Posts filed under ‘books’
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.
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.
29 December 2008 at 7:00 am thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
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.
What to read in 2008?
Andrew Curry writes:
The most recent issue of The Wire, WPP‘s in-house paper, has a feature on ‘What to read in 2008′, a collection of recommendations from individuals working for businesses across the world. I blogged a while ago on my contribution – about Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down. If there are themes from the other contributions, they are about the emerging economies, especially China, and about marketing and management.
WPP Chief Exec Sir Martin Sorrell’s choice is the two working papers (99 and 119, opens in pdf) from Goldman Sachs which, in his words, “describe the shift in wealth from west to east”. (The more recent Working Paper 134 , also pdf, is an update). The other two Chinese selections – from people working in Asian markets – look at China “as a country, not just as a market”. The Search for Modern China locates China within its cultural and political history, while China: The Fragile Superpower is subtitled, “How China’s internal politics could derail its peaceful rise”.
On management, the idiosyncratic Rory Sutherland (of Ogilvy) praises Discover Your Inner Economist, while bemoaning the fact that “It is a disgrace to marketing and research disciplines that economists are now writing more interesting books than we are”. David Muir, at WPP’s Channel Practice, commends as a management primer Team of Rivals – a history of how President Lincoln managed a cabinet whose members disliked each other and coveted his job.
And as always in such lists, there are some quirkier recommendations. The arguments in David Maister’s Strategy and the Fat Smoker, about strategy and change, are both “irrefutable and wonderfully personal”, while Very Thai is a cultural journey into modern Thailand – pictures and text – which offers “new ways of exploring your own, or a new culture”.
Influential Boomers
Siân Davies writes:
Henley Centre HeadlightVision is just embarking on a merger with the US research company Yankelovich – the market leaders in understanding the changing values and behaviours of US consumers.
While we’ve been negotiating I’ve had the good fortune to immerse myself in much of their research. One publication which stood out for me was ‘Generation Ageless‘, by J Walker Smith and Ann Clurman, Yankelovich’s leading commentators on generational marketing. Yankelovich coined the term ‘baby boomers’ in the 1960s when they first started collecting data on this influential generation. As Walker and Ann say: “Without notice or warning, in defiance of all trends and expectations, Baby Boomers exploded onto the American scene, and in the process changed everything”.
The Upside of Down
Andrew Curry writes:
I was asked to write a paragraph on a book which had influenced my thinking in 2007 for a forthcoming issue of the WPP newspaper The Wire. My choice: Thomas Homer-Dixon’s book The Upside of Down:
The Upside of Down changed the way I look at the world. It is about what holds together the complex systems which make our societies work. The answer, in short, is energy – and in particular, energy which doesn’t take very much energy to produce. Sun works well in warm countries; oil is perfect. As societies get more complex, they have to create and shift ever more energy, which makes them even more complex. When the easy energy starts to run out, collapse follows. Homer-Dixon brings his argument to life with stories about the Roman Empire and Californian fires. So where’s the upside? Only this: it may not be too late to make our shift to a world of scarcer energy less disastrous than it was for the Romans.
I’ll blog some more when The Wire is published on the other entries.
24 November 2007 at 12:39 am thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Outing Dumbledore
Andrew Curry writes:
There’s a whole story here about fan culture and celebrities, and also what happens when authors don’t have to worry about what happens next. No sooner had J.K.Rowling mentioned at a reading in New York that Dumbledore was gay than the Dumbledore Pride site is selling the T-shirts – 7,000 before you can even get your wand out.
As Jason Kottke pointed out in his blog – the fan fiction floodgates are surely about to open. If Dumbledore, then who else?
26 October 2007 at 7:26 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
