Outliers: Audiobook

Outliers is the third offering from Malcolm Gladwell.  His book Blink was reviewed previously on this blog.  Outliers can be called a pop-economics book like Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist, because it looks at the hidden causes of situations.  It's not an economics book per-say, but it's core is the price/cost of achieving and succeeding and the hidden factors.  It really follows the trend of the other books.  I found this book to be more interesting and more helpful than Blink.  I think the basis for the book has more real support and application.

Malcolm Gladwell chose an interesting topic to start the book, one that made me very angry at my parents.  Apparently 40% of NHL players were born in in the months from January-March.  Thirty percent in the following three months and so on.  Being both a January baby and a Hockey fan, my parents should have known to move to Canada when I was two so I could have my chance.  I could have been the next Wayne Gretzky.

In all seriousness, Gladwell addresses topics that I would say fall into the common-sense category.  Not literally, more that what he says is the unspoken wisdom about certain things.  The book is about those who succeed and why.  Not just succeed, but the outliers who surpass everybody else.  Why are they so super-successful?  According to Gladwell it boils down to two main things, hard work and luck.  He's states that it takes about 10,000 hours to become truly expert and proficient at a task.  That works out to about 10 years.  The earlier you get the 10,000 hours in, the better.  You'll be ahead of the curve.

Gladwell tackles his topic by looking at various fields, starting with the Hockey example.  He moves on to the Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Bill Joys of the world and then to the corporate take-over lawyers in NY City.  There are other outliers interspersed as well, including The Beatles, Asians and math, and Korean Air.  I will talk mainly about the first three examples and let you read the book (or listen to the audiobook) for yourself.

Why is the NHL comprised of so many people from the first three months of the year?  The answer lies in the fact that the cut off to sign up for hockey is on January 1.  All the kids that missed the cut-off have to wait a whole year to sign up.  By that time they are bigger and more mature than some of the other kids signing up born later in the year.  Early in life this constitutes a significant difference.  When these JFM (Jan/Feb/Mar) kids play, they are seen as being better, because they are better, but not because they necessarily possess more natural skill.  They just happen to have mature enough to stand out a little bit more than their peers.  As a result, they have more opportunities at the All-Star teams and upper leagues.  They end up with better coaching and more difficult challenges that make them much better.

This phenomenon is not just with Hockey, it's found in Soccer (Football), and Baseball.  The largest populations of players come from the group born just after the cut-off date.  It even happens in school where the kids born just after the cut-off a greater advantage over the kids born just before it.  The reason for the success of these kids is due to chance, when they were born.

How do the Bill Gates and the other computer billionaires fit the bill.  Well, they were all born in the years of 1954 and 1955.  In fact Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Bill Joy were born withing 6 months of each other.  Why is this significant?  When the personal computer was coming into being, these folks were at the perfect age at which jump into the field.  The other thing they had in common was the opportunity to learn computers.  Bill Gates had the opportunity to program one of the few on-line computers in the world during his Jr. High and High School years.  By the time computers were making there way to the mainstream, Gates had years of experience beyond his peers.  His birth year was key, because it put him at the age when he could take advantage of the opportunity.  A couple years older and he'd probably have a steady job at IBM and not willing to take a chance.  A couple years younger and he'd have missed the window.  The same goes for Steve Jobs and Bill Joy, as well as a number of the other computer pioneers.

Another group are the Jewish lawyers who specialized in corporate take-overs.  The birth year was important, but their ethnicity was more important.  When they graduated law school, they went to the big NY firms, but were generally rejected, because they were Jewish.  As a result, many signed up with small firms and often took whatever business came in the door.  At the time, corporate take-overs were considered beneath the big law firms, thus these Jewish lawyers ended up with much of the business.  Over the years, this kind of law became more important and the Jewish lawyers reaped the rewards.  The other law firms were far behind the curve and had trouble catching up.  The Jewish lawyers had years, 10-20 years of experience and expertise in this field of law.

From this book I take home the message that hard work is essential to success, but so is luck and opportunity.  None of the people mentioned would be where they are without the hard work.  The opportunities and luck were just as important.  As Gladwell states, there is no such thing as a self-made man.  It's a myth.  We are a composition of out genetics, family history, and opportunities.  I think that in general Gladwell is right.  I do think there some areas that could be improved on the book.

I think that Gladwell does well in emphasizing the hard work and luck that plays a role in the lives of the successful.  Even Bill Gates has stated that he could not be where he is without the opportunities he's been given in life.  Gladwell I think puts too much emphasis on these two areas.  Other factors are also involved that he doesn't address.  He doesn't touch on genetics enough.  Some of us are just wired to be successful at certain kinds of tasks, whereas others may not be wired to be as successful.  That's as important as any other factor.  We are nor born blank slates.

He also misses the fact that interest plays an important role.  Why do the kids play hockey and stay with it? Why did Bill Gates spend so much time programming?  Why did these Jewish folks go to law school in the first place?  I think that drive and ambition are central for success.  The people who are successful would likely be successful no matter what, at least in most cases.  It's the luck and the interest factors that I think shot them into the stratosphere.  If not these folks, we'd be talking about somebody else.

The book is about why certain folks are outliers, so maybe that's why he didn't touch on the two areas I mentioned.  I still think they should have been discussed more.  Overall I thought this was a very interesting book and well worth the time.

Sarah: A "Definitive" Biography

I remember seeing the "Biography" of Sarah Palin at Costco.  Even with the Costco bargain pricing, it was way to steep for my blood.  The regular price is $15.95, in paperback.  That's quite a price for a book that's a mere 146 pages, I think removing the photos and making the text more standard would have reduced the book to about 100.  Maybe the publishing costs are high, like putting lipstick on a dog (I'm just glad the Sunnyvale library forked out the dough for it).  I never had high expectations for the book.  It's not hard hitting in anyway, it's almost a propaganda piece.  I didn't realize Sarah Palin was the inspiration for Wonder-Woman.  Now I think that the country is crazy for not voting in this person without a single personal flaw.

On to the actual book.  As I stated above, my expectations were not high for the book.  The author Kaylene Johnson seemed to have one job, make Sarah Palin look good.  One great thing about the book is that Johnson provides a log of all the interviews and emails she used in writing the book.  I do appreciate that transparency.  I think it proves the book was not meant to compete with the likes of Team of Rivals.  It's right between Tom Cruise extolling the virtues of LRH (L. Ron Hubbard for the uninitiated) and Oprah gushing over Barack Obama.  From reading this book, I think an Obama-Palin ticket would have been unstoppable and they could be the rulers of the Multi-verse.

Seriously, onto the actual book.  The book is really a rough overview of the life of Sarah Palin finding virtue in just about everything she ever did, or least that was recorded in the book.  We start with the Heath's (Palin's family) moving to Wasilla.  We learn of Sarah's tenacity growing up and her driver to get more playing time while playing basketball, which culminated in winning the state championship her senior year.  It was this tenacity and drive that finally led Sarah into politics and she ran for mayor of Wasilla, against some odds.  She followed that up with a run for the Lieutenant Governer, which she lost.  She took the loss in stride and the next election took on the race for the Governorship.  This time she won, despite running a barebones campaign against the well established good 'ole boys network.  According to the book, it was Sarah honesty and willingness to challenge the establishment.  She came into office and followed up on her promises and cut the budget.  She even went as far as selling the state jet on Ebay.  A lot of the qualities she seemed to show as governor were actually quite impressive.  I was a little surprised the book did not dwell on her faith a whole lot, especially considering the publisher is a Christian publisher.

Despite my cynical remarks, I have more appreciation for Sarah Palin having read the book.  I take the book at its face, meaning I didn't expect it to be too in depth.  It was certainly a book rushed to capitalize on the moment.  Though the author did not touch on the weaknesses of Palin, I still thought the book made an honest effort to touch on meaningful aspects of Palin's character.  Though a lot of Liberals don't like her, mainly due to he conservatism and religious convictions, she seems to have a strong side to her that I think a lot of Liberals would appreciate.  In spite of the $150,000 wardrobe for the Presidential campaign, she does seem to be a bit of a minimalist.  She doesn't necessarily fit the Republican political stereotype and I think she might even be more of an actual maverick than John McCain.

Since the campaign, Palin has received a great deal of criticism from the McCain insiders.  Knowing what is real and what is BS is not an easy chore.  I don't believe the statements about Palin's apparent confusion regarding Africa.  That sounds like a cheap shot.  I don't doubt that she rubbed some folks the wrong way.  I don't think she was the right choice for McCain.  I think all in all she has the same level of experience as Obama.  She lacked the polish and that's what did her in.  I think she has the potential to at least make some waves next time.  I think being governor for a few more years will be more helpful too.  A short stint as a mayor and one year as a governor doesn't provide enough to measure her executive skills.  Obama's experience lacks as well, but I already addressed some of those issues previously.

In short the book wasn't that great, but it's not horrible.  It's the kind of book you want to pick up if you're really bored and weird, like me.  I would recommend this over other books like The Secret.  It might actually be a good book to have a young girl read to encourage her to take on opportunities that are normally perceived as male only.

From Catchphrase to Cliche

Barack Obama's election may be one of the most exciting in history.  Much has been made, because of the historic nature of the event.  The most interesting thing over the last several weeks has been the constant references to Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals.  The book is definitely worth reading.  Pundits like to draw the Lincoln/Obama comparisons; national legislators from Illinois, lawyers, overcame difficult family circumstances, and the most notable: Lincoln brought down slavery and Obama is a result of the action.

A new comparison emerged in the weeks after the election finished: The Team of Rivals.  This idea was alluded to somewhat during the campaign, but really too hold in the 2-3 weeks afterward.  So far, it may be a fair assessment, but Obama needs to pull in more rivals.  Bring on Hillary certainly qualifies, Biden qualifies, but his campaign was so short it almost seems like a stretch.  I wonder though, does the Team of Rivals even matter?

I have no personal problem with Obama*, again it's the media pushing it's spin on things.  I've heard the phrase "Team of Rivals" so much lately, it's gone from catch-phrase to cliche.  Having a team of rivals doesn't mean anything really.  It doesn't equal success.  In oder to be successful and avoid groupthink, having people with opposing view points is essential.  That teases out the intricacies of difficult situations and decisions.  It's not guarantee for success, but it does increase the probability.

A team of rivals can be as much of a detriment as a help.  If the team members cannot get along well enough to come to a reasonable decision, then all is lost.  That's one of the problems when we look at the Democrats vs. the Republicans.  Both parties are corrupt morally and neither has the interests in their respective constituents any more than using them to make it through the current election cycle.  They are a team of rivals and they do little to truly improve the nation.  I hear a lot of lip-service, but not a lot of real action.  My point is that a team of rivals is not an automatic recipe for success, though it might improve the chances.  Even though Lincoln had a team of rivals, it was not the reason for the success.  He succeeded because he saw past rivalry in order to pick the best people for the job.  The fact that they were at one time rivals is more an adjective, then a noun in this case.

*That's barring any emerging issues with the Blagojevich fiasco going on a the moment.  So far Obama appears to be innocent of any wrong doing.  I doubt he's got a clean background coming from the Chicago machine zone.  Maybe his goals are lofty enough that he was able to succeed without playing ball too much.  So far it doesn't look like he was willing to play ball with Blagojevich.  I hope that's the case.  That may not save Obama if Blagojevich decides to try and bring Obama down with him.  

The Corporation

I finally had the chance to watch the film The Corporation.  The film centers on the evil committed by corporations as a way to show the failings of capitalism.  The film also includes and all-star cast with the likes of Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and even Milton Friedman.  As a whole the film does make its arguments in a convincing way, but so did Loose Change (Counter-point).  It certainly is a film worth watching, but its bias skews much of the valuable information.  Below is some background to the film, my major criticisms of the film and some recommendations of how it could be more worthwhile.

An overview of the film is also available on wikipedia and the web-page is linked above.  The film was directed by film-makers Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott and written by Joel Bakan (who also authored the book of the same name released about the same time).  It was release in 2003 and is one of the most seen canadian documentaries.  Only Bakan appears to have some relevant education and experience, he being a lawyer. Both Achbar and Abbott are film-makers by trade, so the business credentials may be lacking somewhat.  I don't think that disqualifies from making a film about business, but it is worth keeping in mind in understanding where they may be coming from.

The major players are Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, and Michael Moore.  Naomi Klein is of course famous for last year's book The Shock Doctrine, in which she took a little known Milton Friedman phrase and morphed it into a doctrine she believes was used to justify the Iraq war (her book has been challenged by Johan Norberg of the Cato Institute).  Noam Chomsky is of course professor of Linguistics from MIT.  He's notable for his anarchist views and outspoken criticism of US foreign policy and capitalism (it was a Chomsky book that Hugo Chavez said was suggested reading for all people during a UN appearance).  Chomsky is also the subject of another film by Achbar, Manufacturing Consent.  Most people should be familiar with Michael Moore.  He may be the most famous documentary film-maker in history and he has a fairly strong following.  Milton Friedman is also part of the film, though his time is somewhat short, his appearance is significant.  Milton Friedman is the most important economist of the last 50 years with a very liberal position when it comes to businesses and how they operate.  Friedman is the most significant counter-weight in the film.  There are many other participants who contribute to the film, but these four were the most significant in my mind.

The movie analyzes corporations as "persons" and repeats the concept that a corporation is a legal person.  This point is driven home like no other point in the film.  This becomes most significant when the corporation is diagnosed psychologically.  The tactic is treating the corporation as a person and then assigning it human traits, which conveniently fit the bill for a psychopath.  The trait is cited and then a corporation is shown to have committed an act that fits the trait.  I find this tactic very dishonest, because it's easy to steer people's minds down a track when you set such narrow criteria and cherry-pick examples.  The film-makers also fail here, because each trait is "fulfilled" by a different corporation.  If they wanted to show that corporations in general were psychopathic, they should have picked many corporations and shown how they all compared against the psychopathic traits.  Because the purpose of the film is to maintain the effects of drama and not serve as a scientific analysis, it's not surprising that effort was avoided.  This is really just a straw-man argument and resembles some of the tactics used in the 9/11 conspiracy film Loose Change, which uses similar manipulative language and news reports to build a story that 9/11 was an inside job.

Like Loose Change, The Corporation needs some serious fact checking.  I have not had the time to look into every claim made by the film.  In fact, I don't necessarily think that they are lying or making things up.  I don't doubt that much of what they show happened.  The problem comes in the telling of the story and the way facts can be turned around a bit or motives assigned that may or may not exist.  Two that stick out came from Michael Moore's mouth.  I already have enough trouble taking what he says seriously.  He is not  reliable source for much of anything.  I believe he poorly understands information and does not sufficiently understand the counters to his arguments.  In the film he talks about Coke selling Fanta in Nazi Germany as a way to make money on both sides.  A simple search on snopes brings up strong counters to what Moore stated.  While he wasn't entirely wrong, he got enough wrong to create a great deal of distortion.  He also referenced the Columbine Massacre and the fact that Lockheed Martin is the largest employer in Littleton.  His point being that the parents fail to make the connection between what they do for a living, building WMDs, and the Massacre.  The connection is a stretch and not very meaningful.  I also take issue with the fact that he implies that all Lockheed Martin makes is WMDs.  I am a Lockheed Martin employee (just to expose my bias) and I don't work on WMDs; I work on satellites.  A great deal of the work at Lockheed Martin has little to do with war or WMDs.

Since the psychopathy of corporations are the center of the film, you would expect that the film-makers would have had a solution.  Not really.  It's mostly that corporations are bad and it's in their DNA.  The very existence of the corporation is the problem.  What's the solution, Government?  The same group who had trouble handling Hurricane Kartrina?  I'm not anti-government by any means, but I find that to be a lazy solution to any problem.  It doesn't really address the actual problems caused by corporations.  It also negates all the evil that has been done by governments as well.  It takes a very noble government to control itself when it has the kind of power it seems some people want to give it.  Corporations may be legal persons, but they have no emotions.  Milton Friedman is quoted with his famous line that corporations' only obligation is to get a return to the shareholders.  Because this is be true, it's easier to hold corporations accountable than it is the government when something goes wrong.  The only wrench is when government and corporations get too friendly.

While much of the film bothered me intellectually, there were some things I found beneficial.  The inclusion of Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, former chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, I thought was a nice touch to the film.  The film-makers included footage of a protest outside of Moody-Stuart's home.  The protesters hung a sign on the house accusing him of being a murderer of the environment, because he was the head of an oil company.  In the footage, Moody-Stuart actually came out and reacted well to the protest and ended up having tea with the protesters and a rather nice discussion.  This story added a human element and showed that the film-makers understood the fact that the heads of corporations are people too.  I think this fit in the film without affecting their premise, because they are looking at corporations as something separate from humanity.

The Corporation could be a better film.  I think it made some good point in showing what some corporations have done and the negative effects that resulted.  Certainly, there are many instances where corporations have done horrible things, whether intentional or not.  I think it's important to know about those kinds of events so they don't continue and the damage can be minimized.  To really bring that home, the film-makers should have emphasized the good that corporations do as well.  Rather than show the corporation as a psychopath, the misdeeds have been the center of the film with the people who committed the misdeeds held accountable.  The film could have been an analysis of the market system and how bad things may occur, then suggest ways to fix the any problems.  Unfortunately the film falls short and amounts to a propaganda film against the capitalist system.  I still recommend the film, but more to know what's being said than for any educational value.  Part one can be found here; you can follow the trail to get the rest of the film.  Part one of a critique can be found here.