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Loretta Kalb

Business & Finance

Orbiting the Hairball review

Review by Loretta Kalb

When two hairs unite, a chain reaction ensues. They attract another hair. And another. And another.

"Before long," explains author Gordon MacKenzie, "where there was once nothing, this tangled impenetrable mass has begun to form." It is this resulting mass of hair this hairball that drives MacKenzie to write: Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace.

MacKenzie's guide is, in fact, 224 pages of wisdom and artistry that speaks to rank-and-file workers about creativity, and to corporate leaders about the structure and goals of their enterprises.

The message to workers, honed in his 30 years with Hallmark Cards: Break the stranglehold of company convention and commit yourselves to the creative experience if you are to migrate from that tangled web the corporate hairball. Only then can you learn to glide in orbit, tethered by gravity to the hairball but unleashed from conformity and mediocrity.

His message to the corporate leaders: Traditional corporate structure and managers tend to stifle creativity. Hallmark, in fact, recognized MacKenzie's talents, eventually granting him the title, "Creative Paradox." He became the bridge between Hallmark's creative forces and its executives a self-styled corporate holy man. It was a role in which he excelled. MacKenzie writes that as the Creative Paradox, he had no power. Maybe. But he certainly had the perception of power. And that was what counted. Soon, others began to seek his guidance.

For three years, employees outlined their creative ideas to him. For three years, he gave all of them the pronouncement, "Good idea." The effect was dramatic within the institution. A boss, speculating that the Creative Paradox had power, must have thought, "If the Creative Paradox supports the idea, maybe I'd better support it too," surmises MacKenzie.

And so, with the blessing of the Creative Paradox, ideas gained momentum.

"Did you always tell people their ideas were good?" someone later asked him at a conference. "Yes," came his answer.

"Were all the ideas good?" "Almost all." MacKenzie's reasoning: Most companies are peppered with people quick to reject ideas. "I was simply leveling the imbalance . . ." he writes.

The author also gives his view of the classic corporate structure the pyramid. It is a tomb. Better to be a tree, with creators at top, nourished by the roots, or managers.

And what of the hairballs? They are an inescapable part of the "galaxy of corporate symbiosis," as MacKenzie explains through a wonderfully childlike drawing.

Even MacKenzie, in his early years as a design supervisor, "became a little hairball," he observes. Satellites writers and artists orbited around him. And his system, in turn, orbited the big hairball. MacKenzie describes his own ascension into orbit as emerging from the company cocoon and slipping the bonds of the hairball. "Orbiting," he writes, "is following your bliss."

When two hairs unite, a chain reaction ensues. They attract another hair. And another. And another. "Before long," explains author Gordon MacKenzie, "where there was once nothing, this tangled impenetrable mass has begun to form." It is this resulting mass of hair this hairball that drives MacKenzie to write: Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate […]

A storm that will never be forgotten

Review by Loretta Kalb

It was Saturday, Sept. 8, 1900, and never had Buford T. Morris seen such a beautiful daybreak: The sky seemed to be made of mother of pearl; gloriously pink, yet containing a fish-scale effect which reflected all the colors of the rainbow. Within hours, however, this glorious first light in Galveston, Texas, would be transformed into disaster of unimaginable proportionsÐone that would devastate the seaside town and claim the lives of an estimated 8,000 people as a deadly hurricane blew in from the Gulf of Mexico.

It was, in a sense, Isaac Cline's storm—the man stationed in Galveston for the new U.S. Weather Bureau. Author Erik Larson, who researched survivors' accounts, tells of the hurricane in his new book, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History. Larson, author of two previous books, relates the monumental tragedy with vivid and chilling tales of perseverance, heroism, and mass death.

Throughout the book, the author brings insight to the forces that drive storms and storm damage—knowledge not available to weather observers at the end of the 19th century. He also reveals how a rivalry between weather bureaus in the United States and Cuba contributed to the U.S. Weather Bureau's failure to provide sufficient storm warning. Cuban experts' warnings of a hurricane, the U.S. weather hierarchy decided, were alarmist and not worthy of public attention.

Later the U.S. Weather Bureau would take credit for issuing the proper warnings despite Cline's feeble protest of the lie. And Cline would one day wonder about the measure of his own responsibility for the thousands of lives lost.

The losses were extraordinary. St. Mary's Orphanage and nearly all of its 93 children were swept away—including young charges tethered in groups by clothesline in the nuns' ill-fated attempt to save their lives. Houses floated down streets, becoming battering rams as water from the nearby bay and from the Gulf of Mexico converged on the town, rising well above 30 feet in depth and above the rooftops of many two-story homes.

Dr. S.O. Young, a Cline acquaintance, was drawn by the sheer power of the storm as it assailed his home. Opening the door to a second-floor gallery, he hauled himself outside and was immediately pinned to the exterior wall by 125-mph winds. He remained there, agape, as he surveyed the unfolding drama.

"Waves swept through Young's neighborhood," writes Larson, "propelling huge pieces of wreckage. Within minutes, the only other house still standing began a slow pirouette, rose like a huge steamboat . . . and suddenly disappeared with the occupants, a family of four, still inside. My feelings were indescribable as I saw them go," Young later recounted.

Finally, the rescuers came. As many as 500 dead, some were told. Seasoned reporters accustomed to hearing exaggerated claims soon learned that, in fact, this report of the death toll was a vast understatement.

Meantime, the Weather Bureau had not finished with its misguided claims, according to Larson. After the hurricane left Galveston, the chief of the U.S. bureau telegraphed a New York newspaper that the storm had lost its destructive force.

Not so. For the storm careened to the north and east, bringing hurricane-force winds to Chicago and Buffalo. It killed six loggers in the Eau Claire River, moved to the Atlantic, sank six vessels, and drove 42 fishing vessels aground near mainland Canada. Finally, Isaac's storm crossed the top of the world and disappeared into Siberia.

Loretta Kalb has covered earthquakes, floods, and other natural disasters for the Associated Press.

It was Saturday, Sept. 8, 1900, and never had Buford T. Morris seen such a beautiful daybreak: The sky seemed to be made of mother of pearl; gloriously pink, yet containing a fish-scale effect which reflected all the colors of the rainbow. Within hours, however, this glorious first light in Galveston, Texas, would be transformed […]
NonfictionTechnologyBusiness & Finance

Valley of the kings

Review by Loretta Kalb

This month, authors Po Bronson, Gary Rivlin, and Kara Swisher join in a seven-city journey aptly named the Silicon Valley Bleeding Edge Book Tour. In the high-tech realm, cutting edge won't do. Rather, innovation must run deep. It must draw blood. The tour opens in San Jose and ends in Austin.

Some 35 miles south of San Francisco sprawls an unremarkable expanse of low-slung buildings known as the Silicon Valley. It is the setting for an enclave of fertile minds dreaming up hardware and software for computers, fueling the burgeoning Internet, and invoking a synergy of creative spunk. It is also the backdrop for three new nonfiction books about Silicon Valley culture, high-tech competition, and the egomaniacal push to get ahead. Po Bronson's first work of nonfiction, The Nudist on the Late Shift: And Other True Tales of Silicon Valley, amuses with its physical descriptions and mesmerizes with its rendition of the technical mind.

The mountainous edges of the Silicon Valley, writes Bronson, rise up like the lip of a great big copper-bottomed frying pan of overpriced Revere Ware, and on the high heat of burning money everything and everyone in there melts into a boiling, spattering, frenetic stew. But what a stew! This is no amorphous clique of techno-nerds. It's a delectable blend of brainiacs, visionaries, and market-savvy moguls whom Bronson illustrates with color and verve. Bronson, best-selling author of The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, escorts readers through the synapses of Silicon Valley technical geniuses and then delivers the analogies that bring their visions home. And what of the nudist in the title? Local legend has it that a programmer on the late shift of a Valley animation company misread his office clock and, believing it was after 10 p.m., shed his garb. When he wandered down a hallway, members of the day crew were still hanging out and called security guards, who asked him to get dressed. Bronson tracked down the rumored nudist none other than David Coons, inventor of one of the first film-to-digital scanners, and anointed him the ultimate symbol of how Valley workers inject their personal values into the job. There was something innocent about his nakedness, writes Bronson, adding that the image was one of no distractions. Just a man, a computer, and a job.

While Silicon Valley set the tone for high-tech culture, America Online set the pace for dominance in the online industry. Kara Swisher charts the potholes on the road to success with aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and Made Millions in the War for the Web. The book reveals battles for control of AOL, including a heavy-handed bid by Microsoft. It details the difficult online outages, user access crises, and debates over cyberporn and censorship. It also unveils prescient decisions about the growth of the online industry and some shrewd affiliations including one with the fledgling Motley Fool, an investor site that would become wildly successful in its own right. The Motley Fool founders, brothers David and Tom Gardner, figured their AOL contract based on hours of usage would pay them about $25,000 yearly. A short time later, the site was earning the pair some $60,000 a month. The widely recognized You've got mail greeting to AOL users was accomplished in 20 minutes by a broadcast executive paid $100. Now, when he meets people, Elwood Edwards says people occasionally tell him, I've heard your voice before somewhere. And when AOL marketer Jan Brandt pushed a direct marketing campaign to mail free AOL disks to tens of thousands of prospective users, the strategy was deemed questionable. It turned out to be wildly successful, boosting AOL users to the million mark inside one year. When AOL finally went public in March 1992 offering two million shares at $11.50 each Case's own shares instantly were worth more than $2 million. (He's worth some $400 million today.)

A year after the initial public offering, directors of AOL's board were fending off a hostile takeover attempt by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, by then an independent businessman. When Bill Gates entered the fray, he warned AOL execs: I can buy 20 percent of you or I can buy all of you. Or I can go into this business myself and bury you. Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and the most talked-about figure in the industry, is the focus of Gary Rivlin's The Plot to Get Bill Gates: An Irreverent Investigation of the World's Richest Man . . . and the People Who Hate Him. Rivlin's descriptions of Gates, as well as of the battles waged against him, are unabashed. Here is Gates, twisted like a corkscrew, one arm wrapped around his midsection as if reaching for an itch on his back he can't quite scratch, the other arm flying spastically into the air, head tilted to one side, mouth working. And that's just in the prologue. Gates is ensconced in Redmond, Washington. But his industry dominance looms over the Silicon Valley, which, in turn, is populated by entrepreneurs who want to best him before he trounces them. Rivlin calls it Bill envy. There is Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, developer of database management systems. Ellison is a multi-billionaire in his own right. Nonetheless, Rivlin notes Ellison was obsessed with beating Microsoft. So determined are Gates's competitors that Microsoft's chief technology officer declared the existence of Captain Ahab's Club, with the charter member one Ray Noorda, CEO of the networking company Novell. Noorda, it seemed, had a terrible obsession with Bill not unlike Captain Ahab's obsession with Moby-Dick. Rivlin's investigation of Gates and the industry that is fixated on him grips the reader because of its precision, detail, and perspective. And while at times the light that Rivlin shines on Gates seems a tad harsh, it is a ray that shows no favor. It shines not just on Gates, it also clearly illuminates the people who hate him.

Loretta Kalb is a writer in California.

This month, authors Po Bronson, Gary Rivlin, and Kara Swisher join in a seven-city journey aptly named the Silicon Valley Bleeding Edge Book Tour. In the high-tech realm, cutting edge won't do. Rather, innovation must run deep. It must draw blood. The tour opens in San Jose and ends in Austin. Some 35 miles south […]
Business & Finance

The color of money

Review by Loretta Kalb

It may well be the id of our economic decision-making. We spend with impunity, use our charge cards with abandon, and deliver unto ourselves the material goods our parents could not afford. We know better, of course. But on a powerful instinctual level, we don't care. Like Freudian characters on a whirlwind shopping spree, we are driven to dismantle our financial futures as we erode the spiritual side of our financial lives. Of course, it doesn't have to be this way, as these authors will attest.

The authors of two new books would have us conquer ruinous spending tendencies and set forth on a path of psychic fulfillment in our economic lives. As we embark on this path, authors of three other books would guide us in making the right choices in investing in the stock market, in mutual funds, and, ultimately, in ourselves. Let's begin with a key question: since we are capable of achieving wealth, why aren't we rich? Do we feel guilt for wanting more than we have? Insecurity about what we already possess? These emotions are potent psychological barriers to wealth. The Courage to Be Rich: Creating a Life of Material and Spiritual Abundance, shows how to overcome those hurdles. Abundance is available, promises Suze Orman, the book's widely known author and financial planner. Riches are attainable. But emotional obstacles can keep us from having what we want and fully enjoying what is ours.

Orman should know. The PBS luminary and author of the best-selling book The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom lost her courage after discovering that a burglar had plundered the files of her young business. While recovering from that devastating setback, she began to look at her personal life in a new way, following a course that eventually restored her pocketbook and replenished her personal well-being. In this, Orman's third book, the author tells how we can change our lives, too, leaving behind our mistakes as we seek to achieve personal and monetary wealth.

The author provides plenty of financial guidance, from home-buying to opening an Individual Retirement Account and charitable giving. She tackles common-sense questions typically not addressed in other money-management books: am I liable for the debts my spouse incurred before our marriage? (No.) Do I have a legal duty to support my spouse during marriage? (Yes.) One chapter focuses on what is yours, mine and ours in a relationship addressing many of the questions people face in second marriages or life partnerships.

Money, explains Orman, has its own life force that affects all aspects of our lives. If we neglect our checking accounts and accumulate belongings for which we have no immediate need, we strip ourselves of more than money. When we face financial bankruptcy, is it any wonder we face spiritual bankruptcy, too? The opposite condition the one to which we all aspire is Orman's vision of a rich and radiantly abundant life, where there is spiritual fullness and clarity of purpose, where we value people, money, and material things in that order.

While Orman delves into the courageous side of wealth, author Maria Nemeth's forte is the psychological power money holds over each of our lives. Nemeth's book, The Energy of Money: A Spiritual Guide to Financial and Personal Fulfillment, asks us to view our relationship with money as a metaphor for the other connections in our lives.

In short, basic assumptions we make about ourselves and our personal associations also govern our decisions about money. To understand this is to grasp motivations in nearly all our activities: Why we spend. Why we save. Why we go through life without properly defining what we want to achieve. Why we neglect or insidiously misdirect our personal lives. What's more, once we are swept in a misguided direction, how do we recognize where we went wrong and embark, instead, on the road to abundance in our lives and in our bank accounts? We are so immersed in the culture of currency, explains Nemeth, a clinical psychologist, that asking us to look at our relationship with money is like asking a fish to look at the water it's swimming in. Maybe so. But Nemeth does a commendable job of getting us to examine the lives we create for ourselves so that we may better recognize our motivations and fulfill our standards of integrity relating to our handling of money. Once we have identified our inner blocks to progress, writes Nemeth, we can abandon old beliefs, conquer obstacles, and willingly accept support from others. This, she promises, will set us on the path to mastering the energy of money.

Of course, as we begin to master money, we must learn how to properly invest it. The Book of Investing Wisdom: Classic Writings by Great Stock-Pickers and Legends of Wall Street serves as a foundation. Edited by Peter Krass, this anthology is a classic in a sea of modernistic investment theory, with contributions by stock-pickers and legends such as Warren E. Buffett and Abby Joseph Cohen.

The introduction traces Wall Street from its historical beginnings. Wall Street in Manhattan, for example, started as a 12-foot-high wooden stockade the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam built to protect themselves from repeated attacks from the British. After the Dutch surrender, the British in 1685 built a road alongside the former stockade site and named it Wall Street. American securities trading and modern analysis, naturally, came later. But the connection to history seems evident still in Warren E. Buffett's contribution to the analysis section. Buffett studied under the late Benjamin Graham, who in 1934 co-wrote a seminal book on securities analysis and whose writings are included in the anthology.

Contributors also include gurus Peter Lynch, made famous for transforming Fidelity's Magellan Fund into a $13 billion powerhouse, and Abby Joseph Cohen, the woman who's assessments of impending market cycles are among the most closely watched on Wall Street. Martin E. Zweig of the top-ranked newsletter, Zweig Forecast, tells why it's sometimes better to sell short (bet that a stock will go down). And real estate magnate Donald Trump tells us why, on occasion, he fights back and wins. His telling observation: Money always talks in the end.

Making sound investment choices is central to the next book, The Winning Portfolio: Choosing Your 10 Best Mutual Funds by author Paul B. Farrell. There's no mystery to becoming wealthy. It takes discipline, writes Farrell, director of CBS MarketWatch's Mutual Fund Center. But it need not take all your spare time.

Indeed, Farrell's strategies for investing are refreshing and ingenious in their simplicity. Among them: do your own investing and focus on mutual funds. Start saving early in life (or right away if it's late) and do so with practiced regularity. Take full advantage of your employer-sponsored 401(k) plan. Select a portfolio strategy that meets your needs (such as income preservation v. aggressive growth), and hold onto your funds once you buy them.

Most appealing is that Farrell does much of the work for the investor by researching and compiling America's top 100 superstar funds. The top 100 is a welcome relief to anyone starting out in the 10,000-plus mutual fund world. The book conveniently breaks worthwhile funds into useful categories (index funds, aggressive growth, global and international, bond funds, and so on). Best of all, Farrell provides text on each selection, giving insight into fund managers, fund performance, and the investment strategies.

There's another facet of mutual funds that many investors will want to consider. In recent years, value or socially responsible funds increasingly have allowed investors to choose portfolios that mirror their own values. Investing with Your Values: Making Money and Making a Difference, by authors Hal Brill, Jack A. Brill, and Cliff Feigenbaum, is well-timed to meet this burgeoning market now a $1.3 trillion industry.

If you want to avoid companies that invest in tobacco or alcohol products, these funds can help you achieve your goals. Hope to avoid companies that engage in animal testing or make military weapons? The authors guide you through the process. The Brills are financial consultants specializing in social investing. Feigenbaum is publisher of the social industry newsletter, GreenMoney Journal. They identify funds that emphasize protecting wildlife or sustaining the environment. Other funds allow you to invest in your own community through affordable housing, small business, or community development lending. The book also tells how you can work to increase corporate responsibility on issues you care about through shareholder activism.

The writers have dubbed social investing natural investing. They define it as an act in which personal values and personal finance dwell together in mutually supportive symbiosis. Their concept is inviting: when we integrate our values with our money, we can achieve financial goals while making the world a better place to live.

Loretta Kalb is a writer in California.

It may well be the id of our economic decision-making. We spend with impunity, use our charge cards with abandon, and deliver unto ourselves the material goods our parents could not afford. We know better, of course. But on a powerful instinctual level, we don't care. Like Freudian characters on a whirlwind shopping spree, we […]
Business & Finance

Knight Kiplinger

Interview by Loretta Kalb

For Knight Kiplinger, the future has arrived. Ask the renowned financial journalist what the next decade holds, and he speaks of paths that run deep into the 21st Century. These are routes he already walks. Indeed, so do we all. Yet, where most travelers watch their footing, Kiplinger leaps ahead, embracing a vision of our biological, social, economic, and technological destinations.

It is these destinations that Kiplinger writes about in his latest book, World Boom Ahead: Why Business and Consumers Will Prosper.

Consider the author's prognostications: the Asian economic crisis will spread, dampening growth worldwide before the Asian region surfaces as the star economy of the 21st Century. Genetic changes in human sperm and eggs will allow selected traits to be passed to succeeding generations. Geneticists will create super-producing livestock. Biotechnology will boost the world's food supply. People will live longer, be better educated, and enjoy a better standard of living.

Yet anticipating the future is tricky. Few understand that better than Kiplinger, who is editor of The Kiplinger Letter, the nation's leading business forecasting publication, and publisher of the widely read Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine. Since many events World Boom predicts already show signs of emerging, Kiplinger gives recognition to the present day when he talks about the years ahead. He speaks, therefore, of the paths we all tread.

"My family and I have been visiting colleges at their web sites," said Kiplinger when asked about the shape of the next century, "My son is a high school senior. And we can take virtual walking tours of college campuses." Kiplinger also buys theater tickets for plays in London on the Internet. He buys books on-line. The Internet embedded in the flow of technology is one path to the future.

Other paths may seem ominous. Kiplinger tells, for example, how more sophisticated electronic sensors will be omnipresent. These tiny cameras and microphones will fit on a computer chip and will provide security in homes, offices and stores. But they also will raise new issues of privacy, especially when they are used to monitor and measure such things as worker performance. And our increased reliance on technology overall will render us more vulnerable to cybersabotage or cyberterrorism.

"These are the wild cards of the future that nobody can predict," said Kiplinger from his office on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. "Evil people have more tools at their command today to work their will than ever before." Even so, World Boom offers a vision of the future in which the human condition in the main will be buoyed, not buried, by technology.

World Boom, on bookstore shelves starting this fall, is the latest Kiplinger map to the future. In the late 1980s, Kiplinger and his father, Austin Kiplinger, co-wrote America in the Global '90s. It accurately predicted a resurgent America in the 1990s.

"Typically near the end of the decade, we have a tradition of lengthening our telephoto lens and writing in greater depth about the big, long-term trends that will make world-changing differences in the lives of future Americans and future world citizens," said the author.

As in the earlier book, World Boom offers optimism in the face of a period of economic uncertainty. So its forecast of global growth in the next century looks contrarian, said Kiplinger.

"It will be an easy book to pick apart," he surmised. "But the forecaster's solace is that nobody can say your forecast is wrong right now. They can say, 'No, the outcome will be very different.' Or, 'He's all wet on this point. That's not going to happen.' I can say, 'Well, you might be right. Only time will tell.'"

Loretta Kalb is a writer in California.

For Knight Kiplinger, the future has arrived. Ask the renowned financial journalist what the next decade holds, and he speaks of paths that run deep into the 21st Century. These are routes he already walks. Indeed, so do we all. Yet, where most travelers watch their footing, Kiplinger leaps ahead, embracing a vision of our […]

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