Category: Reading

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Education Globalization Reading

Books to read

My latest shipment from Amazon arrived today…

nextup

I’m looking forward to Joseph Stiglitz’s new really new Making Globalization Work. His first book on the subject Globalization and Its Discontents…seemed maybe a bit hostile?

Also received feedback from MIAD grad Matt Spannem that Glenn Reynolds’ An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths would be right up my alley…sorry for the delay Matt, but I finally have it. Looking forward to the journey.

Categories
Education Globalization Reading

Latest read: The Looming Tower

Lawrence Wright has written an amazing book that helps us understand al-Qaeda. His book The Looming Tower: al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11 is very well written and as a result very upsetting.  This deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize.
The Looming TowerWould you be surprised to learn foundations of al-Qaeda began from an Egyptian enrolled in grad school at the University of Northern Colorado in 1949? His name was Sayyid Qutb. He began the modern Islamist movement that today is al-Qaeda.

Wright documents the wealth of the bin Laden’s family which provided Osama bin Laden the financial ability to forward his own view of the world through terrorism. Osama bin Laden promoted great myths of Islam defeating massive Soviet troops in Afghanistan to sell his vision…including the dreams of airplanes hitting buildings and his relationship with Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The Looming Tower uncovers frustrating examples of how the US government failed to stop the attacks on 9/11 even when small teams within our intelligence agencies had evidence of the coming attacks. But they were fighting each other. The CIA purposefully withheld evidence from the FBI. This shows how broken our intelligence systems were organized and how they failed America.

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Education Reading

Latest read: Koba the dread

Did you think I forgot all my interest in Russian and Soviet studies? Martin Amis’ 2002 work Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million is another post-USSR look at Stalin’s brutal rule in Russia. “It loves blood, the Russian earth.”

Koba the dread

I received a wonderful birthday gift from my brother Chris. Three books about Stalin, war with Germany and ultimately about sadness.

It is very difficult (again) to acknowledge the use of famine as a method of control. Both executed by Lenin and Stalin was so inhuman, yet effective for Soviet control of the non-Russian regions of the USSR. Was it not horrific enough that Stalin bled Ukraine, the fertile lands that kept his Bolsheviks temporarily alive?

Again, like Solzhenitsyn‘s The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956, Amis reveals the true horror of Stalin’s rule. How many people were shot on Stalin’s orders?

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Education Globalization Reading Technology

Latest read: Naked Conversations

With a lot of anticipation I read Robert Scoble’s Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers.

naked conversations

For some time I had been skimming his blog Scoblizer since he became Microsoft’s first official blogger and rose to instant superstar.

As if that ‘permission’ by Microsoft made blogging okay for Corporate America. While his feed is loaded in my NetNewsWire this book is really really entry level…or if you have not read any book about blogging.

While many on Amazon rave about it (maybe my expectations are too high) it really is a rehash of plain – common – sense approaches to having honest communication or “chats” via a blog.

Maybe for the mid-size corporation looking to communicate to their customers…but don’t good companies talk to their customers already?

Categories
Education Globalization Reading

Latest read: The Long Tail

I read about Chris Anderson’s Long Tail in Wired Magazine back in the day (2004 – wow how time really flies) and immediately recognized the Amazon story. Chris turned that article into a book: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Pretty compelling for the opening chapters…but then it just rehashes itself over the last four or five chapters. His website provides the surface overview that fits the needs of the book. NYTimes book review

How many books can you tap into at a local reseller? Two or three thousand? Try competing against Amazon’s millions of titles. Overwhelming only to their competition. Anyone in Toledo remember Thackery’s bookstore? I do — and still miss that store every time I visit. It was a hangout when I was off campus.

Once able to purchase your own unique tastes in music, movies, television shows and books (for example) the idea of a retail store just turns into a sink hole.

Retail locations justify selling only the top 100 popular titles in music, movies, TV and books to pay for electricity, staff and rental space. Clearly this model is broken. Your given few selections, and the limited selection is forced to mass audiences — but not your own niche interests.

Today on in the internet you can find any niche, regardless of age and download it to your computer. Sadly the only thing standing in the way of a massive long tail is copyright.

While Walmart can outsell at fixed locations based upon pricing for the top 100 DVDs, Netflix will fill your niche filled with thousands of opportunities that Walmart cannot cost justify.

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