Simple is the Reason of My Heart

Big Deal - Mergers & Acquisitions in the Digital Age by Bruce Wasserstein

For some time, I have been searching for a book that gives a good overview on the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity in business. For me, it is out of professional interest and the curiosity in understanding how the real big deals are being done in the US and beyond. Bruce Wasserstein's "Big Deal: Mergers & Acquisitions in the Digital Age" will not disappoint. The writer of the book, Bruce Wasserstein is a practitioner of mergers and acquisitions in Wall Street and have facilitated many big and interesting deals and is currently the CEO and Chairman of Lazard LLC. In fact, it was through a gathering among my business partners that I discovered the book. While on a business trip to Indonesia, I spent some time reading the book and learned a lot about a business which I have interests into. It is definitely a few notches better than the book "Barbarians at the Gate"; which was recommended to me by people involved in M&A activity. For those who wanted a good guide on how M&A have evolved over the past few centuries, good case studies on the strategic challenge in the M&A world, and a guide for those who are involved in the business, this is definitely the book that you must read. I will talk a bit more about the themes that revolve around the book as I move along.

The Power of Unreasonable People

If you seriously want to know what type of animal social and environmental entrepreneurs are, "The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World" by John Elkington (founder of Sustainability.org and the concept of the Triple Bottom Line) & Pamela Hartigan (Manging Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship) gives a very good glimpse of how these people turn their unreasonable ideals and dreams into reality. It mirrors a famous quote by George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." This book discusses the interesting social entrepreneurship cases from Aravind Eye Center in India, the Social Stock Exchange in Brazil, ParqueSoft in Colombia and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative.

Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by Social Technologies

At least, I know that Nicholas and I are among the first few people to get our hands on Groundswell: Winning in a World transformed by Social Technologies (a book about social media by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research), since we have ordered this book a few weeks back (before it is officially released in May 2008). In a simple definition by the authors, the groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations. In actual fact, the tipping point for a product or news happened not because of a lot of people, and usually, it started from a groundswell in the ground and attribute to several factors in a complex situation. After a quick read through, the book is specifically targeted for executives in companies or organizations who might want to adopt social technologies (or media) that integrate along with their present business functions.

DigiMarketing: The Essential Guide to New Media and Digital Marketing

I picked up this book while browsing through a stack of business books in Borders some time back. After reading bits and pieces, I have decided to buy the book since I need a reference for social media. The book DigiMarketing: The Essential Guide to New Media and Digital Marketing written by Kent Wertime and Ian Fenwick is an interesting read for me. Coincidentally, while reading the profiles of the authors, I realized that they are based in Thailand. Being a practitioner of social media, it offers a freshly different perspective for me, particularly in learning how people (working in the traditional media space) approach new (or social media) to effectively market out ideas and products to the world.

An Odyssey through Space with Arthur C. Clarke

The last of the three giants in science fiction genre, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, CBE (along with Issac Asimov and Robert Heinlein) passed away in Colombo, Sri Lanka on 19 March 2008. He was 90 years old, prominent as a British science fiction author.  My first encounter with Clarke's work began from "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), partly due to a movie of the same title produced by the late Stanley Kubrick. Unknown to  all, the book was a compilation of various short stories written by the author, most notably "The Sentinel" (1948) written for a BBC competition but was finally published in the magazine 10 Story Fantasy in 1951 under the title "Sentinel of Eternity". The premise of the story is based on the discovery of an ancient artifact on Earth's Moon which was left behind by ancient aliens. In the end, the first person narrator of the story came to the final hypothesis that the artifact was left on the moon as a "warning beacon" for the  evolution of possible intelligent and spacefaring life that might develop on Earth. The object ceases to transmit upon the human race approached the maturity of becoming a space race. That part is integrated into the book.

The Illusions of Entrepreneurship by Scott A. Shane

Other than Presentation Zen, I have ordered another book which has caught my interest recently. The book entitled "The Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths That Entrepreneurs, Investors and Policy Makers Live By", written by Scott A. Shane has not disappointed. In fact, it is a very well written book about the myths of entrepreneurship and showed some interesting and counter-intuitive results against common folklore about entrepreneurship. In my teaching of the same topic to students, I prefer to call it the dark side of entrepreneurship. Ultimately, I prefer an agnostic view of entrepreneurs. Here are some interesting issues to why I think that this is a must-read book for those out there. Before you really think of committing yourself to start a business, it might be good to learn some lessons from this book, because a lot of things you hear about are likely to anomalies rather than the norm.

Silicon Dragon: How China is winning the Tech Race

If you survey the history of the rise of the internet companies in China, you will find very few books talking about them. Of course, it has mostly gotten to do with the language, and these companies are relatively unknown outside China. From the US side, many books have been written on the tech giants from the US. Even the web 2.0 founders are well documented in the book by Jessica Livingston in "Founders at Work". So, here we have a book "Silicon Dragon: How China is winning the Tech Race" written by Rebecca Fannin, a journalist who has been working in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Beijing. In this book, she interviewed 12 top chinese entrepreneurs and their investors, and give a brief overview on how the top Chinese internet companies are now rising to the challenge against their western counterparts.

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

I suppose that I am the first person in Singapore to get my hands on a copy of the book "Presentation Zen" by Garr Reynolds. Well, I made an order some weeks back when I heard about it from Guy Kawasaki's blog. For those who do not know, Presentation Zen is an excellent blog in presenting ideas and pointers in how to make interesting presentations that can capture and allure the audience. I have often tried to work out different presentations with the methods suggested in the blog. Leonard da Vinci, one of my favourite innovators, starts the book with the following quote "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication". From the first glance of the book, it is an easy to read book, with interesting diagrams on how to plan a presentation, making the pitch and finally making your audience feel that you are there for them. Yes, the book also bring forth the experiences of many presenters from Seth Godin to Guy Kawasaki. I strongly recommend this book to those who want to learn how to do away with powerpoint and start doing a presentation that can engage your audience and spread your ideas.

The Google Story

With some free time, I have spent more time to read up the biography of several top internet companies. Treading across the various biographies in the bookstore, I have decided to check out the history of Google. After all, everyone in the world is reliant on Google to find the answers of their daily queries. With the company's expansion towards online enterprise tools (Google Docs/Spreadsheets/Presentation),  innovative new APIs (OpenSocial, GWT and Android) and  fun applications like Google Earth, the company is now touted one of the most innovative companies in the world. The book "The Google Story" by David A Vise and Mark Malseed provides a good description of the company who rocked the world with their search engine a decade back. Interestingly, I was one of the few early adopters of the Google search engine, when it was first launched as a Stanford project. Since my first use, I totally gave up my favourite search engine then, Altavista and never turned back. I found a few interesting lessons that I learn from Google with regards to management and venture funding.

Bad Samaritans - Macroeconomics Revisited

I came across this book when the author Ha-Joon Chang was interviewed about his book "Bad Samaritans" in the Bloomberg on the Economy podcast. I was impressed by how the author has defended his views in the book.  So, I bought the book in Kinokuniya bookstore yesterday, and yes, for those who have the discount card, it's 20% off till the end of the year. So, why is this book interesting? If you remember Andrew Keen's "The Cult of the Amateur" as the anti-thesis to the books Wikinomics and Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail", then "Bad Samaritans" is a book that portrays the opposite end to Thomas Friedman's "The Lexus and The Olive Tree". A scholar in development economics from my alma mater (Cambridge University), Ha-Joon Chang made some interesting comments about the future of globalization and applied the historical arguments how the rich and powerful governments such as the US are "bad samaritans". His argument can be simplified into the following: while most of the intentions of these governments are worthy, their free market ideology and lack of historical understanding failed them in their quest to take poor nations out of poverty. In fact, he demonstrated the successful developed nations such as Japan have totally evolved with policies contrary to those which are prescribed by the leading institutions such as World Bank and IMF. Here are two interesting lessons that I recommend you to take from the book.

Guanxi - The story of Microsoft Research Centre in China

I started reading the book "Guanxi - Microsoft, China and Bill Gates' Plan to Win the Road Ahead" after listening to a podcast from MIT (u can subscribe the podcast for free in iTunes U) featuring a talk by both authors Robert Buderi and Gregory T. Huang. In this book, they told the story about how they started working on this project, and talked about the rise of the Microsoft Research Asia (research centre in China) within a few years. The book offers a behind-the-scenes tale about how Bill Gates courted the Chinese to develop a relationship for Microsoft with China within the span of the last two decades. What I thought was fascinating about this book is that after the emergence of the lab as a successful research centre for computer science (with an investment over 100 million US$), the battle for both talent and the Chinese market has just begun with the entrance of Google.

The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan

The long awaited memoir entitled "The Age of Turbulence: Adventure in a New World" by Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board appointed by US President, Ronald Reagan, is finally out. He is coined "The Maestro" by Bob Woodward, the famous reporter who uncovered the Watergate scandal. When he was the Federal Reserve Board Chairman, every word he uttered may create serious implications and consequences directly or indirectly towards the economy. Hence it was very difficult to gauge his thinking and opinions on the issues of the economy. Of course, the interest are about his revelations about the world before and after September 11 2001, and describes his experience passing through each economic crisis, for example, Black Monday, collapse of Long Term Capital Management and the dot.com bust. He also offers his insights what the world would look like in the near future. Of course, if you purchase the book in Asia (like I made my purchase in Singapore), you get a special Asian edition, where he has written an additional preface on the Asian economy. Here are my thoughts after reading most parts of the book.

The World Without Us

Imagine a day after tomorrow where the entire human civilization is wiped out possibly by a plague (or some cataclysmic event that I leave it to your imagination) but all the modern infrastructure (for example, the city buildings in Manhattan) are left behind. How is a world without us (human beings) look like? How is nature going to reclaim back the world that we inhabit here? Alan Weisman's new book "The World Without US" offers an interesting thought experiment to demonstrate how that future will look like. All in all, it is a very well written book that attempts to predict the natural history of Earth after the world is no longer inhabited by us. I first encountered the book through watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and subsequently hear the podcast interview by Ira Flatow in Science Friday and from Scientific American (by then I have finished the book). Particularly, I enjoyed how he explained using a scientific perspective on how the major buildings in New York are eroded by water rusting most of the metallic structures such as pipes. You can imagine how nature will reclaim New York in thousands of years later. The book also reviews how evolutionary changes will happen to the mammals which are domesticated by human beings and sets up how these species will change in time to come. In the last part of the book, the author talks about the population problem because with a growing population, we consume more resources and hence new ways of energy conservation are required to sustain this population. In some sense, this book is written with our fragile environment in our mind.

The Business of Politics and Ethnicity

My colleague, Wayne Soon from Singapore Angle, has recommended me an interesting book over a cup of coffee last weekend. He told me that this book is so good that he could not take it off his hand. After reading it, I cannot but help to agree with him. Of course, being immersed as both a researcher and practitioner in business and entrepreneurship (otherwise, as Joseph A. Schumpeter termed it "Creative Destruction"), the book "The Business of Politics and Ethnicity: A History of The Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce & Industry" (published by NUS Press) by Sikko Visscher (University of Amsterdam), offers a pair of lens to the social and political history of Singapore from a different angle. Strangely, this angle come from a business entity which was formed in 1906. The Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SCCCI) is a leading cultural and economic organization dedicated to promoting the interests of the Chinese business community. We often hear so much about the government promoting entrepreneurship lately but yet so little about the world of outstanding business leaders and ex-presidents of SCCCI in Singapore from the past to the present,  from Tan Kah Kee (a well-known Chinese industrialist and philanthropist or "Henry Ford of Malaysia" in 1920s), Lee Kong Chian (Chinese businessman and philanthropist who started the Lee Foundation that I am indebted to for my PhD scholarship) to Wee Cho Yaw (incumbent Chairman of UOB bank).  So, I offer you a glimpse of the book after reading this treatise about an interesting civic institution that very few younger generation of Singapore Chinese Entrepreneurs (most of us are western educated) know very little about.

Books on the Virtues and Follies of Internet

A intense back pain has forced me to stay at home this weekend. Since I am bedridden most of the time, I take this time to read intensely or surf the web, as compared to my daily habit of reading one hour before sleep. While I am currently working with founders in web 2.0 start-ups, I am surveying for new ideas from the cyberspace and known literature. So, as a matter of those who are interested in the web 2.0 space, I have decided to recommend two books which illustrate two different perspectives (from the good to the bad) on the phenomenon of the current internet (web 2.0, new media and virtual worlds) and its impact on our culture and economy.

The Audacity to Challenge

"another tradition to politics ... a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done."
- Barack Obama, "The Audacity of Hope"

Two recent interviews about the social-political landscape in the Singapore blogosphere and the recent forum on freedom of speech set me thinking about life in Singapore. It clears my thinking over some  personal issues, helps me to take a step back and take an introspective view about the world set in motion. Oftentimes, we don't really know how our actions can affect the uncertain world out there. Sometimes, they leave us to ponder their ramifications and made us wonder whether our actions are truly worth it.

In the end, I summarize my thoughts with a guiding principle that sets me to engage what is lacking in the Singaporean culture. It is the audacity to believe and challenge that you can achieve things greater than yourself, followed by the passion to overcome difficulties and endure the suffering to reach that goal and finally, youth is not wasted on the young. If you do not  pluck up the courage to challenge dogma that reside in the older generations, what hope is there left for those who come after you?

If you want to know what I read

Sometime back, Cobalt Paladin, a fellow blogger from the entrepreneurial circle asked me whether I have used BookJetty.com, a Singaporean based web 2.0 portal for the user to compile the books which he or she have read. He was interested in finding out the kind of books I read. I thought that it will be a good idea to consolidate a list of books which I believe, will be interesting for friends and strangers to look out for. I highly recommend this service to people who wants to consolidate and search for books on their reading list. I have actually met the founder and inventor behind this service in one of the SG Entrepreneurs bloggers pub crawl.

I do not have the luxury of reading so much as compared to the days when I was studying my PhD in Cambridge. Nowadays, my reading is only confined to a hour before my sleep and also the times when I am taking a bus or train or travelling to another country. Most of time when I was writing my thesis, I like to sit down at the Borders bookstore and read for half a day. In each summer of the seven years spent in UK, I have found myself immersed in books written by many great thinkers (e.g. Popper, Wittgenstein, Kant, Nozick). Actually, I don't just like reading, I use what I read to debate my fellow college friends (who do their PhDs in other areas). It is usually useful to get them to provide me a better insight and perspective to what I read.

If you want to check out what I have read (and I am still slowly adding my list of read books), here is the URL for you to explore and perhaps, you should use BookJetty too to compile your reading lists.

Acquiring knowledge is good for the mind, but critical analysis of that knowledge is even better.

My Reading List

For me, I have enjoyed reading books as a hobby. Of all books I have read, the list I propose here are books which I value and highly recommend for understanding and learning about different areas of knowledge.

1. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (Philosophy)
2. The Philosopher's Toolkit  by Julian Baggini (Philosophy)
3. The 48 Laws of Power by Greene
4. Fashionable Nonsense by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (Philosophy)
5. How to read a book by Charles van Doren (Literature)
6. A Random Walk down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel
7. Competitve Strategy & Competitive Advantage by Michael Potter
8. Philosophical Explanations by Robert Nozick
9. The Political Animal by Jeremy Paxman
10. The Cunning of Unreason by Michael Dunn
11. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay
12. The Alchemist by Paul Coelho (For inspiration)
13. The Art of Seduction by Greene
14. Central Issues in Jurisprudence by Nigel Simmons
15. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
16. 33 Strategies of War by Greene
17. Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times, by Morris Kline

Another recommendation recently from Hui Chieh, Singapore Angle: Economic Sophisms by Frédéric Bastiat

Age of Polarisation?

In the past month, there is a furore of books that centers on opposing the Republicans in retaining the Congress and Senate. Chief among them, are "State of Denial" by Bob Woodward  and "Tempting Faith" by David Kuo. The first book tackles on the mis-management of the Iraq war by the Bush administration and the second book discusses how the Bush administration manipulates the Christian right in the US for their political agenda with their office of faith-based initiatives. These books add political damage to the Republicans, not to mention the scandals surrounding the top Republicans in the congress from Daley to Foley, and it is almost impossible to conceive how they can turn back the tide. I thought that Bob Woodward's book provide some insight to the dynamics within the Bush administration. Yet it still makes me wonder why he wrote two pro-Bush books follow by an anti-Bush book at the end. One thing that seem consistent from him when the other reporters ask him, "Why (pick any title from the Bush At War series)?". He will reply that he is merely reporting the events that led to the Iraq war and its aftermath. Like any journalist, he has also added his interpretation to the events. I have yet to read the second book, but will try to take a look when the book comes out in the bookstores here.

What is common from these books? My view is in the polarising effect it creates. In the same light, another book (that I have read recently) comes to mind but dwells in a totally different subject: religion. "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins tackles the sensitive question about the existence of God and continues his crusade to fire up the moderate atheists into a force that will take on the Christian right. I met Richard Dawkins when he gave a talk about his earlier book "Weaving the Rainbow" in the Cambridge Union. Even as a free thinker, struggling between agnosticism and atheism, my impression of him is that he comes across as a charismatic atheist.

One interesting quote from Dawkins in his book that originates from the late Douglas Adams:

"Religion ... has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? - because you're not. If someone votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. ... But on the other hand, if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say 'I respect
that.'" - Douglas Adams

If you read the book for what it's worth, there are two issues that one must seperate. Without doubt, the book divides science and religion, leaving the moderates that interface between both with no where to stand. The first issue is the problem of institutionalized religion. The values of the religion may be peaceful but the corruption lies in the institution. Oftentimes, people tend to mix up the two, and argue that the religion is responsible for the wars, rather that it is the people who runs the institution behind the religion and take it to war. In the fictional piece Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis made a clear argument that institutionalized religion has a strong propensity for corruption, because they impose values into laws. The second issue is that Dawkins attack seem to be centering on theist religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In his book, there is no mention of Buddhism. Other than one internal war within the two sects of Buddhism (to the best of my knowledge), this religion has not created any major problems in history. Of course, the pundits will tell you that Buddhism is more often viewed as a philosophy rather than a religion, because it does not purport the existence of a powerful being called God.

Reading these books made me wonder whether we are living in an age of polarisation. A long time back, in a Popperian perspective, I wrote an article entitled, "The Moderate Society and its Enemies" with the arguments to show that the moderates are too soft on the extremists, yet the contradiction comes when the moderates decide to start their clamp, they become the extremists eventually. Does this also mean that the postmodernist age is collapsing because the current wave of change seems to move towards the "either you are with us or you are against us" mentality.

I leave that to your thoughts, for I neither beg nor fear, your favours nor your hate.