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The marketplace of ideas is not unlike the marketplace for investments: full of sound and fury. Particularly of late, magazine interviews with fund managers and investment gurus have been recycled into books. The result is subtitle inflation, demonstrated here. After all, who says that original ideas and the industry's greatest minds go together?
Still and all, why give up the opportunity to pan for gold in the baby's bathwater? With articles by characters such as Warren Buffett, Philip Fisher, and Adam Smith, there's bound to be some good stuff here.
Initially I was more attracted to the unfamiliar bylines, to find out why Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko might be included among the industry's greatest minds. I found out by reading the qualifications preceding his article (reprinted from his newspaper) that Royko is also an economist, something I hadn't known in years of reading his pungent workingman's columns.
I then moved to Jerry Goodman, writing as Adam Smith, whose article about Motorola is more than 20 years old, and kind of like Royko's but with more industry talk thrown in. Then, hungry for insight as to the overall rationale behind this book, I went to an article by the editor himself, Charles D. Ellis. This late-breaking item from 1975 addresses why institutional investment managers can't outperform the market. The article is quite astute. That put me in a better mood to skim the articles by Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, and Phinaeas T. Barnum, the late circus mogul.
This compendium of brief articles can be taken as amusing and instructive. The gamut of authors and ideas, if not fulfilling the book's hyperbolic subtitle, at least demonstrates that applied common sense can be pithy, all kinds of experiences can be learned from, and of the making of many books there is no end.
Michael Pellecchia writes about business and finance books each month He can be reached at michael_pellecchia@bookpage.com.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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