Book Review: Microtrends

This book looked interesting given its topic and the praise placed upon it.  It is positioned as a book that highlights small occurrences in society, and their potential impact.  The beginning highlights areas where opportunity exists to improve and in some cases make money on these trends.  The author has a successful background as a pollster, so I felt there would be substance that would be valuable to my life.  Unfortunately after the first 200 pages I found myself victim to political rhetoric, and finding little analysis or expansion on the “so what” to the trends highlighted.  I finished the book by jumping to topics (trends) that looked interesting.  The book is very fast read (less than 4 hours), but compared to the book I read before (Free to Choose) there was a lacking of thought leadership.

Bottom Line:  If you want to hear political rhetoric and be constantly prodded towards a particular political party and more specifically a presidential candidate this book is for you.  If you are able to ignore those additions and looking for a different perspective of what our world will look like in ten years – this may be your book.

James

Book Review: Free to Choose

It was recommended that I check out some works by Milton Friedman given my passion for economics, chaos theory, and developing patterns.  What is fun about this book is that it was written in the late 1970s (or at least the primary examples are from this period), and the author makes scientific arguments on problems and proposes solutions.  The reason this is fun, and your mileage may vary, is you as the reader can judge the author’s guidance and analysis because the world has changed!  Consider the books that are available today advocating XYZ – whether government policy, business strategy, etc….  Now think of the books that are still embraced today that were published 50 years ago?  Not many have survived the test of time, and it is because we are able to evaluate the author based on their proclamations and see how they apply to our current future.

Bottom line:   Buy the book and read it cover to cover.  It will take a bit longer than average because you, most likely, will need to do a bit of Googling on some subjects.  I often found myself saying “What!  Is that department still around… is that ‘problem’ still a problem.”  As in any book of this nature, watch for any political undertones and definitely check out some counter arguments to balance out your own perspectives.

Best,

James

Book Review: Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning

Finished this book while flying back from RSA hoping to find some quantifiable methods that could be applied to business risk management and security threats.  An area that is wholly lacking in specifics.  The book presented good business overviews and analysis of existing firms – in a Good to Great kind of approach.  The authors presented a framework that provided commonalities between each successful company identified.  While there may be a fallacy of induction in some of their results, I thought their analysis to be intriguing and beneficial.

Bottom Line:  I have been able to apply some of the metrics existing in example companies to my executive clients, but the linkage and application are not simple.  I would advise first reading books that focus on statistics and provide the meat and bones used for performing analytics prior to reading this book again.

James

Batch Resize Images in Photoshop

I recently had to resize 48 images of various types and formats into 20×40 images.  I am not an expert in Photoshop and started manually making changes.  I noticed the Batch action available in the file menu (when saving the 4th file for those curious), and after a quick google search found this GREAT article.

Follow it explicitly (except don’t SAVE the file choose DONE.  Saving the file in the custom action results in every file in the batch being saved as that file – and subsequently rewriting every previous effort).

Enjoy the added efficiency, and like my friend David used to say – get a sandwich while it works…

James

Book Review: Jim Cramer’s Real Money

After watching, avoiding, becoming addicted, disgusted, and generally amused by Jim Cramer’s television personality I thought a richer understanding of the man and his methods was worthwhile. (I believe it is better to understand someone fully and truely have an opinion, instead of those who make moral and practical judgements with lesser information) So – the book was interesting. I enjoyed his positiveness and direct attitude (not once did he use the “it depends” statement). He presents a few very succinct strategies for investing, and makes it simple for anyone to understand how to invest. Bottom Line: I was buy it when it goes on sale in your area (I purchased it when Amazon was removing some excess inventory for 80% off cover price), Once you boil down what he outlines on paper – it follows common sense investing, but without his book some people would foolishly leave all their money in their employer – such as the financial experts at Bear Sterns.

Book Review: On the Origin of Wealth

I picked up this book with the hope of a deep analysis in what constitutes wealth and the many variations that may exist.  The author responds to this question and many others throughout the entire book.  The thesis that he provides is one based on the inadequacy and inaccuracy of traditional economic theory, and proposes a new theory that takes evolution, chaos theory, complex adaptive systems, and the work from other sciences.  Overall I enjoyed the book, and thought his digressions into analyzing businesses and social capital were very good.  So good in fact, that I plan to reread those sections independently of the entire text to truly consider their impact and value.
There are some points where the author champions a bit of political bantering, an unfortunate and obvious blemish on an otherwise well defined concept.

Bottom Line:  I would absolutely recommend the book, but perhaps stop 10 pages shy of the end, and forgive the author in a few places where he becomes a little to partisan.