion into nonfiction has been a huge success. The whole sharing of content around the world has been a huge success. Prior to that, people thought Americans won’t watch content that’s produced outside the U.S.

For the full interview, see:

Joe Flint, interviewer. “BOSS TALK; Netflix’s Hastings Isn’t Fan of Remote Work.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, September 8, 2020): B5.

(Note: ellipses added. “WSJ” and “MR. HASTINGS” were bolded in original.)

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Sep. 7, 2020, and has the title “BOSS TALK; Netflix’s Reed Hastings Deems Remote Work ‘a Pure Negative’.”)

Hastings, Reed, and Erin Meyer. No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention. New York: Penguin Press, 2020.

Deliberate Practice Is Key to Peak Performance

(p. D7) Anders Ericsson, a cognitive psychologist who demystified how expertise is acquired, suggesting that anyone can become a grand chess master, a concert violinist or an Olympic athlete with the proper training and the will, died on June 17 at his home in Tallahassee, Fla.

. . .

Professor Ericsson discovered that what separated the violinists’ skill levels was not natural-born talent but the hours of practice they had logged since childhood. The future teachers registered around 4,000 hours, the very good violinists 8,000 and the elite performers more than 10,000. The same study was conducted with pianists, with similar results.

Published in 1993 in Psychological Review, the paper later formed the basis for the so-called 10,000-hour rule described in Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling “Outliers” (2008), which holds that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in a skill or field.

. . .

“Many people think what Anders discovered is that quantity of practice makes you a champion,” said Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Grit” (2016), a book about passion and perseverance. “That’s disastrously incomplete. It’s quantity and quality. One of his insights that I hope will have a lasting legacy is people need to work hard, but also smart.”

Professor Ericsson focused on what he called “deliberate practice,” which entails immediate feedback, clear goals and focus on technique. According to his research, the lack of deliberate practice explained why so many people reach only basic proficiency at something, whether it be a sport, pastime or profession, without ever attaining elite status. A Sunday golfer may whack balls around the course for years, but without incorporating such methods that player will never become the next Tiger Woods.

. . .

He had his critics. One of them, Zachary Hambrick, a professor of psychology at Michigan State University, co-wrote a paper in 2014 that concluded that deliberate practice was not the sole reason for peak performance in chess players and musicians. Innate characteristics like talent and intelligence, Mr. Hambrick argued, play a far more significant role than Professor Ericsson allowed for.

“There’s a side of me that resonates with his hopeful message,” said Scott Barry Kaufman, a humanistic psychologist who studies creativity and hosts “The Psychology Podcast.” “However, there’s another side of me that has seen the research, in a wide range of aspects in the field, that suggests that we can have some pretty severe limits on what we can achieve in life.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Kaufman added, “I don’t think any of this invalidates his contributions. He showed that humans have the capacity to go beyond, from one generation to the next, what had been thought of the limits of human potential.”

For the full obituary see:

Steven Kurutz. “Anders Ericsson, 72, Psychologist Who Became ‘Expert on Experts,’ Dies.” The New York Times (Monday, July 6, 2020): D7.

(Note: ellipses added, italics in original.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated July 4, 2018, and has the title “Anders Ericsson, Psychologist and ‘Expert on Experts,’ Dies at 72.”)

Anders Ericsson explained his views on peak performance in his co-authored book:

Ericsson, Anders, and Robert Pool. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

Net-Zero Emissions Costs 16% of GDP Per Year; Climate Change at Most Costs 4% of GDP Per Year

(p. C1) For decades, climate activists have exhorted people in the wealthy West to change their personal behavior to cut carbon emissions. We have been told to drive less, to stop flying and, in general, to reduce consumption—all in the name of saving the planet from ever higher temperatures.

The Covid-19 pandemic has now achieved these goals, at least temporarily. With the enormous reduction in global economic activity, it has been as if people around the world suddenly decided to heed the activists and curtail their travel and consumption. Largely as a result of the crisis, the International Energy Agency recently concluded, “global CO2 emissions are expected to decline by 8% in 2020, or almost 2.6 [billion tons], to levels of 10 years ago.”

It’s an unprecedented and impressive drop in emissions—by far the biggest year-to-year reduction since World War II. Unfortunately, it will have almost no discernible impact on climate change. Glen Peters, the research director at the Center for International Climate Research in Norway, estimates that by 2100, this year’s enormous reduction will bring down global temperatures by less than one five-hundredth of a degree Fahrenheit.

. . .

(p. C4) Sadly, the vast majority of the actions that individuals can take in the service of reducing emissions—and certainly all of those that are achievable without entirely disrupting everyday life—make little practical difference. That’s true even if all of us do them.

. . .

Achieving global “net zero” emissions in three decades, as a growing number of activists and politicians advocate, would require the equivalent of a series of ongoing and ever-tightening lockdowns until 2050.

. . .

William Nordhaus of Yale, who in 2018 was awarded the first Nobel Prize for work in climate economics, has tabulated all of the estimates of climate-related economic damages from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and peer-reviewed studies to determine the total impact of different levels of global temperature increases. He found that, by 2050, the net negative impact of unmitigated climate change—that is, with current emissions trends unabated—is equivalent to losing about 1% of global GDP every year. By 2100 the loss will be about 4% of global GDP a year.

For comparison, what would it cost to reach net-zero by 2050, through cutting emissions and mandating new energy sources? So far, only one country, New Zealand, has commissioned an independent estimate. It turns out the optimistic cost is a whopping 16% of GDP each year by 2050. That projected figure exceeds what New Zealand spends today on social security, welfare, health, education, police, courts, defense, environment and every other part of government combined.

As this simple comparison suggests, suffering a 16% loss of GDP to reduce a problem estimated to cost 1% or even 4% of GDP is a bad way to help. That is especially true for the many parts of the world that are still in the early stages of economic development and desperately need growth to improve the lives of their impoverished populations.

For the full commentary, see:

Bjorn Lomborg. “Lockdowns Highlight The Climate Challenge.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 11, 2020): C1 & C4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the same date as the print version, and has the title “The Lockdown’s Lessons for Climate Activism.” Where there are slight differences in wording between the versions in the passages quoted, the online version appears above. The online version does not list an author. I cite James Barron, who is listed as the author in the print version.)

Lomborg’s commentary, quoted above, is related to his book:

Lomborg, Bjørn. False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. New York: Basic Books, 2020.

Simison Interviews Diamond on Mazzucato

Recently I was interviewed by Bob Simison for his profile of economist Mariana Mazzucato that appeared in the current issue of Finance & Development, an official publication of the International Monetary Fund. Mazzucato believes that innovation should be more centrally funded and directed by governments. Simison mentions my book Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism, and summarizes my claim that for innovation to flourish entrepreneurs need the freedom to pursue serendipity, hunches, and trial-and-error experiments.

(p. 50) To economist Arthur Diamond of the University of Nebraska,Omaha, Mazzucato’s thesis sounds too much like centrally planned industrial policy, which he argues won’t work because government is inherently unable to foster innovation. In his 2019 book, Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism, he argues that what drives innovation is entrepreneurs who are deeply immersed in their subject and able to benefit from serendipity, pursuing hunches, and plain old trial and error.

“Government decision-makers won’t be as immersed in the problems, won’t have the detailed information, and won’t be in a position to follow hunches toward breakthrough solutions,” Diamond says.

For Simison’s full profile of Mazzucato, see:

Simison, Bob. “Economics Agitator.” Finance & Development 57, no. 3 (Sept. 2020): 48-51.

(Note: in the original article, the title of my book was italicized.)

My book mentioned above is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Water Park Entrepreneur Did Not Use “Market Research or Long-Term Planning”

(p. 12) . . ., “someone had tied off the ankles and sleeves of an old janitorial jumpsuit, stuffed it with sand and fabricated a head out of a plastic grocery bag,” Mulvihill writes in his new book, “Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park.” “The makeshift dummy cleared the loop but emerged decapitated.”

. . .

What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?

I knew my father was a risk taker, but I never really understood the size of the risks, and the sheer tenacity and confidence he possessed to take them on. He was fearless.

I look back on the incredible number of crazy ride ideas and the inventors he’d back to develop those ideas, and it just blows you away. Some of them never worked out, but the ones that did were incredible. He didn’t rely on market research or long-term planning; he acted on gut instincts. Contrast it with the bigger parks and all of their exhaustive analysis.

. . .

Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?

My father. He was a creative genius and a driven entrepreneur. It’s one thing to have dreams and ideas, it’s another to execute them. He never took no for an answer — whether from an investor, regulator, inspector or government official.

He invented the water park and participation rides where you controlled the action, where you were in control of your own destiny. He was really the precursor to extreme sports and the X Games, only he did it at an amusement park. He wanted to show people something they’d never seen before. He never settled for mediocrity — that was boring. If you’re going to do something, go all out. Shoot for greatness. Do not check the box, blow it up. I’d like to think I’ve led my life embracing that premise.

For the full interview, see:

John Williams, interviewer. “5 THINGS ABOUT YOUR BOOK; Risky Business? That’s Really an Understatement.” The New York Times (Monday, July 13, 2020): C5.

(Note: ellipses, and bold font, added.)

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date July 12, 2018, and has the title “5 THINGS ABOUT YOUR BOOK; ‘Action Park’ Looks Back in Amusement and Terror.” The first couple of sentences and the bold questions are from the interviewer Williams. The unbold answers to the questions are from Andy Mulvihill. [Added later: I just figured out that in this blogging template, within the italics block quotations, bolded text does not appear to be bolded.])

The book discussed in the interview is:

Mulvihill, Andy, and Jake Rossen. Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park. New York: Penguin Books, 2020.

“Biggest Barrier” to Cell-Cultured Meat Is the “Difficult Regulatory Landscape” Created by Lobbyists

(p. 12) We should try to get beyond our disgust about “lab meat,” argues the journalist Chase Purdy, who is in the rare position of having actually tasted it. In a fast-paced global narrative, Purdy follows the various cell-cultured meat companies that are currently competing to get their product to market first. The front-runners are in Israel, the Netherlands and (no surprise) Silicon Valley.

. . .

Up until now, the biggest obstacle to getting cultured meat on the market has been the sheer expense — hence the “billion dollar burger” of Purdy’s hyperbolic title. When the first lab-grown burger was unveiled in 2013 by a panel including the Dutch food scientist Mark Post, it was estimated to have cost $330,000 for a single five-ounce patty: equivalent to $1.2 million per pound of beef. But that cost is falling, and fast. In 2019 an Israeli firm called Future Meat Technologies claimed that by 2022, it would be able to get cell-cultured meat on the market for as little as $10 a pound.

. . .

Purdy says that the biggest barrier to getting these products to market in the United States is “a difficult regulatory landscape” influenced by meat lobbyists with a strong vested interest in keeping cell-cultured meat off the shelves.

For the full review, see:

Bee Wilson. “Frankenburger.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, July [sic] 19, 2020): 12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated June [sic] 18, 2020, and has the title “Are You Ready to Eat Meat Grown in a Lab?”)

The book under review is:

Purdy, Chase. Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech’s Race for the Future of Food. New York: Portfolio, 2020.