Harry Deshpande on Economy

(I had emailed this review in April 2010)

http://www.amazon.com/Animals-Translation-Mysteries-Autism-Behavior/dp/0156031442/

I hope this book will help regular people to be a little less verbal and a little more visual. I’ve spent thirty years as an animal scientist, and I’ve spent my whole life as an autistic person. I hope that what I’ve learned will help people start over again and animals…..

I hope what I’ve learned will help people see.

The author is an autistic woman who grows up to be an animal scientist.

The called me Tape Recorder because I’d stored up a lot of phrases in my memory and I used them over and over again in any conversation. ….and then I ‘d tell the story all over again, start to finish. It was like a loop inside my head, it just ran over and over again. So the kids called me Tape Recorder.

It is amazing what the author has achieved despite her short-comings.

Temple Grandin earned her Ph.D. in animal science from the University of Illinois, went on to become an associate professor at Colorado State University, and wrote two books on autism…. Grandin revolutionized animal movement systems and spear-headed reform of the quality of life for the world’s agricultural animals.

The book is primarily about animal behavior or rather how to decipher animal behavior. This book explains why animal do what they do and why humans fail to read the signals. So this book should be interesting enough for anyone who has a pet. However, this book does not stop there. On the way, it deliver profound insight regarding the minds of special needs children and even about human beings in general.

I always find it kind of funny that the normal people are always saying autistic children “live in their own little world”. When you work with animals for a while you start to realize that you can say the same thing about normal people. …..It’s like dogs hearing a while register of sound we can’t. Autistic people and animals are seeing a whole register of the visual world normal people can’t, or don’t.

The author goes on to explain how her autistic brain helps her to resolve mysteries regarding animal behavior just because she can hear/feel/see what most normal human beings fail to perceive.

I was fascinated by most of the “animal decoding” episodes in the book and found very few things that I disagreed with (for e.g. decrease in the size of human brain due to domestication of dogs).

The narrative is quite flowing and interesting though it does sometimes dip into the arcane when the author jumps into the physical structure of the brain. I particularly like her observations and explanations about selective breeding of the dogs and the associated narrative of the rapist rooster.

What is really disappointing is that author does not give us any idea how she managed to earn Ph.D. and become a successful animal scientist despite being an autistic person. I guess we will have to wait till her autobiography comes out.

When I say that I’m a visual thinker I don’t mean just that I’m good at making architectural drawings and designs, or that I can design my cattle-restraining systems in my head. I actually think in pictures. During my thinking process I have no words in my head at all, just pictures.

This is true no matter what subject I’m thinking about. For instance, if you say the word “macroeconomics” to me I get a picture of those macramé flowerpot holders people used to hang from their ceilings. That’s why I can’t understand economics or algebra; I can’t picture it accurately in mind………..

When I was young I had no idea that being a visual thinker made me different from anyone else. I thought everyone saw pictures inside their heads……

http://www.amazon.com/Lords-Strategy-Intellectual-History-Corporate/dp/1591397820 also available in King county library

I was working as finance/procurement manager for a tiny veterinary pharmaceutical company back in 2001 with a mandate of improving profitability. My primary and only focus was on cost-cutting and I spectacularly failed in my objective to increase the profits.  The only consolation was that I remember our CEO engaging a few consultants and we were left speculating about what these consultants might have smoked before compiling their recommendations.

After reading this book I now realize that me and my CEO did not have a clue about strategy and the consultants did not have a clue about what strategy really meant.

I strongly feel that history is an important part of knowledge. In order to intuitively understand a subject matter, it is not enough to understand how things are today, but it is also important to understand how things were, how things evolved and why things evolved in a particular fashion. Understanding time dilation is only possible when one realizes that theory of relativity was not a stand-alone theory that sprung out of Einstein’s hat but it evolved out of successive work over a couple of century’s. Aristotle – Ptolemy – Copernicus – Galileo – Newton – Einstein. (http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/coursedesclong2.aspx?cid=153)

The author of this book, Walter Kiechell has done an excellent job of putting pieces together on a dateline. He pauses enough to give us an idea of how strategy evolved but does not get bogged down in the intricacies.

I encountered this idea about taking on more and more debt is good for business in terms of returns to shareholders in the book “The improbable origins of modern wall street” (review attached). This book mentions Modigliani and Miller’s work as something that sparked the ‘quant’ revolution in finance. Surprisingly enough Modigliani and Miller also get a mention in this book during the early days of strategy.  (To be really honest I did not understand the concept that stock price valuation is independent of the fact whether a company pays dividend or not. I tried to lookup information but I did not ‘get’ the concept till I read this book. )

This book is a mind blowing journey that starts with a simple concept of “experience curve” and it is fascinating to see how this simple concept evolved so quickly and engulfed the entire business world.

(Incidentally I did not know that ‘business’ strategy has such a short history, it all started on July 1, 1963 when the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) opened its doors.)

Here is a quick road map of strategy evolution

Bruce Henderson (BCG) with experience curve -> Growth share matrix -> Bill Bain (Bain and company) with continuous engagement, strategy as a chess and competitive analysis -> Fred Gluck of McKinsey -> Michael porter of Harvard Business school -> Back to BCG with strategy consulting incorporating an element of implementation (as against being strictly of advisory nature) -> Value chain by  McKinsey + Porter -> Junk bonds and LBO’s -> Competitive advantage -> Core competencies -> Reengineering -> ? 

The ? stands for the confusion that I have J. From reading the book I am not very sure as to where things stand today.

I understand that there is a debate on whether Bruce Henderson was really the first one who implemented strategy in business. Some people give the credit to Taylor. For me this is like a who invented 'computer' debate. It is difficult to say when calculators stopped being calculators and morphed into computers.

Overall impression: Amazing book for both beginner as well as practitioner of strategy. A must for anyone who wishes to make career as a business leader.