Category: Books

Ed Telling’s Nimble, Intuitive Labor Decisions at Sears

(p. 49) Telling rarely gave a direct order, so the Searsmen near him knew they had to listen hard and learn to read his arcane signals. You had to understand his gnomic comments and apparent throwaway lines, for you would only hear what Telling thought about something twice. The requirement made people scared, because the third time he spoke you were gone. “No need to beat a horse if he’s not able to pull,” he’d say. “Let’s get another horse.”
He had a habit he said he couldn’t do anything about of judging the utility and character of a man the first time he looked into his eyes. Quick-draw decisions like this were a part of the general managerial ethos at Sears. The practice might have descended from the store master’s knack for spotting at fifteen paces a shopper in the mood to spend freely.

Source:
Katz, Donald R. The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears. New York: Viking Adult, 1987.

Justice Kagan Cites Dr. Seuss to Show Fish Are Tangible

(p. A16) In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the real issue in the case, Yates v. United States, No. 13-7451, was that the law is too harsh. It is, she wrote, “too broad and undifferentiated, with too-high maximum penalties, which give prosecutors too much leverage and sentencers too much discretion.”
She added, “And I’d go further: In those ways,” the law “is unfortunately not an outlier, but an emblem of a deeper pathology in the federal criminal code.”
Still, she said, “this court does not get to rewrite the law.” She said it was “broad but clear.”
“A fish is, of course, a discrete thing that possesses physical form,” Justice Kagan wrote, citing as authority the Dr. Seuss classic “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.”
It does not matter, she said, that what Mr. Yates destroyed was not a document.
“A person who hides a murder victim’s body is no less culpable than one who burns the victim’s diary,” she wrote. “A fisherman, like John Yates, who dumps undersized fish to avoid a fine is no less blameworthy than one who shreds his vessel’s catch log for the same reason.”
Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas joined Justice Kagan’s dissenting opinion.

For the full story, see:
ADAM LIPTAK. “In Overturning Conviction, Supreme Court Says Fish Are Not Always Tangible.” The New York Times (Thurs., FEB. 26, 2015): A16.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date FEB. 25, 2015.)

The book discussed above is:
Seuss, Dr. One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. New York: Random House, 1960.

Ed Telling Centralized as He Talked of Decentralization

(p. 491) Like de Gaulle, Telling talked of decentralization as he centralized all things beneath him. He pulled the authority of individual stores into the purview of the retail groups, then the power of the groups into the territory, and then the awesome power of the territories up into the Tower–with an assist to Ed Brennan at the end. The killing off of layers of management in many large companies causes the authority to fall down as if by gravity, but Telling pulled it back up manually. Every retirement caused former authority to come up to him.

Source:
Katz, Donald R. The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears. New York: Viking Adult, 1987.

Books that Paved Way to Darwinian Evolution

(p. C6) “Visions of Science” is, as Mr. Secord acknowledges, “a book about books.” We learn more about typeface size, bindery material, print runs and sales figures of the books than about the authors. We would not glean from this account, for example, how intertwined their lives were: They attended the same parties, discussed science together and reviewed one another’s works. Taken together, the books Mr. Secord features tell a fascinating story, and they paved the way to another that is not featured in Mr. Secord’s account but hovers over the others like Davy’s spirit guide.
In “Origin of Species” (1859), Charles Darwin took the central ideas in these books–that there is a connection between the sciences, that the Earth is much older than previously thought, that God created the world to work by uniform natural law, and that He built lawful change into his original creation–and used them to frame his theory of evolution by natural selection in terms his readers could accept. The success of Darwin–and the books that influenced him–is evidenced by the fact that within two decades of its publication most British scientists and much of the public accepted that species evolved.

For the full review, see:
LAURA J. SNYDER. “Reading from the Book of Life; Darwin’s radical ideas were accepted surprisingly quickly by an English public already steeped in science.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., April 11, 2015): C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 10, 2015, and has the title “Science Books That Made Modernity; Darwin’s radical ideas were accepted surprisingly quickly by an English public already steeped in science.”)

The book under review is:
Secord, James A. Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Sears CEO Ed Telling Opposed the “Sloppiness” of Across-the-Board Layoffs

(p. 46) It was never that layoffs were anathema to Telling as such; he just resented the sloppiness of a 10-percent across-the-board layoff when some areas of the company should have been cut by 40 percent and some built up by half.

Source:
Katz, Donald R. The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears. New York: Viking Adult, 1987.

Henry Paulson Fears Chinese Economy “Will Face a Reckoning”

(p. B1) About 340 pages into Henry M. Paulson’s new book on China, a sentence comes almost out of nowhere that stops readers in their tracks.
“Frankly, it’s not a question of if, but when, China’s financial system,” he writes, “will face a reckoning and have to contend with a wave of credit losses and debt restructurings.”
. . .
(p. B2) Like the United States crisis in 2008, Mr. Paulson worries that in China “the trigger would be a collapse in the real estate market,” and he declared in an interview that China is experiencing a real estate bubble. He noted that debt as a percentage of gross domestic product in China rose to 204 percent in June 2014 from 130 percent in 2008.
“Slowing economic growth and rapidly rising debt levels are rarely a happy combination, and China’s borrowing spree seems certain to lead to trouble,” he wrote.
Mr. Paulson’s analysis in his book, “Dealing With China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower,” is all the more remarkable because he has long been a bull on China and has deep friendships with its senior leaders, who could frown upon his straightforward comments.

For the full commentary, see:
Andrew Ross Sorkin. “DEALBOOK; A Veteran of the Crisis Tells China to Be Wary.” The New York Times (Tues., APRIL 21, 2015): B1-B2.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date APRIL 20, 2015, and has the title “DEALBOOK; A Veteran of the Financial Crisis Tells China to Be Wary.”)

The book discussed above is:
Paulson, Henry M. Dealing with China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower. New York: Twelve, 2015.

Sears CEO Ed Telling Had an Introverted Fury

Writing of Ed Telling, the eventual entrepreneurial CEO of Sears:

(p. 488) Slowly, the introverted Field soldier from Danville moved up through the organization. He eventually managed the same Midwestern zone he was once made to ride. He found himself in the decadent city-state called the New York group, and it was there, in the strangely methodical fury with which he fell upon the corruption of the group and the profligacy of powerful store jockeys, that certain individuals around him began to feel inspired by his quiet power, as if he’d touched some inverted desire in each of them to do justice at his beckoning and to even numerous scores. He was possessed of a determination to promulgate change such as none of them had ever seen before, and certain hard-bitten bitten veterans like Bill Bass found themselves strangely moved.

Source:
Katz, Donald R. The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears. New York: Viking Adult, 1987.

Technicolor Entrepreneur Kalmus Was Visionary, Stubborn and “in It for the Long Haul”

(p. C15) Judy Garland opening a door from black-and-white Kansas into Technicolor Oz is one of the most enchanting effects in all of movies. But as film historians James Layton and David Pierce relate in “The Dawn of Technicolor: 1915-1935,” the technology that made “The Wizard of Oz” possible came from people who were looking to start a business, not to make art.
The creators of Technicolor–engineer W. Burton Wescott and MIT graduates Daniel Comstock and Herbert T. Kalmus–were visionary, though stubborn is just as accurate.
. . .
In 1934 Fortune magazine wrote, “Businessmen regard Dr. Kalmus as a scientist, and scientists regard him as a businessman.” Comstock and Westcott eventually left the company in the mid-1920s, but Kalmus was in it for the long haul. . . .
Once perfected, Technicolor had a virtual monopoly on color Hollywood productions, and it did indeed make Kalmus and his investors rich. But it took steel nerves to put money into the unprofitable, ever-tinkering Technicolor of the early days.

For the full review, see:
FARRAN SMITH NEHME. “The Very Thought of Hue; Early color films gave viewers headaches. It took decades to develop a process that didn’t simply look odd.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., April 11, 2015): C15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 10, 2015.)

The book under review is:
Layton, James, and David Pierce. The Dawn of Technicolor: 1915-1935. Rochester, NY: George Eastman House, 2015.

The Process Innovations of Ed Telling at Sears

There are a fair number of case studies and biographies of important new product innovations. Rarer are the case studies of process innovations. Two great exceptions are Marc Levinson’s The Box and The Great A&P. I have recently read another exception, this one by Donald Katz, about how Ed Telling brought process innovations to Sears from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s.
In the next few weeks, I will be quoting several of the more useful, or thought-provoking passages.

The book discussed, is:
Katz, Donald R. The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears. New York: Viking Adult, 1987.

Some Immigrate to West for “Peace and Dignity”

(p. A13) There are some words that, through a sort of onomatopoeia, seem fated to be the worst epithets. In Russian, zhid is one of those. Ask any Soviet Jew who grew up in that now extinct empire what it felt like to be on the receiving end of the slur, whose English approximation is “kike,” and they will mention the sound: a sinister hiss ending with a snap of the tongue against the back of the teeth.
For Lev Golinkin, the author of a new memoir about his family’s immigration from Soviet Ukraine to the West, that sibilant sound dominates most of his memories of life before 1989.
. . .
All their fears–of a government that sought to both erase their Jewish identity and discriminate against them for it, as well as of the unknown ahead–reached their apogee at their moment of immigration: Mr. Golinkin’s father, in a desperate attempt to save his life’s work, had hidden microfilm of all his patents in his underwear. When he saw how vigorously the border police were searching people, he took the rolls of microfilm to the bathroom and threw them out the window, into a fire blazing inside a steel drum just outside the border post. Once in the West, this man of incredible will achieved the rare feat of rebuilding his career from scratch.
Things didn’t work out as well for Mr. Golinkin’s mother: She found work only as a security guard.
At one point, a grown Mr. Golinkin confronts her about failing to foresee how difficult re-establishing herself would be, even calling her dreams of America “naïve and ridiculous.” She answers that she didn’t want to be afraid of her government anymore. She didn’t want to tell her son why “he should prepare for a long and painful life.” The sacrifice she made, he realizes, was for “peace and dignity, not a paycheck”–and, of course, for him.

For the full review, see:
GAL BECKERMAN. “BOOKSHELF; The Sinister Hiss; The author’s father, a successful engineer, hid microfilm of his patents in his underwear in a desperate attempt to save his life’s work.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Dec. 19, 2014): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added; italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 18, 2014, and has the title “Book Review: ‘The Marshmallow Test’ by Walter Mischel; To resist the tempting treat, kids looked away, squirmed, sang or simply pretended to take a bite.”)

The book under review is:
Golinkin, Lev. A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka: A Memoir. New York: Doubleday, 2014.

Aaron Burr Gave Jeremy Bentham a Copy of The Federalist Papers

(p. 720) For four years, the disgraced Burr traveled in Europe, resorting occasionally to the pseudonym H. E. Edwards to keep creditors at bay. Sometimes he lived in opulence with fancy friends and at other times languished in drab single rooms. This aging roué sampled opium and seduced willing noblewomen and chambermaids with a fine impartiality. All the while, he cultivated self-pity. “I find that among the great number of Americans here and there all are hostile to A.B.– All– What a lot of rascals they must be to make war on one whom they do not know, on one who never did harm or wished harm to a human being,” he recorded in his diary. He befriended the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham and spoke to him with remarkable candor. “He really meant to make himself emperor of Mexico,” Bentham recalled. “He told me I should be the legislator and he would send a ship of war for me. He gave me an account of his duel with Hamilton. He was sure of being able to kill him, so I thought it little better than murder.” Always capable of irreverent surprises, Burr gave Bentham a copy of The Federalist. The shade of Alexander Hamilton rose up to haunt Burr at unexpected moments. In Paris, he called upon Talleyrand, who instructed his secretary to deliver this message to the uninvited caller: “I shall be glad to see Colonel Burr, but please tell him that a portrait of Alexander Hamilton always hangs in my study where all may see it.” Burr got the message and left.

Source:
Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.
(Note: italics in original.)