Posts filed under 'books'
Christmas Collection # 3
Andrew Curry, London: Future Savvy, by Adam Gordon
Future Savvy was the most stimulating futures book I read this year. I was put off at first; it sets itself up as a book about forecasting, and I am sceptical about this (you learn early in futures work that all forecasts are wrong, except for the ones which are right for the wrong reasons). But businesses and governments live by forecasts, and as you go further in, you discover that Adam Gordon’s intent is to make us appreciate the limits of forecasting.
There are good chapters on the nature of bias (social and personal), on why technology-led forecasts are so often wrong, and a reminder that the ‘blockers’ of change can be as influential as the ‘drivers of change’. Unlike some futures books, it is also clear and well-written.
It ends with a couple of chapters which are designed to improve the quality of our thinking about the future. The first takes some actual forecasts and interrogates their assumptions and gaps. (The forecast for the US housing market to 2013 by the US Homeownership Alliance is self-serving and spectacularly wrong). The second has a useful set of questions the reader can use to test the value of a forecast. As he concludes,
Good forecasting is as much about seeing what won’t change in the future. Even in fast-moving situations, not everything will change.
(The Future Savvy blog is here.)
Liz Walkling, London: The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson
I have just finished reading this crime trilogy inside a month! The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest are un-putdownable, with a complex, interconnected and riveting plot and a cast of intriguing characters – journalists, security experts, corporate heads and a network of hacking experts. Particularly likeable – even given her multi-faceted role as victim, anti-heroine and the saviour of the day – is the dysfunctional Lisbeth Salander, an extraordinarily gifted computer hacker. These skills enable her to uncover the long-unsolved disappearance of the daughter of a Swedish corporate millionaire, aided by the other central character, Mikael Blomqvist, an investigative reporter. The trilogy starts and finishes in tight courtroom dramas. It’s compelling because Lisbeth’s own story is a true injustice in all the senses of the word, but it’s this that makes her unusual character so likable. I was sad to finish it and desperately tried to slow down to eke out the pleasure, but the final volume was so gripping that I failed. I was so engrossed I almost missed my tube stop several times.
Claudia Rimington, London: Damien Hirst, No Love Lost
Hirst’s latest exhibition consists of 25 oil paintings, all large, dark and brooding, in two rooms in the Wallace collection. Most of the paintings contain an object associated with death (a skull, a skeleton) and they sit in dark blue spaces. All similar in feeling, and dominating the two classical rooms in which they are housed, their exhibition space is cold and atmospheric. Though the exhibition isn’t full of cheery subject matter, I would definitely recommend a visit to this before it closes on January 24th. What’s attractive about this exhibition is the rare beauty of some of the works. There’s something strangely compelling about Hirst’s low lit skulls in the dark – the deepness of the colours, the contrast between a sense of humanity and the nothingness which surrounds.
(You can watch a short video where Damien Hirst talks about the works in this exhibition here.)
2 comments 30 December 2009
Christmas Collection #2
Oliver Wright, London: Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day, by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford & Orlanda Ruthven
When we hear about those living on less than $1 or $2 a day, it’s easy to assume that the world’s poor do, in fact, have a stable but incredibly meagre income. The authors of Portfolios of the Poor establish that this is far from the case, and from information gleaned from individual financial diaries kept over the course of a year (and also from the personal relationships formed in so doing) they uncover the complexity that characterizes financial management for those below the poverty line. In Bangladesh, India, and South Africa, they find that the poor have remarkable coping mechanisms to deal with uncertain and irregular incomes. In South Africa, they discover that over the course of a year, people often manage 17 different informal financial products, ranging from savings clubs, deposit collectors, and short-term cash loans. Lacking basic literacy skills, many keep track of these mentally. In order to manage the risks which often threaten their livelihoods, they find that the poor are often using a greater number of financial instruments than the rich.
(This review was based on a podcast with the authors, hosted on Development Drums.)
Ramona Liberoff, London: Rambert at Sadler’s Wells – Triple Bill
Modern dance scares the uninitiated. Will the audience will be comprised of angular women with spectacles on rhinestone chains, with birds nests of greying hair? Will dancers snap their wrists and flail around to honking random horn notes? Nothing could be further than the Rambert’s last mixed bill at Sadler’s Wells. The combination of young dancers, choreographers and audience brought accessibility and modernity to ‘old’ music: Schubert’s Death and the Maiden arranged by Mahler, Saint Saens’ Carnival of the Animals. Modern dance is a great way of ‘hearing through seeing’: the submerged elements of the pieces were re-mixed by the imaginations of the choreographers, and made new again through associations with movements that – while being influenced through classical ballet – were much fresher than that. Imagine a Hermes Kelly bag made of PVC, and you’ll get the picture.
Mary-Kay Harity, Chapel Hill: Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich
Wherever you are reading this, you’re likely to be seeing lots of familiar holiday reminders of those less fortunate: ubiquitous bellringers next to big red kettles, coat collections, food drives and other charity appeals. These are often accompanied by images of homeless families, isolated seniors, and gift-less children at Christmas. These may be even starker than usual this year, courtesy of the recession. That is why I highly recommend reading (or re-reading) Barbara Ehrenreich’s classic Nickel and Dimed. Ehrenreich turns the spotlight on those ‘caught in the middle’ - The unseen poor: neither destitute enough for aid nor solvent enough to live decently, all while working fulltime (and often two and three times ‘full time.’) Nickel and Dimed suggests a new item for the social agenda as a greater sense of shared responsibility takes hold among consumers.
Add comment 29 December 2009
Christmas Collection #1
To see out 2009 on the blog, we asked people from across the company to give us a short review of a movie, book, exhibition, or anything that struck them during the year. Here’s what they sent us.
Andy Stubbings, London: The Hurt Locker, by Kathryn Bigelow
My favourite film of 2009 was The Hurt Locker by Kathryn Bigelow. Hugely captivating and at times ridiculously tense, I can’t remember the last time a film at the cinema has been so immersive (certainly not the slew of mediocre ‘disaster porn’ movies of the last couple of years). I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen it, but if you do get the chance, try and see it in a great big, loud cinema. Just don’t sit too close.
Jessica Baluss, Chapel Hill: Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, by Christopher McDougall
Part-time runner, part-time journalist Chris McDougall tracks down the reclusive Tarahumara (‘the Running People’) in the rugged terrain of Northern Mexico. He explores physiology and training across sports and cultures; the subculture and relatively unknown athletes of modern ultra-running; and a quirky cast of characters – including the author himself – who ultimately face off against the Tarahumara “ghost runners” in a page-turning extreme race through the desert. It’s a thought provoking take on why we run – examining unnecessary layers of the modern running shoe and ‘the Nike effect’, as well as the corporatization of racing and sponsorship. It’s inspired many runners to try a different stride, terrain, pair of shoes, and to rediscover the joy of their next jog.
Stacey Yates, London: Sophie Calle, ‘Talking To Strangers’
For her exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Sophie has taken a ‘break up’ letter from her lover and sent it to 107 women with different backgrounds and asked them to interpret the letter from their professional, or in some cases, personal standpoint. Among others she has called on a criminologist, writer, proof reader, opera singer, mother, mime artist, 9 year old school girl, editor, and an 18th century historian….the list goes on.
It’s a fascinating look at our capacity to approach subjects in a variety of different ways and it’s done brilliantly. A fantastic multimedia installation where the audience seems to be walking around, well… looking for themselves in the various interpretations! Interesting and inspiring – and on until 4th January.
(The picture is from the Whitechapel Gallery, and is used with thanks.)
Add comment 28 December 2009
Connecting with cricket
A guest post by Robert Stanier
The start of a new cricket season (at least in Britain) seems a good moment to mention one of my surprises of the close season – that Bob Woolmer’s huge book on the “Art and Science of Cricket” turned out not to be so much of a coaching manual (although it is), as a complete history of cricketing innovation.
Woolmer played cricket for Kent and England, and coached South Africa and Pakistan, and his book is a wonderful example of someone taking a subject they have deep knowledge of, and love, and completely re-thinking it. He draws on all sorts of fields of expertise, from psychology (visualisation techniques), to physics (reverse swing), to historical analysis (comparing Ian Botham’s tips on batting in 1980 with the Reverend James Pycroft’s in 1851), to statistics (there’s no advantage in winning the toss in a one day match, despite the conventional wisdom!), and fusing them together with his experience of being at the top of international sport.
Every ten pages or so, he comes up with something utterly new and original, even to a hardened fan such as myself. For example, he links Don Bradman’s career batting average (40 runs per innings more than anyone else in the history of the game) to the fact that Bradman never saw any cricket played until he was fifteen, and largely taught himself to bat by striking a ball against a fence in his back yard. No one ever got round to ‘correcting’ his technique – but it was all but impossible to copy.
More practically (for someone like me), he explains why for most batsmen the best guard to take is leg stump.
More importantly, even for a non-player: it’s about taking a subject, completely rethinking it, and coming to utterly new conclusions. It’s a process that must be applicable in dozens of other fields. And this is a classic example.
This is probably the most important book on cricket in the last thirty years. Maybe longer.
Robert Stanier, now a vicar in London, is a former colleague. Thanks to Deewhy RSL Club in Sydney for the photograph.
1 comment 21 April 2009
More books… and a film
A couple of late arrivals for our review of favourites from 2008.
J. Walker Smith, Chapel Hill:
Let’s say you develop some idea of what the future is likely to hold. Do you then know what to do about it? That’s the question that University of Chicago law professor and prolific public intellectual Cass Sunstein tackles in his thorough discussion of planning for Worst-Case Scenarios. This has obvious relevance for the most frightful worries of our age like climate change, suitcase nukes, anthrax, avian flu and GMOs. But it is relevant as well to every policy action and business decision. Sunstein critiques the Precautionary Principle and Cost-Benefit Analysis to recommend an alternative that he believes better balances risks and benefits. This book is another must-read from Sunstein for anyone doing strategic analysis or scenario planning.
Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wasnick (Bantam Books, 2006) Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, Tom Vanderbilt (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008′)
Behavioral economics is all the rage these days, and the bestsellers Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely and Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein have helped popularize this branch of social psychology. But do we really understand how these classic psychology experiments and even the more recent work in economics apply to real life, particularly to business and marketing? Two recent books make this connection for eating and traffic. Brian Wasnick teaches marketing and nutritional science at Cornell where his lab has done pioneering work deciphering the workings of the
‘mindless margin’ that lies between healthy and unhealthy food choices. Tom Vanderbilt is a science and culture journalist who embedded himself for three years with traffic researchers and engineers to answer questions like ‘why does the other lane always seem faster’ and ‘why are dangerous roads safer’ and ‘why do women cause more congestion than men.’
Larissa Persons, New York:
5×2 is the story of an unhappy marriage told backwards in five parts. It begins with the divorce. And it ends with the couple, Marion and Giles, meeting for the first time. Each of the five ‘chapters’ focuses in on a particular scene from their lives together. We see the couple hosting a dinner party while their young son sleeps. We see the birth of their child. We see their wedding. Each scene peels away another emotional layer and offers another insight into the individuals and their relationship.
Ozon exploits the construct of reverse chronology to the full. So the film is not about what happens – after all we know the end from the beginning – but rather is about why it happened. And by the time you get to the end (of the film) it is clear that the roots of the couple’s demise are there, plain for all to see, right from the start of the romance. You can see the drivers that created the future.
And while the construct turns the viewer into a clinical observer of the dissection of the marriage, the details revealed and the style of the narrative are almost disconcertingly intimate. This serves to ensure that you become intensely involved in the story itself and with the two main characters, rather than simply remaining an innocent bystander. The film therefore manages to be gripping, despite its removal of conventional suspense.
It’s not exactly an enjoyable 90 minutes, but I found 5×2 powerful and memorable. It’s also got an excellent soundtrack, courtesy of Philippe Rombi.
Add comment 24 January 2009
Our Books of the Year: part 3
Rebecca Nash, London
Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) is as much about his mother as his father’s life. Obama narrates his mother’s story, which he knew well – her significant intellect, her idealistic but often disappointed father, her hardworking mother (Obama’s now famed grandmother, ‘Toot’) – alongside a more literal search for his father’s identity within a vast Kenyan kinship network that, by the end of the story, makes Obama its new centrepiece. Of course, it is impossible to read this book now without thinking about historical destinies. Obama’s supporters, myself included, often felt during the long campaign that they themselves ‘discovered’ him. Some were then surprised, in fact, to witness his gift for politics. Much of this must be due to Dreams from My Father, written in a complex and honest voice, and of a time when the President-elect was not yet a public being.
Josh Treuhaft, New York
“It’s a truism of the age of globalization that where we live doesn’t matter – we can work just as easily from a ski chalet in Aspen as in a house in Provence or an office in Chicago.” At least that’s what Thomas Friedman and a host of other globalization pundits have been touting since the world became ‘flat.’ According to Richard Florida, however, the world is doing the exact opposite of flattening – it’s getting spikier as more talent co-locates in the world’s ‘mega-regions’ and fuels innovation and economic growth. Technology is making us more mobile, and today’s creative global nomads are taking advantage by moving to the places which provide the best opportunities and the right personality fit. So how do you choose the right place? What makes one location ‘better’ or ‘righter’ than another?
In Who’s Your City, Florida makes the point that where we live is quite possibly the most important decision of our lives. It determines our potential to find a mate and start a family. It determines the range of our employment opportunities, our networks, our friends, and to some extent our values. And not all cities are created equal. Who’s Your City compiles almost 20 years of data on geographic preference, personality and attitudes, census data and a host of other resources to paint a picture of what makes certain cities attractive to certain types of people…and what may contribute to the eventual economic success or failure of a number of great American places. The data is rich and compelling, his storytelling is captivating, and he adds some great personal anecdotes.
Definitely worth a read for anyone interested in urban planning and the forces driving urbanization. And if you’re considering making a big move and need some insight into where you might be most happy and successful, the book may help. Be warned though, the end of the book turns into a ‘self-help’ reader and is sort of flimsy and obvious.
Sarah DelliGatti, Chapel Hill
The Twilight Series by Stephenie Meyer is my book of the year. I wasn’t a huge Harry Potter fan so I hesitated when my friend and colleague Stephanie McDonald told me I should read these books about vampires and werewolves. Twilight is a love story between the two main characters, Edward (vampire) and Bella (human). Their love and relationship should be impossible, but yet it ends up overcoming all of the obstacles that Meyer creates throughout the four novels.
I know these books are marketed to teens and tweens, but I think it’s fair to say that they have crossed age barriers. In these tough economic times, it’s important to step away from the headlines and just get away for a little while. Twilight is the perfect way to do this. I can say that for the two weeks that it took me to read the 500-700 plus pages in each of the four books in the series, I was totally engrossed in Bella and Edward’s world.
Add comment 31 December 2008
Our Books of the Year: part 2
Peter Rose, Los Angeles
The Reach of a Chef: Professional Cooking in the Age of Celebrity is the third in a series of books by author Michael Ruhlman as he digs deep into the world of the professional chef. For any foodies or aspiring cooks, this series (which began in 1999 with The Making of a Chef) is an extraordinary look at the world of the chef. From a consumer insights perspective, however, Ruhlman lends tremendous insight into things we focus on at The Futures Company on an everyday basis. From the impact that the coddled Millennial generation has on the professors/chefs at the Culinary Institute of America (where this new generation of students bristles at the old-school ways of teaching, and has their parents calling the school to complain) to chefs who pursue Responsibility through organic, sustainable, and local food purchases and practices, The Reach of a Chef is in fact a microcosm of many of the macro consumer trends we see today.
Joe Ballantyne, London
Everyone agrees that China is the great economic success story of the past decade and that adapting to its rise will pose a challenge to the political, economic and even moral bases of the current international order. The way in which China evolves will have a profound effect on all of us and, according to Will Hutton, it isn’t going to be an easy ride. The Writing on the Wall argues that Chinese growth is built on an unsustainable model – impossibly high levels of export growth which can’t continue (this much is already coming to pass: Chinese exports have been falling in recent months), state-driven capital accumulation and cheap labour with very low productivity, little technical innovation and the absence of an appropriate business culture or legal structure.
The paradox set up in the book is that while the current system may be economically unsustainable, doing anything to put it right is politically unacceptable – since it will involve weakening the political power of the Communist party, an option which is undesirable to the country’s elite. Hutton’s suggestion is that the Chinese will have to import what he calls the ’soft infrastructure of capitalism’: essentially enlightened institutions and attitudes such as representative government, security of property, an independent civil society, a commitment to political rights.
One of the challenges of futures work is stretching thinking beyond current trends – since the temptation is always to just extrapolate existing trends ad infinitum. The Writing on the Wall is a useful reminder that in some cases, we need to be a whole lot more imaginative about our potential futures.
Jo Phillips, London
In the year that the global balance tipped to urban (for in 2008 for the first time over 50% of the world’s population lives in cities), I was drawn to an account of the dwindling days of rural life in an English village at the end of the nineteenth century. Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise is a charming portrait of a very particular place and time – the observations of the minute details of customs, culture and behaviour, from how a pot roast was cooked on a fire, to the lyrics of drinking songs, are glorious. As someone who was born at a similar point in the following century, aware of the fact that people of my age will be some of the last to say ‘I remember before the internet’, I find myself similarly nostalgic for some of the language and customs of my country childhood.
Add comment 30 December 2008
Our Books of the Year: part 1
Marjorie Goldstein, New York
Parallel Lives, written by Phyllis Rose, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1983. I picked up my copy in a second-hand bookstore in Vermont, and once started I couldn’t put it down. The book, sub-titled ‘Five Victorian Marriages,’ is an extremely well-done account of the machinations, intrigues, infidelities and happinesses (as defined by the protagonists and fairly rare) of five very well-known literary couples: Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle; Effie Gray and John Ruskin (fairly shocking); Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill; Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens (quite a guy!) and George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. In some ways the lives we lead now are extremely different; in others quite the same. It reminded me of the French expression, ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose’
Andy Stubbings, London
Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely, is another pop-economics book and the latest in a line of books debunking ‘Traditional Economics’. Ariely takes us through various experiments that demonstrate that people act in much less rational ways than we might expect, with results that are intuitive but illuminatory. For instance, it is easier to get lawyers to provide their services for needy causes for free than it is for $30 an hour, because they will assess the deal in terms of social norms and not market norms (i.e. “I’m worth much more than $30” vs “it’s good to volunteer). The book is stuffed with anecdotes and factoids like that, which is why it makes for great reading.
Andrew Curry, London
We live on the blue planet, and 60% of our bodies are water. But one of the great conundrums of the future is whether we’ll have enough water – or too much. Poets sometimes have an antenna for such things, and the first poems in Sean O’Brien’s The Drowned Book are suffused with water. In ‘The Water Gardens’, for example, he writes, ‘Water looked up through the lawn/ Like a half-buried mirror/ Left out by the people before’. The language captures a sense of water as a deep history – and a deep sense of foreboding.
Add comment 29 December 2008
All together now
Jo Phillips writes:
When she spoke at the Booksellers Association conference last week Michelle Harrison, one of our Directors, implored the industry to think harder about how to sell books to consumers who are showing signs that they prize collective experience far more than they used to. This extends beyond valuing such experiences over material things (e.g. a book) to valuing the shared experience above the individual experience (e.g. reading a book in the bath). Whereas five years ago people were telling us what they wanted most was a bit of ‘me-time’, now it seems above all what we value is quality ‘we-time’.
As we move into the summer season in the UK this desire to get together is evident in the huge growth in festivals of all kinds and scales – last year there were over 550 of them and nearly two thirds of adults have attended a live music event in the last three years. Booksellers are in on this act – the Hay Festival, which starts today, grows larger every year (new for this year is a link up with a prison broadening its base further). Book clubs are also growing in popularity. But these are still niche audiences among book-buyers.
The need for social innovation is a challenge to many industries that have focused on benefits for individuals. It may call for turning the category on its head, as Nintendo Wii did by sidestepping the industry competition for faster, bigger, better graphics to focus on enabling living room fun between friends, or through product innovation, as Walkers Sensations did by creating the sharing crisps opportunity.
Add comment 22 May 2008
