Business Reads
Written by Gregg Henglein
This month we review four titles that were short-listed for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. The award honours the book that offers the most moving and enjoyable insight into modern business issues, with the 2010 winner…
Reviews
Fault Lines
by Raghuram G. Rajan
Five years ago, Raghuram Rajan wrote that ‘disaster might loom’, contending among other things that ‘the most important concern is whether banks will be able to provide liquidity to financial markets so that if risk does materialise, financial positions can be unwound and losses allocated so that the consequences to the real economy are minimised.’ Now, three years after the worldwide economic meltdown began, Fault Lines fleshes out those concerns in a retrospective approach, identifying what crippled the system: the push for universal home ownership in the USA, and the push for export-led growth in some countries such as Germany and China that spurred massive ‘global imbalances’, with some countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain held in consistent deficits and borrowing from the surplus exporting nations. Lionel Barber, FT editor and chair of the judging panel, praised Fault Lines as a ‘serious and sober book’, one that warns that unless policymakers push through painful reforms, the global turmoil could be revisited. Sobering, indeed.
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
by Michael Lewis
In 1989, Michael Lewis authored what’s arguably the definitive book covering Wall Street during the 1980s explosion, Liar’s Poker. Written from his first-hand experience as a bond salesman, Lewis’s tale shone a light into a dark place the common outsider could see only in the external havoc it created. Lewis has since written a pair of best-selling sports books, Moneyball and The Blind Side. But this long-overdue return to his roots may be his best work yet, praised in some corners as ‘the single best piece of financial journalism ever written’. Here, Lewis offers a comprehensive and accessible analysis of the blunders that built up the biggest credit bubble in history, all through the eyes of the managers of three small hedge funds and a Deutsche Bank bond salesman, none of whom you’ve ever heard of, but all of whom saw the subprime lending fiasco coming well before it burned millions.
Too Big to Fail: Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street
by Andrew Ross Sorkin
There is nothing small about the financial crisis that battered the USA and, as a result, the world, in recent years. With unprecedented access to the major players in both the financial and political worlds, New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin astonishes with details of conversations among the major players and insights into how they reacted as the floor cracked violently beneath them. How did Lehman chairman and CEO Dick Fuld maintain his view Lehman would survive when it was clear to everyone else the company was going down? How did Paulson react to the disaster when there were no rules in place as to how to handle it? And how were politicians on both sides of the political aisle placing their own agendas ahead of that of the financial world? There is little analysis here. More so, it’s a fascinatingly detailed chronology of events that is hard to put down.
The Art of Choosing: The Decisions We Make Everyday – What They Say About Us and How We Can Improve Them: The Decisions We Make Everyday of Our Lives and What They Say About Us
by Sheena Iyengar
An interesting runner-up on the list, primarily because despite author Sheena Iyengar’s back-ground as a professor of business at Columbia Business School the book is more about choices made on an everyday basis than from a business perspective. Iyengar’s research on choice and decision-making has been recognised for two decades. Her work is broadly cited, and globally respected. The core analysis delves into why we make the choices we do, as each decision defines and shapes us, from the life-altering to the mundane. Here, Iyengar recounts the story of her immigrant parents’ wedding, an arranged marriage based on a strict script handed down over generations. Is such an approach wrong? Or does eliminating choices in some situations alleviate stress and ensure a smoother path? Her research may surprise you, as will the means by which such decision analysis can be incorporated into the business setting.
