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kottke.org posts about Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis on social responsible business practices
Michael Lewis on socially responsible business practices. I have so much to write about this issue, but a quick link will have to do for now.
Moneyball
Since Lewis writes primarily on business, business folks will undoubtably read Moneyball with an eye toward picking up some pointers on how to run their companies. Some will completely misunderstand what Lewis discovered about major league baseball and beefheadedly apply their new “knowledge”. The lesson of Moneyball is not that there are potential employees out there that are cheaper than your current employees. That’s the holy grail of large American corporations and exactly what they would want to hear.
As Lewis reports, what Oakland actually did is a) measure player statistics as objectively as they could, b) identify players that perform well in those statistical categories, c) discover that the players they valued were not valued by other teams and were therefore relatively cheap, and d) went out and got the players they wanted at bargain prices. As much as the business person would like to skip directly to step d, it’s impossible to determine if that will actually be effective unless you do the a-c analysis first.
Liar’s Poker
Michael Lewis is one of my favorite authors. He’s not the smartest or the most clever writer but he weaves deceptively simple stories into larger statements on society and humanity with a skill possessed by very few people doing creative work in any field. I haven’t gotten around to reading Moneyball yet, but Liar’s Poker is probably his strongest work. It’s as hard to put down as any fiction. Great book.
From Requiem for a Cheerleader:
From Requiem for a Cheerleader: Silicon Alley Magazine Is Dead: “You can’t have a magazine about unemployed people. You can’t have a magazine about people who are taking time off.” May I suggest to Mr. Calacanis that his magazine, along with most of the other Internet-oriented magazines published in past 3-4 years that have now — or are in the process of — going down the tubes, completely missed the point about the Internet.
The business and financial aspects of the Internet boom were interesting, but there was so much more there. The NY Times, Wired Magazine, and Wired News (among others) understood that and offered more (and continue to offer more) than just IPO news and stories on how much dot com executives make. Maybe now that the financial side of things isn’t that interesting anymore, the remaining publications will focus more on the aspects of the Internet that are still interesting**.
** Just so I don’t get a ton of email saying, “Well Mr. Smartypants, what is so damn interesting about the Internet then?”, there’s a whole lot to be said about how the Internet (and more generally, technology) is affecting the people who use it and how, in turn, that’s affecting society at large. Michael Lewis, author of Next: The Future Just Happened, has written several articles for the NY Times in this vein:
- Boom Box: “The new technology from Tivo and replay provides the ultimate in television convenience. It will also spy on you, destroy prime time and shatter the power of the mass market.”
- Jonathan Lebed: Stock Manipulator, S.E.C. Nemesis — and 15: The Internet and the increased power of the individual.
- Faking It: The Internet Revolution Has Nothing to Do With the Nasdaq: “If the Internet was giving the world a shove in a certain direction, it was probably because the world already felt inclined to move in that direction. The Internet was telling us what we wanted to become.”
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