Category: Nonfiction

Thank You For Arguing

The Book of the Week is “Thank You For Arguing” by Jay Heinrichs, published in 2007. This is a book on debating. The author teases apart the differences between arguing and fighting, and logic and rhetoric.

There are three kinds of persuasive language:  blame, values and choice. Each is of a different tense. Blame is past tense. Values depict the present. Choice talks about the future. The author advises the reader to switch tenses if an argument gets heated. The future, though, is the tense most likely to bring about peace.

People in a courtroom recount past events that involve blame. However, to get their points across, lovers and politicians should try to stick to the present and future. Two useful questions to ask when a problem crops up are, “What should we do about it?” and “How can we keep it from happening again?”

Values, which involve morals, are undebatable. The author says, “Argument’s Rule Number One:  Never debate the undebatable. Instead, focus on your goals… If you want your audience to make a choice, focus on the future.” Also, “When you argue emotionally, speak simply. People in the middle of a strong emotion rarely use elaborate speech.”

One more tip:  When one is deciding on an issue to argue, the most persuasive issue will be the broadest one. For instance, in launching a protest against consolidating two departments in a workplace, one should seize upon the issue of productivity, rather than fairness.

The author sadly concludes that universities used to teach rhetoric, but stopped doing so in the 1800’s when “…academia forgot what the liberal arts were for: to train an elite for leadership.”

Read the book to learn more debating techniques.

The Google Guys

The Book of the Week is “The Google Guys, Inside the Brilliant Minds of Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin” by Richard L. Brandt, published in 2009, with an Afterword published in 2011. This ebook recounts the history of the company that created the world’s largest internet search engine, which can analyze millions of pages a second.

The company has more than one hundred attorneys on staff. It must defend itself against lawsuits in connection with intellectual property, privacy, monopolistic practices, censorship, etc. It has about “twenty thousand employees and $20 billion in revenues.”

Larry and Sergey, the company’s founders, avoid doing conventional things that even many tech companies do. When they set up shop in 1998, the two never wrote a business plan. They “almost never give interviews or attend conferences.” Since they possess incredible power, they are not just tough business negotiators, but unreasonably arrogant ones.

Currently, the company provides a large array of services, in addition to a search engine. These include “PC applications, e-mail, cell phone operating systems, Web browsers, Wiki information sites, social networks, and photo editing sites…”

Read the book to learn more about Google, Inc., its history, and the personalities of its founders.

All By My Selves

The Book of the Week is “All By My Selves” by Jeff Dunham, published in 2010. This is the autobiography of a politically incorrect, professional ventriloquist. He developed his career-passion as a child when, by chance, he was given a dummy as a gift.

Dunham auditioned to be a guest for The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson” nine times before he was finally accepted in April 1990. His striving to become famous took a toll on his family, but when he “made it” he was afforded an “entourage of management, agents and publicists.”

Read the book to learn of Dunham’s experiences as a professional ventriloquist, that include but are not limited to:  his decades-long struggles to achieve an act of sufficient quality to appear on television (prior to the advent of social media), his learning the hard way what not to do before performing, and being stiffed on compensation by night clubs.

Jokes My Father Never Taught Me

The Book of the Week is “Jokes My Father Never Taught Me” by Rain Pryor, published in 2006. The author is one of the daughters of the late Richard Pryor, the African American comedian; the only child of a Caucasian, Jewish mother.

During her childhood in the 1970’s, Rain struggled with her three identities:  black, white and Jewish. Her biracial appearance caused people to instantly develop biases, making it easy for them to practice tribal exclusion when it suited them. She found she could dispel the discrimination by making people laugh. Rain writes, “Comedy was about connecting with people in places so personal that it actually made them uncomfortable, and then showing the humor in it.”

Rain’s early-childhood circumstances did not allow her to develop a personal relationship with her father until she turned four. But when she finally did, he shamelessly exposed her to the birds and the bees. She commented that one redeeming trait of her father’s call girls, was that they were honest.

“They weren’t there because they loved my Daddy, and they didn’t pretend to love my Daddy… That was life with Richard Pryor. Sex and violence, puctuated by rare moments of family happiness.” In addition, over decades, her father went through five wives, who bore a total of seven children.

Although as a young child, Rain witnessed the seamy side of the adult world, she enjoyed a sense of love and belonging from a large family on both her parents’ sides. Another lucky aspect of her life was that of her father’s fame and fortune. He could afford to, and did take her and her siblings on various luxurious domestic and international trips.

Read the book to learn more about Rain’s issues with her own ethnicities, her father’s and her own addictions, his multiple sclerosis, and her family crises.

Medium Raw

The Book of the Week is “Medium Raw” by Anthony Bourdain, published in 2010. This is somewhat of a sequel to the author’s first nonfiction book, “Kitchen Confidential” in that he provides an epilogue on some of the people depicted in his anecdotes; he also elaborates further on various aspects of being a chef, on his own personal life, waxes enthusiastic on the food he has eaten, and gives the reader a detailed bunch of reasons why the likelihood of becoming a full-fledged, successful chef would be low if he or she were to attend cooking school.

The job of most chefs involves a ton of physical activity that is tough on the joints in an environment of high heat and humidity. Paying one’s dues once meant “…burn marks, aching feet, beef fat under the nails, and blisters.” Nevertheless, the kitchen is a meritocracy, where the irresponsible, faint-of-heart cooks get weeded out quickly.

Bourdain’s life has consisted of “…mistakes, failures, crimes, betrayals large and small.” He wrote Kitchen Confidential at a time in his life when he was furious; “the angry, cynical, snarky guy who says mean things on  ‘Top Chef’… [on] hurried hungover early mornings, sitting at my desk with unbrushed teeth, a cigarette in my mouth, a bad attitude…”

Read the book to learn Bourdain’s take on people, places and fancy food in the restaurant industry.

The Cure

The Book of the Week is “The Cure” by Geeta Anand, published in 2008. This ebook tells the emotional, suspenseful story of how a family coped with three disabled children, two of whom were suffering from a genetic disease for which a cure is yet to be found.

In the late 1990’s, John Crowley’s daughter and son were both diagnosed with Pompe disease, a muscle disorder. Patients, with varying severity, “have imperfectly produced acid alpha-glucosidase enzyme” which results in paralysis, obstructed breathing, and, if left untreated, death before the age of five.

Even though Crowley possessed the personality, talents, skills, education and privileged background that one would think would allow him access to a life-saving enzyme to save his children, he had to face numerous obstacles. The father naturally fell into the role of entrepreneur to do so. His wife provided invaluable emotional support and around-the-clock care of the children with the help of nurses; not to mention the running of the household.

Nevertheless, lots of genetic and environmental luck determines whether patients become fully cured and/or whether the quality of their lives improves significantly, or whether they die– even when they are sufficiently fortunate to take part in a trial of a new life-saving medicine. Death would be inevitable without the medicine.

Every patient is different. There are many different criteria the U.S. Food and Drug Administration considers when deciding whether to approve particular medical products for sale. Money plays a major part in whether a new product ever sees the light of day. A young medical research company raises funds through venture capitalists, and because the whole operation carries extremely high risks, if the company achieves success– the rewards, fittingly, are also extremely high.

Scientists must do years of preclinical testing on animals to make sure a new medicine works sufficiently well before even considering administering it to humans. In the United States, possible deadly consequences and possible future litigation motivate the scientists to act with integrity by performing tightly controlled experiments, so as not to have to fudge research results.

Another aspect of drug development, is avoiding a conflict of interest such as that in Crowley’s situation. He played a pivotal role in the race to bring a medicine to market; it appeared he was doing it to get the medicine for his own children.

The estimated annual expense of the enzyme for each child was $200,000, and $1 million for all future annual medical expenses, including the enzyme, plus wheelchairs, nurses, ventilators, catheters, etc.

Read the book to learn of the Crowley family’s experiences with American biotechnology.

Bad Boy Ballmer

The Book of the Week is “Bad Boy Ballmer, the Man Who Rules Microsoft” by Frederic Alan Maxwell, published in 2002. This ebook recounts the history of Microsoft and the career of its co-founder, Steve Ballmer.

Ballmer grew up in Birmingham, Michigan, which was a community comprised of “intense and well-funded academic, athletic, and social competition, and a high level of parental expectation, involvement, and support.” Ballmer’s father decided he was going to attend Harvard College. Fortunately, his superb academic record proved sufficient for acceptance. There, he met Bill Gates. They struck up a friendship and started Microsoft in the spring of 1975.

In the early 1980’s, under Ballmer’s and Gates’ auspices, the company created applications software that worked best on its own operating systems. This was one of many of Microsoft’s monopolistic practices that prompted government investigations and many lawsuits against it. Legally, financially and politically astute, Microsoft successfully defended itself for well over a decade, and employed unlawful dirty tricks in taking swipes at IBM, Sun Microsystems, Netscape and many other companies that made competing products. The whole time, Microsoft arrogantly denied it was a monopoly.

In the summer of 1998, Ballmer was named president of the company, which was still dogged by accusations of illegal business practices. The corporate culture had changed for the worse, and employee turnover rose. In order to boost morale, Ballmer “scheduled one-on-one interviews with the top hundred of Microsoft’s now thirty-five thousand employees, asking them what they thought was wrong with the company and how it could change.”

Ballmer told the press that his $180 billion company was overvalued. Shortly thereafter, on September 23, 1999, Microsoft’s NASDAQ stock price plummeted. Shareholders in the Seattle area alone suffered collective losses of $11 billion, or over “$3,000 for every man, woman, child and dog.” Other tech stocks fell precipitously as well. It was thought that Ballmer’s remark was a deliberate strategy to financially debilitate Microsoft’s rivals, which lacked the resources his company did.

Performance of Microsoft employees was reviewed every six months, on a 5-point scale. Managers competed for the privilege of supervising employees awarded high scores. However, the system had an inherent unfairness in that some managers gave 3’s for 4.5-level work, because they were supposed to rank their subordinates pursuant to the normal curve.

Read the book to learn more about how Ballmer’s personality and actions shaped Microsoft for over a quarter of a century.

Multipliers

The Book of the Week is “Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter” by Liz Wiseman with Greg McKeown, published in 2010. This repetitive ebook discusses two kinds of leaders:  “Multipliers” and “Diminishers.”

Multipliers positively influence the people around them so as to draw out almost two times what they previously believed their capabilities to be, as reported by senior professionals interviewed by the authors. “People reported actually getting smarter around Multipliers.”

A study conducted in a non-workplace arena showed that people who were lauded for their efforts rather than for their intelligence “actually increased their ability to reason and solve problems.” The book’s authors relate this to Multipliers, saying that Multipliers create a self-fulfilling prophecy of greatness by recognizing their colleagues’ accomplishments, spurring better thinking from everyone.

The authors cited many examples of this, including one in which a company did not hire additional talent in order to meet its goal of increasing sales quickly, but instead, utilized Multipliers to better leverage the brain power of its existing sales force. Another company used Multipliers effectively in that “They didn’t box people into jobs and limit their contribution… [they]… let people work where they had ideas and energy and where they could best contribute.”

In addition, Multipliers have a great sense of humor– the trait of a great leader– it represents security with oneself, and a lack of self-consciousness. Multipliers search for talent all over, identify and draw out the positive behaviors that come naturally to the people they influence, maximize performance, and remove obstacles.

Read the book to learn the many other ways Multipliers bring out the best in their coworkers, and how Diminishers negatively impact their coworkers.