The event is a true spectacle, offering a 5K run, comedy skits, disco balls, music, celebrities, and even visits by characters from the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio of companies (such as the GEICO gecko).
In an effort to be timely and topical, I thought about writing something about the coronation of the new titular leader of our closest ally, but—let’s face it—this subject is of limited interest except to the most devoted Anglophile. And, aside from commenting on the huge amount of capital that must have been expended in this exercise, there wasn’t much I could think of in relation to this event that has instructive or inspirational entrepreneurial overtones.
So I turn instead to a story of plain old American ingenuity. In the early days of the American republic, soon after we had overthrown the shackles of colonial status and our allegiance to this leader’s ancestor, the distance between nascent agricultural settlements and trade ports considerably hindered economic development. It didn’t take long, though, for those on the western side of the Appalachian Mountains to discover that they could use rivers as an economical way to float goods to market in New Orleans via the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Even the flatboats used for this purpose themselves generated revenue: after arriving at market, they would be disassembled and the wood sold or repurposed.
Forty years ago, I had just graduated from a law school that is part of a private research university in what is now known as Silicon Valley. At the time, this was a somewhat sleepy area, tucked among the wealthy southern suburbs of San Francisco but devoid of much industry—except for Hewlett-Packard, located just southeast of campus on Page Mill Road, which made hand-held calculators for engineering students.
I now wonder at the personages among whom I lived at the time, and occasionally ponder what might have happened if I had invested my law school tuition with some of the startups occurring all around me. Frequently, after this painful exercise, I consider what it was about the area that was so conducive to entrepreneurial activity in the early 1980s. Here’s where Kevin Starr, in his California: A History, has much to contribute.
It’s a view of human nature that we all accept. It tends to shape how we view our political affairs, our economic institutions, our business practices, and really any realm of human endeavor. It is expressed as an aphorism of only two words: “power corrupts.”
Political Scientist Brian Klaas—a Minnesotan, a contemporary of one of my daughters at a local high school, a graduate of two institutions of higher learning with which I am familiar, and now a professor at the University of London—has set out to examine this idea in light of the question, “Does power corrupt or are corrupt people drawn to power?”
The answer, it seems, is yes—both are true. While Klaas’s analysis focuses on obviously nefarious activities, he includes some aspects of corporate endeavor and business behavior along the same spectrum. His focus is on people who have wielded “enormous power,” be they “cult leaders, war criminals, despots, coup plotters, torturers, mercenaries, generals, propagandists, rebels, corrupt CEOs, [or] convicted criminals.”
Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors, as evidenced by my earlier reviews here, here, and here, but it’s been a while since I’ve dived into something new from him.
A few weeks ago, while browsing mask-free (alas, how short that interval was!) at my favorite big-box bookstore, I stumbled upon Gladwell’s latest offering, The Bomber Mafia. The World War II subject seemed a bit beyond his usual psychosocial playground, but the book looked like a quick read, and besides it was in the “50% off” bin.
Gladwell does not disappoint, coming through again with lessons for the entrepreneur. Though framed as a war story, he seeks an answer to a question with much broader reach: “How is it that, sometimes for any number of unexpected reasons, technology slips away from its intended path?”
Among the people in what made up the Donner party of emigrants to California in 1846 were businessmen, tradesmen, and farmers, all of whom shared the dream of making it big. Most could have stayed where they were and done well enough in life. Just like many entrepreneurs, they were all driven by a desire to build something bigger in the temperate valleys beyond the Sierra Nevada mountains, so they liquidated their assets and set their sights on new lives in the West.
After a series of bad decisions and just plain bad luck, the party found itself stranded in the midst of those mountains, buffeted by extreme snowstorms and unusually cold weather. Some continued to struggle against nature to get over the mountains, others dug in for the winter, but sooner or later exhaustion and the specter of starvation led to otherwise unimaginable consequences in this well-known story.
The few who survived the ordeal did attain a fair amount of success and wealth as Californians, but for the most part they never overcame the psychic wounds of this experience.
I’m not saying The Indifferent Stars Above presents a parable from which entrepreneurs can draw valuable life lessons, although the story does speak to the value of careful planning and performing proper diligence (maybe even with the assistance of your skilled lawyer…) before choosing a path. Instead, as I read this book during the depths of the pandemic, I was reminded of the resilience of the human spirit — and that, as frightening and trying as things were at that moment, at least I wasn’t stranded on a mountain in a blizzard with nothing to eat.
But here’s the thing: Fifty in Reverse is more than the sum of these two parts. Here’s the story of a sixty-something empty nester who goes to sleep in 2020 and wakes up as his 15-year-old self in 1970, fully aware of his circumstances and the future that lies ahead of him. This is a story for all of us for whom the past year has seemed somehow unhinged in time. Show of hands: who else has experienced a perpetual Groundhog Day feeling as they’ve gone about their daily business over the past year?
The fantasy, of course, is that, with fifty-some years of foreknowledge going for you, you’d be set to profit handsomely from both the ups and the downs of the economy. It would be an entrepreneur’s dream. Imagine knowing what the next big thing is going to be before anyone else is even three steps behind you. Maybe that’s what it was like to be Steve Jobs (or maybe he was just seemingly always able to create the next big thing…)
That’s not how this story works out, though. No spoilers here, but this is a fresh take on the time-travel theme, particularly suited for pandemic homebound readers.
And now, as Monty Python would say, for something completely different.
The blurb for this book describes the subject film, “The Room,” as “the Citizen Kane of bad movies.” I have to confess that I haven’t seen it. My curiosity was piqued when James Franco won a Golden Globe in 2017 for his appearance as Tommy Wiseau, the driving force behind “The Room,” in the movie made from this book.
The typical entrepreneurial scenario involves someone with a great idea but not necessarily the financial wherewithal to exploit it, leading to a story filled with successive rounds of venture financing and innumerable compromises along the way. “The Disaster Artist,” by contrast, is the story of a man with a dream and plenty of money, enough that he doesn’t need to refine his vision to satisfy others. The statistics tell the story: the film had a budget of $6 million, and box office receipts of $1,800 (yes, that’s the correct number) in its original release.
The film has gone on to achieve cult status as the best bad movie ever. The book is an entertaining view of what happens to an entrepreneur and his idea when he or she does not need to deal with the reality check that is the marketplace.
If you are like me (and most of Daniel Kahneman’s subjects), you answered this question easily, quickly, and incorrectly. Most of the population answers this way — that the bat costs $1.00 and the ball costs $0.10. Return to the problem and you can see that this answer is incorrect. Very simple math reveals the correct solution: that the bat costs $1.05 and the ball costs a dollar less at $0.05.
This simple experiment showcases the central question of Thinking, Fast and Slow: why does the mind sometimes use answers it knows to be false as solutions to questions it is most certainly capable of answering correctly? Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli psychologist and Nobel Prize winning economist, answers this question by examining the irrationality of the human mind in his international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Kahneman’s book takes the reader on a tour of the human mind — urging the reader to take a step back and examine their own irrationality, to tap into the benefits of what he calls “slow thinking.” He begins by describing the two systems (or characters as he refers to them throughout the book) which govern our thinking. System 1 is fast thinking. It operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 is slow thinking. It allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it — deliberation and strategic thinking. System 1 is our motor. It continuously generates impressions, intuitions, intentions and feelings. System 2 is our steering wheel — turning those impressions, intuitions and impulses into voluntary actions.
Entrepreneurs, and, frankly, most humans, spend most of their time in System 1 — making decisions, putting out fires and navigating the multitude of minute decisions in our day-to-day lives. A well-developed System 1 is at the core of every entrepreneur — the ability to make snap decisions, follow your gut and irrationally believe that a business will prevail. But oftentimes that is how we end up with a baseball bat that costs 90 cents more than the ball.
Take, for instance, money — a topic near and dear to every entrepreneur’s heart. Most of us think we know what it is, but really, as Harari tells us, money is an illusion, a social artifact that we all have agreed, consciously or not, will have a certain meaning. Money has no value except that which we give it. It’s all based on trust.
Harari traces the development of money from ancient times, when bags of grain were used as a means of exchange, to the silver coins used during the biblical era. The silver itself had no inherent value. Unlike the grain, you couldn’t eat it, nor did this soft metal serve any other useful purpose, but it was a great deal easier to carry around and store. Fast forward to today, when most money is actually in the form of electronic data (not just credit cards, but Bitcoin!). Even easier to use!
The amazing thing is that this system based on trust is, and always has been, a global phenomenon. Harari says it all: “Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age, or sexual orientation. Thanks to money, even people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively.”
Sometimes you pick up a book out of mild curiosity and discover that it’s a whole lot more interesting than you thought it would be.