Category — reviews

Oil, Anatomy of an Industry by Matthew Yeomans is a Cliff’s Notes to the tremendous importance of oil and the oil industry in creating and maintaining American life and supremacy.

This fast-paced opens with a tongue-in-cheek attempt by Yeomans to avoid oil for one day. It is, to say the least, an impossible task. Oil is modern life.

A chapter on Energy Wars is a Google Maps of current U.S. military deployment — placing the Bush Administration’s redeployment of U.S. troops to areas near Sao Tome, Equatorial Guinea and Uzbekistan clearly against these nations’ future oil prospects.

The book gives solutions to our “oil addiction” short shrift, with a “blueprint for a new energy future” taking all of three pages, yet overall it’s a solid look at the history and near-term future for our most important natural resource.

One solution mentioned, championed recently by Thomas Friedman, is the institution of a much higher national gas tax. While a political non-starter, Oil also detailed the UAW’s role in helping the auto industry defeat Senator Richard Bryan’s 1990 attempt to raise every vehicles fuel efficiency by 40%.

It’s frightening that the good Ole U.S.A. is so set in its ways that it cannot experiment in a meaningful way with ending its relationship with Oil.

Based on a quote used in a P.J. O’Rourke book from an obscure Scottish economist, William J. Bernstein goes to great lengths to show that prosperity is the result of four factors:

1. property rights
2. scientific method
3. capital
4. technology (communication + transportation)

Bernstein shows that efficient and secure property rights ensure that land will move from being concentrated among a few owners to being held by those who can use it far more efficiently – usually a much larger number of land owners.

But does this same belief in the power of property rights and the tendency for property to flow to where it is most useful fly when applied to intellectual property?

I’m not wholly convinced that intellectual property will naturally flow into the hands of those who will make the most efficient use of it. It seems our laws governing patents mimic too closly the flawed property mechanisms of the Spanish – allowing a few companies to inefficiently hold onto knowledge that might otherwise enrich society.

I’m thinking of medical advances here, but this certainly applies to any patentable technology. Without addressing it, Bernsteins book seems to question the logic of the United States’ continual extension of a patent’s timeframe.

If you’re not going to take the time to read this phenomenal book, you can read more of Bernstein’s work on the horribly designed efficientfrontier.com. However, I cannot recommend this book enough. Great stuff.

It took me way too long to get turned onto the work of Peter F. Drucker. An amazing read on leadership today … one that’s no-doubt familiar to the economist but not as readily known as should be.

Some noteworthy quotes

Management … will increasingly have to be based on the assumption that neither technology nor end-use is a foundation for management policy. They are limitations. The foundations have to be customer values and customer decisions on the distribution of their disposable income

In a declining industry one has to manage, above all, for steady, systematic, purposeful “cost reduction” and for steady improvement in “quality” and “service,” that is, for strengthening the company’s position within the industry, rather than for growth in volume … products in a declining industry tend to become “commodities”

And my favorite quote, which I’ve used before: Again and again in business history, an unknown company has come from nowhere and in a few short years has overtaken the established leaders without apparently even breathing hard. The explanation always given is superior strategy, superior technology, superior marketing, or lean manufacturing. but in every single case, the newcomer also enjoys a tremendous cost advantage, usually about 30 percent. The reason is always the same: the new company knows and manages the costs of the entire economic chain rather than its costs alone

quickly: if you work in TV, read this. if not, save money to pay for tv downloads. they take over soon.

So for the first time Friday night, I decided to watch my favorite TV show “Battlestar Galactica” live.

I’ve seen every episode of the show, now in its third season, but had yet to watch it when SciFi shows new episodes at 10 p.m. Fridays.

With 10 p.m. rolling around, I hit pause on “Rocky” recorded on our ReplayTV and switched to live TV. I then glanced at my laptop and opened it up, too.

Checking on my favorite RSS feeds, I saw many blogs talking about new IBM research “The end of television as we know it.”

I quickly opened up the research paper as “Battlestar” began, hoping to glean some info about the study before the show began in earnest.

The study is a winner and is yet another “must read” for those in the TV business.

Figure 13 made me laugh out loud – in 2008 it’s believed that storing 10,000 hours of TV will cost $236. For standard definition TV, I assume they mean a 10 terabyte hard drive will cost $236. Crazy. Even better – they believe the cost to stream one hour of encoded video will be 9 cents. Again, I assume they mean it will cost 9 cents to move 1 gigabyte of streamed video to an end user – a giant fall from current rates for Windows Media and a gigantic fall from rates for Flash video.

Figure 6 is another winner – showing the many emerging revenue models for video creators and aggregators. Not sure which model works for broadcast news, though.

The threat for those in broadcasting is here — “Networks will be extinct in fifteen years” — yet the opportunities will be amazing, if embraced.

In any case, I yet again missed watching “Battlestar” “live.”

Summary: UD student blogs: Nice try

Searching for music on iTunes, I came across a blog called “My life at UD”

It was the ramblings of a freshman at the University of Dayton. Interesting enough, the blog is hosted by the university.

When I first visited the site, I assumed that the school was actively encouraging students to blog about the school … a seemingly great idea.

Sadly, it’s just a well-thought out PR campaign: The site features six students at UD that blog and podcast about their life at school. While the posts are candid and the effort is fairly progressive for any PR department, it still is a carefully constructed attempt to get high schoolers interested in the school. “A” for effort, “C” for playing it safe by controlling who blogs. Props to the develpment company, beepix.com for creating the smart site.

On a side note, one of the blogs features a picture of our heroic first year student … holding her cell phone on campus. Seven short years ago, there were no cell phones on campus. I can’t imagine the trouble — and monthly bill — I would have rung up if chained to a cell phone during school.

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman is an eye-opening look at global economic changes since 2000.

Friedman — as he proudly states — is a “technological determinist,” which is another way of saying “pragmatic American.”

The first 2/3rds of this work should be required reading for all Americans, with its seriously sobering tales of just how much the world of work has shifted since the 90s. And employers should take heed the ideas of CapitalOne in its quest to train Versatilits — adaptable and versatile employees.

India, China and much of Asia is online and competing on a level playing field. Will Team America be up to the challenge?

The book, however, drags on. For a similar, tighter read, I recommend: The Only Sustainable Edge by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown.