I am the least smart person in the family and proud of it.
Both daughters are bright, smart, intelligent, personable, and, I am unbiased saying this, drop-dead pretty.
They read in very different styles. Younger one “binge read.” She attacks a book by burying in it. Older one used to read with a computer on her side. When we were in Lake Tahoe, I noticed that she no longer. Instead, she scribbled on this blank paper bookmark once in a while.
I now hold a pen when I read. But I just scribble on the title page when something triggered a thought.
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The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century Thomas L. Friedman ISBN: 0374292884 |
Honestly, right after China Inc., I did not want to read another book on globalization. But Vijay gave us each a copy when we were in Bangalore.
I binged it on the flights to US. Hey, if there is one thing this business travel is good for. I read a lot more now.
“Vanilla just won't put food on the table anymore,” Tom Friedman tried waking up Americans. “You have to offer something totally unique.” In this flattened world, everyone competes globally. Whatever you have that was good enough for the village, town, city, state, or even country. It is no longer. It must be the best, or most unique, in the world. Tom Friedman told a story of China selling Virgin of Guadalupe statuette in Mexico. It is not exactly a high-cost country, it has a huge distance advantage, and the statuette is it's own patron saint. Yet China has taken over this market by simply making the statuettes better and cheaper.
“Would Americans wake up,” I thought when I finished the book on the flight back to Beijing. “No.” IT professionals, just like auto workers in the mid-80's, are in deep denial. Instead of upgrading their skills, they spend the precious time protecting their “ways of life” and pretending their jobs cannot possibly be offshored.
Tom put it clearly. There are only 4 untouchables who cannot be offshored: special, specialized, anchored, and adaptive. Honestly, for us “normal” people, the only hope is to be adaptive. This means the way of life of getting a job after a technical degree and enjoy football over beers every weekend is no more. To survive, one must be upgrading himself constantly. Never rest, always embrace changes. It does not matter one likes this new lifestyle or not. There are billions of people over there doing exactly that. They don't mind drinking your beers, when they take over your job. Detroit has proven, unionization does not work. You compete or the factory closes. The way of life is gone.
That just does not sound American. Does it?
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Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Michael Lewis ISBN: 0393324818 |
Moneyball is a much lighter book. It is my first ever on baseball and I learned a lot.
Major League Baseball (MLB) is a complicated sport with a very rich history. The heart of the game is the players who entered the feeder system via high-school or college drafts. The new entrants to the system go into the minor league where they are paid meagerly and watched all the time.
Once they are considered good enough. They are brought up to the “big game” where fame and money shower on them. The system is ruthless. When the talent is no longer needed, or not good enough, the player will be dropped back to the minor leaque or traded away.
Michael Lewis depicts the strange and arcane system most teams use to evaluate the players. As a contrast, Oakland A's general manager, Billy Beane, does it differently. Gosh, he was scientific. The revolutionary general manager that has a vision and the intensity to change. Clearly, he also enjoys autonomy from the owner to run the team his way, as long as he keeps on winning.
Billy Beane has a system that gives each player an “expected score per dollar” evaluation. Simply put, the objective is to win. To win a game, you must score. For baseball, scoring is a mixture of luck and player talents. If there exists a system to give the expected score of a player, per game, you can then compute the expected score of the game, given the totality of all players. Statistically, if you have enough “runs” (baseball's term on scoring), you are likely to win.
Beane's system is complicated, since players have positions in defense and try to slug when they are at bat. The system must evaluate both defensive skills and offensive ones. It is further constrained by the budget allocated by the owner. The general manager's job then becomes running a complicated linear optimization — win enough games to enter playoff with the least amount of money. Billy Beane is so good that he routinely beats other teams that have much larger budget.
Strangely, this is more a management book than baseball. I read Michael Liewis's Liar's Poker years ago. This one is as much a pager turner.
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