Arthur Hailey was born in Lutton, Bedford-shire, England. He served in the Royal Air force as a pilot in World War II. He migrated to Canada and has written best sellers like Airport, Wheels and Hotel. He moved to the Bahamas with his writer wife Sheila. Arthur Hailey died on November, 2004 leaving a legacy of best sellers and over 170 million books in print.
Moneychangers is not only about money, it is about all the effects of money i.e. power, greed, affairs, isolation, loneliness etc. In Money Changers, Hailey tries to present the dynamics of banking. As usual a detailed prelude emerges about the principles of banking, the economics, ethics and above all the operations. He even makes the reader familiar with fake currencies, fraud credit cards and the risk of investment. Towards the end of the book he even explains about the advantages of investments in bullion.
The first Mercantile bank (FMA) is a family run bank and the current chairman Ben Roselli is fatally ill. He is grooming two vice-presidents of the company, Alex Vandervoot and Roscoe Hayward, as his successors. Alex Vandervoot is an honest, principled albeit easy-going person. But his banking fundamentals are strong and he feels that the future of banking lies in retail banking. He believes in giving back to the society and does not believe in risking the banks credibility to bring in the gains.

What is Hailey’s book without a love and personal angle? Alex Vandervoot’s personal life is in shambles. His once lovely wife is confined to a psychiatric facility and he himself fees very guilty about it. He chances upon Margot Bracken, a hard nosed activist lawyer who works for the underprivileged community. To compound matters, the First Mercantile American withdraws financial assistance from some of the projects of the community. Margot’s spirited non-violent protest becomes a success, but Alex’s detractors pin him down to the wall. They feel that Alex has been assisting Margot to pressurize the bank.
Roscoe Hayward, on the other hand, is a very religious, rigid person. He believes that the future profits of the bank lie with big business lending. He does not believe in charity and community projects. Roscoe teams up with a corrupt businessman and undertakes to lend big loans to him. In return for this, he strikes alliances with politicians and is treated to all the pleasure in the world.
But as the businessman defaults and flees the country, Roscoe is left with a huge crisis. This financial crisis threatens to engulf the whole system, setting up a panic reaction among the shareholders, stakeholders, employees and the stock market. Roscoe Hayward faced with criminal offenses commits suicide, paving the way for Alex Vandervoot to take over the ruined financial institution.
Money Changers is a book about the power struggle between two individuals, but Hailey’s research gives the lowdown on the other operatives like mafia, currency rackets and fraudsters who at every stage try to undermine the system. Money Changers is a book for a banking student and a simple layman who does not understand numbers. It is an engrossing tale about the institution which determines the fate of millions in the world – the bank.

Arthur Hailey is a British/ Canadian novelist who is said to have guaranteed his publishers a best seller. His novels were a product of considerable research and therefore very realistic and gripping. Critics say that his style was of a typical potboiler in which he took many different types of crisis and connected them to encompass all the characters.
Hotel is one of Arthur Hailey’s most successful works and to research he had read over 20 books on the hotel industry to convey a realistic feeling for this gripping tale. When you check yourself into a hotel you hardly notice the effort that goes in to making your stay the most pleasant experience ever. The door keeper to the housekeeper and the innumerable invisible background staff work like the spokes in a wheel to keep the whole edifice of a hotel standing and profitable. Arthur Hailey brilliantly portrays the behind the scene actions and intrigues which goes into the working of this business. At the centre of this gripping tale is Peter McDermott, the efficient assistant general manager who has had a checkered past, striving to keep the hotel afloat. The Hotel “St Gregory’s” has fallen on bad times and its aging proprietor Warren Trent has no means to keep it going. He has exhausted all avenues to get credit, and cannot keep the staff and corruption under check. Trying to stave off a take over bid from Charles O’ Keete he resists the changes proposed by Peter McDermott. His old timers are either inefficient or amoral which is bringing the profits down.

So Peter McDermott has to valiantly fight racial segregation, a rape attempt, robbery and a hit and run case which threatens to be bad publicity in the press. Helping him are Christine Francis and a hand full of other staff who many times have their back to the wall. One can see the master stroke of Hailey when an insignificant character like the hotel incinerator operator Booker T, happens to unearth significant evidence to nail the obnoxious Duchess and Duke of Croydon. Booker T, rummages through the garbage and retrieves lost valuables of guests, cutlery and other items. Hailey also draws attention to the fact that such background characters are so significant to the hotel to make its operations profitable.
At the heart of the story is the love affair between the beautiful Christine Francis and Peter McDermott. Both of them have suffered losses and have unenviable pasts. But due to their indomitable spirit and kindness they change the destiny of the hotel. A chance kindness shown to a seemingly destitute Albert Wells who actually owns a gold mine, enables them to stave off the take over battle and preserve the grandeur of St Gregory’s. Peter McDermott has ushered in the change with De-segregation and a freak elevator accident helps him to reconstitute the entire staff.
Hailey’s attempt at humor with Keycase Milne and the playacting Marsha Preyscott also tugs our heart. Al-together “Hotel” is a gripping tale of love, human spirit and business battles.

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.

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.