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Pot, Inc.: Inside Medical Marijuana, America’s Most Outlaw Industry by Greg Campbell

Editor — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:01:31 +0000

Greg Campbell, coauthor of the bestselling Flawless and Blood Diamonds, presents a compelling, close-up investigation of a hot-button topic: America’s schizophrenic attitude to the legalization of pot.

Campbell, a suburban father whose biggest vice is a cold beer, seems like the last person who would grow weed in his basement. But his attitude changed in 2009, when his home state of Colorado led the nation in mainstreaming medical marijuana. Watching with fascination as above-board and financially thriving dispensaries popped up everywhere, Campbell wondered, “Why not me?” Pot, Inc. chronicles Greg’s journey into DIY ganjapreneurialism, as he learns how to cultivate marijuana, examines America’s often unduly harsh laws, and unearths ignorance about pot’s centuries-old therapeutic value–ignorance the government is desperate to maintain. Along the way, he also gains a very personal insight into the drug’s medicinal value that shapes his opinion about legalization.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Greg Campbell

GREG CAMPBELL is the author of Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (a Denver Post, Globe & Mail, and Library Journal bestseller), Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World’s Most Precious Stones (the source material for the Leonardo DiCaprio movie of the same name), and The Road to Kosovo: A Balkan Diary. Campbell is also an award-winning journalist whose his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal Magazine, The Economist, The San Francisco Times, Paris Match, and The Christian Science Monitor, among others. He lives in Fort Collins, CO.

Three books on illegal, or not, drugs

The Washington Post Book Review – May 16, 2012 (Excerpt)

Pot, Inc. (Sterling, $22.95), by Greg Campbell, author of “Blood Diamonds,” is a brisk, clear-headed survey of a complicated topic. That the author managed to write this evenhanded book while running a small (and arguably legal) grow operation in his Colorado home is a testament to his skill as a reporter. Campbell begins with the so-called “Obama Memo,” released by the Justice Department in late 2009. The memo signaled to many users and ganjapreneurs that marijuana would be tolerated by the federal government and therefore was on its way to some form of legalization. The confusion that followed paved the way for an expansion of medical marijuana use and raucous political debate from the city-council level on up. Campbell weaves in a fascinating history of the drug in the United States, including the legal and political story of how marijuana came to be classified as a Schedule I narcotic — more dangerous and less useful than Schedule II drugs such as cocaine and opium. Campbell is a friendly skeptic, largely convinced of pot’s benign nature, but he’s willing to subject the culture of idealists, dropouts, mercenaries and outright criminals that surround it to a healthy dose of sunshine. [Read the full article...]

Publishing: Hardcover, Paperback, or In Between?

Reader Views — Tue, 15 May 2012 11:42:02 +0000

The following is a reprint of the ReaderViews Newsletter May 14, 2012

Hardcover, Paperback, or In Between?

by Irene Watson, Reader Views

Whenever a book is published, the author has to decide whether to print a hard cover, a paperback, or both, and in recent years, a hybrid version—the French flaps cover—has appeared. Deciding which cover to use depends on an author’s budget, the type of book, and the book’s audience.

In the past, the decision about a book cover followed a steady pattern with traditional publishers. Most big name traditional publishers would print a book in hardcover, and then some months later, the paperback version would come out. This process was followed for a couple of reasons. A new book, especially by a well-known author, was a collector’s item. The first edition of a hardcover book was something to treasure, and it was often of the highest quality and made to be aesthetically pleasing, including having a dust jacket. People who wanted a book they could treasure for the rest of their lives would buy a hardcover book. But not all readers could afford hardcover books, so a cheaper mass market paperback would eventually follow. Depending on how much value the readers perceived that the book would hold for them, they might opt to buy the hardcover or they might wait for the paperback. On occasions where the hardcover did not sell well, the paperback edition was never released.

As the world of publishing has changed in the last couple of decades, more publishers have begun to bring out only paperback versions for books perceived not to be of such great lasting value, especially in terms of genre books like romance novels and mysteries. This move saves the publisher money and also makes the books available to a target audience that might not have paid as much for a hardcover of a mystery that can be read in just a few hours.

Now that self-publishing has become so popular, and because traditional publishers are struggling to remain financially stable, more and more books are being printed solely as paperbacks because it’s the most affordable choice. However, hardcover books are still chosen for significant titles by traditional publishers, and some self-published authors also choose hardcover books, often in addition, but rarely in place of paperbacks.

In choosing a book cover format, authors should think about the way the book will be used, the practicality of the cover choice, their own printing costs, what price the market will bear, and how potential readers will view the cover. Following is a breakdown of guidelines for choosing a book cover format for self-publishers.

Hardcover
If you are publishing your first book, you probably should keep your costs low until you know your book will sell, so you are better off opting for a paperback over a hardcover book. That said, there are some exceptions to this rule. Hardcover books are often a good choice for:

· Children’s Books—because children might be rough with their books so these covers will give the book greater endurance.
· Cookbooks—because a hardcover book can more easily lay flat on a kitchen counter for quick reference while cooking.
· Coffee Table Books—hardcover books are easier to hold than paperback books because coffee table books tend to be larger than the average size of 6×9 or smaller used for most paperback books.

While most nonfiction titles and novels will do best as paperback books, you might also ask yourself what perceived value your readers will find in the book. How important is your book, and how important will your readers perceive it to be? Putting your ego aside, you need to understand that your readers are probably not going to place as great a value on your romance novel as they will if you write a biography of Mark Twain. The type of cover you use will speak to the reader, telling him how important your subject is. Remember, readers do judge a book by its cover.

One final advantage to a hardcover book is the amount of “selling” text you can place on it. It is possible to print a nice looking hardcover book without a dust jacket so that the front and back material are the same as if you printed a paperback. However, most hardcover books are printed with dust jackets, which allow for more text to be printed on them. A good formula for text on a dust jacket is to fill the back of it with testimonials you’ve collected from other authors or experts in your field. Then the inside front flap can provide a description of your book that might even run over onto your inside back flap. The inside back flap can also provide space for a short biography of the author and room for a color author photo. Room for more text means more space to sell your book to the potential reader.

That said, if you’re like me, you may find the dust jacket gets annoying while you read the book. I have a tendency to remove the dust jacket while I read, but if readers do that, it doesn’t hurt anything once the book has been sold.

Finally, think about the cost to you and the customer. A paperback book is more affordable to authors and readers. However, a hardcover can be produced sometimes for as little as four dollars more, and that cost can be passed onto the customer by selling the book for five dollars more so you still make a profit on the hardcover. The question is simply: Will people be willing to pay five dollars more for the hardcover edition?

Paperback
The paperback cover is most affordable, and except for the few exceptions listed above, it is probably the best choice for any book, especially novels and self-help books and other nonfiction titles. Again, your book will be judged by its cover, so people may perceive your paperback book as of lesser value—meaning they might actually think the content is of less value too—than if it were a hardcover. However, there is no longer any sense that people are “slumming” by buying paperbacks. I don’t know the percentages for a fact, but I would guess that at least 90 percent of books are printed solely as paperbacks today, especially among self-published books.

You have a little less space on a paperback cover to write text that will sell the book, but you can generally fit on the back cover all the information that you would include on the inside flaps of a hardcover’s dust jacket. If you wish to include testimonials, you can place them inside the front cover as the opening pages. I have mixed feelings about placement of testimonials. Many readers will read them in choosing to buy the book, but others will go to the book description first—most people will buy the book because the topic interests them more than because someone famous said the book is great—but having both can only help so it’s up to you whether or not you feel your testimonials deserve back cover space. Often you can fit just one or two short testimonials on the back cover with the description and author bio to balance everything out.

French Flaps
I’m seeing more and more books published with French flaps. This format is basically a hybrid. It is really a paperback book, but the flaps are an extended part of the paperback cover that fold inward to serve as a dust jacket without being removable. French flaps provide the same space as a hardcover for book descriptions without the expense of a hardcover with a dust jacket. A book with French flaps does cost more than a paperback, but depending on how many books you print, it will probably cost you less than a dollar more per unit.

I believe a lot of authors are choosing to use French flaps because they believe this format makes their book look more professional or significant than if it were simply a paperback. Readers may be impressed with the look of French flaps and even see them as a novelty, but frankly, I find such books annoying to read—the flaps have a tendency of wanting to flip up, making the book somewhat unwieldy. This format feels pretentious to me, like such books have delusions of wanting to be hardcover books.

Making the Choice
Personally, a standard paperback is good enough for me with the few exceptions of books I’ve listed where a hardcover is preferable. While I have offered some guidelines here for choices, no two books are the same and special circumstances may exist that would make one cover a better choice than another. Every author must choose for himself which book cover will best suit his book to promote its value as well as be most desirable in format and price to potential readers.

Comments? I’d like to hear from you here.

A Disposition to Be Rich: How a Small-Town Pastor’s Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States by Geoffrey C. Ward

Editor — Mon, 14 May 2012 10:17:50 +0000

Ferdinand Ward was the greatest swindler of the Gilded Age. Through his unapologetic villainy, he bankrupted Ulysses S. Grant and ran roughshod over the entire world of finance. Now, his compelling, behind-the-scenes story is told—told by his great-grandson, award-winning historian Geoffrey C. Ward.

Ward was the Bernie Madoff of his day, a supposed genius at making big money fast on Wall Street who turned out to have been running a giant pyramid scheme—one that ultimately collapsed in one of the greatest financial scandals in American history. The son of a Protestant missionary and small-town pastor with secrets of his own to keep, Ward came to New York at twenty-one and in less than a decade, armed with charm, energy, and a total lack of conscience, made himself the business partner of the former president of the United States and was widely hailed as the “Young Napoleon of Finance.” In truth, he turned out to be a complete fraud, his entire life marked by dishonesty, cowardice, and contempt for anything but his own interests.

Drawing from thousands of family documents never before examined, Geoffrey C. Ward traces his great-grandfather’s rapid rise to riches and fame and his even more dizzying fall from grace. There are mistresses and mansions along the way; fast horses and crooked bankers and corrupt New York officials; courtroom confrontations and six years in Sing Sing; and Ferdinand’s desperate scheme to kidnap his own son to get his hands on the estate his late wife had left the boy. Here is a great story about a classic American con artist, told with boundless charm and dry wit by one of our finest historians.

About Geoffrey C. Ward

Geoffrey C. Ward is the coauthor of The Civil War (with Ken Burns and Ric Burns), and the author of A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, which won the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography and the 1990 Francis Parkman Prize.

Editorial Reviews

“Imagine that Bernie Madoff was in business with former President Dwight Eisenhower and that after stealing millions from Warren Buffett, Madoff left Ike with only $80 to his name. That’s what Ferd Ward did to Ulysses S. Grant, but it only begins to describe the perfidy of the greatest swindler of the 19th Century. Now Ward’s great grandson, one of America’s finest historians, has redeemed the Ward family name with this wry and engrossing tale of Gilded Age greed that resonates powerfully in our own time.” — Jonathan Alter, author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One

“Before Charles Ponzi, before Bernie Madoff, there was Ferdinand Ward, the greatest and most audacious schemer of them all. Geoffrey Ward, his great grandson, had rare access to private papers, accounts, court documents, and the letters of this evil, self-justifying, mesmerizing sociopath, who went from a poor minister’s son to the swindling partner of President Ulysses S. Grant. This is a superb, exciting, beautifully written book. I couldn’t put it down. You won’t either.” — Barbara Goldsmith, author of Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie

“Geoffrey Ward has written an astonishing book. Readers will not want to put down his fast-paced account of how his great grandfather, “The Best-Hated Man in the United States,” brought U.S. Grant to ruin. He leaves no doubt that Ferdinand Ward of Grant and Ward was a scoundrel, but, in this riveting biography, he also raises the fascinating question of why so many Americans in the Gilded Age were so eager to become dupes.” — William E. Leuchtenburg, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians

Great-Grandfather Was a First-Class Bamboozler

The New York Times Book Review – May 13, 2012 (Excerpt)

After Ferdinand De Wilton Ward Jr. became notorious as a Gilded Age financial schemer of rare weaselly ingenuity, his picture appeared in a manual of phrenology. The shape of his “low-top head, very broad from side to side,” was said to explain why Ward had shown the “Secretiveness, Cunning, Acquisitiveness, Destructiveness” to bilk investors, shame and bankrupt a former president and try to kidnap his own son.

Within the large Ward clan Ferdinand remains “the family sociopath,” although each of his parents was a candidate for that distinction. It took a great-grandson of Ferdinand’s, the prizewinning historian Geoffrey C. Ward, to write the scandal-filled but eminently fair book that airs this dirty laundry.

Geoffrey Ward has reason for backhanded pride when it comes to his great-grandfather’s malfeasance. Ferdinand was not just any crook; he created a Ponzi scheme before Charles Ponzi was even born. He can legitimately be called the Bernard Madoff of his time, and he had the public infamy and prison sentence to prove it. Ferd, as he was known, was incarcerated at both the Ludlow Street Jail and the Tombs in New York, but it was not until he reached Sing Sing that his gifts as a con man really reached their peak. Thanks to well-placed bribes he got a nicer-than-average cell and the privilege of wearing a straw hat, not a striped one.

Before the arrival of this book, “A Disposition to Be Rich,” which takes its title from Ferd’s mother’s excuse for his problems, not much was written directly about Ward’s chicanery. There are several reasons. His illicit financial dealings were best known as a sad footnote to the Ulysses S. Grant story, since Grant became Ward’s woefully ill-informed partner in the firm of Grant & Ward. (Specialty: securities rehypothecating, or “pledging the same paper over and over again to borrow money, paying the interest on one loan out of the principal for the next, hoping that things would somehow balance out one day.” [Read the full article...]

Review: ‘A Disposition to Be Rich’ relates a Wall Street con

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – May 20, 2012 (Excerpt)

In 1863, the young Ferdinand Ward was alone with his mother in their parsonage in Geneseo, N.Y., his minister father and older brother both off to war and his older sister visiting relatives out of town.Diphtheria swept through the village, killing friends and neighbors, and each mail delivery carried the risk of disaster — would it include a notice that one of the Ward men had been killed?

“With the rest of the family away,” young Ferdie “was now his mother’s sole companion in the dark parsonage,” historian Geoffrey C. Ward writes in his new book, “A Disposition to be Rich.” The mother had a religious zealot’s dour view of the secular world and of the wages of sin. Hers was not a reassuring presence during those fearful days, and under her wing, young Ferdie absorbed a lesson that would mark the sweep of his adult life: “No one should expect virtue, no matter how conspicuous, ever to be rewarded in this world.”

Ferdie Ward was Geoffrey Ward’s great-grandfather, and the subtitle of this veteran historian’s new work lays out Ferdie’s future: “How a Small-Town Pastor’s Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States.” [Read the full article...]

Net Smart: How to Thrive Online and Use Social Media Intelligently by Howard Rheingold

Editor — Sat, 12 May 2012 11:48:09 +0000

Like it or not, knowing how to make use of online tools without being overloaded with too much information is an essential ingredient to personal success in the twenty-first century. But how can we use digital media so that they make us empowered participants rather than passive receivers, grounded, well-rounded people rather than multitasking basket cases? In Net Smart, cyberculture expert Howard Rheingold shows us how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully.

Mindful use of digital media means thinking about what we are doing, cultivating an ongoing inner inquiry into how we want to spend our time. Rheingold outlines five fundamental digital literacies, online skills that will help us do this: attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (or “crap detection”), and network smarts. He explains how attention works, and how we can use our attention to focus on the tiny relevant portion of the incoming tsunami of information. He describes the quality of participation that empowers the best of the bloggers, netizens, tweeters, and other online community participants; he examines how successful online collaborative enterprises contribute new knowledge to the world in new ways; and he teaches us a lesson on networks and network building.

Rheingold points out that there is a bigger social issue at work in digital literacy, one that goes beyond personal empowerment. If we combine our individual efforts wisely, it could produce a more thoughtful society: countless small acts like publishing a Web page or sharing a link could add up to a public good that enriches everybody.

About Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold, an influential writer and thinker on social media, is the author of Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (both published by the MIT Press), and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

“The social media landscape changes quicker than you can say ‘future shock.’ As soon as you think you’ve mastered one network, another pops up, demanding its share of time and attention. Thank goodness, then, for Howard Rheingold. He has identified the skills — simultaneously old-fashioned and cutting-edge — that not only will help you thrive in this tumultuous world, but also help you shape social media into a force for good. Net Smart is a lifeboat for people who want to participate in new technologies without drowning in the flood.”–Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and A Whole New Mind

“A desperately needed and wonderfully written guide to being literate in today’s digital, always-on world. This book is not just descriptive. It articulates a comprehensive set of social norms, practices and protocols that help us unleash the collective power of networked intelligence. And, yes, using the web mindfully can indeed make us smarter, as this book will illustrate. A must read for anyone wanting to thrive in today’s increasingly connected world.”–John Seely Brown, Former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corp and Director of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center; co-author of A New Culture of Learning

“Education today is woefully inadequate. It’s about teaching people information and skills as if we’re alone and disconnected, stocking knowledge and tools in our brains. Today, it is important to learn how to find information and how to collaborate. Written in the traditionally smart and fun-to-read Rheingoldian style, Net Smart is the guide on how to think, learn, survive and thrive in the post-internet era. An essential guide and a must-read!”–Joichi Ito, Director, MIT Media Lab

“Net Smart: How to Thrive Online” by Howard Rheingold

The Washington Post Book Review – May 11, 2012 (Excerpt)

Nagging worries about whether the latest bit of cutting-edge technology will have the unforeseen side effect of dulling our minds have been around ever since the dawn of recorded history. Long before Wikipedia or Google, Plato wrote of a king who feared that the invention of letters and reading would give its users the ability to cite facts that they had not properly earned or mastered. Such an invention will lead to forgetfulness among users, the ancient king predicted, and provide them with a false sense of wisdom.

Anyone who has followed an online political discussion or felt a twinge of guilt as she consulted the Web for help with the kids’ homework can identify with this concern. A person may know how to Google the answer to a question, after all, but that doesn’t mean that she knows anything else about the topic at hand.

Technology writer Howard Rheingold ponders this in his latest book, “Net Smart,” which strives to be a sort of consciousness-raising how-to guide for all of us who are immersed in the Web era. Rheingold, who has been writing about the digital revolution for a quarter-century, praises and critiques the Web’s tools and diversions. It’s his aim to make readers more aware of both the benefits and the potential drawbacks of digital life.

“Net Smart” arrives at the same time as a similarly minded title that is more narrowly focused on parenting in the digital age. James P. Steyer founded the San Francisco-based nonprofit organization Common Sense Media with the aim of helping parents figure out how to responsibly usher children into the digital era; his new book, “Talking Back to Facebook,” shares that goal. [Read the full article...]

How to Be Richer, Smarter, and Better-Looking Than Your Parents by Zac Bissonnette

Editor — Sun, 06 May 2012 12:34:15 +0000

Striking out on your own for the first time is exhilarating. But in a culture full of bad advice, predatory banks, and splurge-now-pay-later temptations, it can also be extremely dangerous–leading you to make financial decisions that could hurt you for years to come. Combine this with a slumped economy, mounds of student loans, and dubious examples from reality TV stars to politicians to your own parents, and it’s no wonder so many twenty-somethings are struggling.

Twenty-three-year-old Zac Bissonnette–the author of Debt-Free U–knows exactly what you’re going through. He demystifies the many traps young people fall victim to in their post-college years. He offers fresh insights on everything from job hunting to buying a car to saving for retirement that will give you a foundation for a secure, stable, and happy life. In the process, he reveals why FICO scores are overrated, online job applications are a waste of time, car loans are for suckers, and credit card rewards are a scam.

With detours to discuss wine connoisseurs, Really Broke Housewives, and Lenny Dykstra, Zac shows you how to make better choices today so you can be richer, smarter (and better-looking!) for years to come.

About Zac Bissonnette

Zac Bissonnette is a personal finance writer. His first book, Debt-Free U, landed him on The Today Show, Sean Hannity, The Dave Ramsey Show, The 700 Club, and the Fox News Channel. The Washington Post called Debt-Free U “the best and most troubling book ever about the college admissions process” and it hit #20 on Amazon.com’s bestseller list the day it was released. It has been featured by The BBC, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Bloomberg, Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, The Suze Orman Show, The Boston Globe, ABC News, and many others.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

“Are you there, Zac? It’s me, Chelsea. I loved your book. Plus, I’m only half-Jew so your financial wisdom really balanced out my Mormon side.” –Chelsea Handler

“Our four daughters learned ‘Waste not, want not’ before they knew their ABCs, but Zac Bissonnette says it better and more credibly than a mere father could. His enjoyable romp through the basics of debt-free personal finance will be in their next Christmas stockings.” –Mitch Daniels, governor of Indiana

“Zac Bissonnette puts the ‘smart’ in smart-aleck with his irreverent, hilarious, and eminently sensible financial advice. This may be the one personal finance book that actually delivers on its title. Parents, give it to your kids. Kids, leave a copy on the kitchen table–maybe your parents will pick it up and learn something.” –Daniel Pink, author of Drive and A Whole New Mind

‘Be Richer’ By Learning From Parents’ Mistakes

NPR Book Review – May 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

College seniors graduating in 2012 face a sluggish economy, bleak job prospects and a mountain of student loan debt. To make matters worse, many don’t have the first clue about how to manage their personal finances.

Author Zac Bissonnette, a recent college graduate himself, learned how to handle money by watching his parents’ mistakes and ignoring most of their advice. He put himself through college without loans, scholarships or help from his parents.

In his book How to Be Richer, Smarter, and Better-Looking Than Your Parents, he offers advice to his fellow 20-somethings.

“The reason that this money stuff is so important for young people now,” he tells NPR’s Neal Conan, “is that we’re operating with no margin for error, that … 10 years ago young people had. … You don’t have the room to make mistakes.”

Bissonnette gives his advice for avoiding common financial mistakes and staying out of debt. [Read the full article...]

The Art of the Sale: Learning from the Masters About the Business of Life by Philip Delves Broughton

Editor — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:48:22 +0000

A revelatory examination of the alchemy of successful selling and its essential role in just about every aspect of human experience.

When Philip Delves Broughton went to Harvard Business School, an experience he wrote about in his New York Times bestseller Ahead of the Curve, he was baffled to find that sales was not on the curriculum. Why not, he wondered? Sales plays a part in everything we do—not just in clinching a deal but in convincing people of an argument, getting a job, attracting a mate, or getting a child to eat his broccoli. Well, he thought; he’d just have to assemble his own master class in the art of selling. And so he did, setting out on a remarkable pilgrimage to find the world’s great wizards of sales.

Great selling is an art that demands creativity, mindfulness, selflessness, and resilience; but anyone who says you can become a great salesperson in 15 minutes is either a charlatan or a fool. The more Delves Broughton traveled and listened, the more he found a wealth of applicable insight. In Morocco, he found the master rug merchant who thrives in Kasbah by using age-old principles to read his customers. In Tampa, he met with Tony Sullivan, king of the infomercial, and learned the importance of creating a good narrative to selling effectively. In a sold-out seminar with sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer, he uncovered the ways successful selling approaches religion, inspiring faith and even a sense of duty in customers. From celebrity art dealer Larry Gagosian to the most successful saleswoman in Japan, Broughton tracked down anyone who would help him understand what it took to achieve greatness in sales.

Though sales is the engine of commerce and industry—more Americans work in sales than in manufacturing, marketing, or finance—it remains shrouded in myth. The Art of the Sale is a powerful beam of light onto the field, a wise and winning tour of the best in show of this endeavor which is nothing less than the means by which all of us, one way or another, get our way in the world.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Philip Delves Broughton

Philip Delves Broughton was born in Bangladesh and grew up in England. From 1998-2004, he served successively as the New York and Paris bureau chief for The Daily Telegraph of London and reported widely from North and South America, Europe and Africa. He led the Telegraph’s coverage of the 9/11 attacks on New York and his reporting has twice been nominated for the British Press Awards. His work has also appeared in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, and the Spectator. In 2006, he received his MBA from Harvard Business School. He currently lives in New York with his wife and two sons.

Editorial Review

For the author, sales is where the rubber hits the road, where the deals are done. If a business can’t sell its product, of course, it won’t survive. More Americans are employed in sales than any other line of work. Not to be confused with marketing, the author’s definition of sales goes from his sons’ lemonade stand to the Dalai Lama representing the Tibetan people against Chinese repression. Broughton has met with top sellers around the world, traveling to Japan, Morocco and the United Kingdom in search of the keys to success in sales. In addition to his interview research, he examines academic studies, history, self-help literature, academic research on the psychology of selling and the character attributes of sales people. He explores the differences in theory and practice, and he draws from the history of the field, by way of P.T. Barnum and Joseph Duveen, who brought fine-art sales to the U.S. Broughton does not exclude the seamy underside—e.g., pharmaceutical companies recruiting college cheerleaders to “sell” their products to the country’s doctors, who “buy more and prescribe more to please ex-cheerleaders than they do for salesmen who look like themselves”—but he supplies plenty of success stories, including Ted Turner, casino magnate Steve Wynn and former AOL executive Ted Leonsis. – Kirkus Reviews

‘The Art Of The Sale’: Life’s A Pitch

NPR Book Review – April 28, 2012 (Excerpt)

Salesmen are rarely heroic figures in American culture. They’re often shown as slick, unscrupulous charlatans like Ricky Roma in David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross. And then there are sad, defeated characters like Willy Loman in Death Of A Salesman, who shortly before taking his life says, “After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.”

Yet sales drive the economy. The cleverest invention or product will disappear — creating no income, no employment — unless someone can sell it.

Philip Delves Broughton was a world-roving reporter for TheDaily Telegraph of London. But Broughton left journalism for Harvard Business School, where he observed that most M.B.A. programs teach nothing about sales.

Intrigued by the difficulty of selling, Broughton embarked on a journey to discover the methods used by sales gurus. He chronicles the encounters in his new book, The Art Of The Sale: Learning From The Masters About The Business Of Life.

Broughton explains that successful salespeople exude tenacity even in a challenging situation. “The idea is that in a flat, very democratic society, if you can sell, [and] you can persuade others of your ability, you can essentially rise up,” he tells NPR’s Scott Simon. [Read the full article...]

The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do about It by Timothy Noah

Editor — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 11:31:04 +0000

For the past three decades, America has steadily become a nation of haves and have-nots. Our incomes are increasingly drastically unequal: the top 1% of Americans collect almost 20% of the nation’s income—more than double their share in 1973. We have less equality of income than Venezuela, Kenya, or Yemen.

What economics Nobelist Paul Krugman terms “the Great Divergence” has until now been treated as little more than a talking point, a club to be wielded in ideological battles. But it may be the most important change in this country during our lifetimes—a sharp, fundamental shift in the character of American society, and not at all for the better.

The income gap has been blamed on everything from computers to immigration, but its causes and consequences call for a patient, non-partisan exploration. In The Great Divergence, Timothy Noah delivers this urgently needed inquiry, ignoring political rhetoric and drawing on the best work of contemporary researchers to peer beyond conventional wisdom. Noah explains not only how the Great Divergence has come about, but why it threatens American democracy—and most important, how we can begin to reverse it.

The Great Divergence is poised to be one of the most talked-about books of 2012, a jump-start to the national conversation about what kind of society we aspire to be in the 21st century: a land of equality, or a city on a hill—with a slum at the bottom.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Timothy Noah

Timothy Noah was recently named “TRB,” the lead columnist at The New Republic. He wrote for Slate for a dozen years, and previously served at the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, and the Washington Monthly. He edited two collections of the writings of his late wife, Marjorie Williams, including the New York Times bestseller The Woman at the Washington Zoo. Noah received the 2011 Hillman Prize, the highest award for public service magazine journalism, for the series in Slate that forms the basis of The Great Divergence.

Editorial Review

This inequality, writes the author, is worse than it has been in any other period of American history, and it is completely out of line with America’s trading partners and allies. Noah shows that this trend is not directly related to the usual political suspects—black-white disparity, the treatment of women, etc.—and their correlatives in the economy and employment, but is in a class by itself, a result of contextual developments broader than particular laws or taxes enacted by Congress. The author examines the research of Princeton and Vanderbilt public policy professor Larry Bartels, whose message in his 2008 book Unequal Democracy “boiled down to a bluntly partisan message. You don’t like income inequality? Then don’t vote Republican.” Noah discusses the rise and fall of the trade-union movement and demonstrates that turning points in that movement were also turning points in the growth of income inequality. While after the end of World War II it was normal for the president to sit down with labor and business officials to discuss the economy, it no longer is. The author indicates that when anti-labor legislation (e.g., the Taft-Hartley Act) was combined with corporate lobbying, the institutions underpinning ideas of what was acceptable where income was concerned were undermined. Noah also calls out financial deregulation as a major offender, and he lists measures that he believes can help the situation, such as soaking the rich (think higher taxes and fees for wealthy individuals), fattening government payrolls and attracting more skilled immigrants. – Kirkus Reviews

What’s Behind America’s ‘Great Divergence’

NPR Book Review – April 26, 2012 (Excerpt)

Thirty years ago, CEOs of America’s largest businesses earned an estimated 42 times as much as their average employee. These days, that number has jumped to more than 200 times as much, by many counts. Since the economic crisis of 2008, there has been much more focus on income inequality, not just from economists and social scientists, but also from politicians and from protesters who occupied Wall Street.

While there’s no argument about what happened, there’s plenty of debate about why and what — if anything — should be done to correct it. In a new book, The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, journalist Timothy Noah traces the causes of the growth in inequality and prescribes some solutions that may or may not prove politically palatable.

Income inequality is corrosive, Noah tells NPR’s Neal Conan. “The affluent and the middle class really constitute two separate cultures now that are deeply alienated from one another,” says Noah. “Even conservatives have started to recognize this.” [Read the full article...]

All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending by Laura Vanderkam

Editor — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 14:49:59 +0000

How happy would you be if you had all the money in the world? The universal lament about money is that there is never enough. We spend endless hours obsessing over our budgets and investments, trying to figure out ways to stretch every dollar. We try to follow the advice of money gurus and financial planners, then kick ourselves whenever we spend too much or save too little. For all of the stress and effort we put into every choice, why are most of us unhappy about our finances?

According to Laura Vanderkam, the key is to change your perspective. Instead of looking at money as a scarce resource, consider it a tool that you can use creatively to build a better life for yourself and the people you care about.

For instance, the average couple spends $5,000 on engagement and wedding rings, making these pricey purchases largely because everyone else does. But what if you decided to spend $300 on rings and apply the rest to future date nights, weekend getaways, and thinking-of-you bouquets over the next ten years? In he long run, what would bring more joy to your marriage? Likewise, will owning a home with a pristine lawn and a two-car garage—the American Dream—really make you more satisfied? Or are you saving up for this investment just because financial planners tell you it’s worth it?

Vanderkam shows how each of us can figure out better ways to use what we have to build the lives we want. Drawing on the latest happiness research as well as the stories of dozens of real people, Vanderkam offers a contrarian approach that forces us to examine our own beliefs, goals, and values.

Among her advice:

Laugh at the Joneses: It’s human nature to compare yourself to those around you, but you can create lifestyle hat rings you personal satisfaction without copying your neighbors.

Give yourself the best weekend ever: Studies show that experiences often bring more pleasure than material goods. With a little planning and creativity, you can give yourself a memorable getaway without leaving town or going broke.

Embrace the selfish joy of giving: Giving back not only helps you build karma, it also helps you build a community—which is much more fulfilling than a tax deduction. All the Money in the World is a practical and inspiring guide that shows how money can buy happiness—if we spend it wisely.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Laura Vanderkam

Laura Vanderkam is the author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think and Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career Without Paying Your Dues, which the New York Times hailed as “loaded with smart observations.” Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, City Journal, the Huffington Post, USA Today, Scientific American, and Reader’s Digest, among other publications. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and their three children.

Editorial Review

The author debunks the traditional approach to budgeting in which fixed percentages are allocated to predetermined categories that prioritize the basics such as housing and food. According to Vanderkam, the trick to remaining financially solvent without sacrificing is not to scrimp and save on the small items—the lattes and occasional nights out. She offers a road map about how this might be accomplished and substantiates her claim that “the resources we already have or can obtain can do more for our happiness than we think.” A key tenet is that our happiness is not based on the accumulation of big-ticket items—diamond engagement rings, super-sized homes and cars—but on the accumulation of everyday pleasures, especially those activities we share with friends and family. Vanderkam provides thought-provoking examples of how it’s possible, even in a depressed economy, to explore new entrepreneurial opportunities to supplement income as an alternative to penny-pinching self-denial. She also warns of the pitfall inherent in saving for retirement—not only because of the effect that market volatility can have on a nest egg, but also the possibility of inflation. She suggests that it is better to find rewarding work than plan for early retirement, and warns of the dangers of becoming entrapped by the “hedonic treadmill” of increased expectations and spending more for less. – Kirkus Reviews

“All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending” by Laura Vanderkam

The Washington Post Book Review – April 27, 2012 (Excerpt)

Forget saving for college, cutting coupons and even bulking up your 401(k). Laura Vanderkam’s new book, “All the Money in the World,” examines money from a unique perspective: What if it can buy happiness? “We often assume we can’t afford X, Y or Z, or that only rich people experience certain things and we’ll never be rich,” she writes. “We assume certain expenditures are absolutely necessary, even though much of humanity survives without them. And so we live with a constrained mental picture of our lives.”

Vanderkam’s compelling book is not a lesson in greed or shallowness; rather, she asks you to consider ignoring what society says you ought to buy or own, and instead make choices according to your actual needs and desires. You like your morning latte? Buy it guilt-free knowing that you’re forgoing that designer sweater. You want to head to Paraguay for two weeks with your family? Do it knowing that you picked up extra work to pay for it. You like donating your money? Find a fun cause that speaks directly to you. [Read the full article...]

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, a Study of Big Oil by Steve Coll

Editor — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 10:59:14 +0000

In Private Empire Steve Coll investigates the largest and most powerful private corporation in the United States, revealing the true extent of its power. ExxonMobil’s annual revenues are larger than the economic activity in the great majority of countries. In many of the countries where it conducts business, ExxonMobil’s sway over politics and security is greater than that of the United States embassy. In Washington, ExxonMobil spends more money lobbying Congress and the White House than almost any other corporation. Yet despite its outsized influence, it is a black box.

Private Empire pulls back the curtain, tracking the corporation’s recent history and its central role on the world stage, beginning with the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989 and leading to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The action spans the globe, moving from Moscow, to impoverished African capitals, Indonesia, and elsewhere in heart-stopping scenes that feature kidnapping cases, civil wars, and high-stakes struggles at the Kremlin. At home, Coll goes inside ExxonMobil’s K Street office and corporation headquarters in Irving, Texas, where top executives in the “God Pod” (as employees call it) oversee an extraordinary corporate culture of discipline and secrecy.

The narrative is driven by larger than life characters, including corporate legend Lee “Iron Ass” Raymond, ExxonMobil’s chief executive until 2005. A close friend of Dick Cheney’s, Raymond was both the most successful and effective oil executive of his era and an unabashed skeptic about climate change and government regulation.. This position proved difficult to maintain in the face of new science and political change and Raymond’s successor, current ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson, broke with Raymond’s programs in an effort to reset ExxonMobil’s public image. The larger cast includes countless world leaders, plutocrats, dictators, guerrillas, and corporate scientists who are part of ExxonMobil’s colossal story.

The first hard-hitting examination of ExxonMobil, Private Empire is the masterful result of Coll’s indefatigable reporting. He draws here on more than four hundred interviews; field reporting from the halls of Congress to the oil-laden swamps of the Niger Delta; more than one thousand pages of previously classified U.S. documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act; heretofore unexamined court records; and many other sources. A penetrating, newsbreaking study, Private Empire is a defining portrait of ExxonMobil and the place of Big Oil in American politics and foreign policy.

About Steve Coll

Steve Coll is most recently the author of the New York Times bestseller The Bin Ladens. He is the president of the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy institute headquartered in Washington, D.C., and a staff writer forThe New Yorker. Previously heworked for twenty years at The Washington Post, where he received a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1990. He is the author of six other books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestsellerGhost Wars. He lives in Washington and New York.

Editorial Review

With admirable restraint, New Yorker contributor and two-time Pulitzer winner Coll (The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century, 2008, etc.) demonstrates how the merger of Exxon and Mobil has allowed the company to wield more power and wealth than even the American government, in the manner of John D. Rockefeller. Exxon had functioned as an independent corporate state since its antitrust breakoff from Standard Oil in 1911, and was ranked by profit performance in the top five corporations from the 1950s through the end of the Cold War. With the catastrophic spill of the Valdez in Alaska in 1989, the network of secrecy and internal security within Exxon was exposed but hardly tempered. The iron chief who emerged from the crisis, Lee Raymond, reappraised risk and security within the organization and took a hard line against efforts to extract from it punitive damages. Moving the headquarters to Texas in 1993, the company retrenched in its nose-thumbing determination to encourage and supply America’s thirst for oil, casting around at more far-flung spots in the world that could provide the crude—such as where Mobil held attractive assets, in places like West Africa, Venezuela, Kazakhstan and Abu Dhabi. The Exxon-Mobil merger in 1999 created a global behemoth and also provoked small wars at drilling spots where the poor and disenfranchised deeply resented the foreign workers on native soil and disrupted the extraction by violence and insurgency. Raymond and his cohorts’ cynical spin on the denial of global warming and the role of the burning of fossil fuels makes for jaw-dropping reading, as does the company’s cunning manipulations of the war in Iraq to garner an oil deal. The Obama administration’s emphasis on renewable energy sources and environmental concerns has barely challenged the formidable political power of Big Oil. – Kirkus Reviews

Oil’s Dark Heart Pumps Strong

The New York Times Book Review – April 26, 2012 (Excerpt)

The cover of “Private Empire,” Steve Coll’s new book about the Exxon Mobil Corporation, is a forbidding black slab. Even the lettering looks dismal. It’s the color of a chain smoker’s lung.

Mr. Coll’s vast narrative is bookended by accounts of man-made disasters. “Private Empire” opens with the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989 (the captain had been drinking), and closes with the BP Deepwater Horizon nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. In between there is much for those who loathe Big Oil generally, and Exxon Mobil specifically, to feast upon.

The company, Mr. Coll writes, is “a corporate state within the American state” and “one of the most powerful businesses ever produced by American capitalism.” Some employees call its ominous headquarters near Dallas the Death Star.

Little light, or information, leaks from the Death Star. The company wields “a corporate system of secrecy, nondisclosure agreements and internal security,” Mr. Coll writes, “that matched some of the most compartmented black boxes of the world’s intelligence agencies.” Exxon Mobil’s media strategy, an in-house joke declares, is learning to say “no comment” in 50 different languages. [Read the full article...]

Steve Coll Talks About the Power of Exxon Mobil

The New York Times Arts Beat – May 2, 2012 (Excerpt)

In his new book, “Private Empire,” Steve Coll offers an expansive portrait of Exxon Mobil: its leaders, operations, global entanglements, environmental impact and relationship to the United States government. In a recent interview via e-mail, Mr. Coll discussed the company’s access to various presidents, the future of energy consumption and more. Below are excerpts from the conversation.

Q. Dwight Garner called the book, “perhaps surprisingly,” “impartial.” Did you feel sympathetic toward Exxon Mobil as you researched?

A. I try to think of my goal as a reporter more as empathy than sympathy. I want to understand and describe how the world looks to any of my subjects, why they act as they do. The aggregation of empathy is, I suppose, a form of impartiality. [Read the full article...]

Review of Steve Coll’s ‘Private Empire’: How ExxonMobil bent Washington to its will

The Washington Post Book Review – May 11, 2012 (Excerpt)

“Private Empire” is a big book about big oil, big money and big government. It chronicles how ExxonMobil — the energy behemoth that recently displaced Wal-Mart atop the Fortune 500 list, with more than $450 billion in revenue — operates in failed states, keeping the oil flowing when no one else can, and how it handles hapless bureaucrats charged with regulating it, scientists challenging it, rival companies trying to outsmart it and activists bent on changing it.

It is also a book about one idiosyncratic man — Lee “Iron Ass” Raymond — who was chief executive of the company from 1993 to 2005.

The global marketplace was remade during those years. The Soviet collapse had unleashed a wave of deregulations that opened markets to foreign investors. Asia, especially China and India, began a rapid ascent, fueling a global economy that posted unprecedented growth and booming stock markets. At the same time, the world gained heightened awareness about environmental damage caused by fossil fuels, while terrorism, war and all kinds of domestic political upheavals became common.

The impact on the corporate world was mixed. Most of these transformations boosted profits, but their speed and complexity created volatile conditions for business. And a company such as ExxonMobil is allergic to volatility. [Read the fall article...]

The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food by Josh Schonwald

Editor — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:46:54 +0000

A fascinating look at the people, trends, and technologies transforming the food of today and tomorrow

In The Taste of Tomorrow, journalist Josh Schonwald sets out on a journey to investigate the future of food. His quest takes him across the country and into farms and labs around the globe. From Alice Waters’ microfarm to a Pentagon facility that has quietly shaped American supermarkets, The Taste of Tomorrow is a rare, behind-the-scenes glimpse at what we eat today—and what we’ll be eating tomorrow.

Schonwald introduces us to a motley group of mad scientists, entrepreneurs, renegade farmers, and food engineers who are revolutionizing the food we eat. We meet the Harvard-trained pedia-trician who wants to change the way humans raise fish; a New York chef who believes he’s found the next great ethnic cuisine; a lawyer-turned-nanotechnologist who believes he can solve human nutritional needs without using food.

In this lively and fascinating book, Schonwald explains how new foods happen; why some foods explode on the scene virtually overnight while others take decades—and countless failures—to catch on. And he doesn’t shy away from controversy. Although the book begins as a simple search for “the salad, meat, seafood, and pad Thai of the future,” Schonwald becomes increasingly focused on finding environmentally friendly foods of the future. Ultimately, he comes to believe that emerging scientific breakthroughs—genetic engineering, nanotechnology, food processing—are essential to feeding the globe’s expanding (and hungry) population.

About Josh Schonwald

Josh Schonwald has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Salon. He lives in Evanston, Illinois, with his wife, children, and indoor aquaponic system.

Editorial Review

In his examination of food trends of the future, journalist Schonwald discovers a fascinating array of characters and an unpredictable set of conclusions. He begins with the vibrant world of greens, particularly salad greens, and pursues a cross-continental search for the next big salad ingredient, a journey that takes him from his local Illinois farmer’s market to California’s “Salad Bowl.” While conducting research, the author began to realized that “many of the ideas of the foodie mainstream are dangerously myopic, potentially destructive, and possibly the source of widespread blindness in Southeast Asia.” Describing his own then-radical experience of eating bagged salad mix in the late 1990s and his resulting abstinence from iceberg lettuce, Schonwald displays a gleeful obsession with heirloom varieties of radicchio, deep interest in the “weedy” greens grown on Alice Waters’ farm and childlike delight in rooting his own eating in the realities of seasonal availability. The author tackles an admittedly self-selected set of potential food trends, including “the next salmon” (cobia), healthier meats and the next big trend in ethnic food. Along the way, Schonwald comes to the conclusion that the future of food trends is actually a question about the future of the earth’s ecological integrity, leading him to explore and largely embrace the possibilities of genetically engineered foods. The author effectively pairs his personal experiences with significant research, interviews and lively anecdotes. – Kirkus Reviews

“The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food” by Josh Schonwald

The Washington Post Book Review – April 20, 2012 (Excerpt)

“This book,” Josh Schonwald writes, “is fundamentally a search for people who think they have the Next Big Thing in food. . . . I’ve devoted months to investigating salad, seafood, and meat, but nary a moment to cheese or dairy products. This unequal treatment is due to a couple of things: a gagging reflex that is provoked by cultured dairy products, and my obsession with finding the salad of the future. So full disclosure: this is a look at the food frontier, a search for the next big things in food, through the eyes of a human with some food preferences and prejudices.”

Just about anyone who writes about food comes to the task with built-in positive and negative prejudices, so there’s nothing unusual about that. As one who can’t imagine getting through the day without a healthy (or unhealthy) helping of cheese, I obviously do not share all of Schonwald’s biases, but on broader matters, his views are much to my taste. Though he came to his research much under the influence of Michael Pollan and other prominent foodies who are opposed to biotechnology and genetically engineered foods, what he saw and learned persuaded him to a somewhat more complicated and nuanced view. While he shares their preference for natural, organic ingredients and agrees with many of their strictures about real as opposed to scientifically manufactured food, he also came to appreciate the work being done by scientists on ways to increase the food supply at a time in world history when population is expanding and our ability to feed it with natural foodstuffs is not keeping up. [Read the full article...]

Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century’s Biggest Bestsellers by James W. Hall

Editor — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 22:56:22 +0000

DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF WHAT MAKES A MEGA-BESTSELLER IN THIS ENTERTAINING, REVELATORY GUIDE

What do Michael Corleone, Jack Ryan, and Scout Finch have in common? Creative writing professor and thriller writer James W. Hall knows. Now, in this entertaining, revelatory book, he reveals how bestsellers work, using twelve twentieth-century blockbusters as case studies—including The Godfather, Gone with the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Jaws. From tempting glimpses inside secret societies, such as submariners in The Hunt for Red October, and Opus Dei in The Da Vinci Code, to vivid representations of the American Dream and its opposite—the American Nightmare—in novels likeThe Firm and The Dead Zone, Hall identifies the common features of mega-bestsellers. Including fascinating and little-known facts about some of the most beloved books of the last century, Hit Lit is a must-read for fiction lovers and aspiring writers alike, and makes us think anew about why we love the books we love.

About James W. Hall

James W. Hall is the author of seventeen novels, four books of poetry, two short-story collections, and a book of essays. He’s also the winner of the Edgar and Shamus awards.

Editorial Review

The author animatedly shares a distinct fascination with books and reading that has taught him “secrets about the real world that I could discover nowhere else.” Inspired and developed by a popular fiction course he began teaching more than two decades ago, Hall examines 12 of the most successful novels of the 20th century and “reverse-engineer[s]” them, mining their separate defining qualities and their comparative appeal to readers. Chosen for their dexterity and entertainment potential with consideration for gender diversity, location, familial dysfunction and their “strikingly similar techniques and themes,” they range from melodramas like Gone with the Wind, Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls to suspense/horror hits The Exorcist, Jaws and The Dead Zone, as well as classics like To Kill A Mockingbird and The Godfather. For readers, Hall writes, an emotional connection with a central character is paramount. Social taboos, time constraints and the “threat of danger” also draw (and hold) attention, as does secrecy and mystical mystery (see The Da Vinci Code and The Exorcist). Hall writes that the graphic sex in Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls takes on a deeper adulterous subtext in The Bridges of Madison County and The Firm. Similarly, the author partially attributes the runaway successes of The Hunt for Red October and The Godfather to the irresistibility of the American Dream. Referential and cleverly elucidated, the book raises many good points about the precise methodology of bestselling novels—Hall’s own work included. – Kirkus Reviews

On Writing A Best-Seller (Shhh, There’s a Formula)

NPR Book Review – April 17, 2012 (Excerpt)

Like many people in the book world, I’ve found it impossible to ignore the phenomenon that is E.L. James’ erotic novelFifty Shades of Grey and its two sequels, which morphed from Twilight fan fiction to word-of-mouth blockbuster. The books aren’t to my taste, to put it tactfully, but I keep reading article after article attempting to explain their appeal. Some of the most popular theories put forward so far: The escapist fantasy is catnip for exhausted working moms. It’s a BDSM-flavored take on the Cinderella fantasy. It’s a dirty book for people who don’t ordinarily read dirty books (or read much at all).

Naturally, I have my own theory: James, like other 21st-century mega-sellers Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown, writes genre fiction that reaches far beyond genre readership, bursting open the doors to what the savvy may find old hat but newbies find intoxicating. But is it possible to find a more substantive explanation for James’ breakout success by looking back at the previous century’s biggest and fastest sellers?

In her excellent overview of American best-sellers, critic Ruth Franklin warned, “No possible generalization can be made regarding the 1,150 books that have appeared in the top 10 of the fiction best-seller list since its inception.” But in his new book, Hit Lit, mystery writer James W. Hall makes a case that the biggest hits from the past hundred years share 12 features. [Read the full article...]

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies by Tyler Cowen

Editor — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:34:18 +0000

One of the most influential economists of the decade-and the New York Times bestselling author of The Great Stagnation-boldly argues that just about everything you’ve heard about food is wrong.

Food snobbery is killing entrepreneurship and innovation, says economist, preeminent social commentator, and maverick dining guide blogger Tyler Cowen. Americans are becoming angry that our agricultural practices have led to global warming-but while food snobs are right that local food tastes better, they’re wrong that it is better for the environment, and they are wrong that cheap food is bad food. The food world needs to know that you don’t have to spend more to eat healthy, green, exciting meals. At last, some good news from an economist!

Tyler Cowen discusses everything from slow food to fast food, from agriculture to gourmet culture, from modernist cuisine to how to pick the best street vendor. He shows why airplane food is bad but airport food is good; why restaurants full of happy, attractive people serve mediocre meals; and why American food has improved as Americans drink more wine. And most important of all, he shows how to get good, cheap eats just about anywhere.

Just as The Great Stagnation was Cowen’s response to all the fashionable thinking about the economic crisis, An Economist Gets Lunch is his response to all the fashionable thinking about food. Provocative, incisive, and as enjoyable as a juicy, grass-fed burger, it will influence what you’ll choose to eat today and how we’re going to feed the world tomorrow.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Tyler Cowen

Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He is a prominent blogger at marginalrevolution.com, the world’s leading economics blog. He also writes regularly for The New York Times, and has written forForbes, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wilson Quarterly.

Editorial Reviews

“Tyler Cowen’s latest book is a real treat, probably my favorite thing he’s ever written. It does a fantastic job exploring the economics, culture, esthetics, and realities of food, and delivers a mountain of compelling facts. Most of all it’s encouraging–not a screed, despite its occasionally serious arguments–and brings the fun back to eating. Delicious!” -Stephen J. Dubner, author of Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics

“A gastronomic , economic and philosophical feast from one of the world’s most creative economists. Tyler Cowen offers the thinking person’s guide to American food culture, and your relationship with food will be hugely enriched by the result.” -Tim Hartford, author of The Undercover Economist and Adapt.

“Tyler Cowen explains with great authority why good food doesn’t have to be expensive and why expensive food isn’t inevitably good. Cowen makes an argument for affordable food that results in both economic and sensory benefits. He espouses a fascinating new discipline I couldn’t help but think of as ‘Foodienomics.’” —Barb Stuckey, author of Taste What You’re Missing

A Contrarian Chowhound Weighs In - ‘An Economist Gets Lunch,’ by Tyler Cowen

The New York Times Book Review – April 10, 2012 (Excerpt)

Tyler Cowen’s book “An Economist Gets Lunch” arrives on the table like a big, unidentifiable, whey-colored casserole. After 75 pages you’re still poking at it, thinking, “What is this thing?” and “Can I order something else?”

For a while I thought I had a bead on its contents. Mr. Cowen is a right-leaning economist and a contrarian foodie. He takes aim at a fat target: food-world pretentiousness. He attempts to skewer the slow-food, eat-local and eat-fresh movements; to him, they’re expensive and snobbish. He praises modern agribusiness. He admires the genetically modified animals and produce that opponents call Frankenfood.

Reading Mr. Cowen is like pushing a shopping cart through Whole Foods with Rush Limbaugh. The patter is nonstop and bracing. Mr. Cowen delivers observations that, should Alice Waters ever be detained in Gitmo, her captors will play over loudspeakers to break her spirit.

These observations include: “There’s nothing especially virtuous about the local farmer”; “buying green products seems to encourage individuals to be less moral”; and — a contender for Orwellian sentence of the year — “technology and business are a big part of what makes the world gentle and fun.” [Read the full article...]

White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You by Simon Johnson and James Kwak

Editor — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:35:53 +0000

America is mired in debt—more than $30,000 for every man, woman, and child. Bitter fighting over deficits, taxes, and spending bedevils Washington, D.C., even as partisan gridlock has brought the government to the brink of default. Yet the more politicians on both sides of the aisle rant and the citizenry fumes, the more things seem to remain the same.

In White House Burning, Simon Johnson and James Kwak—authors of the national best seller 13 Bankers and cofounders of The Baseline Scenario, a widely cited blog on economics and public policy—demystify the national debt, explaining whence it came and, even more important, what it means to you and to future generations. They tell the story of the Founding Fathers’ divisive struggles over taxes and spending. They chart the rise of the almighty dollar, which makes it easy for the United States to borrow money. They account for the debasement of our political system in the 1980s and 1990s, which produced today’s dysfunctional and impotent Congress. And they show how, if we persist on our current course, the national debt will harm ordinary Americans by reducing the number of jobs, lowering living standards, increasing inequality, and forcing a sudden and drastic reduction in the government services we now take for granted.

But Johnson and Kwak also provide a clear and compelling vision for how our debt crisis can be solved while strengthening our economy and preserving the essential functions of government. They debunk the myth that such crucial programs as Social Security and Medicare must be slashed to the bone. White House Burning looks squarely at the burgeoning national debt and proposes to defuse its threat to our well-being without forcing struggling middle-class families and the elderly into poverty.

Carefully researched and informed by the same compelling storytelling and lucid analysis as 13 Bankers, White House Burning is an invaluable guide to the central political and economic issue of our time. It is certain to provoke vigorous debate.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Simon Johnson and James Kwak

Simon Johnson is Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He is a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisers and of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee. He was previously the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

James Kwak is an associate professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law. He is currently a fellow at the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance. He has also worked as a management consultant and cofounded a software company.

Johnson and Kwak cofounded The Baseline Scenario, a widely cited blog on economics and public policy. They also wrote 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (Pantheon, 2010), a bestselling analysis of the financial system and the recent financial crisis.

Editorial Reviews

“By skillfully placing the debt debate in an insightful historical context and providing detailed recommendations, Johnson and Kwak make a major and timely contribution to a national debate that will only get more heated in the years ahead. It’s a must-read for those wondering about the relationship between the national debt and America’s challenges; the choices that we must make to restore fiscal viability, promote growth, create jobs, and reduce inequality; and the way that polarized politics torpedoes coherent discussion of these complex issues.” —Mohamed A. El-Erian, CEO of PIMCO and prize-winning author of When Markets Collide

“Johnson and Kwak have written a book every American should read. It gives us a rich context for understanding the problem of today’s national debt. Full of wisdom and specific recommendations, it reminds us that only when citizens understand the seriousness of our predicament will politicians take the necessary steps to strengthen our country. Let’s hope this book is a best seller.” —Bill Bradley, former United States senator and cosponsor of the Tax Reform Act of 1986

“Could there be a more important subject today than the national debt? And could there be two smarter, clearer, more incisive writers to tell us about it than Simon Johnson and James Kwak? With precision and common sense, WHITE HOUSE BURNING tells the story of where our debt came from, what it means, and what we can do about it. This is the kind of important, informed, and accessible book a democracy can’t do without.” - Noah Feldman, Bemis Professor of International Law, Harvard Law School, and author of Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices

Debt Struggles As Old As America Itself

NPR Book Review – April 5, 2012 (Excerpt)

As of today, the national debt held by the public is more than $10 trillion. That’s more than $30,000 for every man, woman and child living in the United States.

We might think heated debates about the national debt are a relatively new phenomenon, but in fact, they stretch back all the way to the earliest days of the Republic, says economist Simon Johnson. His new book, White House Burning, co-written with James Kwak, traces the history of the national debt from America’s earliest days, when the nation started out in dire financial shape.

“In fact, it was essentially bankrupt,” Johnson tells Fresh Air‘s Dave Davies. “It was in default on its debt. There wasn’t a stable, robust source of revenue.”

During the Revolutionary War, American soldiers had suffered from poor food and a shortage of boots, uniforms and blankets because the Continental Congress couldn’t come up with the money to pay for them. As a result, shortly after George Washington became president, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton established a revenue stream through tariffs and customs to support the federal government. He also helped restructure the nation’s debt. [Read the full article...]

Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ’60s and Beyond by Jane Maas

Editor — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 10:59:37 +0000

What was it like to be an advertising woman on Madison Avenue in the 60s and 70s – that Mad Men era of casual sex and professional serfdom? A real-life Peggy Olson reveals it all in this immensely entertaining and bittersweet memoir.

Mad Women is a tell-all account of life in the New York advertising world by Jane Maas, a copywriter who succeeded in the primarily male jungle depicted in the hit show Mad Men.

Fans of the show are dying to know how accurate it is: was there really that much sex at the office? Were there really three-martini lunches? Were women really second-class citizens? Jane Maas says the answer to all three questions is unequivocally “yes.” Her book, based on her own experiences and countless interviews with her peers, gives the full stories, from the junior account man whose wife almost left him when she found the copy of Screw magazine he’d used to find “a date” for a client, to the Ogilvy & Mather’s annual Boat Ride, a sex-and-booze filled orgy, from which it was said no virgin ever returned intact. Wickedly funny and full of juicy inside information, Mad Women also tackles some of the tougher issues of the era, such as unequal pay, rampant, jaw-dropping sexism, and the difficult choice many women faced between motherhood and their careers.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Jane Maas

JANE MAAS began her career at Ogilvy & Mather as a copywriter in 1964 and rose to become a creative director and agency officer. Ultimately, she became president of a New York agency. A Matrix Award winner and an Advertising Woman of the Year, she is best known for her direction of the “I Love New York” campaign. She is the author of Adventures of an Advertising Woman and co-author of the classic How to Advertise, which has been translated into 17 languages.

Editorial Reviews

“How authentic is Peggy Olson, the young secretary-turned-copywriter on Mad Men? Very real, judging from the fun memoir Mad Women by Jane Maas, a real-life Olson…. Mad Women isn’t a straightforward memoir or companion book to the show. It’s more a witty, impressionistic whirl through 1960s Manhattan… Fans of the show will see echoes of the fictional Sterling Cooper ad men in Maas’ real-life colleagues. Maas is a great storyteller, and Mad Womenstands enough on its own that even those who have never seen the TV show can enjoy the book…. Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner could probably find a few good plots in the changes that Maas notes have so far escaped Sterling Cooper.” –The Hollywood Reporter

“I think of Jane Maas as a real-life Peggy Olsen. When I started at Ogilvy & Mather in 1971, a lowly Account Executive, she was already a creative director. She took me under her wing and taught me a lot about creative work that sells. Mad Women made me laugh. It also made me nostalgic for those legendary days when David Ogilvy roamed the corridors exhorting us all to come up with BIG IDEAS. And the book made me think again about working women. Jane reminds us that the challenge of being a good wife, a nurturing mother and a successful professional, all at the same time, still remains. In this respect, we are all Mad Women.” – Shelly Lazarus, Chairman of Ogilvy and Mather Worldwide

“Jane Maas has written a book about advertising that isn’t just for advertising people, although God knows they will find it fascinating. So will fans of Mad Men, who can compare the real thing with the TV series. Women of all ages will see themselves in its pages. Most of all, Mad Women is for anyone curious about what life was like in another century – - before computers, before cell phones, before equality.” – Laurel Cutler, groundbreaking futurist, 2011 inductee Advertising Hall of Fame

‘Mad Women’ by Jane Maas

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – March 23, 2012 (Excerpt)

“Does she or doesn’t she?” — the innuendo-filled catchphrase for Clairol from 1956 easily could have been conceived by “Mad Men’s” Don Draper.

It was not, of course, but rather was penned by one of the few female copywriters of her day. Jane Maas, also a pioneer in the nearly all-male world of advertising decades ago, pays homage to the hair color campaign by Shirley Polykoff in her new book, “Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ’60s and Beyond.”

A witty, personal account of the “real life Peggy Olson,” Maas details her climb from copywriter to creative director at Ogilvy & Mather to “Advertising Woman of the Year” for her work on the famous “I Love New York” campaign.

Maas admits she was not a fan of “Mad Men” at first. “It’s grown on me,” she said by phone interview from her home in New York, where she was happy to point out what they get right (and wrong) in the Emmy-winning AMC show, which begins its fifth season Sunday.

Was there really that much sex at the office? Yes. Was there really that much booze and cigarettes? “Yes and yes,” reveals the once-two-pack-a-day smoker. [Read the full article...]

Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer

Editor — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 18:09:11 +0000

Did you know that the most creative companies have centralized bathrooms? That brainstorming meetings are a terrible idea? That the color blue can help you double your creative output?

From the New York Times best-selling author of How We Decide comes a sparkling and revelatory look at the new science of creativity. Shattering the myth of muses, higher powers, even creative “types,” Jonah Lehrer demonstrates that creativity is not a single gift possessed by the lucky few. It’s a variety of distinct thought processes that we can all learn to use more effectively.

Lehrer reveals the importance of embracing the rut, thinking like a child, daydreaming productively, and adopting an outsider’s perspective (travel helps). He unveils the optimal mix of old and new partners in any creative collaboration, and explains why criticism is essential to the process. Then he zooms out to show how we can make our neighborhoods more vibrant, our companies more productive, and our schools more effective.

You’ll learn about Bob Dylan’s writing habits and the drug addictions of poets. You’ll meet a Manhattan bartender who thinks like a chemist, and an autistic surfer who invented an entirely new surfing move. You’ll see why Elizabethan England experienced a creative explosion, and how Pixar’s office space is designed to spark the next big leap in animation.

Collapsing the layers separating the neuron from the finished symphony, Imagine reveals the deep inventiveness of the human mind, and its essential role in our increasingly complex world.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Jonah Lehrer

JONAH LEHRER is a contributing editor at Wired and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. He writes the Head Case column for the Wall Street Journal and regularly appears on WNYC’s Radiolab. His writing has also appeared in Nature, the New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, and Outside. The author of two previous books, Proust Was a Neuroscientist and How We Decide, he graduated from Columbia University and attended Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.

Editorial Reviews

Combining cutting-edge neurological research with the age-old mystery of how and when inspiration strikes, Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works is a fun, engaging study of creativity. Lehrer uses case studies like 3M’s and Pixar’s innovative corporate cultures and Bob Dylan’s songwriting habits to frame scientific findings about the brain and where creativity comes from. You won’t find exercises to help you think more creatively or ways to avoid creative blocks in this book. Instead, you’ll learn how and why creativity is stimulated by certain activities—like looking at the color blue, traveling, or daydreaming productively—and how these activities stimulate creativity in everyone, not just in ‘creative’ people. Lehrer’s focus is as wide and fascinating as his topic itself and there’s something to engage every reader, no matter where you rate yourself on the creativity spectrum. –Malissa Kent, Amazon.Com Review

“Flummoxed by an intractable problem? You probably just need to work harder, right? Actually, try taking a walk instead. Thanks to how we’re hardwired, insight tends to strike suddenly—after we’ve stopped looking. In this entertaining Gladwell-esque plunge into the science of creativity, Jonah Lehrer mingles with a wide cast of characters—inventors, educators, scientists, a Pixar cofounder, an autistic surfing savant—to deconstruct how we accomplish our great feats of imagination. Notable themes emerge: Failure is necessary. The more people you casually rub shoulders with—on and off the job—the more good ideas you’ll have. And societies that unduly restrict citizens’ ability to borrow from the ideas of others—see our broken patent system—do so at their peril.” – Mother Jones

“Imagine argues that modern science allows us to identify and harness the many different thought processes from which creativity emerges . . . The book’s strength lies in specific examples—detailed stories about 3M, Pixar, Bob Dylan and Don Lee, the computer programmer who became a master mixer of quirky cocktails. These insightful tales make Imagine well worth the read.” - Scientific American

Fostering ‘Creativity’ In The Workplace

NPR Book Review – March 21, 2012 (Excerpt)

Beethoven would try as many as 70 different versions of a musical phrase before settling on the right one. But other great ideas seem to come out of the blue. Bob Dylan, for example, came up with the lyrics to the chorus for “Like a Rolling Stone” soon after telling his manager that he was creatively exhausted and ready to bail from the music industry. After going to an isolated cabin, Dylan got an uncontrollable urge to write and spilled out his thoughts in dozens of pages — including the lyrics to the iconic song.

Scientists are now learning more about how such moments occur, says science writer Jonah Lehrer. His new book,Imagine: How Creativity Works, explores where innovative thoughts originate and explains how some companies are now working to create environments where they’re more likely to occur.

“Moments of insight are a very-well studied psychological phenomenon with two defining features,” Lehrer tells Fresh Air‘s Dave Davies. “The answer comes out of the blue – when we least expect it. … [And] as soon as the answer arrives we know this is the answer we’ve been looking for. … The answer comes attached with a feeling of certainty, it feels like a revelation. These are the two defining features of a moment of insight, and they do seem to play a big role in creativity.”

Scientists have determined that people in a relaxed state and a good mood are far more likely to develop innovative or creative thoughts. And companies are now taking advantage of this fact. Lehrer points to 3M, which started out making packaging tape and has now expanded into other sectors including electronics and pharmaceutical delivery. [Read the full article...]

“Imagine: How Creativity Works,” by Jonah Lehrer

The Washington Post Book Review – March 23, 2012 (Excerpt)

Not many writers can make plausible links among musicians Bob Dylan, Yo-Yo Ma and David Byrne, animators at Pixar, neuroscientists at MIT, an amateur bartender in New York, entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and Israeli army reservists. Not many reporters do research about an expert surfer who has Asperger’s, information theorists, industrial psychologists and artists. But Jonah Lehrer is such a writer-reporter, who weaves compelling and surprising connections based on detailed investigation and deep understanding. He says that working memory is an essential tool of the imagination, and his book is an excellent example of how a dynamic storehouse of captivating information feeds creative thinking and writing.

Lehrer begins with the story of a pop-culture breakthrough, the artistic reinvigoration that Dylan experienced when he wrote “Like a Rolling Stone.” Dylan was finishing a grueling tour schedule that had left him increasingly dissatisfied with making music. He decided to leave behind the madness of celebrity culture and the repetitive demands of pop performance. But once he was ensconced in Woodstock, N.Y., once he decided to stop trying to write songs, the great song came: “It’s like a ghost is writing a song,” he said. “It gives you the song and it goes away. You don’t know what it means.” Lehrer adds, “Once the ghost arrived, all Dylan wanted to do was get out of the way.” [Read the full article...]

How to Cultivate Eureka Moments - ‘Imagine: How Creativity Works,’ by Jonah Lehrer

The New York Times Book Review – April 2, 2012 (Excerpt)

What makes the cartoon light bulb of creativity go off over someone’s head? What is the catalyst for groundbreaking inventions and innovative breakthroughs? In his illuminating new book, the journalist Jonah Lehrer explicates some now classic case studies. As he tells it:

The Nike slogan “Just Do It” materialized when Dan Wieden, a founder of the advertising agency Wieden & Kennedy, thought of the last words uttered by the murderer Gary Gilmore before his execution — “Let’s do it” — and gave them a tweak. That day a colleague had mentioned Norman Mailer, author of “The Executioner’s Song,” an acclaimed book about Gilmore, and that killer’s final words popped into Mr. Wieden’s head.

The idea for Post-it Notes came about when Arthur Fry, an engineer at 3M, was daydreaming in church, thinking how annoying it was that the bookmarks he’d placed in his hymnal so frequently fell out. He then remembered a 3M colleague’s talk about a new glue he’d developed: a paste so feeble that it could barely hold two pieces of paper together. That weak glue, Mr. Fry suddenly thought, might help him create the perfect bookmark, one that would stay put. [Read the full article...]

Boggle the Mind - ‘Imagine,’ by Jonah Lehrer

The New York Times Book Review – May 1, 2012 (Excerpt)

Have you ever wondered how Nike came by its famous slogan “Just Do It”? Neither have I, but it’s an interesting story. Dan Wieden was searching for a tag line to unify a series of ads his agency was making for Nike. Late one night he suddenly thought about the convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, whose last words before his execution were “Let’s do it.” Sitting at his desk Wieden turned that phrase over in his mind until it became “Just do it.” Accolades ensued.

Reflecting later, Wieden realized he’d thought of Gilmore because someone at work had mentioned Norman Mailer recently, and Wieden knew that Mailer had written a book about Gilmore. Without that serendipitous chain of associations, Nike might have wound up with a different slogan: “A sneaker is forever”? “Got kicks”?

Jonah Lehrer tells many stories like this in “Imagine: How Creativity Works.” Along with admen, his examples come from famous musicians and poets, obscure scientists, even large corporations like 3M and Eli Lilly. He deploys them to illustrate the science of creativity, and he derives from that science some tips for readers to become more creative and for society to promote innovative thinking. [Read the full article...]

American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company by Bryce G. Hoffman

Editor — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 13:50:11 +0000

THE INSIDE STORY OF THE EPIC TURNAROUND OF FORD MOTOR COMPANY UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF CEO ALAN MULALLY.

At the end of 2008, Ford Motor Company was just months away from running out of cash. With the auto industry careening toward ruin, Congress offered all three Detroit automakers a bailout. General Motors and Chrysler grabbed the taxpayer lifeline, but Ford decided to save itself. Under the leadership of charismatic CEO Alan Mulally, Ford had already put together a bold plan to unify its divided global operations, transform its lackluster product lineup, and overcome a dysfunctional culture of infighting, backstabbing, and excuses. It was an extraordinary risk, but it was the only way the Ford family—America’s last great industrial dynasty—could hold on to their company.

Mulally and his team pulled off one of the greatest comebacks in business history. As the rest of Detroit collapsed, Ford went from the brink of bankruptcy to being the most profitable automaker in the world.

American Icon is the compelling, behind-the-scenes account of that epic turnaround. On the verge of collapse, Ford went outside the auto industry and recruited Mulally—the man who had already saved Boeing from the deathblow of 9/11—to lead a sweeping restructuring of a company that had been unable to overcome decades of mismanagement and denial. Mulally applied the principles he developed at Boeing to streamline Ford’s inefficient operations, force its fractious executives to work together as a team, and spark a product renaissance in Dearborn. He also convinced the United Auto Workers to join his fight for the soul of American manufacturing.

Bryce Hoffman reveals the untold story of the covert meetings with UAW leaders that led to a game-changing contract, Bill Ford’s battle to hold the Ford family together when many were ready to cash in their stock and write off the company, and the secret alliance with Toyota and Honda that helped prop up the American automotive supply base.

In one of the great management narratives of our time, Hoffman puts the reader inside the boardroom as Mulally uses his celebrated Business Plan Review meetings to drive change and force Ford to deal with the painful realities of the American auto industry.

Hoffman was granted unprecedented access to Ford’s top executives and top-secret company documents. He spent countless hours with Alan Mulally, Bill Ford, the Ford family, former executives, labor leaders, and company directors. In the bestselling tradition of Too Big to Fail and The Big Short, American Icon is narrative nonfiction at its vivid and colorful best.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Bryce G. Hoffman

BRYCE G. HOFFMAN is an award-winning journalist who has covered the auto industry, both in the United States and around the world, since 1998. He began covering Ford Motor Company for the Detroit News in 2005. That beat gave him a front-row seat for many of the events chronicled in American Icon. Hoffman has been honored by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press, and others for his coverage of Ford and is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the automaker. He lives in Grand Blanc, Michigan.

Editorial Reviews

“A Detroit News journalist’s in-the-room account of the resurrection of America’s most storied car company…With colorful anecdotes, sharp character sketches, telling details and a firm understanding of the industry, Hoffman fleshes out every aspect of this tale, reminding us of the hard work, tension, and high-stakes drama that preceded the successful result.” —Kirkus

“Bryce Hoffman has done a stellar job of capturing the Ford story—and more to the point showing us how Mulally did it. American Icon is a story of leadership that offers valuable lessons for organizations of all sizes.” —Lee Iacocca

“Bryce G. Hoffman’s American Icon brilliantly recounts the Lazarus-like resurgence of the Ford Motor Company under the bold and inspiring leadership of CEO Alan Mulally. Hoffman, one of America’s best auto industry reporters, has written a timely book about the relevance of Ford that serves as a larger metaphor for America at large. Highly recommend!” —Douglas Brinkley, professor of history, Rice University, and author of Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress

How Ford’s CEO Helped Restore The ‘American Icon’

NPR Book Review – March 12, 2012 (Excerpt)

Seven years ago, when journalist Bryce Hoffman started covering the Ford Motor Co. for The Detroit News, he knew he was either witnessing the end of an American icon or its resurrection.

Back then, Bill Ford Jr., great-grandson of founder Henry Ford, was still at the helm — but he wouldn’t be there much longer. In 2006, Ford brought Alan Mulally, a Boeing executive with no automotive experience, on as chief executive officer. At the time, many in Detroit questioned the hire. But three years later, when Chrysler and General Motors were filing for bankruptcy protection, Mulally helped Ford post its first annual profit since 2005.

In his new book, American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company, Hoffman explores how Mulally helped Ford avoid the fate of its fellow automakers. He describes the CEO as an older version of the character Richie Cunningham from the sitcom Happy Days, writing that he had “the same reddish-blond hair” and the “same gee-whiz grin.”

Hoffman tells Morning Edition‘s Renee Montagne how Ford changed under Mulally’s leadership, and what the CEO may yet want to accomplish before he retires. [Read the full article...]

Charlotte Au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood by Charlotte Silver

Editor — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 17:29:03 +0000

Like Eloise growing up in the Plaza Hotel, Charlotte Silver grew up in her mother’s restaurant. Located in Harvard Square, Upstairs at the Pudding was a confection of pink linen tablecloths and twinkling chandeliers, a decadent backdrop for childhood. Over dinners of foie gras and Dover sole, always served with a Shirley Temple, Charlotte kept company with a rotating cast of eccentric staff members. After dinner, in her frilly party dress, she often caught a nap under the bar until closing time. Her one constant was her glamorous, indomitable mother, nicknamed “Patton in Pumps,” a wasp-waisted woman in cocktail dress and stilettos who shouldered the burden of raising a family and running a kitchen. Charlotte’s unconventional upbringing takes its toll, and as she grows up she wishes her increasingly busy mother were more of a presence in her life. But when the restaurant-forever teetering on the brink of financial collapse-looks as if it may finally be closing, Charlotte comes to realize the sacrifices her mother has made to keep the family and restaurant afloat and gains a new appreciation of the world her mother has built.

Infectious, charming, and at times wistful, Charlotte au Chocolat is a celebration of the magic of a beautiful presentation and the virtues of good manners, as well as a loving tribute to the author’s mother-a woman who always showed her best face to the world.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Charlotte Silver

Charlotte Silver grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before attending Bennington College in Vermont. She studied writing at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and has been published in The New York Times. She lives in New York and Boston.

Editorial Reviews

“Child of artist-restauranteurs, Silver recalls a girlhood filled with pink linens, candied violets, and constant threat of financial ruin. But it’s her ode to her quirky, dazzling mom that makes the dish.”—Good Housekeeping

“Charlotte au Chocolat is simply exquisite. Savor it. Devour it. Silver has taken a cool-eyed, unsentimental look at her unique and strange childhood and made lavish, glorious art of it.”—Lily King, author of Father of the Rain

“Charlotte Silver has written a love song to a remarkable restaurant and a vanished world. I devoured these pages with the same enthusiasm as the author brings to pheasant’s legs and steak tartare on toast.”—Margot Livesey, author of Eva Moves the Furniture

In ‘Charlotte,’ Decadent Childhood Memories

NPR Book Reviews – March 4, 2012 (Excerpt)

Author Charlotte Silver describes her childhood as rich with food, experiences, odd (and wonderful) people. She grew up in her mother’s Cambridge, Mass., restaurant — Harvard Square’s Upstairs at the Pudding — a rather glamorous upbringing complete with foie gras and other delights.

In her new memoir, Charlotte au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood, Silver vividly tells the story of her adventures in the famed establishment. Named after a dessert created by her mother, Silver describes Upstairs at the Pudding as a historic building nestled above the Hasty Pudding Club, one of the oldest social clubs for Harvard students.

Silver tells NPR’s Rachel Martin that, as a child, she remembers Upstairs at the Pudding as a building “not of this era,” and that the restaurant served as a “faculty clubhouse.” “It was so much part of Harvard,” she says. “You would often have famous professors and public intellectuals dining there, and it was also a place where celebrities came.” [Read the full article...]

In the Pink - ‘Charlotte au Chocolat,’ by Charlotte Silver

The New York Times Book Review – March 30, 2012 (Excerpt)

“For a long time, I assumed that bow ties — not regular ties — were the usual thing for men to wear,” Charlotte Silver writes in her wistful memoir, “Charlotte au Chocolat.” Such were the perils of growing up in the same building as the Hasty Pudding Club, Harvard’s oldest social club, where for 20 years Silver’s mother, Deborah Hughes, along with a business partner, Mary-Catherine Deibel, ran the four-star restaurant Upstairs at the Pudding, housed on the club’s third floor.

“Boston was still a baked-beans-and-broiled-scrod kind of town then,” Silver reminds us. Proto-locavores, the restaurant’s proprietors were locally sourcing their ingredients long before hipster chefs in Brooklyn and Copenhagen got the idea: “My mother air-kissed the woman who dug our Wellfleet clams out of the sea with her own hands and the man who foraged for our wild mushrooms in the woods.” [Read the full article...]

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

Editor — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:32:40 +0000

A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.

Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern—and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.

An untested CEO takes over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is attacking a single pattern among his employees—how they approach worker safety—and soon the firm, Alcoa, becomes the top performer in the Dow Jones.

What do all these people have in common? They achieved success by focusing on the patterns that shape every aspect of our lives.

They succeeded by transforming habits.

In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.

Along the way we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. We visit laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation’s largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.

At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work.

Habits aren’t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Charles Duhigg

Charles Duhigg is an investigative reporter for The New York Times. He is a winner of the National Academies of Sciences, National Journalism, and George Polk awards, and was part of a team of finalists for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. He is a frequent contributor to This American Life, NPR, PBS NewsHour, and Frontline. A graduate of Harvard Business School and Yale College, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two kids.

Editorial Reviews

“Charles Duhigg’s thesis is powerful in its elegant simplicity: confront the root drivers of our behavior, accept them as intractable, and then channel those same cravings into productive patterns. His core insight is sharp, provocative, and useful.”
—Jim Collins, #1 bestselling author of Good to Great and Built to Last

“The Power of Habit is not a magic pill but a thoroughly intriguing exploration of how habits function. Charles Duhigg expertly weaves fascinating new research and rich case studies into an intelligent model that is understandable, useful in a wide variety of contexts, and a flat-out great read. His chapter on ‘keystone habits’ alone would justify the book.”
—David Allen, bestselling author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

“Charles Duhigg masterfully combines cutting-edge research and captivating stories to reveal how habits shape our lives and how we can shape our habits. Once you read this book, you’ll never look at yourself, your organization, or your world quite the same way.”
—Daniel H. Pink, author of #1 New York Times bestselling Drive and A Whole New Mind

How You Can Harness ‘The Power Of Habit’

NPR Book Review – February 27, 2012 (Excerpt)

The 19th century psychologist William James observed, “All our life … is but a mass of habits.”

Ad men in the 20th century took this aphorism to heart. It wasn’t enough to simply sell a product; the goal was to hook consumers and keep them coming back.

In his new book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Charles Duhigg, a business reporter for The New York Times, explains how some companies have achieved enormous success by altering people’s habits. By luck or design, they’ve been tapping into a powerful psychological pattern: the “habit loop.”

The habit loop is a three-part process. First, “there’s a cue, which is kind of a trigger for an automatic behavior to start unfolding,” Duhigg tells Morning Edition‘s Renee Montagne. “There’s a routine, which is the behavior itself … and then there’s a reward, which tells our brain whether we should store this habit for future use or not.”

Toothpaste is a perfect example of how companies put the habit loop to use. About a hundred years ago, says Duhigg, no one in America brushed his or her teeth. But when one of the nation’s most prominent advertising executives, Claude C. Hopkins, heard about a new toothpaste called Pepsodent, he thought he could make a killing.

“Claude C. Hopkins had made his name creating habits around products and making them famous,” Duhigg says. “He had these two simple rules: make a product into a daily habit — find some simple cue, something that’s going to trigger the consumer — and second of all, you have to give them the reward. … He intuited [the habit loop] years before laboratories had proven that it exists.” [Read the full article...]

Habits: How They Form And How To Break Them

NPR Book Review – March 5, 2012 (Excerpt)

Think about something it took you a really long time to learn, like how to parallel park. At first, parallel parking was difficult and you had to devote a lot of mental energy to it. But after you grew comfortable with parallel parking, it became much easier — almost habitual, you could say.

Parallel parking, gambling, exercising, brushing your teeth and every other habit-forming activity all follow the same behavioral and neurological patterns, says New York Timesbusiness writer Charles Duhigg. His new book The Power of Habit explores the science behind why we do what we do — and how companies are now working to use our habit formations to sell and market products to us. [Read the full article...]

Can’t Help Myself - ‘The Power of Habit,’ by Charles Duhigg

The New York Times Book Review – March 9, 2012 (Excerpt)

Human consciousness, that wonderful ability to reflect, ponder and choose, is our greatest evolutionary achievement. But it is possible to have too much of a good thing, and fortunately we also have the ability to operate on automatic pilot, performing complex behaviors without any conscious thought at all. One way this happens is with lots of practice. Tasks that seem impossibly complex at first, like learning how to play the guitar, speak a foreign language or operate a new DVD player, become second nature after we perform those actions many times (well, maybe not the DVD player). “If practice did not make perfect,” William James said, “nor habit economize the expense of nervous and muscular energy, he” (we, that is) “would therefore be in a sorry plight.”

But of course there is a dark side to habits, namely that we acquire bad ones, like smoking or overeating. I imagine that most people — save, perhaps, for a friend of mine who said, in reaction to a news story about the dangers of hypertension, “I’ve given up all of my vices; please don’t take away my salt!” — would love to find an easy way of breaking a bad habit or two.

Charles Duhigg, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, has written an entertaining book to help us do just that, “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.” Duhigg has read hundreds of scientific papers and interviewed many of the scientists who wrote them, and relays interesting findings on habit formation and change from the fields of social psychology, clinical psychology and neuroscience. This is not a self-help book conveying one author’s homespun remedies, but a serious look at the science of habit formation and change. [Read the full article...]

Book review: ‘The Power of Habit’ by Charles Duhigg

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – April 9, 2012 (Excerpt)

When Paul O’Neill took over the floundering Aluminum Co. of America in October 1987, he shocked attendees at an introductory news conference by proclaiming that his focus would not be on expanding sales or improving profitability. Rather, he said, his emphasis would be on improving employee safety. Investors at the conference thought he was crazy and rushed from the room to tell their clients to sell Alcoa stock immediately. “It was literally the worst piece of advice I gave in my entire career,” one later said.

O’Neill instituted wide-ranging programs to increase safety in what was previously a dangerous industry, empowering employees to offer suggestions and ensuring that accidents were immediately brought to the attention of executives. As the accident rate declined — ultimately to about 5% of the national average — something funny happened. Communication among employees increased, line workers offered other suggestions to improve efficiency, and the company underwent a renaissance. Within a year, Alcoa’s profits reached a record level. By the time O’Neill retired in 2000, the company’s stock was worth five times as much as when he started. [Read the full article...]

The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth by Joseph Turow

Editor — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 11:32:30 +0000

The Internet is often hyped as a means to enhanced consumer power: a hypercustomized media world where individuals exercise unprecedented control over what they see and do. That is the scenario media guru Nicholas Negroponte predicted in the 1990s, with his hypothetical online newspaper The Daily Me—and it is one we experience now in daily ways. But, as media expert Joseph Turow shows, the customized media environment we inhabit today reflects diminished consumer power. Not only ads and discounts but even news and entertainment are being customized by newly powerful media agencies on the basis of data we don’t know they are collecting and individualized profiles we don’t know we have. Little is known about this new industry: how is this data being collected and analyzed? And how are our profiles created and used? How do you know if you have been identified as a “target” or “waste” or placed in one of the industry’s finer-grained marketing niches? Are you, for example, a Socially Liberal Organic Eater, a Diabetic Individual in the Household, or Single City Struggler? And, if so, how does that affect what you see and do online?

Drawing on groundbreaking research, including interviews with industry insiders, this important book shows how advertisers have come to wield such power over individuals and media outlets—and what can be done to stop it.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Joseph Turow

Joseph Turow is Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication, Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of eight books, including Niche Envy: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age. He lives in Bala-Cynwyd, PA.

Editorial Reviews

Joe Turow pulls back the curtain on the secretive practices that define the online experience for almost all Internet users. Informative, engaging, and often alarming, The Daily You should be the starting point for a national campaign to bring accountability and transparency to the world of online advertising.”—Marc Rotenberg, Electronic Privacy Information Center and Georgetown University Law Center

“Joe Turow’s The Daily You is a gem of public-spirited scholarship and dogged reporting. It is full of startling insights about how deeply known we are to the people who are serving us personalized ads tied to personalized content based on the incredibly accurate, predictive profiles that are assembled about us from the digital and real-world details we reveal – often unwittingly – about ourselves. Turow is the best kind of trail guide for those who care about the widespread commercial, cultural, and political implications of these developments. Take heed.”—Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Research Center”s Internet & American Life Project

“As he has throughout his career studying media and its social impact, Turow gets us beyond the simplistic ‘digital privacy’ meme and opens a much richer theme: social profiling. Through the audience segmentation digital media seems hell bent on perfecting, we risk handing over to others something more precious than our personal ‘data.’ We may be giving people we don’t know—and certainly never elected—control over what information we get, what offers and access we receive, and what opportunities we and our families may or may not enjoy. Privacy? Small potatoes compared to the larger social issues Joe is highlighting here.”—Steve Smith, Digital Media Editor at Media Industry Newsletter

How Companies Are ‘Defining Your Worth’ Online

NPR Book Review – February 22, 2012 (Excerpt)

One of the fastest-growing online businesses is the business of spying on Internet users. Using sophisticated software that tracks people’s online movements through the Web, companies collect the information and sell it to advertisers.

Every time you click a link, fill out a form or visit a website, advertisers are working to collect personal information about you, says Joseph Turow, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. They then target ads to you based on that information.

On Wednesday’s Fresh Air, Turow — the author of the bookThe Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth — details how companies are tracking people through their computers and cellphones in order to personalize the ads they see.

Turow tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that tracking is ubiquitous across the Internet, from search engines to online retailers and even greeting card companies. A recent Valentine’s Day card sent to his wife, for instance, contained trackers from 15 separate companies.

“[Advertisers] might make inferences about me and romance, they might make inferences — right or wrong — about my age, they might know where I did this — because of some sense of where my computer is, my IP address,” he says. “There are a lot of things they can infer about me even from [a greeting card].” [Read the full article...]

Paper Promises: Debt, Money, and the New World Order by Philip Coggan

Editor — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:39:17 +0000

For the past forty years western economies have splurged on debt. Now, as the reality dawns that many debts cannot be repaid, we find ourselves again in crisis. But the oncoming defaults have a time-worn place in our economic history. As with the crises in the 1930s and 1970s, governments will fall, currencies will lose their value, and new systems will emerge. Just as Britain set the terms of the international system in the nineteenth century, and America in the twentieth century, a new system will be set by today’s creditors in China and the Middle East. In the process, rich will be pitted against poor, young against old, public sector workers against taxpayers and one country against another.

In Paper Promises, Economist columnist Philip Coggan helps us to understand the origins of this mess and how it will affect the new global economy by explaining how our attitudes towards debt have changed throughout history, and how they may be about to change again.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Philip Coggan

Philip Coggan is the Buttonwood columnist of the Economist. Previously, he worked for the Financial Times for twenty years, most recently as investment editor. Among his books are The Money Machine, a guide to the city of London that is still in print in the UK after twenty-five years, and The Economist Guide to Hedge Funds.

Editorial Reviews

Financial Times
“Bold and confident … Coggan covers the terrain with characteristic calmness and objectivity, avoids over-simplification, and laces his arguments with his trademark erudition … The alphabet soup of acronyms, from SIVs to CDO Squareds, is blissfully lacking … Finally, the book is free from the shrieking ideology that afflicts virtually all contemporary debates over money. Indeed, it offers a clear explanation of the fresh ideological divisions that have arisen over how to deal with the crisis … the book should be taken very seriously.”

Publishers Weekly, October 31, 2011
“Coggan traces ‘history’s tug of war between monetary shortage and excess’ in this engaging and timely book about the current financial crisis…. Thoughtful and thorough.”

Kirkus, November 15, 2011
“Comprehensive…. A helpful analysis for anyone who wants to know how the world got into the present financial mess, which issues need to be addressed and what the consequences might be.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan
“This book stands way above anything written on the present economic crisis.”

Amid Debt Crisis, A Trail Of Broken ‘Promises’

NPR Book Review – February 7, 2012 (Excerpt)

Financial writer Philip Coggan traces the current global financial crisis to the 1970s, when the U.S. went off the gold standard.

“Up till then, every form of money had some link to precious metal: gold or silver,” Coggan, author of a new book, Paper Promises: Debt, Money and the New World Order, tells Morning Edition‘s Renee Montagne.

Coggan, who writes about finance for the Economist magazine, explains that before that time, the U.S. used gold to back the dollar; other countries could exchange their currency for American gold. But when President Nixon went off the gold standard, “essentially you had no limit on the amount of money that could be created and no limit on the amount of debt that could be created.”

The result, he says: asset bubbles.

Debt was used to buy assets, which rose in price and then burst. He points to Black Monday in 1987, when global financial markets crashed and the Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 20 percent. Those same factors, he says, led to the dot-com bubble of the 1990s and the more recent housing bubble. When bubbles burst, central banks stepped in and cut interest rates to keep the system afloat.

“The result of all that was that it was kind of a one-way bet for speculators: Keep borrowing money to keep buying assets; central banks will always bail you out,” Coggan says. “And that’s why we ended up in this mess that we are in … with lots of debts and central banks creating money to try and prop the whole system up.” [Read the full article...]

Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives by Ruth W. Grant

Editor — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:00:02 +0000

Incentives can be found everywhere–in schools, businesses, factories, and government–influencing people’s choices about almost everything, from financial decisions and tobacco use to exercise and child rearing. So long as people have a choice, incentives seem innocuous. But Strings Attached demonstrates that when incentives are viewed as a kind of power rather than as a form of exchange, many ethical questions arise: How do incentives affect character and institutional culture? Can incentives be manipulative or exploitative, even if people are free to refuse them? What are the responsibilities of the powerful in using incentives? Ruth Grant shows that, like all other forms of power, incentives can be subject to abuse, and she identifies their legitimate and illegitimate uses.

Grant offers a history of the growth of incentives in early twentieth-century America, identifies standards for judging incentives, and examines incentives in four areas–plea bargaining, recruiting medical research subjects, International Monetary Fund loan conditions, and motivating students. In every case, the analysis of incentives in terms of power yields strikingly different and more complex judgments than an analysis that views incentives as trades, in which the desired behavior is freely exchanged for the incentives offered.

Challenging the role and function of incentives in a democracy, Strings Attached questions whether the penchant for constant incentivizing undermines active, autonomous citizenship. Readers of this book are sure to view the ethics of incentives in a new light.

About Ruth W. Grant

Ruth W. Grant is professor of political science and philosophy and a senior fellow of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. She is the author of “John Locke’s Liberalism” and “Hypocrisy and Integrity”.

Editorial Reviews

“Strings Attached offers a fascinating tour of the history, morality, and unintended consequences of the modern obsession with using incentives to change behavior. Exploring cases from plea bargaining in criminal courts to paying students to earn good grades, Grant compellingly argues that using material incentives to get people to do things they otherwise would not raises important and previously unexamined questions about ethics, power, and character.”–Lynn Stout, University of California, Los Angeles

“This remarkable book asks some deceptively simple questions: With what norms should we judge the use of incentives? How can we compare incentives to coercion and persuasion? With characteristically lucid prose and a productive blend of theory and case studies, Ruth Grant illuminates an often neglected arena of inquiry. At a time when philosophers advocate ‘libertarian paternalism’ as an alternative to coercion and governments deploy ‘conditional cash transfers’ as instruments of social policy, Grant’s reflections could hardly be more relevant.”–William Galston, The Brookings Institution

“Moving comfortably from Plato, modern philosophy, and organizational science to plea bargaining, medical research, and IMF loans, this impressive book lays bare some of the ethical complexities raised by the use of incentives in various social and political contexts. A comprehensive look at an underanalyzed topic, this book is a pleasure to read.”–Alan Wertheimer, National Institutes of Health

When Life Is a Bunch of Carrots

The New York Times Book Review – February 4, 2012 (Excerpt)

WHAT does it mean to treat human behavior as if everyone has a price? That’s the broad question animating “Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives” (Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton) by Ruth W. Grant.

When the government offers tax deductions for charitable donations, when a soup kitchen feeds the homeless on the condition that they attend church, or when the writer of a will attaches stipulations to a bequest — all these situations involve incentives.

Dr. Grant, a political science and philosophy professor and senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, says we tend to view such incentives as some form of voluntary trade. In fact, she says, they often indicate an imbalance of power, and thus raise ethical issues.

“How can legitimate uses of incentives be distinguished from illegitimate ones — bribery or blackmail, for example?” she asks. She puts forth three standards for evaluating incentives: legitimacy of purpose, the autonomy involved in choosing to accept an incentive, and the effect on the character of the parties involved.

She explains that the current notion of incentives emerged in three spheres in the early 20th century. The first was the young field of scientific management, in which Frederick Taylor experimented with paying workers by the task to increase productivity and reduce idleness. [Read the full article...]

Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World by Sam Sommers

Editor — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 19:43:12 +0000

An “entertaining and engaging” exploration of the invisible forces influencing your life-and how understanding them can improve everything you do.

The world around you is pulling your strings, shaping your innermost instincts and your most private thoughts. And you don’t even realize it.

Every day and in all walks of life, we overlook the enormous power of situations, of context in our lives. That’s a mistake, says Sam Sommers in his provocative new book. Just as a museum visitor neglects to notice the frames around paintings, so do people miss the influence of ordinary situations on the way they think and act. But frames- situations- do matter. Your experience viewing the paintings wouldn’t be the same without them. The same is true for human nature.

In Situations Matter, Sommers argues that by understanding the powerful influence that context has in our lives and using this knowledge to rethink how we see the world, we can be more effective at work, at home, and in daily interactions with others. He describes the pitfalls to avoid and offers insights into making better decisions and smarter observations about the world around us.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Sam Sommers

Sam Sommers is an award-winning teacher and researcher of social psychology at Tufts University outside Boston. His research specialties include how people think, communicate, and behave in diverse settings, as well as psychological perspectives on the U.S. legal system.

At Tufts Sommers is known for his engaging lecture style and has won multiple teaching awards, including being selected by the Student Senate as the Professor of the Year in 2009. (His wife would insist on mentioning that he was also voted by the student newspaper the “hottest” male professor on campus; however, being well-versed in the power of situations, he’d note that the honor had less to do with him than with the anything-but-fierce state of the competition.)

Sommers has given talks at dozens of colleges and universities, including Harvard, Yale, M.I.T., Dartmouth, Cornell, Emory, UMass, and Rutgers. His research has been featured by a wide range of media outlets, and he has testified as an expert witness in criminal trials in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Oregon.

In his free time, Sommers enjoys hanging out with his wife and two daughters, blogging on the Psychology Today website, batting lead-off for the vaunted Tufts Psychology summer softball team, and exerting more effort than he probably should editing Seinfeld and Daily Show clips for use in the classroom.

Editorial Reviews

“In this wonderful and witty book, Sam Sommers reveals one of the most important factors driving human nature. (Hint: Look around.) He demonstrates time and time again that who you are is shaped by where you are.” —Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide

“Understanding and appreciating the power of situations gives you a leg up in life, and Situations Matter is the best place to start investigating this challenge. It is excellent, entertaining reading for anyone interested in classic human questions about morality, conformity, and the real differences between men and women.” — Tyler Cowen, professor of economics, George Mason University, and author of Create Your Own Economy and The Great Stagnation

“It can be easy to overlook how ordinary situations shape behavior. It might seem like Sam Sommers is brilliant for choosing to write a book on this important topic, but he’d probably just explain that circumstance drove him to it. Still, we’re all lucky he did.” — Leonard Mlodinow, author of The Drunkard’s Walk and coauthor of The Grand Design

“Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World,” b y Sam Sommers

The Washington Post Book Review – February 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

Most of us consider ourselves to be objective, consistent people who make decisions that reflect our core principles, no matter what the situation. In “Situations Matter,” psychology professor Sam Sommers throws this common-sense notion out the window. Our environments are actually much more powerful than we think.

Statistics show that people are more likely to marry someone who lives in the same neighborhood than someone from farther away. And the idea that women are more nurturing and less aggressive by nature? An experiment that allowed women to anonymously blow their opponents away during video games showed that they were just as trigger-happy as the male participants. Our perceptions, both of ourselves and of the actions of others, are heavily influenced by context. We are, Sommers suggests, unconscious of the way that different scenarios can manipulate our seemingly objective understanding. [Read the full article...]

I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy by Lori Andrews

Editor — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 12:52:24 +0000

BUY THE BOOK AT

Social networks are the defining cultural movement of our time, empowering us in constantly evolving ways. We can all now be reporters, alerting the world to breaking news of a natural disaster; we can participate in crowd-sourced scientific research; and we can become investigators, helping the police solve crimes. Social networks have even helped to bring down governments. But they have also greatly accelerated the erosion of our personal privacy rights, and any one of us could become the victim of shocking violations at any time. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest nation in the world; but while that nation appears to be a comforting small town, in which we socialize with our selective group of friends, it and the rest of the Web is actually a lawless frontier of hidden and unpredictable dangers. The same power of information that can topple governments can destroy a person’s career or marriage.

As leading expert on social networks and privacy Lori Andrews shows, through groundbreaking in-depth research and a host of stunning stories of abuses, as we work and chat and shop and date (and even sometimes have sex) over the Web, we are opening ourselves up to increasingly intrusive, relentless, and anonymous surveillance—by employers, schools, lawyers, the police, and aggressive data aggregator services that compile an astonishing amount of information about us and sell it to any and all takers.

She reveals the myriad ever more sophisticated techniques being used to track us and discloses how routinely colleges and employers reject applicants due to personal information searches; robbers use postings about vacations to target homes for break-ins; lawyers readily find information to use against us in divorce and child custody cases; and at one school, the administrators actually used the cameras on students’ school-provided laptops to spy on them in their homes. Some mobile Web devices are even being programmed to listen in on us and feed data services a steady stream of information about where we are and what we are doing. And even if we use the best services to get our personal data removed from the Web, in a short time almost all that data is restored.

As Andrews persuasively argues, the legal system cannot be counted on to protect us—in the thousands of cases brought to trial by those whose rights have been violated, judges have most often ruled against them. That is why in addition to revealing the dangers and providing the best expert advice about protecting ourselves, Andrews proposes that we must all become supporters of a Constitution for the Web, which she has drafted and introduces in this book. Now is the time to join her and take action—the very future of privacy is at stake.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Lori Andrews

Lori Andrews is a law professor, a public interest lawyer and mystery novelist. She’s taught at Princeton, written for a television legal drama, and advised governments around the world about emerging technologies. Now she’s focusing on how social networks are changing our lives, for good and for ill.

Lori started her consumer activism when she was seven and her Ken doll went bald. Her letter to Mattel got action. She’s been fighting for people’s rights ever since.

A professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law, Lori frequently appears on television, including on Oprah, 60 Minutes, Good Morning America, and Nightline. The American Bar Association Journal calls her “a lawyer with a literary bent who has the scientific chops to rival any CSI investigator.”

Editorial Review

Unnerving narrative about the misuse of personal online information—without our knowledge—to track, judge and harm us in innumerable aspects of our lives.

Social-network executives often dismiss online privacy concerns: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it,” said Sun Microsystems’ Scott McNealy. But the constitutional freedoms of millions of people posting personal data on Facebook and other networks are violated routinely, and the law has not kept up with the new technology, writes lawyer Andrews (Institute for Science, Law and Technology/Illinois Institute of Technology; Immunity, 2008, etc.). Noting that social networks make their profits on users’ data, she describes the multibillion-dollar industry of data aggregators who mine online data for the advertising industry, often “weblining” people, denying them certain opportunities due to observations about their digital selves. Most users have no idea how much information is being collected about them: “People have a misplaced trust that what they post is private.” The results can be devastating: A Georgia teacher posted a photo showing her drinking a glass of Guinness at an Irish brewery, and she was forced to resign after the photo was e-mailed anonymously to her school superintendent. After seeing a mother’s MySpace page showing her posing provocatively in lingerie, a judge awarded custody of her young children to her husband. “Virtually every interaction a person has in the offline world can be tainted by social network information,” writes the author, who proposes creating a “Social Network Constitution” to govern our lives online. Her governing principles would protect against police searches of social networks without probable cause, require social networks to post conspicuous Miranda-like privacy warnings and set rules for the use or collecting of user information. – Kirkus Reviews

The Dangers of Sharing

The New York Times Book Review – January 27, 2012 (Excerpt)

It may surprise anyone under 16, but even before the advent of social networking we faced threats to our privacy. A hospital accidentally releasing patient records or a shady marketing firm engaging in Stasi-like data collection — such violations were substantial enough and disturbing enough to make the evening news. Today, however, the “death of privacy” is more like death by a thousand cuts: information leaks out slowly and invisibly, and so routinely that we’re hardly shocked when it does. Internet companies, which use the word “sharing” almost as a euphemism for “oops,” like to pretend these lapses are normal, even natural. If Mark Zuckerberg’s private photos are up for grabs (as when a recent glitch exposed his Facebook account), what can the rest of us expect?

Such sloppy reasoning is under fire in “I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy,” by Lori Andrews, a law professor and bioethicist whose previous books include “The Clone Age” and “Body Bazaar.” For Andrews, the Internet is a natural subject. She ventures far beyond the social networks of her subtitle to consider the ramifications of search engines, data mining, targeted “behavioral” advertising and other technologies. Likewise, she covers a range of issues beyond privacy, including discrimination in the workplace and free speech in schools.

Some of her questions are challenging and potentially explosive. Is it valid to expect judges to refrain from “friending” lawyers they work with? Should sitting jurors be prevented from using social media? If a parent once wrote on Twitter that he or she didn’t want children, should that statement be admissible in custody hearings? [Read the full article...]

Collaborate or Perish!: Reaching Across Boundaries in a Networked World by William Bratton And Zachary Tumin

Editor — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:48:52 +0000

BUY THE BOOK AT

In Collaborate or Perish! former Los Angeles police chief and New York police commissioner William Bratton and Harvard Kennedy School’s Zachary Tumin lay out a field-tested playbook for collaborating across the boundaries of our networked world. Today, when everyone is connected, collaboration is the game changer. Agencies and firms, citizens and groups who can collaborate, Bratton and Tumin argue, will thrive in the networked world; those who can’t are doomed to perish.

No one today is better known around the world for his ability to get citizens, governments, and industries working together to improve the safety of cities than William Bratton. At Harvard, Zachary Tumin has led senior executives from government and industry in executive sessions and classrooms for over a decade, burnishing a global reputation for insight and leadership. Together, Bratton and Tumin draw on in-depth accounts from Fortune 100 giants such as Alcoa, Wells Fargo, and Toyota; from masters of collaboration in education, social work, and the military; and from Bratton’s own storied career. Among the specific strategies they reveal:

• Start collaboration with a broad vision that supporters can add to and make their own
• Rightsize problems, and get value in the hands of users fast
• Get the right people involved—from sponsors to grass roots
• Make collaboration pay in the right currency—whether recognition, rewards, or revenue

Today companies and managers face unique challenges—and opportunities—in reaching out to others, thanks to the incredibly connected world in which we live. Bratton and Tumin provide practical strategies anyone can use, from the cubicle to the boardroom. This is the ultimate guide to getting things done in today’s networked world.

About William Bratton And Zachary Tumin

WILLIAM J. BRATTON is chairman of Kroll, one of Altegrity, Inc.’s three core businesses. Mr. Bratton joined Altegrity in November 2009 after serving as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department for seven years. Prior, he served as chief of the New York City Transit Police and commissioner of the Boston Police Department and the New York City Police Department. A frequent lecturer, writer, and commentator, Bill Bratton is known as one of the world’s premier police chiefs. Mr. Bratton also serves on the Motorola Solutions board of directors. In 2009 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II recognized Bratton with the honorary title of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE).

ZACHARY TUMIN is special assistant to the director and faculty chair of Harvard Kennedy School’s Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program, the most recent of a number of key posts that Mr. Tumin has held at the school. In addition to leading research programs and executive teaching at Harvard, Mr. Tumin served in senior executive roles for industry and government, including as head of public safety for the New York City public schools, on the executive staffs of the Brooklyn District Attorney and the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, and as director of the Financial Services Technology Consortium. A frequent lecturer, Mr. Tumin is also author of numerous teaching cases, working papers, reports, and essays.

Editorial Review

It would be hard to argue that collaboration was ever an entirely alien concept in government, business or private spheres. What former Boston, New York City and Los Angeles police chief Bratton (The Turnaround, 1998) and co-author Tumin assert is that technologically up-to-the-moment collaboration is now virtually a matter of survival. Either learn to create shared-goal cyber platforms linking all the players or, as they exclaim in their title, perish! With Bratton drawing on his front-line policing experiences, the authors present a series of highly informative, wide-ranging and frequently unsettling examples showing the rapidly expanding impact of collaboration-enhancing technology. They also suggest techniques for effective collaboration, ranging from right-sizing problems to coercing participation, if it comes to that. Their purpose, they write, is to share the wisdom they have gathered over their 40-year careers from government leaders, top executives, managers, researchers and others. “It is a book that will help you collaborate better,” they write, “and get on with the business of transforming the world as it is into the world that should be”—though they never get around to explaining the exact nature of that world. That it might be repressive, given the immense new powers of top-down control that come with collaboration as the book defines it, never arises as a topic. – Kirkus Reviews

Borrow: The American Way of Debt by Economic Historian Louis Hyman

Editor — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:28:40 +0000

In this lively history of consumer debt in America, economic historian Louis Hyman demonstrates that today’s problems are not as new as we think.

Borrow examines how the rise of consumer borrowing—virtually unknown before the twentieth century—has altered our culture and economy. Starting in the years before the Great Depression, increased access to money raised living standards but also introduced unforeseen risks. As lending grew more and more profitable, it displaced funds available for business borrowing, setting our economy on an unsustainable course. Told through the vivid stories of individuals and institutions affected by these changes, Borrow charts the collision of commerce and culture in twentieth-century America, giving an historical perspective on what is new—and what is not—in today’s economic turmoil.

About Louis Hyman

Louis Hyman attended Columbia University, where he received a BA in history and mathematics. A former Fulbright scholar and a consultant at McKinsey & Co., he received his PhD in American history in 2007 from Harvard University. He is currently an assistant professor in Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, where he teaches history.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

“The story of how Americans learned to love debt—and became dangerously addicted to it. Anyone who has ever wondered how we got into the mess we are now in must read this powerful book.”
—Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers’ Republic

“The author traces consumer debt beginning in the 1910s and through the 1920s, when personal loans became legal and mortgages were in demand. After WWII, consumption continued to be financed by debt, particularly television sets. . . . As the century progressed, we learn about the rise of discount stores over department stores, loans financed by issuing corporate debt, securitization, and credit cards. Hyman indicates that although policymakers declare the worst of our current financial crisis ended in mid-2009, important causes continue, and he concludes, ‘Debt, along with every other aspect of capitalism, is something that we have created and have the capacity to master.’ This is an excellent book.”
—Booklist

“Stocked with colorful personalities and trenchant insights, Hyman’s lucid, entertaining, and timely treatise illuminates the murky processes by which debt became the troubled center of economic life.”
—Publishers Weekly

“An evenhanded account aimed at the general reader baffled by today’s economic crisis. From Model-Ts to TVs to McMansions, Hyman uncovers the credit story behind all the glittering prizes and offers a prescription to prevent the American Dream from turning into the American Nightmare.”
—Kirkus Reviews