Author: authoress

A First-Rate Madness

The Book of the Week is “A First-Rate Madness, Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness” by Nassir Ghaemi, published in 2011. This book describes the leadership abilities of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, various Civil War generals, Adolf Hitler, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Ted Turner, as determined by their mental health, or lack thereof.

The author argues that most people who have mental illness are not insane all the time; they merely have abnormal moods, such as depression or mania some of the time. He claims that mentally ill political and military leaders are heroic in times of crisis, and mediocre during peaceful, uneventful times; the opposite is true for mentally healthy leaders. This concept can be applied to the corporate world, too.

“In a strong economy, the ideal business leader is the corporate type… He may not be particularly creative… all is well only when all that matters is administration… When the economy is in crisis… the corporate executive takes a backseat to the entrepreneur…” It is rare to find someone who is an excellent leader under both extreme and normal conditions.

Ghaemi contends that “…depression led to more, not less realistic assessments of control over one’s environment, an effect that was only enhanced by a real-world emotional desire…” In other words, people prone to clinical depression have a more acute sense of reality than those who are not, a concept called “depressive realism.”

When the mentally healthy leader faces a crisis, he handles it poorly, because having suffered little in his youth, he “…hasn’t had a chance to develop resilience that might see him through later hardships” and has not developed the ability to empathize. George W. Bush was one such leader. To boot, he had “hubris syndrome.” Getting drunk on power, like many mentally healthy leaders, made him “…unwilling and even unable to accept criticism or correctly interpret events that diverge from their own beliefs. Hubris syndrome worsens with duration and absoluteness of one’s rule.”

Read the book to understand the psychology behind the successes and failures of the aforementioned leaders.

Dot Bomb

The Book of the Week is “Dot Bomb” by J. David Kuo, published in 2001. This ebook details the business dealings and the ensuing suspenseful power struggle at a dot-com company called Value America between 1996 and 2001.

The online retailer’s intended brand image was to boast maximum selection of merchandise shipped directly from sellers. This delivery-on-demand arrangement allowed the company to remain inventory-free, and thus minimize overhead costs. However, in reality, it needed to use resellers for many of the supposedly infinite products it sold.

Value America’s founder and leader, Craig Winn, was a charming megalomaniac who had grand plans to partner with various major corporations in order to attract investors and make the company worthy of an IPO. Unfortunately, Winn had planned to sell stock to the public just after the peak of the dot-com boom, when brokerages’ confidence in internet companies had started to wane.

After Value America went public, Goldman Sachs issued a report that Amazon.com was the internet retailer with the highest potential for success because it had high sales margins on its then-merchandise consisting only of books; a $30 billion valuation was not out of the realm of possiblity. Goldman went on to say Value America had the worst prospects, with sales margins of 1% and runaway costs. It would have to achieve revenues of billions of dollars in order to make any money.

Toward the end of the story, the author realized “Despite the hype, headlines, and hysteria, this was just a gold rush we were in… a lot of us were kin to those poor, freezing fools in Alaska who had staked everything on turning up a glittering chunk of gold.”

Read the book to learn the fate of the author, his family and the other Value America employees with dollar signs in their eyeballs.

Confessions of A Prairie Bitch

The Book of the Week is “Confessions of A Prairie Bitch” by Alison Arngrim, published in 2010.  This is the autobiography of the actress who played Nellie Oleson on the hit American TV show, “Little House on the Prairie” which aired from 1974 to 1983.

On the show which was set in a small town in the late 1800’s, Arngrim played the role of the spoiled, rich teenage daughter of the owners of a general store. She frequently got into fights with a goody-goody girl from another family in the neighborhood. Arngrim was twelve years old when she started the show.  Prior to that, her show-business parents had afforded her the chance to play some small parts in TV commercials and movies. Starting when she was six, she was subjected to sexual abuse at the hands of her much older brother.

Read the book to learn how Arngrim was able to deal with the trauma from her early childhood in positive ways later in life through her acting career and social and political activism.

Venus Envy

The Book of the Week is “Venus Envy” by L. Jon Wertheim, published in 2002. This book describes the colorful characters that graced women’s professional tennis in 1999, 2000 and 2001.  Those included the Williams sisters, Hingis, Davenport, Pierce, Capriati, Kournikova, Sanchez-Vicario and others.

Most tennis players who become professionals are pressured by a parent to make playing a career. Venus and Serena Williams’ father Richard filled that role. He had the promotional instincts of Don King. In the mid-1990’s, when his older daughter had just turned pro at the young age of fourteen, he predicted that both his daughters would play each other in Grand Slam finals. Most people thought, “This wasn’t a tennis father from hell. This was a tennis father from outer space.” He knew what he was talking about. Not only did he guide them to success, but did so without making them crazy, unlike so many other tennis parents who cause their kids psychological harm.

Tennis is a typical professional sport in that making money is the major goal. Tennis’ authoritative bodies that hold global tournaments, have a history of awarding less prize money to the women than to the men. The purported reason is that the women are less entertaining. This led to an interesting course of events in the early 1970’s.

The women also get treated differently at post-tournament press conferences, at which they are asked personal questions that men would never be asked. Another cause for complaints from the women is that the quirky ranking system awards more money to some players who have more entertainment value than playing ability. The system “unfairly punishes older, less attractive players.”

Read the book to learn more about why women’s tennis is the “world’s most popular and financially successful women’s sport.”

High Priest

The Book of the Week is “High Priest” by Timothy Leary, published in 1995.  This is a personal account of a man who, in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, developed a reputation for experimenting with brain-altering chemicals such as LSD.  He used students as guinea pigs at his Harvard University laboratory.

Some of Leary’s impressionable charges unwisely updated their parents on their religious and philosophical enlightenment; others “quit school and pilgrimaged eastward to study yoga on the banks of the Ganges.” Unsurprisingly, the parents and school administrators felt that Leary was a bad influence, and he was fired. He attempted to relocate his spiritual profiteering to Mexico, but was busted in 1963 for failing to obtain authorization to run a business there. He then took his allegedly raunchy, psychoactive, disease-spreading endeavors in the dark arts to Antigua in the West Indies.

Read the book to learn the details of this ideological character’s psychedelic research results.

The Man Time Forgot

The Book of the Week is “The Man Time Forgot” by Isaiah Wilner, published in 2007.  This ebook tells the history of Time magazine, and contains the biographies of its two original business partners. According to this account, Brit Hadden alone came up with the concept for the magazine, and partnered with Henry Luce to create the publishing company for it.

The concept was to cobble together days-old stories from all the news outlets and retell them in a sassy way, intended to provoke controversy. Hadden believed “Controversy is unrest, and unrest breathes the spirit of progress.” In the mid-1920’s, one could get away with reprinting articles without crediting his sources.

In the nineteen teens, Luce and Hadden had developed a contentious but complementary relationship at the elitist Hotchkiss, a private boarding school in Connecticut, and then continued their teamwork on academic publications at Yale college. There, they competed in a rigorous contest whose prizes consisted of opportunities to work on the school newspaper. They both made the cut.

During WWI, the president of the college allowed academic credit to be given for military courses. In fact, the school became largely a military training ground in the war years. Hadden and Luce availed themselves of training but stayed stateside, although in 1918, President Wilson lowered the age of conscription to 18.

Postwar, consumerism abounded. “As households bought their first automobiles, washing machines and phonographs, companies plastered the streets with billboards.” The public spent its leisure time partaking of magazines, newspapers, books, movies and radio. Sensationalism had become big business.

More and more American residents were able to experience common entertainment. This was advantageous for the ad sales success of Time. When the magazine met its “rate base”– a minimum number of magazines being circulated among the public– it was able to charge more money to its advertisers. Direct mail was a budding advertising outlet for the magazine itself, of which it took full advantage. By the early 1920’s, Time had tens of thousands of readers.

It took several years for Hadden to convince the Post Office to classify Time as a newspaper, affording the national publication faster delivery from its sole office in New York City.

Letters to the editor (some were fictional, concoted by Hadden) was a favorite section of the magazine. The author contends that “Time remained the place to hear the full-throated call of the average American moron, expressing his prejudices with confidence and joy. Subscribers enjoyed reading such letters…”

Sadly, Hadden’s poor health resulted in his untimely death. Until he himself died, Luce was extremely reluctant to concede that Time was Hadden’s idea, and released propaganda making himself and Hadden co-founders. He failed to credit Hadden as the magazine’s true sole creator. Such deception boosted his ego and brought him undeserved honors. Such can be the nature of publishing and public relations.

Louis D. Brandeis, A Life

The Book of the Week is “Louis D. Brandeis, A Life” by Melvin I. Urofsky, published in 2009. This is the lengthy biography of an attorney and Supreme Court Justice.

The youngest of three siblings, Brandeis grew up in Louisville, KY in the 1850’s and 1860’s, and graduated from Harvard Law School.

Prior to the early 20th century, Brandeis felt that his job as an attorney was to help develop a fair solution for all parties involved in a dispute. He felt he was a mediator and moralist, rather than an attorney being paid to favorably act on behalf of and give legal advice to only his client. This mentality led Brandeis to engage in a few conflicts of interest in dealing with his firm’s clients.  For instance, he represented a corporate client in litigation in which a third party was represented by his firm.

Despite becoming embroiled in a few episodes of hypocrisy, Brandeis fought against corrupt, monopolistic practices of various large American institutions. He felt obligated to do what he considered public service, pro bono. Fortunately, his income as a law partner allowed this.

In the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, there were three big insurance companies that wielded an amount of power similar to that of big-name brokerages in the early 2000’s. The outsized ego and greed of the insurance executives, too, led them to manipulate the government, commit accounting irregularities, and abuse their power and the public’s trust. Brandeis took them on, exposing what he thought was their moral depravity. He then found a way for the public to avoid adding to the profits of the evil insurance corporations by initiating the sale of affordable life insurance through savings banks.

Brandeis was nominated a Supreme Court Justice by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916. “When confronted with the first Jew named to the Supreme Court, and in a time of growing nativism, clearly those who ‘feared foreigners’ would oppose the appointment.” Brandeis had to endure four stressful months of hearings and background checking before he was appointed.

Around 1920, Brandeis became active in the Zionist movement. He controversially defined the movement as one in which oppressed Jews could receive financial assistance to improve their lot through settling in Palestine. Since the persecuted Jews who had found a haven in the United States had become successful in their adopted country, they did not need to go to Palestine to build a homeland there. But they were urged to help their fellow Jews who were worse off than themselves, to do so. Other people in the movement felt Brandeis did not truly understand the mentality of the oppressed Jewish immigrants, who viewed Palestine as a place they could freely practice their religion.

During the 1930’s, when Great Britain realized that Arabs greatly outnumbered Jews, and that there was so much oil in the Middle East, she changed her political position on Zionism as mentioned in the Balfour Declaration. She found the Jews argumentative, and wanted Palestine to be “an Arab-dominated region under English tutelage.”

Brandeis favored a workday shorter than twelve or fourteen hours, in order to give unionized American workers time to fulfill their civic responsibilities to get involved in local politics and “as parents and members of their communities.”

As a Supreme Court Justice, Brandeis left an influential legacy in that he had a “… great impact not only on jurisdictional matters but on commercial law, antitrust, administrative law, utility regulation, federalism, and individual liberties.”

Until the Sea Shall Free Them

The Book of the Week is “Until the Sea Shall Free them” by Robert Frump, published in 2001.

This wordy, repetitive, yet suspenseful book tells the detailed story of the February 1983 shipwreck of the Marine Electric, among many other briefly described maritime catastrophes. The scurvy old 605-foot bulk carrier transported coal in the North Atlantic Ocean from Boston, MA to Norfolk, VA.

The investigation of what happened conducted by the Marine Board– a panel of industry officials– was subject to the vagaries of the maritime legal system. Safety inspections of ships were performed by the U.S. Coast Guard and the American Bureau of Shipping. The National Transportation Safety Board was yet another regulatory body of maritime matters.

The Marine Board generated reports on shipping accidents. In rare cases, its recommendations might include Justice Department investigation and prosecution of a shipping company executive, or a review of the license of a ship’s captain; the latter, for criminal law violation, like for negligence in putting men’s lives at risk for failure to follow safety procedures.

A ship’s officers were usually blamed for disasters because ship owners and builders had a friendly relationship with the federal government. Political contributions helped elect candidates who turned a blind eye to regulating safety in marine commerce.

The ship’s top officers were under tremendous pressure to go on a voyage despite safety violations. Whistle-blowing behavior might get them fired. There was always the threat that a rival union would be awarded their current shipping contract. Some men waited more than a year before they could be assigned their next job on a ship.

For years, disasters were waiting to happen, due to the “rationalization, denial, greed and stubbornness” in connection with repairing and mantaining of decades-old ships. In the mid-1970’s, more than one fifth of all deaths from shipping accidents were due to structural failures of the vessels.

Heartbreakingly, during a winter storm at sea, some crew members die when they are so close to surviving. The lifeboats are buffeted about by rough waves and dashed on rocks or into a seawall, or men who lack protective clothing and proper safety equipment, fall into the freezing water while trying to board a rescue boat.

As in many other industries, shipping is one in which the big companies care more about money than seeking to reduce dangerous conditions. Despite poor safety records and the expenses of lawsuits and damage to their reputations, the large players stayed in business through the decades of the twentieth century. On the flip side, in accidents, numerous greedy seamen abused a lenient system that awarded them big bucks in personal injury cases.

Read the book to learn the fates of the parties associated with the Marine Electric after its fall from grace.