Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell

Copy - Kindle
Rating - 3/5

Around the globe, Malcom Gladwell is known as a foremost thought leader. The gift that the author has, apart from distinct ideas, is his flair for writing. This is the second book I read in recent weeks that this author wrote & you couldn’t help notice but a similar strategy that he follows- Taking a central idea & wrapping it around in layers of anecdotes that reinforces the central idea.  Here the author uses his now famous “The 10,000hrs rule”. The author puts forth his views that the outliers of this world – the Bill Gates & the Steve Jobs, the ones who made to the top of the Canadian ice hockey team & Europe’s football team et el had undergone more than 10,000hrs of training & educating themselves  in a particular skill.

                                                             

Apart from hard work, the author puts a lot of emphasis on the culture & environment that the test cases grew up in during those 10,000hrs. There is an interesting episode where he details the life of Chris Langan  reported to having an IQ of 190+. Chris has every bit of intelligence as Albert Einstein had but Chris did it not make it to the newspapers for winning the Noble Prize – he now takes care of a ranch in Missouri. The culture & the environment were not conducive for Chris to make the right decisions during his early life.  The passage where this is entailed is called Opportunity.
A similar set of ideas are put forth in the other half of the book called legacy. Here the author takes a view, what in economics is called a macroeconomic view, to reinforce the effect of culture & environment. His dissection of why Asians are good in Maths & why so many plans crashed in Korea in late 1990s makes a very interesting read.

Though the books binds you with the idea that the books brings forth, I couldn’t help notice at some places that the views were flimsy. There is no space of counter argument or an approach mentioned that delivers a different result. In short I felt it was an abridged version of Daneil Kahnmen’s book “ Too fast & too slow” ; it lacks the finer details that Kahnmen’s book provides.

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

Copy: Paperbound
Rating - 5

Bink is one of those rare books that will make you stop & connect with what the author just said to your personal incidents.  Malcolm Gladwell, one of the foremost thought leaders of our times, wings in a simple concept that we use every day – thin slicing. How do you react in the first two seconds when confronted with a situation or have to make a snap judgement? Early in the book the author introduces us to the part of the brain that leaps into conclusions called adaptive conclusion. The years of experiences in leading a life or pursuing a career helps us in hard-wiring certain aspects which leads to adaptive conclusion.

The author takes us through different cases where these aspects come into play – from a tennis coach who was very accurate in calling the double fault even before the ball hit the racket, to the fire-fighter who instantly knew something was wrong in one of incidents. The author weaves in a series of test cases where snap judgement works  & where it did not. The test cases exhibited in the book ranged from a car salesman in Florida to a head doctor in Chicago. The writing is such the reader will make several pit-stops to think & wonder about those blink situations.

The gold nuggets of the book are buried in the last chapters of the book. It will be unwise to tell it. What will be wise to tell is that reading the book was an experience.

Pearls by the river by Sudipta Mitra

Copy - Paperback 

Rating- 3/5

It seems extraordinary that a character as colourful as Wajd Ali Shah would vanish completely from Bengali consciousness. That is the first sentence in the forward passage of the book – Pearls by the River essentially signifying the forgotten effect of Wajid Ali Shah of Awadh had on Bengali cultural & aesthetic revolution. Whether the author does well to lead us down the road of remembering the deposed King of Awadh as the primary architect of Bengali arts & culture is another thing. The book has many pluses which makes it an engaging read – fast paced, easy & fictionalized way of writing, and chronical in its order. 

However, the book takes a long time to warm up to the actual topic of the King building a mini-Lucknow on the banks of Hoogly. The book quickly gathers pace in the second half when the King reaches Calcutta, and brings his cultural tastes of thumri, kathaks & symphony to the foreground. The author very well exhibits the architectural delights of Metiyaburj. It leads to more of an encapsulated effect of the Shah on the Bengali culture. The brief paragraph on gastronomical benefit & passages on paan that the Shah introduced had a pleasant underlining. There are a few passages on “The Oudh Commission” which, though engaging, leads to a meandering effect to the storyline. The King’s private relationships– his wives & concubines is presented in bits & pieces throughout the book.

 The book overall presents a composite picture of Wajid Ali Shah, but there a few dark spots that makes you underwhelmed.

Losing the Signal -The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish & Sean Silcoff

Rating - 3/5
Copy- Borrowed
Genre - Corporate History

Tracking the market cap of Reseach in Motion, now BlackBerry Ltd. gives you a sense of wonder. The creation & erosion of wealth- from $70B to $3B, in such a short span is remarkable. One can draw parallel to a video that goes viral & goes off your notice when a new video surfaces. Popular opinion is that the advent of iPhone & Android- Samsung led to the demise of the enterprise - the book does well to shatter that opinion.

The book is neatly divided into two sections - one depicts the rise of RIM & the other fall. The author maintains a fast pace taking the readers through the ups & downs, the struggles & victories, the similarities & dissimilarities of the co-founders that serve as the spine of the book.  The author gives a lot of word-time to the villains who brought the company down - a legal tangle with an entity that pushed the focus away of the co-founders from the emerging players, the mobile networks who didn't allow RIM to put up a full browser, backdating options to the executives  - to name a few. Surprisingly the author does not dig much into the lack of corporate governance & the roles of the directors which in my view, could have salvaged the company. The reader gets a fascination account of the challenges in the  launch of the BB10 & the Playbook.  There were bright spots which the author could have covered more on-  BBM & the handset Storm. The book begins & ends in an obituary-like tone which gives an uni-dimensional view of the whole saga. The lack of quotes from the directors & just a few snippets from the co-founders  also did not go down well.

Singularly Blackberry as a company has transformed the way we communicate. Instant messaging got into vogue because of this company. The book does not give enough credit to this cause. The book though lives up the title - it encaptures everything we know about the company, but only a few feet beneath the surface. 

Breakout Nations- Ruchir Sharma

Rating- 3.5/5
Copy- Hardbound
Genre- Economics

Many marketing pundits say that the tagline captures imagination more than the title. Ruchir Sharma’s book – Breakout Nations “In Search of the Next Economic Miracle” does justice to the title. Sharma, a leading economist at Morgan Stanly, brings his wealth of experience in economics in a lucid prose which is extremely engaging for someone who is doing a cursory reading. The unfortunate part that comes across is the lack of depth in the book. Here and there, one gets the feel that the book is made from the footnotes of research papers or made from a string of interviews to a television channel.  By mid-way, you have kind of figured out what a nation must have to be an economic juggernaut

• low inflation
• diversified economy
• export oriented or a big domestic market
• not highly corrupted
• low %share of debt (public+private) to GDP

Added Bonus factors are
• less share of GSE (govt sponsored enterprises) in key market areas
• reform-oriented government
• tier-II level for per capita income (sub-$10,000)
• younger demography

Taking a cue from the above indices, the author paints the economic picture of a county. The author lists few countries to watch out for – South Korea, Poland, Czech Republic & Turkey which he considers to be breakout nations that can be subsets of engine growth to the world economy. He makes passionate cases on why he considers these economies to fare well. The book was written in 2012 when China was leading the economic growth of the world. Sharma questions the high debt the country was incurring & predicted correctly that a bubble will burst soon. His notes on the Russian economy makes a decent read, his warnings to the commodity-oriented economy are well-founded. Russia & Brazil are currently bearing the brunt of falling commodity prices.
Sharma does bring a personal touch to each of the cases he deciphers. The book manages to package an economy but does fall short of expectations to someone who is looking for more than just a cursory read.