Category: Business

Appetite for Self-Destruction

The Book of the Week is “Appetite for Self-Destruction, The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age” by Steve Knopper, published in 2009. This is an account of how the American music industry, for the most part, reacted badly to the jarring changes wrought by technological advances starting in the late 1970’s.

For decades prior to the 1970’s, the music market in the United States had had a shady reputation– involving drugs, kickbacks, bribes and cronyism, among other vices.

Even after CDs proved to provide sound that was superior to plastic records, entities in the music industry supply chain resisted making CDs because it necessitated the reconfiguring of their: factories, marketing materials, store displays, etc. Modernizing everything was expensive.

In 1978, the Sony CDP-101 could play the first CD title:  “52nd Street” from Billy Joel. But only in Japan. PolyGram Records, CBS Records and Sony understood the value of the new product. Arista Records, Capitol Records and EMI didn’t.

In addition to the widespread introduction of CDs in America by the late 1980’s, the sale of CBS Records was another disruptive force in the industry, resulting in power struggles and lots of layoffs. The old-school record labels depended on MTV, radio and music stores to distribute their wares for another decade.

The tail end of the 1990’s saw a new technology that really turned the industry on its ear:  the World Wide Web. It enabled people to create software that allowed free (no-cost and no restrictions) electronic-music-file sharing. In December 1999, the organization regulating intellectual property rights on music, the RIAA, sued one of the major organizations doing the sharing– Napster– for copyright violations. By the following summer, the latter had approximately nineteen million users per month.

Read the book to learn of the outcome of the above and other legal battles; the new 1990’s and early 2000’s music conduits and devices, their relationships to the laws on music piracy; and many other actions taken by the American music industry that have fueled the current state of digital music sales.

Start-Up Nation

The Book of the Week is “Start-Up Nation, The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle” by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, published in 2009. The authors of this extended essay ponder why Israel had, at the book’s writing, a huger number of tech start-ups than all other industrialized nations, second only to the United States’. The reasons range from the cultural to the political to the economic.

The Israeli corporate and military mentality involves: complete focus; learning from errors (which are tolerated and treated as learning experiences); constant debriefings and self-criticism sessions; endless, heated debate; and empowerment of employees at all status levels to use their initiative and resources– even to the point of upstaging their bosses with their input. This atmosphere encourages independent thinking, and discourages herd mentality and blind obedience.

Militarily, all Israelis serve a minimum of two to three years and then become reservists for two more decades. Close social ties are formed that foster business relationships later. The exceptional rising stars participate in special nine-year training programs that create  “foxes” rather than “hedgehogs.” Foxes use diverse skills from operating and maintaining high-tech equipment to imaginatively solving problems.

After serving their country, many Israelis then attend university. Finally, employers consider quality and quantity of military experience as major hiring criteria.

The authors provided real-life examples of how the traits Israelis possess cause them to gravitate toward entrepreneurial ventures. In 1965, in one instance, kibbutzniks digging a well hoping to find drinking water instead encountered warm, salty water. A creative academic advised them to breed tropical food-fish. By-products of the fish-farm were used for fertilizer for their olive and date trees.

Read the book to learn of additional characteristics of and actions taken by Israelis and their government that have helped them achieve technological advances in various economically rewarding areas, including medicine, auto manufacturing and computing.

Digital Gold

The Book of the Week is “Digital Gold– Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money” by Nathaniel Popper, published in 2015.

This ebook is about Bitcoin, a bookkeeping system used on various websites that distributes, records and stores the value of units called Bitcoins.

The system was created in 2009 by a computer geek who called himself Satoshi Nakamoto. His vision was to create a worldwide means-of-exchange to be used online that would be:

  • a decentralized network of users so that no one central authority has the majority of power over the system– unlike the current situations in the world; in other words, place power in the hands of the users, rather than the economic royalists. (Nevertheless, the irony is that Bitcoin has largely stayed in the realm of the wealthy computer geeks- so there has basically been redistribution of wealth among the wealthy);
  • created and maintained by users of the system on a consensus basis rather than by the powers-that-be, whose political campaigns are funded by financial institutions, and who stay in power by doing their will;
  • anonymous (like cash– no third parties acquire the information of buyers and sellers);
  • secure (no one point of failure would mean vulnerability for the whole system, plus have protections against identity theft, malware, counterfeiting etc.); and
  • offered at a lesser cost than the current system (avoiding financial institutions with their fees).

However, no utopian vision is perfect. Various tech-startups around the world have been created to store and exchange Bitcoins. That is all well and good. In the last seven years or so, a “remarkably engaged online community” has sprung up to discuss the ideology and all the different issues attendant to the new system. Even the major American financial institutions, fearing competition, have begun to rethink the security of their online dealings, and so have assembled task forces to research how to harness Bitcoin’s loss-prevention technology.

Bitcoins are acquired by computer users who log on to a specific site on the Internet. The users get the virtual “coins” for free, but might have to pay to store them elsewhere to keep them secure.

Bitcoins are more like a security than a means of exchange like cash because:

  • The system distributing Bitcoins is like a combination slot machine and a financial market where instruments are bought and sold, and the value of Bitcoins fluctuates.
  • There’s an inherent unfairness in the system in that– technologically astute users of the system have banded together to create devices that mine Bitcoins at a significantly faster rate than individual users.
  • People can acquire a national currency such as the American dollar in many more ways than they can Bitcoins, most of them honestly– earning, borrowing, begging or stealing.

Anyway, the purpose of Bitcoins as a means of exchange has yet to catch on among mainstream consumers of industrialized countries. There is no sufficiently compelling reason for consumers to start to buy things online with Bitcoins rather than credit cards. “Why should they trust a digital code that had nothing backing it but the computers of some libertarian nerds?”

Argentina is one country where Bitcoins have been useful. The super-speedy inflation of the peso there has meant people must spend their Argentinian money the minute they acquire it or risk the inability to buy anything because they wouldn’t be able to afford it– even food. In China, Bitcoin is popular because the government regulates the yuan exchange rate in order to stem “capital flight” and sell more of its own goods to the world.

As with all human-created systems that rely on the honor system, ALL users must act ethically. One American Bitcoin-processor in particular created a drug-distribution entity called Silk Road that was deemed illegal according to U.S. law.

Another bad actor hacked into a company called Mt. Gox in Japan. All users of that service suffered. “Bitcoin users eventually went to government authorities that Bitcoin had been designed, at least partly, to obviate.”

Besides, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has been examining the legal aspects of Bitcoin as a virtual currency. Homeland Security is concerned about the fact that Bitcoins could be anonymously sent to terrorist cells overseas.

Read the book to learn much more about the good and bad consequences of the creation of Bitcoin.

Dragon Sea

The Book of the Week is “Dragon Sea” by Frank Pope, published in 2007. This ebook describes the lives of sunken-treasure hunters– people who go SCUBA diving to recover material assets of ships that have sunk in prior centuries.

Such a pursuit interests marine archeologists, too. They should have knowledge of art, ancient history and the sea. The oil industry has developed the technology that allows the least expense and the fewest complications for conducting underwater research and exploitation of the seabed. However, the exploitation part is still life-threatening and very expensive. A gruesome death might await divers at any time, so they make big bucks.

Many divers take a chance by attempting to retrieve treasures from a sunken ship whose contents might be claimed by its country of origin. They risk confiscated cargoes, impounded vessels and court cases, not to mention plunder, if pirates find out what they are doing before they can finish grabbing the ceramics, coins or other valuables from the ship. Those items might end up at a big-name auction house or at a museum. Or on eBay.

Read the book to learn about the salvaging of ceramics from one particular ship– along with the dangers, complications and conflicts that arose, the equipment used, worker interactions in light of the situations they encountered, and the financial results of the project.

Adventures of a Currency Trader – Bonus Post

This blogger skimmed the ebook, “Adventures of a Currency Trader” by Rob Booker, published in 2007.

This fable describes fictional characters who were doing currency trading in the early 2000’s at New York City offices. It is about human nature. People are loss-averse and lazy, but love gambling.

It is difficult to say whether readers will actually heed the lessons in the story because it has many unrealistic elements; among them: a) the newbie-trader protagonist had a major mentor who cared about him even though he impulsively disobeyed his mentor from the get-go; b) the protagonist influenced an entire trading floor of seasoned traders; c) the protagonist had access to all the resources that significantly accelerated his learning curve.

The moral is that those who realize they are passionate about currency trading– before they actually start trading with highly leveraged real money– need to understand what they are getting into and do their homework– develop on paper, a trading system that is statistically profitable in the long run.

Read the book to get an overview of currency trading, including the risks, and the mentalities of different traders.

Siberia Bound

The Book of the Week is “Siberia Bound” by Alexander Blakely, published in 2002. This is the personal account of a recent college graduate who decided life in the United States was too easy.

In the early 1990’s, the author moved to Novosibirsk, Siberia to see, with a business partner, whether he, fluent in Russian, could help a region of the former Soviet Union make the transition from Communism to capitalism. He and his partner borrowed money to buy cocoa beans and sold them to chocolate factories on credit.

Blakely wrote about Siberian culture. One amusing passage told of the detergent brand “Barf” imported from Iran. “Things got dirty all the time: In summer, it was dust and car exhaust. In winter, it was coal soot and body odor trapped by layers of insulation.” The relationship between Blakely’s business partner’s wife and her mother-in-law was less than friendly. This was partly because the wife spoiled her young daughter, and the mother-in-law was strict with her– the opposite behavior of mothers and grandmothers in American culture.

Sadly, the moral of the author’s story became “Be careful what you wish for.” He realized that the major cultural, political and economic changes taking place in his community meant that Siberians had become like Americans. They started riding in cars instead of walking. They ate fatty foods for lunch and the men stopped exercising. The women started going to aerobics classes at the gym.

Blakely thought that bringing capitalism to them would be a good thing. However, they soon developed an insatiable appetite for consumer goods. Once they were made of aware of their severe deprivation by the media and increased their connections with the rest of the world, they became depressed. Previously, they had been happy due to their ignorance of how materially poor they were.

Read the book to learn of the sea changes taking place at the author’s business, which sold not just chocolate, but surgical gloves, potatoes and other products; and the formerly Communist community, over the next four years.

The Real Deal

The Book of the Week is “The Real Deal, My Life in Business and Philanthropy” by Sanford Weill and Judah S. Kraushaar, published in 2006. This career memoir describes how, over the course of about fifty years, Weill became a major change agent in the American financial services industry. His specialty became leading the execution of mergers and acquisitions for the investment, banking, and insurance companies of which he was an executive and board member.

In spring 1960, he started a securities brokerage, actually on Wall Street, with three partners. The stock market was bearish in 1962 and 1963. Interesting Side Note: “The typical stock in the Dow Index had a price 23 times its earnings as this downturn began, compared to a multiple of only 10 times in the early 1950s.”

Through the years, he gained more and more power and accumulated more and more wealth. When he attended events at which he had to speak to stockbrokers, he adopted a policy of brevity, saying, “You’ve heard enough speeches– what questions do you have for me?”

Although the author fostered a corporate culture of informality and “Management By Wandering Around” at his own company, in many instances, he failed to take into consideration the culture of the target company. His strengths lay more in bringing the top executives of the parties together to do the deals, and negotiating the new management structures. It was ironic that he was such a poor judge of how the two cultures would mesh once the integration process began.

At times, Weill tapped the power of his friends in high places, one of which was the government. It helped him change federal law to allow transactions to proceed. For instance, prior to 1999, certain banking and investment banking services could not be legally offered by the same company, due to financial conflicts and possibilities for abuses. He and his cohorts had a hand in making the historic change so that people within the same company could offer their clients all kinds of financial services.

Weill describes a whole bunch of instances that provided evidence for the necessity of strict financial auditing laws. In just a few years at the turn of the 21st Century, greed had spun out of control in the industry, leading to the accounting scandals of Enron and WorldCom, the dot-com crash, and a major hedge-fund crash that required a bailout. A terrorist attack didn’t help, either. By 2002, the chickens had come home to roost in the form of a bear market. “The regulators, the press, and politicians of all stripes…” played “the game of pointing fingers.”

And yet Weill writes, “…governance rules mandated by Sarbanes-Oxley (enacted in summer 2002) made it seem likely that bureaucratic needs would trump the fun of the business.” He also complains that businesses would have to spend more money preparing their financial statements. Sorry about that, Mr. Weill. Yes, pesky, bureaucratic, expensive laws reining in greed are no fun.

Six years later– same song, different verse… a whole lot worse. Need it be said– The more things change, the more they stay the same. History will continue to repeat itself, given human nature.

Read the book to learn the details of Weill’s career ups and downs and trials and tribulations. This blogger skipped the last chapter, in which Weill merely rambles on stating his opinions, and the endnote, which is an interview with his wife, whom he lavishly praises as loving and supportive throughout this ebook.

Why I Left Goldman Sachs

The Book of the Week is “Why I Left Goldman Sachs” by Greg Smith, published in 2012.

This career memoir details how the author experienced the change for the worse in corporate culture of stock brokerage Goldman Sachs (GS) over the course of a little more than a decade, from 2000 to early 2012. The company lost its way in terms of its mission and values, which embodied fiduciary duty and integrity.

In 2000, the author completed the selective, elitist, highly coveted summer internship program at the brokerage. He saw how principled the money managers were in recommending truly suitable transactions to their clients; not necessarily the most profitable ones.

When he began working there as a full-fledged staff member the following year, he took to the work, possessing the right combination of talents, skills and abilities to focus for long hours on conferring with clients and doing what was financially best for them. The goal was to build trust in order to foster a long-term relationship. It stands to reason that that is a more profitable course of action than seeking to rake in maximum money in the short term– which would provoke disloyalty from the client, when the client realizes he’s been taken advantage of.

Smith writes that a gradual change was occurring at his workplace around the start of 2005. At the time, he admittedly was “drinking the Kool Aid” like everyone else. The megabucks were multiplying because conflicts of interest were increasing betwen the brokerage and the government and other entities with which the brokerage was associated in various ways. The CEO and COO of GS were all for it. Their yearly letter to shareholders reasoned that such conflicts were inevitable, and were a sign that business was good. A telling example: GS netted approximately $100 million when it helped its client, the New York Stock Exchange merge with publicly traded, electronic exchange Archipelago in a $9 billion deal.

In the early 2000’s, one trend in the securities industry that would contribute to huge financial losses for the big firms including GS, was automated trading via software. The autotraders of the different firms were programmed to engage in largely the same behavior. They sought to trade in obscure, off-the-beaten path investments in markets in which it was difficult to find a buyer when it came time to sell. And they were all trying to sell at the same time. That was not a condition the autotrader creators had anticipated.

Another aspect of the big picture was that the people selling the financial products– more specifically, derivatives– did not themselves, understand what they were selling. It might be recalled that a derivatives debacle plagued the securities industry in 1994. Apparently, in 2007-2009, the greedy people involved in this rerun of a financial catastrophe failed to read their history, or had short memories. And governments of entire countries like Libya, were suffering losses of billions of dollars, thanks to GS, in 2007.

Read the book to learn much more about the outrageous occurrences borne of avarice witnessed by the author and the world during what became for him, an ordeal, characterized by the saying, “The fish rots from the head down.”