The subtitle of Money for Nothing lets you know what’s coming: How the Failure of Corporate Boards Is Ruining American Business and Costing Us Trillions. If you’ve had your pitchfork and torch at the ready for a march on corporate malfeasance, then this is the book for you. John Gillespie and David Zweig spend the … Read more »
Category: Book reviews
Weekend Book Review: The Big Short
Michael Lewis has put together a great book on subprime loans, home mortgage bonds and how their crash led to the Great Panic. The Big Short starts with this quote: The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest … Read more »
Weekend Book Review: The Informant
I’ve had Kurt Eichenwald’s The Informant on my reading list for a long time. It dropped farther down the list after seeing the previews for the Steven Soderbergh movie. Why read the book when you can watch the movie? What raised my interest was hearing a great radio segment from This American Life that tells … Read more »
Weekend Book Review: Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
Books about compliance, business ethics, law and financial markets can be well written, interesting and thought-provoking. But they’re not fun. So I decided I needed change and found a whimsically absurd novel that touches upon compliance: Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde. Chromatacia is a world where people have limited ability to see color and … Read more »
Weekend Book Review: In Fed We Trust
It is only fitting that I am writing this book review on a Sunday. In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic starts off by telling about the importance of a few Sundays in 2008. In March, there was the Sunday when the Federal Reserve announced an unprecedented action to lend $30 … Read more »
Weekend Book Review: Sonic Boom by Gregg Easterbrook
You may know Gregg Easterbrook from his previous book The Progress Paradox (one of his six books) or his articles in The Atlantic. I know him mostly from his hobby: writing the Tuesday Morning Quarterback column on ESPN.com. Sonic Boom tries to look beyond the current recession. Easterbrook looks ahead to what to expect after … Read more »
The Drunkard’s Walk, The Butterfly Effect and The Black Swan
The “drunkard’s walk” refers to the Brownian motion, the seemingly random movement of particles suspended in a fluid. The original thought was that you might be able to calculate the movement by measuring and calculating the interaction. It proved impossible. There are too many factors and too many interactions. Small changes in a system can … Read more »
SUPERfreakonomics and Compliance
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner are back putting the freak in economics. As they did in Freakonomics, SUPERfreakonomics uses economic analysis to give some insights into actual human behavior. When the original Freakonomics came out it was very original. Since then other books have hit the mainstream trying to do the same thing, … Read more »
Are You Trying to be a Trust Agent?
Yes? Then you have probably already read at least part of Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust, the new book from Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. Most likely, you are wondering what a “Trust Agent” is supposed to be. “Trust agents have established themselves as being non-sales-oriented, non-high … Read more »
Whales and Compliance
I was surprised to be thinking about compliance while I was reading about whales. Sure, I eat, drink and sleep compliance. But there are some lessons that compliance professionals can learn from the study of whales. This came up while I was reading Watching Giants: The Secret Lives of Whales by Elin Kelsey. My original … Read more »