Airframe is an interesting novel by Michael Crichton. It starts out with a normal flight returning back to Denver from Hong Kong when suddenly the whole plane starts to go haywire. The plane starts rapidly going out of control, and everything inside moves very rapidly, with passengers getting bounced around. And the plane declares a emergency off the California coast, and makes a rapid landing. A pretty horrific event. This starts the whole novel.
A typical event like this, which results in injuries and deaths to passengers will get investigated to the last bit of detail; after all, if there is a problem inside the type of plane, it needs to be found out so that the same thing can be avoided on other planes with other airlines. Part of the people who get affected by such an accident are the plane manufacturers, Norton Aircraft. They have to quickly figure out what went wrong, both to avoid scaring other airlines and to satisfy other stakeholders such as the media, shareholders, etc.

The person central to this novel is Casey Singleton, a divorced single mother who is currently the Quality Assurance Representative on the Incident Review team (the team who actually does these sort of investigations) at Norton Aircraft. She will also be the press spokesperson, a high pressure job. Unfortunately, for the investigating team, there are some constraints;
- The flight crew has already left the country
- There is a probable deal with the Chinese airlines for 50 aircraft, so this incident needs to be investigated accurately within a very short time
- The union has heard rumours about a vital transfer of technology to China, and is beginning to get hostile
AS the investigations start, Casey soon discovers that not everything is as it seems to be, and she could very well be the scapegoat. She also has to balance being a single mother on top of everything else. She is also getting attacked by a mediaperson out to get some sensational stuff. DOes she manage to do a good job and uncover the truth ?

Whats great about this book is that it will change the way you look at things. Economics, for me, has never been my cup of tea. It is a science much bigger than reaching to Mars, I think. But this book is made for people like me. It is fun reading, all the while using data mining, to prove why things happen as they happen in terms of economics.

“Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” is a book by Steven Levitt (University Of Chicago) and Stephen J. Dubner (New York Times). It proves that economics is not dull all time and not all related to finances most of the times. The book’s topics include:
Chapter 1: Discovering cheating as applied to teachers and sumo wrestlers (See below)
Chapter 2: Information control as applied to the Ku Klux Klan and real-estate agents
Chapter 3: The economics of drug dealing, including the surprisingly low earnings and abject working conditions of crack cocaine dealers
Chapter 4: The controversial role legalized abortion has played in reducing crime
Chapter 5: The negligible effects of good parenting on education
Chapter 6: The socioeconomic patterns of naming children

Authors ask a lot of hilarious questions like: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers? or Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? or Do real estate agents have their clients’ best interests at heart? or What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? or How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime?

The book was first published in 2005 and was a best seller, selling more than 3 million copies till now in around 30 languages. For many people, this book is an absurd book. But for me, this has been a “aha” effect book - nice one time read. Wonderful way of looking at things - it surely turns conventional wisdom on its head.

For more, have a look the book’s official site.

This book “The Search: An insight into the development of Google and search” is probably one of the most important books highlighting the development of search as a business, focusing on the evolution of the idea and growth. You will get an inside view of how a company named Google became an icon, the undisputed market leader of search and the company feared by many others. You also get an idea of the future potential of the search market, and some trends of how the future of search could develop into.
Google is the main star of this book, and this focus on Google seems quite natural. There have been many search engines before Google such as Altavista that were popular, but the sheer simplicity and power of Google blew away all contenders, and it would be hard to talk about why search is such an interesting topic unless you focus on a company that made search so popular.

The author of the book, John Battelle, is well suited to write a book such as this. After all, when you get a person who has been intimately connected with some of the pioneering influential sites on the Internet arena such as ‘Wired’ magazine, ‘The Industry Standard’ magazine and is able to touch base with the heads of some of the leading people in this area - such as the founders of Google, founders of Yahoo, the chief brain behind the Altavista search, and the venture capitalists (who are as connected and important for technological developments as the entrepreneurs themselves). As a result, the book presents a great detail of the inside view on how search as a technology and business developed, how early pioneers such as Altavista and Goto.com pioneered some of the technology, but were almost shoved aside when Google came into the picture.
There are some great number of stories in this book; one among them that always puzzled me was as to why Altavista, at one time the number one leader in the search space lost out so easily in the search game (the suits running the company failed to take advantage of the early lead). If you ever wondered as to how this company called Google came into being and what was the growth like, then this book has the answers. For people who were confused as to the difference between Google and Yahoo, you get a lot many answers in this book.
However, the book does not always go ga-ga over the Google Story, with a fair amount of criticism of the company also included. Thus you get to hear about the internal style of functioning of the company (with the 2 founders almost being portrayed as dictators), about how different the development/organizational model of Google is when compared with other software companies. For me, one important section was about the Google policy of ‘Do no evil’. Even though the book has covered the ethical dilemmas of Google when matching this policy with the force exerted by the Chinese Government, it does not cover the disappointment that a lot of people felt when Google compromised and agreed to be a part of the China censorship effort (through its google.cn site).
Overall, this book will take you through the development of search in some detail, including the evolution of Google and to some extent of Yahoo, and some trends in future search technology development. Most of all, this book should enthuse you about what the single-minded dedication (and luck) of a group of inventors can take them. Read the book for some inspiration.

For those who have read the book before this one ‘The Goal’, the book must have seemed like a breath of fresh air. Imagine a business novel written in the shape of a gripping novel, and seeking to present the objective (business concepts) in a way that does not put you to sleep - well, that was the way in which ‘The Goal’ was written. And here is the next book in the series. ‘The Goal II - It’s not chance’ takes the story forward from the first book.
Is ‘The Goal’ required reading for ‘The Goal II - It’s not chance’ ? No, you can read the second book without having to read the first book, but the ‘The Goal’ is good enough that you can read it on its own.

The book is written in the same style as the first book. The story is gripping, giving touches of both personal and business examples, and keeps you reading. If compared with ‘The Goal’, the book seems a bit less gripping, but just a bit less. Overall, it is worth reading. I found that you learn most from the book if you re-read it again within a few days of reading it first, since you are able to grasp the power of the concepts more thoroughly.
So while ‘The Goal’ was all about using the Theory of Constraints and associated bottlenecks to the manufacturing arena and how best to build predictability and flexibility to production, ‘The Goal 2: It’s not luck’ takes you to a higher level. The people involved are roughly the same. It’s still Alex Rogo and his team (and his family) who are now all promoted out of the plant that they helped save and have important positions in the conglomerate.
The conglomerate is a diversified one, having a printing business, women’s cosmetics, services and parts, auto products, etc. In this time and age, any expert would recommend that such a diversified group should consolidate; it gets more difficult to hold onto these when these diverse concerns are making losses and dragging down the conglomerate. It is quite logical that board members are pushing to sell them off, it is difficult for Alex Rogo to oppose these measures; the only thing he can do is to get them to be profitable so that either they earn enough to add value or they can be sold as a good profit making entity.
That is the quest of this book; how to use the Thinking Processes to turn around diverse companies - in fact, the idea is to show the strength of the Thinking Processes, which are used to examine conflicting logical arguments, incorporate customer needs and business environment and develop a workable solution that can help take a business from loss to profit, and also be used to solve personal problems ! It seems fairly logical, but there is a weakness as well - you need to get all the concepts and environmental points correct in order to do a good analysis.

This is not a new book. I remember reading it more than a decade back, and then suddenly I caught sight of the book in my office library, and it brought back memories. The book is an incredible piece of writing, and one can expect a great deal of detail, since the authors, Bryan Burrough and John Helyar are investigative reporters and had covered the takeover deal for RJR Nabisco in great detail. The book may seem a bit dated, since it was written in 1990 covering the Leveraged Buyout (LBO) of RJR Nabisco in 2 frantic months of 1988. However, I would argue that anybody who reads this book and is even moderately interested in the working of businesses, takeovers, and most importantly, the CEO’s and boards of companies should read this book.

The book is gripping reading, especially because it desists from going into details into arcane financial details and boring readers (except the ones who get their kicks from too many financial details). Let me re-phrase; the book does not desist from providing financial details and certainly does not try to dumb down how things work, but the way in which the story line is crafted would make this seem like a thriller based on company mergers (and if you did not know this actually happened, you could believe this to be a work of fiction).
For a lot of readers, the stock-market boom of the internet era and the crash-and-doom of 2001 was a major thing, and they would have expected a period in history to be similar. But the fact remains that the 1980’s was also an extra-ordinary period of financial turmoil with 2 great (and very controversial) terms coming to life; the junk-bonds most popularized by the junk-bond king Michael Miliken of the Drexel Burnham Lambert, and the Leveraged Buyout kind of takeover made most popular by a small firm called KKR (Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts).
These came together in a burst of what seemed like a great financial innovation - the Leveraged Buyout. What does LBO mean ? Loosely put, a LBO is used when the executives of a company believe that the company is being under-valued, or they want to make a pitch for the company when it is under hostile attack; and they go in for buying the company outright. They need to raise a bid high enough that shareholders (including the institutions - typically pension funds and others) sell of their shares. However, this requires a massive amount of money, and the net result of this is high debt levels (indeed, in many cases, crippling debt levels where interest payments demand massive cost-cutting). Some companies manage, becoming lean and mean, and in other cases, the whole stack of cards crumble.
Barbarians At The Gate is the story of the LBO launched by the CEO of RJR Nabisco, Ross Johnson, and his battle with the takeover firm, KKR (Kohlberg Kravis and Roberts - the important partners being Henry Kravis and George Roberts). Now KKR was a firm with extremely efficient partners, and the battle between Ross JOhnson and KKR was an epic battle with many rounds of discussion, debate and escalating payoff’s, all being weighed by the board of RJR Nabisco, former friends and partners of Ross JOhnson, and now being the principle representatives of shareholders.
The interesting part of the book is a telling of the history of the companies, main people involved, their ambitions, their motivations and how they plan and scheme to get ahead. The book has what is called the ‘people’ perspective, and you will get a fair idea of what the personal ambitions of a person as ambitious (and ruthless) as Ross Johnson will cost many of the other people involved. However, it also details the variability involved in decision-making, particularly when Ross Johnson did not anticipate anybody else getting involved.
Also, you get to see something evolving in this book that continues to this day, namely the notion of how executive perks have kept on increasing. It is a fair understanding that many shareholders do not know the full level of executive perks, otherwise you would see far more resentment especially when the company is barely plodding along with not much dividend or increase in stock value.
This book is a great read, and I was absolutely hooked after reading it.

Have you ever read a business book that was so interesting that it made you turn pages to see what is going to happen next ? I have read a number of strategy books, books on what excellent companies do, books on what enterprising leaders do, but I have never read a business book such as this one.
The Goal takes a somewhat familiar concept of a loss making unit being told that his unit can no longer be afforded by the parent company due to its losses and will have to be shut down, with the loss of its entire work-force and him personally as well, unless, the plant can be turned around and show profits. In addition, the time and pressures involved in the job is causing incredible pressures in the marital life of the Plant Manager Alex Rogo (the book is written from his perspective), with the marriage showing strong signs of breaking down.
Now Alex knows that he has to increase profits, for which he has to show better sales and reduce inventories, but neither nor his managers are able to figure out how to. In addition, with the way that the plant is working, they are not able to execute orders on a proper ordered schedule, and when a major customers calls, they have to execute a rush order that in turn causes costs to go up. At this time, Alex remembers an old college mate of his who is a college professor in the area of operational effectiveness, but he is a very busy person and his mechanisms are also radical, going against most cost accounting. In the midst of all this, his wife goes back to her parent’s house.
And then comes the change around. Based on the long-distance and 1 visit by the professor, Jonah, which causes Alex to push for the concept of using the Theory of Constraints to figure out what the changes are needed in the plant. He needs to increase throughput, reduce inventory and reduce operational expense, seemingly very logical steps, but extremely difficult to bring out.
And the real hard conceptual part starts, where Alex and his team figure out what constraints and bottlenecks actually mean, and have to try and overturn traditional accounting. They need to overcome the bottleneck, since the bottleneck decides the speed of throughput through a system. If work items are lined up at a bottleneck and are piling up, then the throughput of the system is slowed down. In addition, a good learning from the book was that a bottleneck can be a dynamic system, in the sense that any machine can be a bottleneck depending on how work items are getting piled up. This could even involved getting an older machine if it helps break up the bottleneck.
Once they are able to resolve this system, they find that the system starts to move more smoothly, order scheduling and predictability becomes more accurate and much shorter. The harder part is in convincing the management and cost accounting department about this new system, but even they are convinced by the new figures and sales starting to emerge.
At the same time, Alex Rogo is saving his marriage by starting again, giving time to his wife and starting the romance again. The book finally ends by everything getting solved, and leaves a long thought in the head about how to use this great system to help resolve things.

I guess more people would have seen the Godfather movies rather than read the book; but let me start by saying that this is a great book. The book is a fairly gripping book, establishing both the history of why the godfather became the godfather (Vito Corleone), and also the birth of the next Godfather, Michael Corleone. It does meander a bit in between when trying to explain various things, but overall is a very taut book.
The book takes the Corleone family, one of the 5 mafia crime families and the tensions between them. The book explains the motives and the development of characters for some of the main characters of the book, Vito Corleone, Sonny Corleone, Michael Corleone, Connie, Kay (Michael’s wife), Tom Hagen, and a few others, but whose characters are not so well developed.
The book also explains numerous mafia activities to people who may not be well-enough acquainted with some of these terms, terms such as button man, hitting the matresses, omerta, La cosa nostra, etc.
The story explains how a poor Italian immigrant, a man of quiet nature, but internally a very powerful individual, slowly starts to be seen as a man of power, a man of stature and one who can influence things. He can get his people justice, deferment from the army, rough justice against anyone who has harmed them and so on. While reading this book, it would not seem strange at all that all these activities are illegal :-), they just seem natural. Slowly, he starts to build an empire consisting of political connections, book-keeping, races, and many other vices including the illegal running of alcohol. However, even such people have their own scruples, such as being against prostitution and drugs.
And this is what brings him down and decides the rest of the book. Vito refuses help to another family seeking to expand in the drugs field, and provokes an assassination attempt in which he is injured, and which brings his violent son Sonny into the field as the interim leader (his other son Michael is outside the family business, being a decorated soldier). Hence, in a quirk of fate, Michael gets involved, kills 2 people and escapes the country. In the ensuing gang warfare, Sonny is killed and Vito Corleone, The Godfather, gets up from his sick bed in an attempt to ensure the safe return of his son Michael back.
Vito makes a deal in which he accepts Sonny’s death and foreswears all vengeance (although he is perceived as weak due to this lack of revenge) in order to get Michael back. The aim of course is long-term, to get Michael to take the revenge after setting him up as the Godfather. The latter part of the book is about this effort; how Michael gains the power of the family, how he turns from being a loyal American to the head of a major criminal family, and how he eventually carries out the revenge (by killing a number of the opposition families leaders, and also killing his own brother-in-law for the role he had in getting Sonny killed).
It is only at the end where the author puts a touch about that these people are bad people, when you see that the women of the family are praying for their souls. The book also depicts women and the African-American community in a bad light, thus depicting the inherent racism of the Italian (and maybe others) community as of that time.

For those who remember the times of the IT craze around the beginning of this century, there were a flurry of reports wildly talking about something called ‘Ginger’. By a prolific inventer called Dean Kamen, who had invented varied other things in the past such as the AutoSyringe, the first insulin pump, and an all-terrain wheelchair known as the iBot. Read more about Dean Kamen over here. He has won numerous awards, and made himself a fair amount of money through his inventions.
Back to Ginger, while not revealed to the public, it got an immense amount of publicity, its true character being debated in numerous articles. Praise from Steve Jobs (Apple), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and venture caplitalist John Doerr added to the praise and curiosity regarding what Ginger was all about. Possible speculation included a device for time travel, teleportation, hovercraft, jet-pack, etc. In the end when the device was reported as another glorified ’scooter’, alebit more technical, there was a massive sense of let-down. However, the device, now known as the Segway, is still a technical marvel. The usage of gyroscopes and technical wizardy has almost made this a mind-reading human transportation device.
The book tries to explain the phenomenon in more detail from an insider view, taking us through the development of the idea to the development of the device. It includes the conception of the idea, the meetings and frenzied development and modifications in the device, the discussions with venture capitalists (including know-how about how the venture capital process works), the dependency on an individual to drive the company that he founded. One interesting thing that came out in the book was how Dean refused to give any of his employees any stock, thus no stake in the profits of the company.
The book does go into a lot of detail, so there is a chance of people getting bored (I wasn’t). And towards the end, the book meanders into more about the author of the book getting booted out of the project, and hence the perspective slightly changes, and bitterness towards the eviction starts to show. However, I consider the book a must-read.