For the book club, a decision was made to ease into the new year (at the time, 2011 was a then-new year) with a book on finances. If for no other reason that a lot of people get stressed about money ’round the time Christmas bills arrive, and stressed employees aren’t productive employees.
J.D. Roth’s Your […]
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EclecticLip: Book summary #30 – The Corporate Lattice
The Corporate Lattice was chosen as the book club’s thirtieth book, in recognition of the fact that the “corporate ladder” is a poor metaphor for a companies of relatively stable size. The situation is different for rapidly growing companies, who might need an ever-enlarging cadre of managers or directors to oversee burgeoning work teams.
It was also recommended […]
EclecticLip: Book club summary #29 – Show Me The Numbers
Given the overriding importance of data presentation (read graphing skills) to the effectiveness of the modern “knowledge worker” it was decided that the book club would cover a book on that very subject.
Stephen Few’s Show Me The Numbers was chosen after a review of reviews (a meta-review?) on Amazon, which seemed to suggest that Edward […]
EclecticLip: Gartman beaten by 82% of funds in 2010; investment SAT score 410
(originally written Jan 17; posted Jan 23 as part of some backfill)
Now that the Globe and Mail’s GlobeInvestor site has mutual fund performance data for calendar 2010, I decided to check in on ubiquitous business-channel commentator and investment guru Dennis Gartman’s performance this year. As you may recall, his ETF (exchange traded fund — basically, […]
EclecticLip: Book club summary #28 – Understanding A3 Thinking
A long-time proponent of the “A3″ reporting format (which aims to summarize a problem and its solution in a roughly 11″ x17″ sheet of paper) it was a delight to cover Understanding A3 Thinking in the book club.
Having authored some epic reports and PowerPoint slide decks in my time, the prospect of condensing findings into […]
EclecticLip: Book club summary #27 – Financial Intelligence
Hmm… life’s busy-ness sure didn’t return to normal, there…
Anyways, here’s the 27th book we covered in the work business book club: Financial Intelligence. It was chosen because of the feeling that a little financial literacy could probably go a long way for engineers and other technical types. The fact that the question “what’s EBITDA?” recurs in […]
EclecticLip: Well, this one’s an oldie… pomegranate mania
[originally written July 28. Posted Nov 18.]
While stuck, iPodless, in a near-interminable supermarket lineup the other week, I swallowed my dignity and perused the celebrity magazines near the cash register. And you know what? They’re actually pretty good! While I’m veering into fiction, the fashionista in line behind me complimented me on my Vibram Five […]
EclecticLip: How Libertarians brought America big religion and bigger lawsuits…
(originally written Nov 2; posted Nov 16)
It looks like the Democrats are going to get clobbered in next week’s tomorrow’s today’s US elections. Economic malaise tends to do this to governing parties, which is one reason currency devaluation is the policy-du-jour: if country A can make its currency cheaper, it becomes more competitive and can […]
EclecticLip: Book club summary #26 – Getting to Yes
Hmm… missed out a few weeks there. Life’s busy-ness has only now returned to normalcy.
Getting to Yes was chosen as the book club’s 26th volume because it deals with negotiations, which, like it or not, play a pivotal role in business. It was expected that book club members’ careers would benefit from knowing a bit […]
EclecticLip: Diminishing returns on increased complexity in financial markets…
My brother forwarded me this article in the Financial Times recently. Superficially about the fall of Rome and other civilizations, as chronicled by Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies, it links back to the fact that the complexity of the financial sector has increased far faster than the balance of the economy — the “real” […]
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