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investment book reviews

“HBR’s 10 Must Reads – CEOs” – A Harvard Business Review Press Book Review

HBR Press Book ReviewAdmit it, you want to make it to the top job: CEO. This is arguably one of the most difficult tasks on Earth: competition is fierce, incumbents hang on hard, aspirers have a one in ten thousands chances to make it. Yet, the one element that distinguishes the normal aspirers to becoming CEOs to those who make it is green Yes, I talk about how to do the job: better, faster, less sweat. And the information is cheap to come by – there are a few books that will offer you the information you need. The difficulty consists in choosing the right book, reading it and applying it’s know how.

Harvard Business Reviews “CEO” title gives you just that. 

As with many other points, “CEO” was curated by HBR Press’s editors, who perused through hundreds of articles and extracted the most interesting and relevant ones. This collection of “best of CEO” articles makes no exception l. From titles such as “Your Strategy Needs a Strategy” to “Revisiting Your Core Business”, this articles collection will probably start to change the lenses through which you perceive the business world. As Harari mentions in “Homo Sapiens”, all modern methods economy is an abstract mind construct – yet, we are further ahead as a race more than we ever dreamed about. So why not take the race further and further? Read More »“HBR’s 10 Must Reads – CEOs” – A Harvard Business Review Press Book Review

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else – A Book Review

Recently I was given the chance to have a sneak peak preview of the incoming book hit of Penguin called “Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else” (by Chrystia Freeland). And I was impressed. Usually I rarely read books which kind of detour me from the big goal of becoming a better investor. However, this Penguin books release falls in the “invest in yourself” category. “Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else” is a book about the new global financial elite. And even more important, this book tells the stories of how these people got there and how they are maintaining they sweet number one spot, whilst the rest of the world… well, just advances slower.
The book is fascinating. It starts laying out the facts and the figures – we all know the number of billionaires, but we know very little beyond the topline of the yearly Forbes articles. “Plutocrats” goes beyond that of course and does the nice job of showing the context. Which brings me to my “strategic advantage” MBA course. The “Plutocrats” book brings back some nice learnings from there. What actually these super-rich people do is to exploit pockets of competitive advantage in their favor. What the plutocrats do is also to build fences (“barriers of entry”) around these strongholds in order to prevent other people entering their and dilluting their competitive advantage. What the MBA course said was that these strongholds suffer during the years a process of strategic decay. And naturally, the plutocrats must get smarter and smarter in finding new ways of increasing or even maintaining their fortunes. Which they do in very interesting ways…
“Plutocrats” is a fascinating story of the super-rich stories. The Penguin book has also some surprising conclusions. For example, the most striking one is that the richest people on planet are the most intelligent ones – over 70% hold doctoral degrees and they invest huge amounts of money into their family’s education. So forget about getting very rich unless you are (not “you think you are”!) very smart and worked hard very early in your lifetime.Read More »Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else – A Book Review