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Why cars still matter

Fortune Editors — Fri, 11 May 2012 11:42:35 +0000

Rumors of the automobile's demise are persistent but wrong. A review of Paul Ingrassia's Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars.

By Alex Taylor III, senior editor-at-large

FORTUNE -- It has become an all-too familiar trope for the lazy writer or overworked editor: The American love affair with the automobile is over. The evidence for this assertion is usually shallow, and its half-life fleeting: a dip in new car sales, a hike in gasoline prices, an outbreak of road rage. Periods of slack economic growth tend to spawn a bumper crop of these reports, as strapped car buyers lean toward less-expensive new models.

Lately, a subset of this genre has gained popular currency: Young people are losing interest in cars. You can blame this on the energetic trend spotters at The New York Times. In a March 22 article, Times reporter Amy Chozick argued that "many young consumers today just do not care that much about cars," and asserted that this trend was "one of the most vexing problems facing the car industry."

I would argue that car manufacturers face many more vexing problems, such as meeting draconian fuel economy standards and avoiding another round of bankruptcies. But that's a topic for another day.

The Times story served as a signal for other news outlets to pile on. In search of explanations for this apparent phenomenon, the usual suspects were rounded up: high car prices, videogames, texting. Journalists dusted off familiar analogies with Japan, where economic stagnation and permanent congestion have long squeezed young consumers out of the car market.

Journalists trotted out a number of factoids to support their claims: The percentage of licensed drivers was declining, the number of miles driven was shrinking, bike racks were popping up everywhere. At least these arguments made more sense than an earlier analysis that extrapolated the accelerated scrappage rate from the Cash for Clunkers bill to conclude that the number of cars on the road was in long-term decline.

Reading between the lines of Paul Ingrassia's engaging new book, Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars, I uncovered a more likely villain: Interest in cars is declining due to a lack of exciting cars. (Full disclosure: Ingrassia and I have been friendly competitors for 20 years. No one works harder and knows more about the car business than he does, and he has a Pulitzer Prize to prove it).

Ingrassia identifies 15 cars that "defined large swaths of American culture, helped to shape their era, and uniquely reflected the spirit of their age." Unfortunately, that age has largely passed. Of the cars on Ingrassia's list, only the Toyota Prius from made its debut as recently as the year 2000. And while the Prius is a remarkable engineering achievement, nobody has ever called it exciting.

Ingrassia is a veteran journalist who currently serves as deputy editor-in-chief of Reuters News. He has studied the culture of Detroit's auto industry with the thoroughness of an anthropologist. He skillfully evokes the industry's glory years of the 1950s and 1960s, when big men like GM's Bill Mitchell created memorable cars like the 1963 Buick Riviera, the 1963 Corvette Stingray, and the 1970 Chevrolet Camaro.

Mitchell became GM's chief designer in 1959. Ingrassia describes him as having "terrific talent, a wicked sense of humor, and a combative personality." One night in New York when he had been over-served, Mitchell hijacked a horse-drawn carriage from Central Park and tried to drive it into a hotel lobby.

Mitchell was the stylist in charge when GM (GM) unveiled the '59 Cadillac at the height of the tailfin craze, and he had no trouble defending those distinctive if outlandish ornaments. "I say if you take the fins off the Cadillac, it's like taking the antlers of a deer," Mitchell declared. "You got a big rabbit."

Another memorable character: John Z. DeLorean. In 1964, when he was Pontiac's chief engineer, DeLorean dumped a 389-cubic-inch V-8 into a timid Tempest and created the GTO. DeLorean would later become better known for his multiple marriages and for dating actresses like Ursula Andress and Raquel Welch -- not typical behavior for a GM executive. Ingrassia writes: "On Thursday nights he would commandeer a General Motors jet from Detroit to Los Angeles, where a GM junior executive would meet him with keys to a company car and to a hotel room in Beverly Hills or Bel Air."

DeLorean later started his own car company, which collapsed in short order. GM's jets are also gone. Thanks to its bankruptcy and the government bailout, all GM execs now fly commercial. Meanwhile, innovative buccaneers like Mitchell and DeLorean are in short supply today. To paraphrase Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard: "They took the idols and smashed them. And who've we got now? Some nobodies. I am big. It's the pictures that got small."

Lee Iacocca appears as a leading character in the creation of two vehicles on Ingrassia's list, the Ford Mustang and the first minivans. He also helped popularize a third vehicle on the list, Chrysler's iconic Jeep. Now 87, Iacocca lives quietly in Bel Air. Back in the day, his battles with Henry Ford II were the talk of Detroit.

When Ford approved Iacocca's Mustang, he told him, "You have got your car. It had better work." It did, but the Mustang's success didn't help Iacocca in 1978 when Ford justified his dismissal by saying: "Well, sometimes you just don't like somebody." Iacocca moved to Chrysler and saved it from bankruptcy, wrote a best-selling book, and nearly ran for president, but he never got over the way he was treated by Ford.

Ingrassia calls the Chevrolet Corvair the most significant car of the post-World War II era, first because of its radical rear engine design and then because of its defective engineering, which brought consumer advocate Ralph Nader onto the national stage. He doesn't address the question about whether young people will become as passionate about cars as their parents and grandparents are. My guess is that they will need something to get passionate about: a car that isn't lower, longer, and wider like the '59 Cadillac, or cooler than a GTO, but that reflects their own values.

It could be an environmentally friendly, space-efficient car like the tiny Scion iQ, or a fuel sipper like the Toyota Prius plug-in. Or it might be a city car that combines the best features of both, like BMW's i3 electric car, which goes into production next year. We just need some big men to create them -- and an accomplished writer like Ingrassia to make them memorable.

More Weekly Reads

Steven Sears' The Indomitable Investor
Tom Bissell's Magic Hours
Michael J. Sandel's What Money Can't Buy
Vijay Govindarajan's and Chris Trimble's Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere
Bryce Hoffman's American Icon

Filed under: The Weekly Read

How to beat the street

Fortune Editors — Fri, 04 May 2012 10:57:19 +0000

Can ordinary investors really make money through good times and bad? A review of The Indomitable Investor, by Steven Sears.

By Scott Cendrowski, writer-reporter

FORTUNE -- Let's say you've never read a book on investing. You avoided Peter Lynch's advice on how to get one up on Wall Street, dodged all the Internet get-rich-quick schemes, brushed off your in-laws' efforts to get you to read Suze Orman, and finally steered clear of the various "crisis investing" titles that have appeared in the past few years.

If you've held off all these years, why buy an investing book today? For starters, stock markets obliterated billions of dollars of your money. Then they skyrocketed while many people -- probably including you -- sat on the sidelines. But there's also the inconvenient fact that most Americans are now on the hook for managing their own retirement assets in some form or another -- either in a 401(k) or IRA. You may have even already admitted it to yourself: It's time for you become a better investor.

Steven Sears' The Indomitable Investor offers an enticing premise. The author, a Barron's editor, promises to explain how investors can avoid Wall Street's countless pitfalls and build wealth in good times and bad. Sears begins with an awesome truth that would make every investor 10 times richer if they only knew it. "Bad investors think of ways to make money," Sears writes. "Good investors think of ways to not lose money."

Think of it in practice. Warren Buffett, the most successful investor of the last 100 years, didn't get rich executing trades each day from behind a Bloomberg terminal in Omaha. Instead, he became one of the world's richest men by buying low-priced stocks that gave him a margin of error if things went wrong. Buffett didn't blow up during disappointing years, either, which means his wealth compounded year after year after year. Buffett often jokes about the importance of compounding. His first rule of investing? Don't lose money. The second rule? Don't forget rule No. 1.

Unfortunately, Sears squanders this brilliant starting point. After the first chapter, The Indomitable Investor grows a tangle of conflicting advice and dubious tips that emphasize typical Wall Street ideas for stock trading, which are exactly what civilian investors should avoid. He offers advice from former Bear Stearns Chairman Ace Greenberg, who always sells losing stocks -- no excuses.

Should you always get rid of fallen stocks? Of course not. Stocks of good companies dip for all sorts of reasons on their way to long-term gains. Plus, Main Street investors can't afford the trading costs of churning through stocks like Wall Street traders.

Sears then argues that successful investors must follow economic cycles and indices such as the VIX fear index to understand when to hop in and out of market sectors and individual stocks. It's worth noting, however, that the VIX and ISM economic reports are some of the most widely followed reports in the investing world. Yet tracking them didn't save anyone in 2008.

Sears often sounds like a day trader in this book. That makes sense given that his day job is covering the options market for Barron's. It's not that he can't provide wise insights, but his advice seems distorted from covering market gyrations on a second-by-second basis.

The truth is that successful investing is among life's harder pursuits. Great investors often possess traits unlike yours and mine, and they act in ways that often contradict basic human behavior. Take Buffet again. There was a time in the early 1990s when he publicly supported Wells Fargo (WFC) stock because the bank's shares were cheap enough to protect against further losses and offered enormous upside. But everyone else was focused on the bank's terrible real estate loans.

A trio of well-regarded short selling brothers went around wearing "Buffett Busters" T-shirts and shouting that Wells Fargo was going down. (We know who came out on top.) What's the takeaway? Many of the best investors don't worry about trying to time economic cycles like everyone else. Instead they chart their own course.

It may seem hopeless, but people with day jobs can invest successfully. And it doesn't require playing the game by Wall Street rules. You only need to know a few "secrets." First, cost is the only aspect of the investing process that you'll ever be able to control. Nowadays, many Wall Street analysts tell us that U.S. corporate earnings will continue to flourish, that U.S. stocks can be expected to rise by 9% a year on average, and on and on. These predictions may pan out over the next decade, and then again they may not. Who knows? But if your mutual fund charges 1.50% in expenses, the one thing you can bank on every year is losing 1.50% of your money.

Second, you shouldn't buy stocks when they're expensive, nor sell when they're cheap. How do you know which condition applies today? The most reliable indicator is Yale professor Robert Shiller's long-term gauge of stock levels that he tracks on an Excel file and publishes on a Yale website for all the world to see. According to Shiller's spreadsheet, the average historical cyclically-adjusted P/E multiple for U.S. stocks is 16. Today they trade at 22. Wall Street will always tell you to buy. Shiller espouses a better method.

Third, invest in the broad stock market or find someone who will do it for you, preferably someone who favors value stocks instead of high-flying but unpredictable growth companies. Simply, the only time you should gamble on individual stocks is to have fun. Tens of thousands of very smart, very ambitious stock pickers crowd into the market every day. Do you really know more than they do?

That's about all the investing secrets there are. One book that incorporates most of this wisdom but has so far received little press is Daniel Peris' The Strategic Dividend Investor. Written for the lay investor, the preface begins, "If you like to trade stocks, read no further." (This should be music to your ears.) Peris espouses an easy-to-understand dividend philosophy -- he demands to be paid cash to hold onto stocks -- that preaches patience, low costs, and strong long-term returns. If you're only going to read one book about investing, try this one.

Compared to Peris, Sears often seems myopic. He says timing is everything in stocks, and he's right. (You should never buy stocks regardless of valuations -- remember 2000?) But Sears prescribes a difficult-to-follow -- and potentially dangerous -- method to deal with that truth: a Goldman Sachs-endorsed approach to play market cycles. The strategy favors cyclical stocks like energy and materials when the economy is growing and retreats to defensive sectors like healthcare and utilities when the economy is shrinking.

If you think you can time market cycles better than Wall Street, well ... maybe you should get a job on Wall Street. It's telling that Goldman Sachs (GS) provides the research that supports these prescriptions, given that Goldman runs a very successful brokerage business selling stocks.

If you want to become a better investor, you can't possibly try to play the same game as Wall Street. Start with the easy stuff -- picking low-cost funds, buying stocks when Shiller's long-term P/E line is low, not betting on too many individual stocks. And remember what Buffett often says: Successful investing is simple, but not easy to do. The same might be said for writing a book on the topic.

More Weekly Reads

Tom Bissell's Magic Hours
Michael J. Sandel's What Money Can't Buy
Vijay Govindarajan's and Chris Trimble's Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere
Bryce Hoffman's American Icon
The Mayo Clinic's Healthy Heart for Life!

Filed under: The Weekly Read, Uncategorized

Essays on culture, and the essayist

Fortune Editors — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:37:28 +0000

Tom Bissell's new collection, Magic Hours, covers film, literature, video games, and the author himself.

By Daniel Roberts, reporter

FORTUNE -- Essay collections are like bags of jellybeans. If the candy-maker is a high-quality brand like, say, Jelly Belly, then even the flavors you don't love will be pretty good. Such is the case with Magic Hours, a collection of essays out this month from journalist Tom Bissell that covers brainy topics ranging from the war reporting of Robert D. Kaplan to the documentary films of Werner Herzog.

Bissell, who now writes regularly about video games for ESPN's Grantland, is engaging enough -- usually, but not always -- to make interesting even those essays whose topics seem unlikely to absorb the mainstream reading public. Most of Bissell's subjects are abstruse, but it's a journalist's job to make any topic interesting, right? Just be forewarned that the real subject in most of the essays collected here is Bissell himself.

When he writes about the filming of a 2001 Jeff Daniels indie movie in Escanaba, Mich., the essay becomes a personal reflection on his hometown, because Bissell grew up in Escanaba. Writing about an intriguing, nerdy sect called the Underground Literary Alliance, he mentions John Kennedy Toole's beloved novel A Confederacy of Dunces, which is indeed relevant, but he can't resist including his own review ("one of the most overrated novels ever published"). A profile of the wilderness novelist Jim Harrison, who happens to be a friend of Bissell's father, is as much about Bissell as about Harrison.

All of this is perfectly fine -- it's why Bissell calls these works of reportage "essays." Nowadays, the word signals a license to depart from strict objectivity via authorial comments, interjections and snarky asides. Of course, if you were looking for a straight-faced account of Tommy Wiseau's cult movie The Room, you would head to Wikipedia rather than reading Bissell's engaging but highly personalized interpretation.

Magazine journalism has been headed this way for decades, especially journalism on the quirky, pop culture subjects that Bissell favors. Even mainstream celebrity profiles in glossy magazines like GQ and Esquire freely use the first-person voice, and feature the reactions and inner monologue of the author as much as quotes from the subject.

In an Author's Note, Bissell notes that after his Jeff Daniels essay appeared, an editor assigned him to go report on NASA in Canada, to which Bissell responded: "You're aware that I'm not actually a journalist?" Nonetheless, these essays are works of journalism. Bissell is reporting from events or in-person interviews, but also acting as a guide to the reader, reminding us constantly of his presence. (See, also, the nonfiction of John Jeremiah Sullivan, Mary Roach, or David Foster Wallace, a writer whom Bissell openly worships.)

It is no surprise, then, that the two least indulgent essays, from which Bissell is mostly absent, both appeared first in The New Yorker. (One is on sitcom-king Chuck Lorre of Two and a Half Men fame, the other on video-game voiceover actor Jennifer Hale). Other pieces were originally published in outlets like The Believer, which, as an imprint of McSweeney's, happens to be the publisher of this book.

Bissell arranges Magic Hours chronologically by when he wrote them. This demonstrates his clear growth as a writer, but breaks the commonsense rule of beginning a collection with the best it has to offer. The opening piece is the book's most boring, even for fans of Dickinson, Melville and Whitman; the essays toward the end are far stronger.

In that Author's Note, Bissell argues that "these essays are about magic" because, "to create anything -- whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom -- is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic." It's an appealing thought, but a tenuous argument at best. People create things all the time without believing they constitute magic, or any achievement at all.

Thematically, the work he has selected lacks any connective tissue. Sure, in a big-picture sense they all cover pop culture mainstays: Of the book's 15 essays, nine are about writing, four are about film, one is on television, and one on video games. But drill down and they are narrow in focus.

The strongest essay in the collection, "Cinema Crudité," is about The Room, by all accounts a very bad movie that nonetheless still shows at late-night screenings all over the country and brings devotees out in droves. A significant portion of the movie's "fans" seem to enjoy ridiculing Wiseau, who wrote, directed, and stars in the film. Bissell handles this irony respectfully and humorously: "Why are so many people responding to this… Is it the satisfaction of seeing the auteur myth cruelly exploded, of watching an artist reach for the stars and wind up with his hand around a urinal cake?"

When he meets Wiseau in person, Bissell admirably avoids taking unfair jabs at him, though he's also honest with us about what he felt during the meeting. When Wiseau says his goal is for 90% of Americans to see The Room, Bissell tells us, "At this I all but laughed in his face."

He similarly strips his own process bare in the piece on Jim Harrison, which was published just last summer in Outside and closes out the book. Bissell readily mentions the hangover he suffered after the first night of drinking with Harrison. He adds that he was too scared, initially, to join Harrison in checking out a snake den on his property. Bissell recounts how David Foster Wallace once discovered an essay by Harrison, and mentioned liking the piece in a letter to Bissell. He then fawns: "For a young writer just starting out, this was indescribable. Two of my literary heroes were talking to each other, as it were, through me." Yes, the conclusion smacks slightly, perhaps, of the self-congratulatory, but it's hard not to appreciate his pride and candor.

In fact Bissell shines most when he meets his subjects face-to-face, rather than expounding in a vacuum. That's true of the Escanaba essay (Bissell hung around during shooting), the Herzog analysis (Bissell interviewed the venerated filmmaker at his home), and the Wiseau and Harrison profiles.

A few essays could have been omitted. One is a gratuitous defense of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Another is an all-too-brief account of David Foster Wallace's 2005 speech at Kenyon College, which Wallace's publisher packaged as a coffee-table book called This Is Water. Bissell's rather nasty critique of author Robert D. Kaplan is another head-scratcher.

It's anyone's guess as to why Bissell did not include his outstanding 2010 Guardian piece about becoming addicted to Grand Theft Auto and cocaine. Perhaps he didn't want two essays on video games in there, or felt he should stick to stories that first appeared in magazines.

No matter. Magic Hours has a lot to love and very little to skip. Film buffs should enjoy the deep dives into literary phenomena, and vice-versa: A lit nerd who might be bored stiff by film analysis (especially analysis of a subversive German director or of a Vietnam War documentary) will still be drawn in. For media business aficionados, Bissell delivers front-row insight into the production process in Hollywood and beyond, from the outdoor set of the movie Escanaba in da Moonlight, to the indoor set of the sitcom Mike & Molly and the recording booth of the video game Mass Effect 3.

Reading Bissell's essays will educate you on a vast range of intellectual and cultural minutiae. You will also learn a lot, perhaps more than you bargained for, about the essayist Tom Bissell.

Our Weekly Read column features Fortune staffers' and contributors' takes on recently published books about the business world and beyond. We've invited the entire Fortune family -- from our writers and editors to our photo editors and designers -- to weigh in on books of their choosing based on their individual tastes or curiosities.

More Weekly Reads

Michael J. Sandel's What Money Can't Buy
Vijay Govindarajan's and Chris Trimble's Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere
Bryce Hoffman's American Icon
The Mayo Clinic's Healthy Heart for Life!
David K. Shipler's Rights at Risk

Filed under: The Weekly Read

One nation, ruled by money

Fortune Editors — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 11:29:11 +0000

It's said that every man has his price, but what's the cost to society when everything is for sale? A review of What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, by political philosopher Michael J. Sandel.

By Scott Olster, editor

FORTUNE -- How much is the space on your forehead worth? Would you sell that especially personal piece of real estate to an interested advertiser if you were strapped for cash? How about your ability to give birth? Or maybe your organs? What's your price? After all, as the proverb goes, every man has one.

In What Money Can't Buy, Harvard government professor Michael J. Sandel argues that it might not be that simple. He takes readers on an exhaustive tour of the many ways in which markets and market thinking have infiltrated our lives, sometimes to our detriment.

Whether it's buying ad space on human bodies, paying schoolchildren to read more books, or giving drug addicts money in exchange for accepting sterilization treatment, Sandel argues that we've suffered from the penetration of market forces into aspects of the human experience that were traditionally thought to be either sacred or beyond monetary value. "The commercialism of the last two decades has displayed a distinctive kind of boundlessness, emblematic of a world in which everything is for sale," he writes.

While commercializing our most intimate possessions and those that belong to others is nothing new (see under: slavery and prostitution), Sandel suggests that the past few decades have been an especially victorious time for market thinking. He has a point. Over the past 20 to 30 years, we have increasingly placed our faith in privatization and the power of financial incentives. We hire private security companies to run our prisons, send mercenaries to fight our wars, and pay for-profit schools to educate our children, all with varying degrees of success.

The price we pay for this behavior plays out in several ways, Sandel argues. First off, poorer people are impacted disproportionately by the commercialization of personal space. How many affluent people are lining up to turn their houses or bodies into billboards? In this way, the decision to sell isn't necessarily as independent and free as it may look. In a society increasingly driven by financial power, moreover, the wealthy hold even better hands than they would otherwise. Why bother encouraging your kid to study hard if you can simply grease his path into Harvard or Yale with the promise of a massive donation?

Some of these tradeoffs and incentives may have noble intentions, such as putting more money in the hands of the needy, or encouraging students to hit the books. Yet they also change how we value these activities. Suddenly, doing well in school becomes about pocketing extra change rather than learning for its own sake. Selling your blood puts money in your wallet, but it also deprives you of the moral reward of altruism. The behaviors may be the same, but the motivations have changed. As a result their meaning also changes, not always for the better.

When it comes to acts of charity, many economists would say that there is only so much generosity to go around. In a world filled with need, offering a few bucks to encourage behavior that helps the whole group is a safe way to ensure the job gets done. Fair enough. But are good intentions a finite resource? Or are they, as Sandel suggests, "more like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise?"

At times, market principles put in place to make an altruistic act look even more attractive do just the opposite. Sandel cites the case of a small village in the Swiss mountains called Wolfenschiessen that was once a candidate to house a nuclear waste site. When surveyed by economists, a majority of residents said they'd accept the site as an act of civic duty. The economists then added money to the equation, offering the residents as much as $8,700 each to accept the waste site. At this point, support for the deal plummeted among the villagers. From their perspective, the cash turned a sacrifice for the greater good into a plain old bribe.

Sandel offers us example after example of the many ways in which financial incentives and other market forces now dictate just about every aspect of our lives, creating a world that is richer in dollars but poorer in moral and social cohesion. At each step, he poses the same question: "Do we really want to live this way?" It's a fair question that get asked a lot nowadays, by everyone from Occupy Wall Street protesters to Citigroup shareholders who recently rejected the bank's executive compensation proposal.

Sandel doesn't address the more challenging question, whether there's a viable alternative to the market-driven hamster wheel that we're apparently trapped on. Did we as a society sacrifice whatever core values we once had as we scaled ever-higher financial heights?

In the wake of our most recent economic crisis, it's about time we start to consider the costs of pervasive commercialization along with its benefits. Just the same, it's easy enough to point out flaws in the world we inhabit. If you want to mend that world, it's helpful to suggest what ought to go in its stead. Sandel deserves credit for sounding the alarm, but he also leaves us holding the bag, wondering if there's a reset button hiding somewhere we haven't looked.

More Weekly Reads

Vijay Govindarajan's and Chris Trimble's Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere
Bryce Hoffman's American Icon
The Mayo Clinic's Healthy Heart for Life!
David K. Shipler's Rights at Risk
Amy Reading's The Mark Inside

Filed under: The Weekly Read

The future of innovation

Fortune Editors — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 11:57:57 +0000

Our Weekly Read column features Fortune staffers' and contributors' takes on recently published books about the business world and beyond. We've invited the entire Fortune family -- from our writers and editors to our photo editors and designers -- to weigh in on books of their choosing based on their individual tastes or curiosities. In this installment, writer Nin-Hai Tseng reviews Reverse Innovation: Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere, by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble.

FORTUNE -- Try this. Take a map of the world. Mark the countries with the most growth potential. Now plot the office locations of your company's 50 highest-ranking executives. Chances are that most of them don't work in an emerging economy, where the most robust market opportunities lie today and for the foreseeable future.

In Reverse Innovation: Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere, Dartmouth professors Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble use this exercise to illustrate the challenges of reverse innovation, which they define as innovations that start in poorer countries rather than rich ones.

It used to be that most products were invented in the developed world and then tweaked for consumers in developing countries. But as incomes grow in places like China, India and Brazil, many executives have spotted opportunities to grow their businesses by reversing this trend. Reverse innovation comes with plenty of hurdles, which makes this book particularly timely.

The book, an extension of a 2009 Harvard Business Review article that Govindarajan and Trimble co-authored with General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, reads like a how-to guide for executives looking to innovate beyond the U.S. and Europe. Govindarajan spent two years as an innovation consultant for GE (GE). His work inspired Reverse Innovation, much of which explains how GE set about creating products in the developing world and India, including a portable, lower-cost health device that measures heart rhythms. The authors point out that similar technology can be used to help the rural and urban poor in the U.S.

Reverse innovation has a long history. You probably think of Gatorade as an American sports drink, but it's actually rooted in Bangladesh. A 1960s cholera outbreak brought Western doctors to the country, where they tweaked a local recipe of coconut water, carrot juice and other ingredients used to treat severe diarrhea caused by the infection. Its success was highlighted in a medical journal and eventually made its way to researchers at the University of Florida who were trying to figure out how to re-hydrate athletes quickly.

The authors provide numerous case studies that explain why innovations created in rich countries often struggle to take off in the developing world. We're reminded that building a successful business is as much about anthropology as it is about economics. It's not enough to look at income trends. We also need to understand how people actually live in different parts of the world.

A few examples: Logitech (LOGI) realized that Chinese consumers needed a mouse that also doubled as a remote control, because so many of them downloaded movies from the Internet and then watched them on their televisions. Deere & Company (DE) learned that big tractors didn't work so well in India, where farms are much smaller and where tractors often double as the family car.

The book has a few shortcomings. While the authors do a good job of explaining how managers can overcome organizational and administrative barriers to reverse innovation, they ignore external obstacles that come with doing business in economies where everything from courts to government institutions are relatively weak.

After all, these are real concerns. In 2010, according to The Financial Times, Jeff Immelt told business colleagues assembled at a private dinner that he found China hostile to multinational companies: "I really worry about China," he said. "I am not sure that in the end they want us to win, or any of us to be successful."

The book's forward, written by PepsiCo. CEO Indra Nooyi, seems oddly timed given the challenges that PepsiCo (PEP) has recently faced marketing healthier products to customers globally. This is certainly a noble effort, especially as the U.S. struggles to confront its obesity epidemic. But the strategy damaged key brands like Pepsi-Cola, which has lost ground to Diet Coke in the U.S. market.

Still, the global financial crisis confirmed that developing nations will probably drive global growth in coming years, given that most richer countries are now saddled by heavy debts and budget deficits. It's a useful and even inspiring read for any executive who cares about the future of business innovation.

More Weekly Reads

Bryce Hoffman's American Icon
The Mayo Clinic's Healthy Heart for Life!
David K. Shipler's Rights at Risk
Amy Reading's The Mark Inside
Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit

Filed under: The Weekly Read

How Ford bounced back

Fortune Editors — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 11:54:29 +0000

Our Weekly Read column features Fortune staffers' and contributors' takes on recently published books about the business world and beyond. We've invited the entire Fortune family -- from our writers and editors to our photo editors and designers -- to weigh in on books of their choosing based on their individual tastes or curiosities. In this installment, senior editor-at-large Alex Taylor reviews American Icon: Alan Mulally and the fight to save Ford Motor Company, by Bryce Hoffman.

FORTUNE -- As a longtime follower of the auto industry, I am addicted to books that promise the inside skinny about the personalities behind the products. When a new tome arrives in the mail, I scour it for inside dope, untold stories, and back-room gossip that will unwrap another layer of this fascinating and complex business. Full disclosure: I also peek at the index to see if Fortune has been quoted.

At the moment, my bookshelf runneth over. The upturn in industry fortunes that followed the bankruptcies of Chrysler and General Motors (GM) has provided an irresistible story arc of near-death, repentance, and revival. Among a number of first-rate accounts that have appeared in the past 24 months, Bryce Hoffman's American Icon: Alan Mulally and the fight to save Ford Motor Company is a standout.

Unable to accommodate a deluge of requests from writers eager to document its revival under Mulally, Ford (F) chose Hoffman, a reporter for the Detroit News, and granted him unique access to tell its story without editorial oversight. It chose wisely. Hoffman has produced a book brimming with smart observations and fresh insights into Ford's success. (Another disclosure: Both Fortune and I are mentioned, briefly, in the book).

The outlines of the Ford turnaround are well known by now. Family scion Bill Ford lured Mulally, a former Boeing (BA) executive, to Detroit in 2006 after being rebuffed by two more experienced leaders. Mulally reshaped the company by dropping lines like Volvo and Mercury and focusing on one global Ford brand. He built a team of like-minded executives through persistence, persuasion, and force of personality.

"Ford's executives finally stopped making decisions based on what was best for their own careers and started trying to figure out what was best for the company as a whole," Hoffman writes. "That was something that had never happened before in Dearborn and it was the key to Ford's phenomenal resurgence."

At first telling, Mulally comes off like a character from a Preston Sturges movie, all "aw shucks" and "gee whiz." But behind the smiles, Hoffman reveals a toughness in Mullaly that surfaces when dissenters threaten his carefully-nurtured atmosphere of collegiality.

When one executive refused to follow his direction, Mulally simply eliminated his job. He pushed another manager into early retirement because he played badly with others. Hoffman also reports that Mulally withstood a threat from Americas president Mark Fields to quit when Fields was challenged over the use of a company airplane. Mulally stood his ground but didn't hold a grudge. Fields is now the clear favorite to succeed him whenever the 66-year-old decides to retire.

Hoffman also provides a full account of a long-rumored rift in the Ford family that surfaced in the early months of Mulally's tenure. With their dividends suspended and family jewels Jaguar and Land Rover headed for the auction block, dissidents members -- notably Bill Ford's sister and brother-in-law -- consulted with the boutique investment bank Perella Weinberg about ways to monetize their holdings, which included selling control of the company.

Bill and his cousin Edsel beat back the effort and placed their faith in Mulally. They were rewarded with a spectacular turnaround. After losing $14.6 billion in 2008, Ford snapped back and went on to make a $7.8 billion profit in 2011.

The long hours that Hoffman evidently spent with Mulally reveal a man with few flaws, except that he likes to beat everybody into the office by arriving at 5:30 a.m. But this is not hagiography. Hoffman doesn't try to finesse Mulally's ample compensation, which became an issue in labor contract negotiations. (Mulally made $29.5 million in 2011 -- the biggest Detroit payday since Lee Iacocca got $23.6 million from Chrysler in 1986). He's also made good use of his access to dig into previously neglected topics, like the protracted 2009 negotiations required to extract concessions from the United Auto Workers.

Hoffman has a good ear for dialogue and a thorough knowledge of the industry, though he sometimes resorts to clichés when dealing with less familiar topics. Describing Bill Ford's background, for instance, he writes that Ford grew up in a "posh enclave" and attended a "prestigious" school, yet was "down-to-earth" enough to "rub elbows with the common man."

The fortunes of American auto companies tend to rise and fall with the GDP, and Ford follows its own cycle of good and lean years. "Ford's history is a long list of stunning successes followed by epic failures, of against -- all -- odds comebacks that turn into retreats back into mediocrity and mismanagement," writes Hoffman.

The company still has weak spots. Ford has been slow getting to China, U.S. market share is falling, and its first two global cars (Fiesta and Focus) have failed to excite. The true test of Mulally's tenure will be whether the changes he has put in place -- data-driven management, consistent application of agreed-upon principles, teamwork -- survive him. If Mulally ever gets around to retiring -- say around 2015 -- I look forward to adding Hoffman's sequel to my bookshelf.

More Weekly Reads

The Mayo Clinic's Healthy Heart for Life!
David K. Shipler's Rights at Risk
Amy Reading's The Mark Inside
Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit
Elizabeth Browning Taylor's A Slave in the White House

Filed under: The Weekly Read, Uncategorized

How to pamper your heart

Fortune Editors — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 11:49:09 +0000

Our Weekly Read column features Fortune staffers' and contributors' takes on recently published books about the business world and beyond. We've invited the entire Fortune family -- from our writers and editors to our photo editors and designers -- to weigh in on books of their choosing based on their individual tastes or curiosities. In this installment, Lawrence A. Armour reviews Mayo Clinic Healthy Heart for Life! The Mayo Clinic Plan for Preventing and Conquering Heart Disease.

FORTUNE -- I usually go out of my way to avoid books with exclamation points in their titles, but Mayo Clinic Healthy Heart For Life! has a lot going for it. For one thing, it's a feel-good book in the true sense of the word, printed on heavy, glossy stock that's nice to the touch and brings the four-color diagrams and photos to life.

For another, each chapter features individuals we can relate to who followed the authors' advice and bounced back from serious heart conditions. Most important, the book has outstanding bloodlines. I visited the Mayo Clinic twice on assignments for Fortune ("Me & The Mayo," July 21, 1997 and "The Checkup, Part II," October 26, 1998), and my back, joints and overall health were prime beneficiaries. I came away from my trips to Rochester, Minnesota convinced that Mayo doctors knew what they were doing. Judging from this book, they still do.

Healthy Heart For Life! Delivers the obligatory quick-start program with a catchy title ("Eat 5, Move 10, Sleep 8"). It goes on to explain why eating five or more veggies a day, exercising for 10 or more minutes daily and getting eight hours of sleep a night are good ways to begin the battle against the leading cause of death in the U.S.

Major takeaways: Close to 80% of heart disease cases are preventable, and even small lifestyle changes can make a big difference. Dr. Martha Grogan, a Mayo Clinic cardiologist who served as the book's editor-in-chief, puts it this way: "Moving even 10 minutes a day for someone who's been sedentary can reduce the risk of heart disease by 50%."

Along the way, Dr. Grogan throws out another factoid that resonates: "Because more people have been able to identify and treat their risk factors, deaths from heart disease have fallen 50% in the last 30 years."

The heart is just one part of a very large story, of course, but it's key. When you lower your risk for heart disease, the book tells us, you lower your risk for everything from dementia, cancer, and diabetes to kidney disease, erectile dysfunction, and blindness.

The authors offer useful tips to take the drudgery out of eating and living right. When it comes to diet, for example, there's no need to become a vegetarian or embrace everything in the produce department. Simply find the vegetables and fruit you like and stick to them. Another: Make it easier on yourself by going for food that requires little or no preparation, things like baby carrots, cherry tomatoes, grapes, bananas and apples.

Another piece of good advice: Set realistic expectations. "Trying to lose 40 pounds is a little like deciding you're going to go out and make a million dollars," says Dr. Donald Hensrud, one of the Mayo gurus on nutrition and preventive medicine. "Instead, concentrate on losing one pound at a time."

The book contains detailed instructions on working out, but it also cuts to the critical quick: Choose exercises you enjoy, and focus on how good you feel when you exercise. The authors offer strategies to help quit smoking and manage stress. They cover blood pressure, cholesterol, medications, transplants, and bypasses, along with angina, coronary artery diseases, vascular disorders, arrhythmias, stroke, CPR, and more.

It's all there, including a chapter with some appetizing, heart-healthy recipes. What's really nice is that every page of Healthy Heart For Life! treats the reader like an adult. Example: "It's okay to give up if you're feeling discouraged. Everyone fails once in a while -- just get back up and don't lose sight of your goals."

While we're on the subject, I've run across two new paperbacks that are informative and fun to read. Despite the exclamation point in its title, Chuck Runyon's Working Out Sucks! provides a series of solid how-tos for those who find it hard to move their butts off the couch. The second, Coffee is Good For You, by Robert J. Davis, cuts through the maze of conflicting food information (turns out oatmeal is good for you, low-fat cookies usually are not) and leaves the foodies among us with lots of interesting items to chew on.

However, we wouldn't need to waste valuable time on any of these books if we used a little common sense. A well-known journal recently reported on a 22-year study of the soft-drink habits of 42,880 male health professionals, ages 40 to 75. After adjusting for smoking, exercise, and family history, the researchers found that men who drank one sugar-sweetened drink a day were 20% more likely to have had a heart attack than non-drinkers. Duh? Hate to say it, but it's hard to see why that's breaking news.

—Lawrence A. Armour is deputy editor of custom content for Fortune, Time, Money and Sports Illustrated.

More Weekly Reads

David K. Shipler's Rights at Risk
Amy Reading's The Mark Inside
Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit
Elizabeth Browning Taylor's A Slave in the White House
Bobby Keys' Every Night's a Saturday Night

Filed under: The Weekly Read, Uncategorized

Know your rights: The limits of liberty

Fortune Editors — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:37:33 +0000

Our Weekly Read column features Fortune staffers' and contributors' takes on recently published books about the business world and beyond. We've invited the entire Fortune family -- from our writers and editors to our photo editors and designers -- to weigh in on books of their choosing based on their individual tastes or curiosities. In this installment, contributor Richard McGill Murphy reviews David K. Shipler's Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America.

FORTUNE -- Ernesto A. Miranda was a hardened criminal with a rap sheet stretching back to the eighth grade. His offenses included truancy, armed robbery, and the kidnapping and rape of a mentally impaired 18-year-old woman. When the Phoenix police arrested Miranda for this last offense, they interrogated him in a soundproofed room for two hours without advising him of his legal rights to silence and counsel, which are guaranteed respectively by the 5^th and 6^th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Miranda was subsequently convicted of kidnapping and rape, and sentenced to serve 20 to 30 years in prison. He appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1966 that his constitutional rights had been violated. The Court set aside the conviction and fashioned the famous four-part warning that bears Miranda's name. Henceforth, the justices ordered, all criminal suspects must be advised up front that they have the right to remain silent, that anything they say can be used against them in a court of law, that they have the right to an attorney, and that an attorney will be appointed for them prior to questioning if they so desire.

The state of Arizona then tried Miranda again for the same crime, using different and this time untainted evidence. He was duly convicted and given the same 20 to 30 year sentence. Released on parole in 1972, he was stabbed to death in 1976 in a barroom fight over a $3 gambling pot. "As in many other landmark cases, a noble legacy was left by an ignoble life," writes David K. Shipler in Rights at Risk, his fascinating, wide-ranging new study of civil liberties in America.

Shipler is a former New York Times correspondent who won the Pulitzer Prize for Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land. His latest book is the second volume in a monumental account of the long American struggle to balance collective security and individual liberty. While this story dates back to the founding of the Republic, Shipler focuses on the tumultuous years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

After 2001, the federal government addressed legitimate security concerns by engaging in warrantless wiretapping, the judicial abuse of both legal and illegal immigrants, and the torture and indefinite detention of "enemy combatants" without due process. But these end-runs around the Constitution have not been confined to the "war on terror." Despite the Bill of Rights, Shipler points out that police and prosecutors continue to abuse the constitutional rights of prisoners suspected of ordinary street crimes. In a chapter called "Torture and Torment," he compares the physical abuse of black prisoners by Chicago police to the CIA torture of Muslim terror suspects in secret prisons abroad.

Note the ethnic and religious qualifiers. In his introduction, Shipler notes that "most of the victims in these pages are black, Muslim, or members of other minorities -- most, but not all. Many are criminals, terrorists, or misfits -- many, but not all. They are often guilty -- often, but not always. They get little sympathy from the larger, law-abiding citizenry. But they should, for if a retarded man is abused during police interrogation, if a poor woman is denied a competent lawyer, if a dissenting student is punished for the slogan on her T-shirt, the rights they lose are lost to everyone."

Beyond the war on terror, Shipler demonstrates the routine subversion of due-process rights by an assembly-line judicial process that legal professionals cynically describe as "McJustice." He also shows how our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and association have been violated by everyone from overzealous school principals to presidential advance teams, in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, who have been eager to eliminate any trace of dissent from the Commander-in-Chief's photo-ops.

Shipler is particularly good at weaving together legal history and personal storytelling. He brings the rarefied world of Supreme Court jurisprudence alive by introducing us to ordinary people whose rights have been trampled by the executive branch, often with legislative and judicial branch connivance. They range from legal immigrants jailed for the crime of looking foreign, to an impoverished black woman who went to jail for six years after she was forced to share her drug-dealer boyfriend's attorney. (The attorney resolved this egregious conflict of interest by favoring the drug-dealer's interests over those of his girlfriend.)

We are all responsible for defending our civil rights, which brings us back to the legacy of Ernesto Miranda. "In a way, it is pathetic in this open system that people under arrest have to be read the Miranda warning," Shipler writes. In effect, we can only secure the blessings of liberty if we are constitutionally literate, and every generation must relearn the hard lesson that rights must be invoked if they are to be preserved.

More Weekly Reads

Amy Reading's The Mark Inside
Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit
Elizabeth Browning Taylor's A Slave in the White House
Bobby Keys' Every Night's a Saturday Night
John D'Agata's and Jim Fingal's The Lifespan of a Fact

Filed under: The Weekly Read

Meet Bernie Madoff's ancestors!

Fortune Editors — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 09:57:13 +0000

Our Weekly Read column features Fortune staffers' and contributors' takes on recently published books about the business world and beyond. We've invited the entire Fortune family -- from our writers and editors to our photo editors and designers -- to weigh in on books of their choosing based on their individual tastes or curiosities. In this installment, Fortune.com editor Scott Olster reviews Amy Reading's The Mark Inside, an account of con artists and their victims in early 20^th century America.

FORTUNE -- Americans love a good con. Whether it's the unauthorized sale of the Brooklyn Bridge to naive tourists (yes, this happened, many times), the exhibition of an "authentic Feejee" mermaid in the American Museum (thank you, P.T. Barnum), or even a successful ad executive living large under another man's name (the fictional Don Draper of Mad Men), there's a little bit of entertainment in just about every swindle.

Unless, of course, you happen to be the unwitting punch line of an expensive joke (Bernie Madoff, Allen Stanford, Enron, Worldcom, the list goes on).

Amy Reading's The Mark Inside is a skillful exploration of the development of con artistry in America and how it came to embody both the benefits and costs associated with the nation's explosive economic growth between the 19th and 20th centuries.

Reading tells the story of the American con by tracing the odyssey of a self-made, straight-shooting Texas rancher named J. Frank Norfleet. In 1919 Norfleet was fleeced of his savings and dragged into debt by a gang of five confidence men led by Joseph Furey, a man who faked his own death, possibly twice.

The con that decimated Norfleet's bankroll was far from extraordinary. In fact, as Reading tells it, the routine had been practically perfected by November 1919, when Norfleet strolled into the St. George Hotel in Dallas to find his swindlers already waiting for him. Reading describes this particular con -- a ruse that methodically convinces a sucker (or "mark") that they can make a huge bundle by taking advantage of inside information on stock trades -- as a play in nine acts. With each successive act and every new person the sucker encounters, he gains more confidence in the deal and the prospect of making an easy fortune, until he surrenders his savings to the cause. Norfleet lost $45,000 and wound up $90,000 in debt, no small sum in 1919.

Once he realized that he had lost just about everything he had, Norfleet vowed vengeance against his swindlers. Using Norfleet's two autobiographies, newspaper archives, and court documents as guides, Reading traces the mark's cross-country quest to put his five con men behind bars. It's a journey replete with assumed identities, fortuitous discoveries, briberies, courtroom theatrics, double crossings, and gunplay. Reading spares few details in her description of Norfleet's movements, sometimes to a fault, as he summons the help of police officers -- some honest, others not so much -- district attorneys, the media, and the public to aid his mission.

What becomes quickly apparent is that our no-nonsense, salt of the earth Texan is not as straight a shooter as he has claimed to be. The same man who apparently banned gambling on his own land claims that he funded his mission by betting on horses. In pursuit of his prey, Norfleet dons disguises and plays the sucker to swindlers across the country. He also develops a flair for fanciful storytelling and a keen desire for media attention. At times, Reading catches inconsistencies in his story compared to other accounts and records. So even Norfleet, the man who eventually gained national hero status for his con-catching efforts, adopts some of the swindler's swagger.

Reading puts this swagger in its historical context, arguing that in Norfleet's time it wasn't uncommon for upwardly mobile Americans to adopt the mannerisms of confidence men. Why rely on the strength of your actual character when you can develop a personality that will sway others to your cause? (That notion has fueled many, many business and self-help books since Norfleet's time.)

As the U.S. economic pie grew, more Americans wanted to get their slice. For many, living off your land and buying only what you could afford didn't seem as exciting as the prospect of scoring a quick fortune. Coupled with generally weak law enforcement, these desires created ideal conditions for rampant speculation -- in gold, oil, land, railways, you name it -- and its disreputable cousin, swindling.

"If organized crime exploits the opportunities created by a weak central government," Reading writes, "confidence artistry profits from a strong economy, by filling in the uncharted terrain that opens up when business innovation gallops ahead of legislation."

Con artistry didn't just leech off the U.S. economy. Instead, Reading argues, it fueled its growth. When currency was scarce in the west, counterfeiters brought the supply. When more Americans wanted in on the stock market, bucket shops delivered the market to their towns. "The new nation would never have prospered without imposture, speculation, and counterfeiting, because America was, from its inception, a confidence trick," Reading writes.

Interspersed with Norfleet's tale are a series of essays on the history of confidence artistry in the U.S., with cameos by P.T. Barnum, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin Roosevelt, and Charlie Chaplin, among others. The Mark Inside is certainly not short on detail. At times, some of the specifics clog the narrative. We don't necessarily need to know everything about the evolution of fraud as a U.S. legal doctrine, for example. With that said, many of Reading's side narratives and contextual notes are illuminating, giving us a more refined sense of what it felt like to live in an America that was developing at a breakneck pace.

After a mark has been swindled, conventional wisdom holds that he or she emerges sadder but wiser in the ways of the world. J. Frank Norfleet certainly fits that mold. Yet Norfleet seems to have retained a certain optimism despite his travails. "Norfleet never possessed that hard carapace of skepticism that the experts of his day tried to instill in the American populace," Reading writes.

Norfleet's naiveté gave him just enough hope and gall to think that he could track down his tormentors and many other con artists to boot. Sure enough, he caught all five of his con men plus scores of others. Reading poignantly suggests that this balance between credulity and savviness captures the American spirit of the time. She writes: "Norfleet came to represent the personality type that best fits American modernity: the sophisticated sucker."

More Weekly Reads

Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit
Elizabeth Browning Taylor's A Slave in the White House
Bobby Keys' Every Night's a Saturday Night
John D'Agata's and Jim Fingal's The Lifespan of a Fact
Raymond Bonner's Anatomy of Injustice

Filed under: The Weekly Read, Uncategorized

How to break bad habits

Fortune Editors — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 09:00:53 +0000

Our Weekly Read column features Fortune staffers' and contributors' takes on recently published books about the business world and beyond. We've invited the entire Fortune family -- from our writers and editors to our photo editors and designers -- to weigh in on books of their choosing based on their individual tastes or curiosities. In this installment, senior editor-at-large Allan Sloan reviews The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg.

FORTUNE -- Habits are the kind of thing you don't think twice about. You do something because that's the way you always do it, you slip into a routine, and the longer you keep at it, the deeper the groove worn in your brain becomes, and the harder it becomes for you to change.

You have to fight against your habits sometimes. After Hurricane Irene flooded our basement last August, for example, I needed to replace 10 copies of the 1982 Haggadah that my family uses at Passover seders. I began in the habitual way that you hunt for old publications these days: online. I didn't like what I found, and it finally occurred to me to contact the publisher, United Synagogue. Success! I got new books from one place at one time for considerably less than what online sellers were charging for used Haggadahs.

Print journalists are especially prone to behaving habitually, because print journalism is such a habit-driven business. That's why I'm impressed that Charles Duhigg, a business reporter for the New York Times, managed to step outside what he and I do for a living in order to write about habits, how they're formed, how they affect what we do, and how to modify them.

I bought The Power of Habit because I was responding -- habit! -- to an e-mail from Duhigg, whom I know slightly and whose work I generally like. To make sure that I didn't allow myself to be distracted by lighter fare -- a bad habit of mine -- his book was the only reading material I took with me on a recent plane flight. I finished it more quickly than I expected, and ended up having to read in-flight magazines for half the return flight. That's one habit I don't plan to get into.

I read the book as a series of essays rather than as a whole, which may explain why I finished it quickly. I enjoyed (and learned from) Duhigg's description of how Starbucks (SBUX) trains its baristas to respond cheerfully and automatically to grumpy customers, and how "habits of society," as Duhigg calls them, explain why Rosa Parks' refusal to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Ala., touched off the boycott that helped launch Martin Luther King Jr.'s career.

Some parts of the book -- such as a creepy tale of how a compulsive gambler ruined her life -- don't really seem compatible with other parts. And while I found the Rosa Parks tale interesting, I think that Duhigg's "habits of society" construction is a reach. Ditto for the idea that Paul O'Neill stressing worker safety made Alcoa (AA) the top performer of the 30 Dow Industrial stocks (a meaningless metric, by the way) during his tenure as chief executive.

But those are quibbles. On the whole, the book is a good and educational read, which is what matters. Duhigg doesn't preach, rather he invites you to learn -- a much better approach. The book's most valuable contribution is explaining how habits are formed, and how you can modify your behavior gradually by changing a piece at a time rather than taking on an entrenched habit frontally.

Just as I was finishing this review, habit struck again. I was doing a walkthrough with the contractor who had just finished repairing the damage that Irene inflicted on our house. He asked why the refrigerator in our laundry room is wedged into a tight, inconvenient spot rather than in a larger, more convenient space nearby. My wife and I answered, "Because it's always been there." But it won't be there for long, now that we recognize the situation. Habits are only habits. Unlike your destiny, they can be changed.

More Weekly Reads

Elizabeth Browning Taylor's A Slave in the White House
Bobby Keys' Every Night's a Saturday Night
John D'Agata's and Jim Fingal's The Lifespan of a Fact
Raymond Bonner's Anatomy of Injustice
Susan Cain's QUIET

Filed under: The Weekly Read

America's founding slave

Fortune Editors — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:14:52 +0000

Our Weekly Read column features Fortune staffers' and contributors' takes on recently published books about the business world and beyond. We've invited the entire Fortune family -- from our writers and editors to our photo editors and designers -- to weigh in on books of their choosing based on their individual tastes or curiosities. In this installment, editor at large David Whitford reviews A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons, by Elizabeth Browning Taylor.

FORTUNE -- Paul Jennings was an American slave who belonged to James Madison Jr., fourth president of the United States. In the author's note to A Slave in the White House, Elizabeth Browning Taylor writes about meeting her subject's great-granddaughter, Sylvia Jennings Alexander. It was a startling occasion for Taylor: to come face to face with a vital, 93-year-old woman whose "stories went right back to Paul Jennings's time."

Reading Taylor's book, I was repeatedly struck by how few leaps are required to connect the present with slave days, and even with the era of the founders. Among the illustrations that complement the text is an 1848 daguerreotype of Dolley Madison, born nine years before the Declaration of Independence. I stared at her visage for several long minutes. We are indeed a young country.

That's half the power of Taylor's narrative. She also reminds us how profoundly strange and foreign-feeling America was during the first half of the 19^th century. At the beginning of the Madison administration in 1810, "Washington City" was a swampy, forest-ringed backwater with a population of 8,208. Both the White House (or "Great House," as some still referred to it) and the Capitol were still under construction. President's Square, later Lafayette Square, was "a half abandoned apple orchard with a few abandoned gravestones poking up in one corner." And yes, "Slave pens were located throughout the city, including in the shadow of the White House and Capitol, with auctions of enslaved men, women, and children a regular occurrence."

Some of the founders really did struggle with the contradiction between their Enlightenment passion for liberty, and the liberty they denied to others. In his early 30s, Madison briefly considered renouncing his inheritance and taking up Thomas Jefferson's offer of "a little farm" near Monticello that he could manage mostly on his own, part of a Jeffersonian scheme to entice some of his Southern friends to chuck it all and establish a "society to our taste."

"I feel the attractions of the particular situation you point out to me;" Madison wrote back a month later, "I cannot altogether renounce the prospect; still less can I as yet embrace it." The will that would assign to Madison the grand, porticoed mansion at Montpelier, a vast estate, and the slaves to work it was dated September 17, 1787. "By striking coincidence," Taylor notes, Madison was not at home that day. He was in Philadelphia affixing his signature to "the world's greatest achievement in self-sovereignty, or the right of people to govern themselves, the United States Constitution."

The title of the book is slightly misleading. Only one chapter concerns Jennings's teenage years, when he served President Madison as footman, and lived with the other family slaves in the cellar of the White House. Madison was not the first president who brought slaves to the executive mansion, or the last. According to the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Grand Valley State University, 12 U.S. presidents at one time owned slaves, eight while they were in office: "Put another way, for 50 of the first 60 years of the new republic, the president was a slaveholder."

When the British burned Washington in 1814, Jennings held the ladder while another slave removed Gilbert Stuart's life-size portrait of George Washington from its frame. He helped load the canvas into a cart for safe transport to a barn in Maryland for the duration of the war. Today that portrait hangs again in the East Room of the White House.

After Madison's presidency, Jennings returned with his master to Montpelier, where he was promoted to personal manservant. In this role Jennings tended to the retired president's wardrobe (Madison stuck with breeches and silk stockings his whole life, long after most of his peers had switched to pants), shaved his whiskers, entertained him with fiddle tunes, and stood in constant if generally unnoticed attendance while Madison entertained a constant stream of prominent visitors. Jennings's "exposure to the visual and auditory 'feast' at Montpelier was a daily education," Taylor writes. "The light, the knowledge was shared with him, if only inadvertently."

What emerges is a portrait of a remarkably willful, ambitious, opportunistic, and in his own way well-connected American whose life came to embody what the Civil War historian Gabor Boritt has called the "right to rise." You could also call it the American dream. Born into slavery in the last year of the 18^th century, Jennings died a free man in his own home a decade after the Civil War. "Not only did he secure his own freedom" -- with a loan from Daniel Webster -- "and his family's future, but as an intrepid antislavery activist, he forged passes and free papers, aided runaway slaves, helped organize a major slave escape attempt, and raised funds for slaves in peril."

Near the end of his life Jennings published a small book, A Colored Man's Reminiscences of James Madison, which counts as the first White House memoir, and is republished in its entirety as an appendix to Taylor's book. In the course of her research, Taylor also relied on oral history, and so became acquainted with many of Jennings's descendants. One young man said that reading about his slave ancestor was "a life-changing experience -- I did not know black people did things like that then." At times, if I might complain gently, Taylor's narrative, with its many names, dates and places, reads a little too much like a family history. Then again, this is a family whose history touches us all.

More Weekly Reads

Bobby Keys' Every Night's a Saturday Night
John D'Agata's and Jim Fingal's The Lifespan of a Fact
Raymond Bonner's Anatomy of Injustice
Susan Cain's QUIET
David Jones's Who Cares Wins

Filed under: The Weekly Read

A rock 'n' roll circus

Fortune Editors — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 10:00:38 +0000

Our Weekly Read column features Fortune staffers' and contributors' takes on recently published books about the business world and beyond. We've invited the entire Fortune family -- from our writers and editors to our photo editors and designers -- to weigh in on books of their choosing based on their individual tastes or curiosities. In this installment, deputy editor Hank Gilman reviews Every Night's a Saturday Night: The Rock 'N' Roll Life of Legendary Sax Man Bobby Keys, by Bobby Keys with Bill Ditenhafer.

FORTUNE -- B.B. King, Barbara Streisand, Billy Preston, Chuck Berry, Dr. John, Eric Clapton, Etta James, George Harrison, Graham Nash, Harry Nilsson, Joe Cocker, John Lennon, Keith Moon, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Martha Reeves, Carly Simon, Ringo Starr, Sheryl Crow, the Rolling Stones, Warren Zevon, and Yoko Ono.

For those of a certain age (me) that's quite a list, and what every one of those artists has in common is this: They played with the extraordinary rock saxophone player, Bobby Keys.

The title of the book, Every Night's a Saturday Night, pretty much reflects its feel: a little unpredictable, but spontaneous and a whole lot of fun. At 277 pages, it's not an exhaustive autobiography like, say, Keith Richard's recent Life. (Keith was Bobby's good friend, benefactor, and bandmate in the Rolling Stones.) But that's not the point. Every Night's a great romp that is almost more of a history of modern rock than it is a look at the life of Bobby Keys. That also makes it an enjoyable and fascinating read for anyone who loves classic rock, as well as for folks who grew up on the genre.

For those of you not familiar with him, Bobby Keys is one of the great sidemen of rock 'n' roll. He's the unsung hero who put his stamp on some of the legendary songs of his generation. That sax solo on the Stones' "Brown Sugar?" Bobby Keys. The sax solo on John Lennon's "Whatever Gets You Through the Night?" Yup, Bobby Keys again. You can also hear him on legendary albums such George Harrison's All Things Must Pass and, of course, Exile on Main Street, Sticky Fingers, and Let it Bleed by the Rolling Stones.

Now, I enjoyed reading about Bobby and his early days in Texas (lived for music; raised by his grandparents), and about debauchery on the rock 'n' roll roller coaster (drugs, drinking, women, police, throwing a TV out of a hotel window -- the usual). But I really was fascinated with the Bobby Keys-eye view of some of the recording industry's great stars.

Ever wonder about Mick Jagger's background vocals on Carly Simon's "You're So Vain?" Bobby's the guy who made sure Jagger was in the studio on time. (He also played on that classic album.) John Lennon? You get a completely different perspective on him. If you spent any time reading the endless collection of Beatles books, you come away thinking that Lennon was just a prickly, damaged, SOB genius. To Bobby Keys, he was a warm-hearted friend. During the recording of the 1974 album Walls and Bridges, Lennon gave Bobby written charts for all the sax parts. The trouble was, Bobby didn't know how to read music.

Lennon, with guitar in hand, took Keys into a stairwell of his apartment building and patiently (my word) taught him the parts on each song -- saving Keys from "certain death by embarrassment" when he appeared in the studio with the jazz-trained session players he was supposed to supervise. "One of the million reasons to love that man," writes Keys.

If I have any beef with the book, it's this: There's not nearly enough on why Keys was so in demand as a session musician, beyond the fact that he was a great guy to have in a band and that his playing style was perfect for rock 'n' roll. In other words: What was so good about him? Keys, perhaps like his playing, just glosses over most of it. He tells us that his iconic "Brown Sugar" solo basically happened in one take. So did his solo on "Can't You Hear Me Knocking," also by the Stones.

There's not much more to it in the book, but you have the sneaking feeling there was a LOT more to it in real life. Bobby's formula in his own words: Just "blow, and whatever came out, came out." But that's okay. Maybe it wasn't/isn't all that complicated. It's only, after all, rock 'n' roll.

Filed under: The Weekly Read

Can journalists really tell the 'truth?'

Fortune Editors — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 15:27:31 +0000

Our Weekly Read column features Fortune staffers' and contributors' takes on recently published books about the business world and beyond. We've invited the entire Fortune family -- from our writers and editors to our photo editors and designers -- to weigh in on books of their choosing based on their individual tastes or curiosities. In this installment, reporter Daniel Roberts reviews The Lifespan of a Fact, an argument on truth in journalism by John D'Agata and Jim Fingal.

FORTUNE -- In July 2002, a 16-year-old boy named Levi Presley killed himself by jumping off The Stratosphere, a Las Vegas hotel and casino. The writer John D'Agata soon undertook an investigative story for Harper's about that event, and on suicide in general in Sin City. But in 2003 the magazine rejected his article due to factual inaccuracies. Finally, in 2010, the more artsy journal The Believer published D'Agata's piece, "What Happens There." This was five years after The Believer assigned a fact-checking intern named Jim Fingal to review the story.

What took them so long? The Lifespan of a Fact has all the answers, and at the same time, none of them. The book, which credits D'Agata and Fingal as co-authors, chronicles years of correspondence between the two men, as one reviewed the other's facts and found, again and again, discrepancies and hearsay that strayed far from what most would expect from so-called "nonfiction."

This may all sound a bit dense and theoretical. But The Lifespan of a Fact needn't only be read for the intellectual debate it offers about authenticity in storytelling. If you like compelling, emotional stories set in wild, business-friendly locales, this book delivers. And it's actually fun to see the editorial process behind a long work of journalism stripped bare, although you'll enjoy this book a lot more if you can accept that the debate between its co-authors will not be satisfyingly resolved.

The book is quite dense in its presentation. In a small block on each page we see text from the original magazine article, surrounded by Fingal's notes and D'Agata's responses to them. The notes are colored vivid red in cases where Fingal found problems with the text, or black when D'Agata's facts checked out (more rare). The best route is to go through and read the original piece first, on its own, then go back and read the notes.

The article itself is an interesting and well-told meditation on the circumstances of Presley's death and its larger implications. And there's lots of great detail about the Vegas business scene, where gaming moguls like The Stratosphere's Bob Stupak (or Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson, names that may be more readily recognizable to Fortune readers) vie to create over-the-top attractions for big-spending guests.

D'Agata notes that The Stratosphere has been named "Ugliest Las Vegas Building" and "Trashiest Place in Vegas." (It cost $550 million to build and quickly accumulated $887 million in debt.) He provides compelling numbers about suicides, varieties of death, and other grim indicators associated with the hotel and with Vegas at large.

But Fingal quickly finds that many of D'Agata's numbers are incorrect or fudged. After enjoying the main story and then discovering its many untruths in the notes, you might feel outraged or indifferent, depending on whether you think D'Agata's loose allegiance to facts actually matters. D'Agata's attitude is clear from the very first response he gives when Fingal contacts him: "Hi, Jim. I think there's maybe some sort of miscommunication, because the 'article,' as you call it, is fine. It shouldn't need a fact-checker."

Oh, but it does. When Fingal discovers there are 31 strip clubs in Vegas, not 34 as D'Agata has written, D'Agata responds, "The rhythm of 34 works better in the sentence than the rhythm of 31." Yes, the statement is ridiculous, but D'Agata isn't the only self-important voice in the room. Fingal lavishes neurotic attention on details that most fact-checkers wouldn't feel need to be checked, or would at least recognize cannot be.

For example: D'Agata cites a "rumor" that there was originally a tiny kink in one of The Stratosphere's towers. Fingal asks for the source. D'Agata responds that a bus driver/tour guide said it in 1994, when he was on a Vegas trip as a sophomore in college. Though every publication has a different editorial process, most factcheckers would accept this anecdotal detail as just that -- an unverifiable anecdote. Not Fingal, who requests the name of the tour company and D'Agata's notes from that trip. D'Agata possesses neither of them.

Fingal also quibbles when D'Agata quotes a police officer saying, "None of this is gonna sound like a Mickey Spillane novel. You know?" In D'Agata's notebook the quote reads: "It's not going to sound like a Mickey Spillane novel." The exchange will help you discover your own threshold of permissibility in terms of altering quotes. But it's hard not to agree when D'Agata responds reasonably, "I punched up his statement, but I think the basic gist is the same."

Lifespan has already stirred controversy in the literary world. At the Book Bench blog, a New Yorker fact-checker sides entirely with Fingal and contends that D'Agata's worldview is "delusional," adding that he "fails to realize … these liberties are indeed harmful." Over at Salon, Laura Miller takes issue with both authors, describing the book as a "pissing match" full of "dickish replies." Miller aptly notes that the entire situation could have been resolved by adding an editor's note to D'Agata's article saying that the piece "contains factual material but is not restricted to factual material." But then there would have been no book.

David Shields, author of Reality Hunger and a writer at the forefront of a literary movement that seeks to destroy genre definitions like "memoir" and "nonfiction," gives a highfalutin' blurb for the book in which he praises D'Agata's "vision of the slippery nature of existence, the deep unknowability of things, the beautiful facticity of 'nonfiction' and the fictionality of 'fact.'" But this book doesn't necessarily need to be read as a high-concept manifesto. And it's unlikely to instigate sweeping changes in the practice of journalism: Every publication out there will likely continue to operate under its own editorial parameters.

Media professionals can be expected to read the book as a provocative, perhaps gimmicky statement on the ethical dilemmas inherent in producing a work of nonfiction. But the rest of the reading public may not feel a need to probe these questions. Indeed, it's quite possible to enjoy this book simply as an amusing, testosterone-flooded argument between two men who would both rather see the story killed than bend to the other's way of thinking. And furthermore, what is packaged as an erudite, ethical debate is also, more simply, a facetious performance built specifically to provoke.

Appropriately for a book about the line between fact and fiction, D'Agata and Fingal have obviously modified bits of their exchanges to amp up the comedy -- the two of them are too snarky and rude to each other too quickly for it to have been the real exchange.

Case in point: D'Agata speculates that as Presley rode up in The Stratosphere's elevator, a fellow rider "might have interrupted the operator to ask … while giggling, how many times each day she goes up and down the shaft." Fingal responds bitterly: "No proof of this in John's notes, but everyone loves a good dick joke, so I'll let it pass."

"This is getting nowhere," Fingal grouses after a predictably heated debate about the essay's larger implications. D'Agata responds: "You feel misled by my essay. I accept that … We disagree. I'm OK with that. But I'm also not sure where else to go." He then bows out, giving Fingal the last word. In the end the factchecker very nearly comes around to D'Agata's point of view, asking: "Even if everything that's in question could be verified by unbiased third-party witnesses, and even if I could definitively determine to a fraction of a second exactly when it was that Levi left his house and from how high it was that he jumped … I'd have done my job. But wouldn't he still be dead?"

Filed under: The Weekly Read, Uncategorized

Murder he wrote

Fortune Editors — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:00:36 +0000

Our Weekly Read column features Fortune staffers' and contributors' takes on recently published books about the business world and beyond. We've invited the entire Fortune family -- from our writers and editors to our photo editors and designers -- to weigh in on books of their choosing based on their individual tastes or curiosities. In this installment, assistant managing editor Nicholas Varchaver reviews Raymond Bonner's Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong.

FORTUNE -- It took just two days after the discovery of Dorothy Edwards' body, in January 1982, before Edward Lee Elmore was arrested for her murder. Today, 30 years later, the justice system still has not reached a final resolution in the case.

The tension between the police sprint to judgment and the glacial movement of the courts is a central focus of Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong, by Raymond Bonner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has written for the New York Times and the New Yorker. A one-time fraud prosecutor who also worked for Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, Bonner has had a long and distinguished career marked by concern for social justice. He has superb credentials to tell this story, which proves to be a depressingly revealing look at how police and courts, in particular, grapple with death penalty cases.

The case in question began with a gruesome crime: A 76-year-old white widow stabbed 52 times and left, wearing only a blood-soaked bathrobe, in the bedroom closet of her home in Greenwood, S.C. (Forensic evidence suggested she may have been violated after her death.) The white neighbor who found the body -- a rumored lover of the victim who years later would come under suspicion himself -- quickly pointed police to Elmore, a black 23-year-old handyman with an I.Q. of 61 who had cleaned the victim's gutters and windows and whose fingerprint was found near a door to the house. Within three months of the crime, Elmore was convicted of murder, criminal sexual conduct, and burglary, and sentenced to death.

Spoiler alert: It's hard to discuss this book without outlining the key events in it. Given that Bonner has bluntly titled the book Anatomy of Injustice, readers will likely intuit where the narrative is headed. This is a book whose value rests on its details and insights, not on a heart-warming Hollywood conclusion. But if you don't want to find out what transpires, I recommend you stop reading here.

The crime and first trial occupy the opening third of the book. It's clear that Elmore's defense was hampered by an extreme version of the deficiencies that commonly afflict indigent defendants in death-penalty cases. First there was the performance of Elmore's two court-appointed lawyers, who, as the book puts it, "consulted no independent experts, no pathologists, no fingerprint specialists. They didn't search for witnesses; didn't talk to any of Mrs. Edwards's neighbors; didn't interview Mr. Holloway [the neighbor who found the body]. They didn't even read the police interviews with the witnesses, which the prosecution had turned over to them as required by law … [They] stipulated to the admissibility into evidence of everything Jones wanted to introduce -- hair, fingerprints, Elmore's blue jeans and coat -- 98 items altogether."

Not only did Elmore's lawyers not attack the prosecution's evidence, they went so far as to praise the police officers to the jury. The defense lawyers' failure to challenge what would later turn out to be questionable evidence would haunt Elmore's case, not just at trial but through decades of appeals.

That wasn't all. According to a police official quoted in the book, one of Elmore's defenders "was drunk throughout the trial." (The lawyer denied it but acknowledged heavy drinking at points in his life.) Perhaps even more disturbing is what this same lawyer apparently told the author about his own former client: "In my judgment the son of a bitch did it … I was convinced of that at the time, and I still am."

Elmore had to contend with more than incompetent lawyers. There was a jailhouse informant who testified that Elmore had confessed to the murder. (Years later, the informant admitted making up the story and testified that a jail official had told him, "You help me out on the Elmore thing, and we'll look out for you.") Then there were the officers from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division who "lost" an important piece of evidence for 17 years and didn't try to match fingerprints to anybody other than Elmore. One day after the body was found, the officers even gave Edwards's house key to the neighbor who found her -- again, a person who would later come under suspicion for the crime -- after which he hired cleaners to remove blood and fingerprinting dust from the house.

Police behavior was also at issue when it came to a crucial piece of evidence: the alleged presence of Elmore's pubic hair at the crime scene. Given that no semen had been found, the presence of his pubic hair was critical to proving he had sexually assaulted the victim. But the police failed to photograph the bed on which the rape allegedly occurred. Nor did they test the bed coverings and sheets for bodily fluids. Indeed, their initial reports made no mention of hair on the bed. Only later, at trial -- after Elmore had been compelled to give samples of his pubic hair -- did this claim mysteriously materialize. By the police's own admission, his hair was kept in an unsealed evidence bag, raising even more questions.

Reading these appalling details, the surprise isn't that Elmore's conviction was overturned. It's that prosecutors kept pursuing him and juries kept sentencing him to death -- three times in all. And that's only the beginning of a saga that winds through countless appeals and motions.

Elmore eventually finds skilled and passionate appeals lawyers. Time after time they try to overturn his conviction. Time and again, over years and years, they are rebuffed. (The legal battles are so protracted that, at one point in the narrative, the author simply skips over seven years in Elmore's saga.) These agonizing attempts occupy the second two-thirds of the book.

The most galling moment in these failed tries occurs 14 years into Elmore's case, when he is losing for the umpteenth time in a bid for "post-conviction relief." After months of hearing evidence and briefs, South Carolina state judge J. Ernest Kinard turned down Elmore's motion. That in itself was not unusual. It was how he did it. According to the book, Kinard simply copied the prosecutor's brief -- which disparaged Elmore's claims of innocence -- and adopted it as his opinion. As the author puts it: "He didn't modify a paragraph, a word, a comma. He didn't even clean up the typos."

Having failed to offer a single thought of his own in his "opinion," Kinard sent the lawyers a three-paragraph letter. It concluded: "Edward Lee Elmore may well not be guilty and I appreciate the effort put forth by defense counsel and perhaps an appellate court may agree with one of your positions and grant relief." It's hard to imagine a more cynical act: A judge -- the very person who could have granted Elmore relief -- accepting the prosecution's argument wholesale and then tossing off a short note casually mentioning that the defendant "may well not be guilty," as if he had nothing to do with Elmore's case.

Bonner describes the note as "egregious," which spotlights a tension in his writing. He believes Elmore was railroaded -- the title of the book alone makes that clear. Inside courtroom scenes, he inserts lines such as "The state's case was beginning to resemble Pinocchio's nose." He shows himself to be deeply concerned about the mistakes and callousness of the judicial process involving death penalty cases (even if he never explicitly proclaims his opposition).

But Bonner is also an old-fashioned newspaper reporter with an unadorned, just-the-facts style that can border on flat. So there are periodic jarring shifts in tone, as Bonner alternates between those two modes. And occasionally, Bonner clogs his narrative with extraneous, narrative-slowing details. At one point he interrupts a dramatic, life-or-death race to the courthouse to identify the building's architect.

If you are a staunch advocate of the death penalty, you probably won't like this book. Of course, if you are such an advocate, you're precisely the person who should read it.

Anatomy of Injustice makes a useful legal primer. Periodically, Bonner pulls back from Elmore's case to offer short summaries of the important developments, and the more than occasional outrages, in death penalty cases. You could call this a lawyer's book for laypeople -- not only because of its cogent legal summaries but because it focuses on an underdog appeals lawyer named Diana Holt. Holt rose from an abused childhood to become a tireless and fiery advocate for Elmore. She's a compelling character who, along with her co-counsel, becomes the key player in the book's drama. If there is such a thing as a "good" side to death-penalty cases, it's the decades of toil and commitment that lawyers like Holt pour into a case like this.

The defendant, alas, is not so vivid. That's probably inevitable. With a fifth-grade education and an I.Q. that puts him at the level of mild retardation, Elmore is nowhere near as articulate as the lawyers. Through most of the book's action, he remains locked in a prison cell while the action swirls around him. Elmore sometimes appears as a background character in his own story. Bonner seems aware of this and repeatedly returns to Elmore's plight.

So where, exactly, does Elmore's case stand 30 years after it began? Frankly, the book's final pages are bumpy. After 272 pages spent methodically building the case for Elmore's innocence, Bonner reveals that in 2007, DNA testing found traces of the victim's blood on pants Elmore was wearing when he was arrested in 1982.

Bonner suggests that the police may have "planted" the blood, which is not impossible given their prior record of misconduct in the case. Still, I couldn't help wondering if Elmore is quite as innocent as Bonner has led us to believe. A few pages later we learn that in 2007, a judge reduced Elmore's sentence to life imprisonment based on new Supreme Court limits on executing mentally disabled people.

It's not the clear-cut exoneration a reader (or Bonner) might hope for. But before the reader can even process that, there's a brief epilogue that was apparently added at the last moment: In late November, a federal appeals court overturned Elmore's conviction. The chief reason (cited in the opinion but not in the book): the "gross failure" of Elmore's original lawyers. The opinion also asserted that there was "evidence of police ineptitude and deceit" and wondered in one place whether "the real perpetrator was Holloway," the neighbor (who is now deceased).

The epilogue notes that there was a fervent dissent to the opinion, which Bonner suggests will encourage the state of South Carolina to continue its pursuit of Elmore through further appeals. Death penalty cases, this book makes clear, are profoundly messy. "Meanwhile," as Bonner puts it, "Elmore remains in prison."

Filed under: The Weekly Read, Uncategorized

Why silence is golden

Fortune Editors — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:41:06 +0000

Our Weekly Read column features Fortune staffers' and contributors' takes on recently published books about the business world and beyond. We've invited the entire Fortune family -- from our writers and editors to our photo editors and designers -- to weigh in on books of their choosing based on their individual tastes or curiosities. In this installment, contributor Larry Shine reviews Susan Cain's QUIET -- The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.

FORTUNE -- "We find so many people impatient to talk. All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world. It is so much waste of time." --Mahatma Gandhi

Extroverts rule in American society, which can make life difficult for those who aren't comfortable imposing themselves, instantly and constantly, on their surroundings. Our celebrity-driven culture favors loud, impulsive, forthright folk and sets up social hazards for the quiet, thoughtful and reserved among us. As a result we're swamped by the white noise of self-promotion, advertising, and so-called "news" about, mostly, celebrity.

Enter Susan Cain, a former Wall Street attorney who represented clients like JP Morgan and General Electric. That led to a career as a negotiations consultant, training everyone from hedge fund managers to TV producers. In QUIET -- The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, she sets her sights on the tribe she claims as her own, introverts.

Cain explores the issues, frustrations, and accomplishments of the (approximately) one-third of the population who fall on this side of the personality curve. Drawing on extensive psychological and sociological research, she explains why introverts act the way they do.

While not all of Cain's evidence is new, much of it will be unfamiliar to lay readers. For example, a 1987 study of computer programmers found that the most productive coders generated 10 times more work than their least productive colleagues. The study found no correlation between productivity on one hand, and age, training, experience, or company on the other. Rather, the single biggest factor in their productivity was lack of interruptions. Makes sense, right? Computer programming attracts many introverts who like a quiet place to think.

Cain holds the reader's interest with a steady stream of facts, interviews and stories about introverts who have adjusted (or not) to a loud, boisterous, casually connected society. She finds that introversion is more common and its defining values more valued in the Far East, a theme that emerges in interviews with Asian-American college students.

The author's intimate knowledge of the corporate world fuels numerous useful insights for managers and HR professionals. For example, she notes that group brainstorming sessions and open-plan offices tend to suit extroverts but may have a chilling effect on more introverted colleagues.

The last part of the book is focused on teaching introverts how to cope in an extroverted society. Although the story drags a bit here, Cain offers a wealth of useful advice for teachers and parents of introverts.

QUIET should interest anyone who cares about how people think, work, and get along, or wonders why the guy in the next cubicle acts that way. It should be required reading for introverts (or their parents) who could use a boost to their self-esteem. Overall I think Cain will reach a wide audience. About a third of us, I suspect.

Filed under: The Weekly Read, Uncategorized

An ad exec's wise warning about social media

Fortune Editors — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:00:27 +0000

Our Weekly Read column features Fortune staffers' and contributors' takes on recently published books about the business world and beyond. We've invited the entire Fortune family -- from our writers and editors to our photo editors and designers -- to weigh in on books of their choosing based on their individual tastes or curiosities. In this installment, reporter Daniel Roberts reviews Who Cares Wins, a new take on corporate social responsibility and social media by senior advertising executive David Jones.

FORTUNE -- There was a time when corporations could merely say, "We're green," and consumers, not yet as scrutinizing as they are today, or perhaps simply less equipped to check up on corporate claims, would believe it. For corporations, those days probably feel like a lost Eden. "We help the environment," Mega-Conglomerate X would announce, and Consumers Y & Z would smile and nod, and be duly impressed, and lo, it was good (for the companies, anyway).

Now those days are gone, and big businesses can't just talk the talk, but must walk the socially responsible walk. Such is the argument of Who Cares Wins, a new biz book and pseudo CSR manual by David Jones, CEO of the French advertising giant Havas.

There's nothing new about arguing that businesses need to be socially responsible and prove they do positive work (whether that means environmentally-friendly operations, community outreach, or other good deeds). Nor is it news that companies need to care about what customers say about them on social media. The book's main argument is that these ideas are now intrinsically linked. In short, companies will be punished in the latter space for not being transparent in the former.

Some would argue that this rhetorical marriage isn't new either. But in a recent a sit-down with Fortune, Jones said he continually meets CEOs of major corporations who remain blissfully unaware of social media and its power. Worse, many of them wish to ignore it.

"I talk to people all around the world about this stuff, and they look at me like I'm a left-wing loony," he said. "To young people or people in media, it probably seems like I've written something obvious. But to so many executives, it really isn't obvious. If you talk to CEOs today, many of them think social media is a fad, something trifling that will go away."

Whether or not you find its premise interesting or newsworthy, the book is mostly a delight. A slim little volume with an appealing cover, Who Cares Wins doesn't always know what it wants to be -- corporate guide, market trend analysis, or autobiography. But Jones, a charming and engaging Brit, makes up for these small weaknesses with amusing personal anecdotes and hordes of examples, many of them stories that even the most attentive newshounds could have missed.

Everyone in the business world remembers, perhaps with a sad laugh, when BP (BP) leader Tony Hayward said that he wanted his life back after the Gulf spill. Five years ago, Hayward's gaffe would likely not have achieved the same level of notoriety. What's different now? Social media.

Thanks to Twitter and Facebook -- Jones heaps continual praise on the latter, perhaps due to his seat on Facebook's Client Council -- there are new laws of conduct for CEOs, almost like a corporate version of the Miranda rights: anything you say or do can and will be tweeted, Facebooked, and used against you in the court of public opinion.

The book is fat with instructive case studies. Companies that have done it right include GE's Ecomagination (GE) campaign and Marks & Spencer's "Plan A." Those who haven't include "Oil companies should clean up after their messes," a particularly unfortunate marketing slogan from Chevron (CVX), as well as Toyota's (TM) clumsy response to safety problems in 2009. Some of the worst offenders have been BP, along with Kenneth Cole's (KCP) famously insensitive Egypt tweet.

Jones can occasionally seem self-serving. His social media success stories include Havas clients, notably Evian's viral Roller Babies ad and the Dos Equis "Most Interesting Man in the World" campaign. Yet that's probably unavoidable in a book about successful marketing campaigns, written by a guy who happens to run one of the world's biggest ad agencies.

Jones inserts repeated plugs for Havas's own outreach and activism program "One Young World," which Jones founded. In a section about Unilever (UL) CEO Paul Polman, Jones introduces him as "Polman, a One Young World Counsellor," which seems gratuitous. The middle section of the book features eight color photographs of Jones with famous politicians and executives. The photos are a bit baffling, as this is not an autobiography.

Jones does write entertainingly about his own social media gaffes. An Ad Age article published on his ascension to the top spot at Havas quoted two of his public Facebook updates: "Sitting 5 seats down from Cameron Diaz at TED -- I wish she'd stop staring at me" and, "The joys of jetlag … #fuckihatetravelling." Seeing his own posts in the article made him regret them. The passage is funny, informative, and admirably self-deprecating.

Who Cares Wins is mainly a warning to other executives that they need to get with the program, or else. Jones telegraphs this agenda with sub-headings like "You can't opt out" and "Be prepared -- social media is always on the record."

Bottom line: Corporations need to be "fast, authentic, and transparent" on social media. As Jones told Fortune: "When something bad has happened, the company should not believe it has more than one minute to react and take proper action." Everyone from CEOs and marketing directors to bottom-rung employees should pay attention.

Filed under: The Weekly Read

King Larry: The story of a business monster

Fortune Editors — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:00:22 +0000

Our Weekly Read column features Fortune staffers' and contributors' takes on recently published books about the business world and beyond. We've invited the entire Fortune family -- from our writers and editors to our photo editors and designers -- to weigh in on books of their choosing based on their individual tastes or curiosities. In this installment, senior features editor Timothy K. Smith reviews James D. Scurlock's King Larry, a new biography of eccentric DHL co-founder Larry Hillblom.

FORTUNE -- Growing up fatherless on a peach farm in California, Larry Hillblom told friends he wanted to be like Howard Hughes some day. He came closer than anyone could have expected. Hillblom went into business, amassed a huge fortune, acquired an airline, built a secretive empire, sustained hideous injuries in a plane crash, and developed into a full-blown germaphobe eccentric.

For all that, there was an important difference between the two men. Hughes indulged his whims in Hollywood and Las Vegas, becoming an object of public fascination. Hillblom cut his wackadoodle swath across Micronesia, which is why you may not have heard of him.

Hillblom was the "H" in DHL, the international courier service, and is the subject of King Larry, a biography by James D. Scurlock. The author unquestionably has a nose for a good story. In 2006, two years before Lehman Brothers collapsed, he made a jeremiad movie called Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders. He published a book by the same name the following year.

With his new book, Scurlock has again hit upon a story that was crying out to be told. Hillblom, it seems, was a business monster -- a man with an unquenchable work ethic and no discernible moral compass. His principal hobby seems to have been deflowering virgins. A billionaire cheapskate, he was passionately devoted to a cause: shielding his money from the IRS. As soon as he had DHL up and running, he moved to Saipan, a U.S. protectorate with disputed (or at least disputable) tax regulations. There, dressing like a surfer and riding around in a DeLorean, he disported himself with breathtaking self-indulgence for 14 years.

And then he vanished.

Hillblom is probably dead; his seaplane, a vintage SeaBee, crashed into the Pacific in 1995. The bodies of two other people on the plane were recovered, but Hillblom's was not. Some people believe that he wasn't on the plane, that he disappeared to avoid responsibility for the messes he had made. After the plane crash, those messes triggered a probate battle running to more than a million pages.

Scurlock has done an impressive job reporting this book -- he spent months on Saipan gathering Hillblom stories and reading the court record. He persevered when sources tried to dissuade him from writing the book at all. The result is very good -- almost.

King Larry is a biography in three parts. Part one tells the story of Hillblom growing up in Kingsburg, Calif., escaping via Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, and founding DHL. That is not as over-compressed as it sounds -- Hillblom began working as a courier when he was still in school, carrying documents between Oakland and Los Angeles, and founded DHL with two partners after graduating from Berkeley.

Part two takes us to Saipan, where Hillblom, while overseeing DHL's growth into a global business, also built an empire based on real estate, communications, and other investments extending as far as Hawaii and Vietnam. Hillblom battled Frank Lorenzo for control of Air Micronesia. He learned to fly a plane, poorly, and lost an eye when he missed a runway. He got himself appointed a special judge to Micronesia's Supreme Court. He tended bar and owned a pawnshop. He tried to open a rodeo-brothel complex on the island's northern tip, but for some reason that didn't work out.

Part three covers the battle over the fortune that Hillblom left behind. Estimates of its value started at $420 million and rose to more than $600 million as lawyers started untangling his complex holdings. In his will he bequeathed his money to a trust for medical research, but there was a little problem, or rather four of them: illegitimate children who emerged to claim millions from his estate. Hillblom, who never married, was a committed sex tourist. Fearing AIDS, he procured young girls, some very young, in the Philippines, Vietnam, and elsewhere. One of Scurlock's sources recalls a conversation in which Hillblom said he had spent $10 million on virgins.

So yes, this is a satisfyingly salacious business book. And yet reading it may make you feel like a consummate nerd. That's because it leaves you wanting to know more about DHL. And about whether and how Hillblom concealed his ownership of some of the company. And about an island real-estate deal that fell apart. And about the governance of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. And on and on…

The trouble is that Scurlock, who is after all a filmmaker, is determined to build his story around scenes. His book suffers from the usual sins that arise when a biography is constructed this way, chief among them imagined details that step into the ditch of fiction. ("A balmy evening gust tousled his hair as he climbed the steps to the 707's front door, where he was greeted by a smiling stewardess wearing a sky-blue cap and gloves…")

The main difficulty is that Scurlock devotes so much attention to animating his characters and putting them on stage that he frequently neglects the big picture, making important issues difficult to follow. It happens again and again, but let a single example suffice. In the buildup to a conversation in a Manhattan bar, Scurlock mentions that Hillblom's interlocutor, a Navy lawyer, is "a tall, blond surfer from Laguna Beach, California." He also mentions that Hillblom "had just purchased the Marshallese ambassadorship to Vietnam for $25,000."

Wait. What?

In his acknowledgements, Scurlock thanks his editor first of all. Perhaps he shouldn't have. Scurlock has turned up a rip-roaring story, but it reads like a first draft. Had someone held his feet to the fire, it might have been a very good book indeed.

Filed under: The Weekly Read, Uncategorized

Why trust matters so much in business

Fortune Editors — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:02:39 +0000

Our Weekly Read column features Fortune staffers' and contributors' takes on recently published books about the business world and beyond. We've invited the entire Fortune family -- from our writers and editors to our photo editors and designers -- to weigh in on books of their choosing based on their individual tastes or curiosities. In this installment, reporter Caitlin Keating reviews Smart Trust, The Trustworthy Leader, and The Progress Principle, three new books that address the role that trust and related emotional issues play in business success.

FORTUNE -- In business as in private life, all successful relationships run on trust. Yet we often get trust wrong, giving it either too readily or too stingily. From Bernie Madoff to the mortgage industry, con artists have always operated by persuading naïve investors to give their trust. On the other hand, relationships often fail because one or both parties are afraid to give trust.

That's the premise of Stephen M.R. Covey's Smart Trust: Creating Prosperity, Energy and Joy in a Low-Trust World. "[T]hose who live in blind trust eventually get burned; those who live with distrust eventually experience financial, social, and emotional losses," writes Covey, the son of Stephen R. Covey of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People fame.

Successful companies and people find a middle way that Covey and co-authors Greg Link and Rebecca R. Merrill call "smart trust." For example, eBay's (EBAY) 235 million registered users are mostly strangers to each other. Yet they engage in one million financial transactions a day. According to former eBay CEO Meg Whitman: "[M]ore than a decade later, I still believe … the fundamental reason eBay worked was that people everywhere are basically good."

So how do successful companies manage risk in a low-trust world? Among many other examples, the authors point to Netflix (NFLX), which built a thriving movie rental business on trust. Netflix trusted all customers to mail back their DVDs, occasionally eliminating unreliable customers as a cost of doing business. If Netflix hadn't extended this original trust, they wouldn't have nearly as many subscribers. Less happily, Netflix's business suffered last year when it abruptly changed its pricing structure, which many customers viewed as a violation of trust.

A related topic is how successful leaders inspire trust. Amy Lyman, cofounder of the Great Place to Work Institute, has been studying this question for about 30 years. In The Trustworthy Leader, Lyman argues that trustworthy leaders inspire cooperation from their employees, which in turn produces a strong sense of commitment and loyalty throughout the organization.

While Covey and co. highlight the important of trust in general, Lyman focuses on the workplace. She presents detailed examples from many industries, including healthcare, retail and real estate, using her institute's Trust Index to measure the quality of relationships between employees and their leaders. (Fortune partners with the Great Place to Work Institute to produce our annual list of the Best Companies to Work For. The Trust Index is a pillar of our ranking methodology.)

Finally, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer wrote The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement and Creativity at Work to try and understand how various aspects of an employee's work and personal life affect performance and motivation at work. Amabile teaches at Harvard Business School. Kramer is an independent writer and researcher, as well as Amabile's husband. In the course of their research the authors analyzed nearly 12,000 diary entries from hundreds of employees at many organizations.

Although Amabile and Kramer pile up an impressive mound of data, their conclusions are generally unsurprising. For example, they found that "participants … experienced much more positive emotion when they made progress than when they had setbacks." They also found that happy employees tend to perform better. Strikingly, managers are often clueless about the importance of these "small wins". In a survey conducted for the book, only 35 out of 669 managers ranked progress as the number-one motivator, after recognition, incentives, interpersonal support, and clear goals.

Filed under: The Weekly Read

One historic recruiting year at Holy Cross

Fortune Editors — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:00:26 +0000

Our Weekly Read column features Fortune staffers' and contributors' takes on recently published books about the business world and beyond. We've invited the entire Fortune family -- from our writers and editors to our photo editors and designers -- to weigh in on books of their choosing based on their individual tastes or curiosities. In this installment, reporter Daniel Roberts reviews Fraternity, Diane Brady's chronicle of five young black men recruited to Holy Cross, who went on to lead remarkable lives.

FORTUNE -- When the journalist Diane Brady finally heard back from Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas about an interview for her new book Fraternity, he told her that, in his view, the media "have been universally untrustworthy" and "often has its own script." He was also sure to note that the reason he was finally agreeing to an interview was simply that, "Father Brooks asked me to do it."

Reverend John Brooks asked Thomas, and a handful of other students, to do a lot of things. First, in 1968, the theology professor and eventual dean asked them to enroll at the College of Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. In the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, Brooks, a white academic, decided the school needed to aggressively court promising young black men. The surprising story of that project, and the people that those young men grew up to be, is the very engaging subject of Fraternity. And what the book lacks in refined language or eye-opening quotes, it more than makes up for with its engrossing narrative.

The story is almost too good to be true, an unlikely result of happenstance (or was it kismet?). Of the 20 black men Brooks recruited to Holy Cross, among them would be an eventual Supreme Court justice, star NFL wide receiver, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, high-profile Wall Street executive, and prominent defense attorney. And that's not to mention any of the other Holy Cross men discussed, many of which also went on to greatness in their fields (among them Gil Hardy, a Yale Law grad who started his own firm before, sadly, dying in a scuba accident, and Art Martin, who went to Georgetown Law and became deputy attorney general of New Jersey). The faces of the five men on which Brady chooses to focus—Clarence Thomas, Eddie Jenkins, Edward P. Jones, Stan Grayson, and Ted Wells—adorn the book's appealing, yearbook-style cover.

Brady opens her book with a compelling moment indeed, the kind of anecdote a journalist feels lucky to get. On the day of MLK's assassination, she writes, Holy Cross sophomore Art Martin was studying in the dorm when a white student burst in and announced that "Martin Luther Coon" had been shot. It's an alarming, fiery lead-in to a book about racial tension, education, and ambition. Her first chapter utilizes the same moment as a way to introduce the main five, but in these cases it isn't as effective: each section ends with what the student in question decided, or how he felt, after the assassination, and certain phrases repeat themselves to the point of over-saturation: "Later in life, Thomas would refer back to King's death as a turning point," concludes an introductory section on Clarence Thomas. The Eddie Jenkins introduction ends similarly: "Years later… He would still cite King's death as a turning point in his life." Then, Stan Grayson's section ends: "Years later, the investment banker… would still shake his head in sadness when thinking about King's death." The point is made a few too many times.

Brady again lapses into clichéd phrasing when first introducing Brooks: "In an era of black and white, Brooks was unafraid to embrace views that were gray," she writes. But it's possible that such glittering generalities are unavoidable with a story so implausibly inspiring. When you've finished Fraternity, you nearly feel surprised you haven't seen Disney's movie preview for it yet.

Elsewhere, Brady shows strength at the same task of describing individuals succinctly, but uniquely. When she first mentions the president of the college, Reverend Raymond Swords, Brady gives a holistic, vivid depiction of the man in two concise sentences: "Swords, a cerebral and sometimes aloof academic, had come to the president's job reluctantly. Although he had little desire to be in the public spotlight, he wasn't afraid to break with tradition when he felt it was necessary." Indeed, one tradition Swords breaks with is the lack of racial diversity on campus. He gives Brooks a long financial leash with which to recruit the new students—and pay their way—and in so doing, the two of them help lead some students to believe "that the people running Holy Cross might feel as uncomfortable with its overwhelming whiteness" as others did.

Where the storytelling shines is not in any golden, revealing quotes (in fact, for the most part, Brady does not quote so often), but in dramatic moments described from multiple perspectives, and in the tender telling of friendships that were formed, such as when Jenkins and Wells meet on the football field: "They both looked relieved to see a fellow brother on the field… Wells, meanwhile, immediately liked Jenkins's sense of humor… Jenkins came across as a man who assumed the world was full of friendships waiting to be formed."

Similarly strong are the views—gained through careful reporting and, presumably, multiple conversations—of the personal emotional struggles that the new recruits were experiencing when they enrolled at Holy Cross. Wells missed his high school girlfriend, and as Brady puts it, "everywhere he turned, someone was preaching the merits of free love. But he couldn't stop thinking about her." Jones, as well, still harbored longings for a high school crush, and last year wrote in The New Yorker about the love letters he would send her: "I was alone in the wilderness in Worcester, away from Washington, D.C., my home, for the first time, and I needed some shack of a life."

In the book's most striking chapter, "The Walkout," Brady recounts how a December 10, 1969 campus visit by General Electric recruiters was greeted with raucous student protest, in support of an ongoing GE worker strike. After the protest, instead of charging every student that participated (or none), the college brought academic charges against a small handful of people, four of them black students that had only been "peripheral players." In response, the Black Student Union organized a walkout, threatening to quit the college. Reverend Brooks got them to come back, with tears in his eyes, and it is here that the wonderful photographs in the book, including one of Ted Wells announcing the walkout over campus radio, serve perfectly.

Fraternity tells a compelling story of justice, and trust. At the center of the narrative stands Brooks, who continued to be a mentor to the black students in their time at the school, and has remained one to this day, as Thomas's words to Brady make clear. The adult lives of these men intersected in surprising ways. By way of example, just look at Thomas and Wells, who both made wonderful names for themselves in law, but in markedly different ways (one a staunch conservative, the other having served as general counsel to the New Jersey Democratic Party). To think that these two men not only went to college together, but found themselves in the same close-knit group of Brooks mentees, is something indeed.

Filed under: The Weekly Read

Dylan Ratigan's inglorious bastards

Fortune Editors — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:00:34 +0000

Our Weekly Read column features Fortune staffers' and contributors' takes on recently published books about the business world and beyond. We've invited the entire Fortune family -- from our writers and editors to our photo editors and designers -- to weigh in on books of their choosing based on their individual tastes or curiosities. In this installment, executive editor Stephanie N. Mehta reviews Greedy Bastards: How We Can Stop Corporate Communists, Banksters and Other Vampires from Sucking America Dry, Dylan Ratigan's prognosis of America's problems, and his prescriptions for fixing them.

FORTUNE -- Just how dumb does Dylan Ratigan think readers of his new book, Greedy Bastards, are?

Ratigan, host of an eponymous MSNBC show, uses the game of Monopoly to illustrate how the banking system functions but first explains to his readers how to dole out the $1,500 each player starts with ("two $500s, two $100s, two $50s, and so on"). He invents games called "Take a Cup" and "Make a Cup" to demonstrate how capitalism works and the difference between traditional banks and systematically important financial institutions, or SIFIs -- banks that are too big to fail -- and riffs on these make-believe games for pages on end.

He even feels the need to explain to his readers what the expression "you get what you pay for" means.

Ratigan himself is no dummy. He's a former Bloomberg editor and CNBC anchor who became a vocal critic of big government and big business following the U.S. financial crisis and subsequent government bailout of banks and automakers. (A cynic might say his conversion to populism was more strategic than religious; when he was on CNBC he wasn't exactly the network's man of the people, and he seemed content to be portrayed as a Porche-driving, frat-boy type.)

When Ratigan isn't over-explaining, he's jumping from one subject to another, prosecuting villains before making the case for why they're "vampires" in Ratigan parlance. A section on education declares the student-loan industry bad guys. Ditto for-profit universities. And banks ("banksters") are baddies for enabling families to take out second mortgages to pay for their kids' college tuitions. His argument: These institutions, with their lobbyists and political contributions, are gaming the regulatory system so that they end up saddling students with worthless degrees and a mound of debt. And then to pay off that debt many of those students become, yes, banksters and vampires. The implication seems to be that the securities industry is bankrupting American families just so it can force its children into indentured servitude as investment bankers.

Even if the reader puts aside this conspiracy theory, the author glosses over a few systemic problems: College tuitions are rising (which is why students and their families take out big loans in the first place) yet a college degree on its own is no longer a guarantee of employment post-graduation. But Ratigan doesn't take on Harvard or Northwestern or Oberlin or any of the institutions of higher education that are contributing to the rising cost of school, other than to insist they become more transparent and provide families with itemized bills showing what they are paying for. Nor does he address the question of whether young people really need to attend college to be successful, an issue that investor Peter Thiel has taken up recently, for example. (Notably absent from Ratigan's unsurprising critique of elementary education -- not enough innovation, mediocre teachers -- is any mention of teachers' unions.)

But the book's biggest shortcoming is its lack of original reporting, a shame, since Ratigan likes to remind his readers of his journalistic bona fides. ("[Treasury Secretary Tim] Geithner wouldn't agree to do an interview with me ... I can understand his choice -- if I were Geithner, I wouldn't want to answer my tough questions either!") Ratigan, justifiably, criticizes big media for often being beholden to political and business interests that buy advertising, and implies that information in the press may not always be reliable because so many academics and experts are funded by corporations. But then he proceeds to grab anecdotes, quotes that support his assertions, and assorted facts from the likes of The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times -- even outlets Manufacturing News and Tax Notes.

But there's very little in the way of shoe-leather reporting. His section on education, for example, is full of descriptions of innovative programs and quotes from well-meaning folks like MIT's Nicholas Negroponte and Susie Buffett, Warren Buffett's daughter and an advocate for early education. He praises Sal Khan of the Khan Academy, whose innovative teaching videos are widely embraced by parents and even some schools to supplement classroom learning. But he never takes us inside a classroom -- we don't see how and why students struggle, nor do we get a glimpse of his proposed solutions in action. He tells, but doesn't show, us techniques for making learning more accessible and effective. We never hear a child or parent talking about their experiences. Instead, this populist spends a lot of time talking to Ivory Tower types.

The result is a book that is full of anger and passion, but utterly lacking in heart. Again, this is too bad, because there are many personal stories that Ratigan could have found to illustrate the problems caused by banksters and villains, but also to show how to fix classrooms, healthcare, banking and other broken systems. As for whether you should buy Ratigan's book, as Ben Franklin once wrote, "A penny saved is twopence dear." And if you need that expression explained, perhaps Ratigan's book is perfect for you.

Filed under: The Weekly Read, Uncategorized