Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don't by Kevin Maney
A book that everyone working in the educational technology industry should read. Where does your companies products or services fall along the fidelity (quality) and convenience spectrum? Four-year residential colleges are a high fidelity / high cost experience - with bundled learning, living, and socializing. University of Phoenix aims to be a high convenience provider. Maney argues that companies need to choose to specialize in fidelity or convenience, or they will fall into the "fidelity belly" where their products and services are neither loved or required. Expensive products or services (high fidelity) need to be ten times as good as convenient (cheap or free) services to survive. Newspapers gutted themselves by laying off reporters and closing branches, therefore diminishing their fidelity. We all need to make hard choices and trade-offs, and figure out where the product/service we deliver meets the demands for fidelity or convenience.
Grade: A-
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon
Fatherhood is about constant failure. We will be impatient when we should be wise. Focussed on trivial matters when we should be hanging out with our kids. Talking when we should be listening. Distracted when we should be focussed. Chabon is one of my favorite novelists, a beautiful and funny writer. His stories of growing up in a divorced household in the 1970s rang true to my own (although Chabon is about 6 years older) - we both swam through endless amounts of pop culture crap. His attempts to create a stable and invigorating home life (4 kids and a writing spouse) provide a funny roadmap and mirror the rest of us amateur dads, husbands, and guys.
Grade: A
Googled: The End of the World As We Know It by Ken Auletta
Googled is best when Auletta uses his extensive knowledge of the media world to analyze how Google is disrupting the news, advertising, and entertainment businesses. I wish Auletta knew as much about education as he does about newspapers and media, as it would be fascinating to speculate how Google will disrupt academe. I was less interested in the exhaustive biography of the company, its founders, its executives, and its early history (although all of this is well told). Googled is worth reading because Auletta is able to look at the emergence of Google from the perspective of the newspaper execs, telecom managers, ad men, and technology companies whose businesses have been swept away and along by the Google tsunami.
Grade: B+
Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism by Richard C. Longworth
I hope that this book is being included in the curriculum of a range of courses at Washington University in St. Louis (where I majored in history and graduated in 1991). Longworth asks, "is anyone dying to move to St. Louis?" Longworth is a longtime Chicago journalist with an important story to tell about the failure of the Midwest to compete in a globalized economy. States, cities and towns that fail to attract creative people, knowledge workers, and the educated and industrious foreign born are doomed to marginality and irrelevance. The political organization of Midwest states has hampered a regional approach to education and economics, insuring that the loss of high-paying / low-skills manufacturing jobs lead only to the death of communities. Where other regions have been able to diversity and reinvent themselves, most Midwestern cities fail to make the hard choices to invest in education, culture and advanced industries (such as biotech or green engineering), preferring instead to try to hold on to dying industries (such as manufacturing) with ever larger tax subsidies and rebates. The U.S. can't simply write-off the Midwest (for one thing the Midwest contains the largest concentration of institutions of higher learning in the U.S.), we must learn from the regions failures, widely apply it successes, and invest in insuring that the left-behind cities like Detroit and Cleveland receive the attention and investment they deserve.
Grade: A-
Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction by Lisa Chamberlain
My wife and I were both born in 1969. We are firmly Generation X'ers. We've been active perpetrators and victims of the dot-com and housing boom and busts. Slackonomics might not be a great book - but it is a good enough book - and I recommend it to anyone born between 1965 and 1975. We are children of the divorce and internet revolution. The rise of the PC and the Web, the demise of the stable job or predictable career, and the erosion of middle-class wages. Entertainment is way better then it was for us growing up in the 1970s - we have Netflix and premium cable. We spent maybe a million hours growing up as latch-key kids watching bad television (did I really watch re-runs of Hawaii Five-O after school each day?) - today our kids spend maybe as much time on YouTube and with their iPods. It was our generation that was supposed to ride the advantages of a baby bust - both more educated then any previous generation with a multitude of available jobs left opening by the retiring boomers. It didn't quite work out that way - we got the economic (bubbles, recessions) and social stocks without the jobs. But we are lucky in that our priorities and aspirations are pointed towards our families and our creativity, as we have seen the dangers of relying on employers and institutions. Keep your expectations for analytical and economic analysis low, and enjoy hearing our story.
Grade: B
The Delivery Man: A Novel by Joe McGinniss Jr.
Beautiful Children: A Novel by Charles Bock
For some reason my December fiction reading centered around dysfunctional family live in Las Vegas. Drugs, sex, absent parents, strippers....what else can you recommend in the genre?
Grade: B for both
A book that everyone working in the educational technology industry should read. Where does your companies products or services fall along the fidelity (quality) and convenience spectrum? Four-year residential colleges are a high fidelity / high cost experience - with bundled learning, living, and socializing. University of Phoenix aims to be a high convenience provider. Maney argues that companies need to choose to specialize in fidelity or convenience, or they will fall into the "fidelity belly" where their products and services are neither loved or required. Expensive products or services (high fidelity) need to be ten times as good as convenient (cheap or free) services to survive. Newspapers gutted themselves by laying off reporters and closing branches, therefore diminishing their fidelity. We all need to make hard choices and trade-offs, and figure out where the product/service we deliver meets the demands for fidelity or convenience.
Grade: A-
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon
Fatherhood is about constant failure. We will be impatient when we should be wise. Focussed on trivial matters when we should be hanging out with our kids. Talking when we should be listening. Distracted when we should be focussed. Chabon is one of my favorite novelists, a beautiful and funny writer. His stories of growing up in a divorced household in the 1970s rang true to my own (although Chabon is about 6 years older) - we both swam through endless amounts of pop culture crap. His attempts to create a stable and invigorating home life (4 kids and a writing spouse) provide a funny roadmap and mirror the rest of us amateur dads, husbands, and guys.
Grade: A
Googled: The End of the World As We Know It by Ken Auletta
Googled is best when Auletta uses his extensive knowledge of the media world to analyze how Google is disrupting the news, advertising, and entertainment businesses. I wish Auletta knew as much about education as he does about newspapers and media, as it would be fascinating to speculate how Google will disrupt academe. I was less interested in the exhaustive biography of the company, its founders, its executives, and its early history (although all of this is well told). Googled is worth reading because Auletta is able to look at the emergence of Google from the perspective of the newspaper execs, telecom managers, ad men, and technology companies whose businesses have been swept away and along by the Google tsunami.
Grade: B+
Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism by Richard C. Longworth
I hope that this book is being included in the curriculum of a range of courses at Washington University in St. Louis (where I majored in history and graduated in 1991). Longworth asks, "is anyone dying to move to St. Louis?" Longworth is a longtime Chicago journalist with an important story to tell about the failure of the Midwest to compete in a globalized economy. States, cities and towns that fail to attract creative people, knowledge workers, and the educated and industrious foreign born are doomed to marginality and irrelevance. The political organization of Midwest states has hampered a regional approach to education and economics, insuring that the loss of high-paying / low-skills manufacturing jobs lead only to the death of communities. Where other regions have been able to diversity and reinvent themselves, most Midwestern cities fail to make the hard choices to invest in education, culture and advanced industries (such as biotech or green engineering), preferring instead to try to hold on to dying industries (such as manufacturing) with ever larger tax subsidies and rebates. The U.S. can't simply write-off the Midwest (for one thing the Midwest contains the largest concentration of institutions of higher learning in the U.S.), we must learn from the regions failures, widely apply it successes, and invest in insuring that the left-behind cities like Detroit and Cleveland receive the attention and investment they deserve.
Grade: A-
Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction by Lisa Chamberlain
My wife and I were both born in 1969. We are firmly Generation X'ers. We've been active perpetrators and victims of the dot-com and housing boom and busts. Slackonomics might not be a great book - but it is a good enough book - and I recommend it to anyone born between 1965 and 1975. We are children of the divorce and internet revolution. The rise of the PC and the Web, the demise of the stable job or predictable career, and the erosion of middle-class wages. Entertainment is way better then it was for us growing up in the 1970s - we have Netflix and premium cable. We spent maybe a million hours growing up as latch-key kids watching bad television (did I really watch re-runs of Hawaii Five-O after school each day?) - today our kids spend maybe as much time on YouTube and with their iPods. It was our generation that was supposed to ride the advantages of a baby bust - both more educated then any previous generation with a multitude of available jobs left opening by the retiring boomers. It didn't quite work out that way - we got the economic (bubbles, recessions) and social stocks without the jobs. But we are lucky in that our priorities and aspirations are pointed towards our families and our creativity, as we have seen the dangers of relying on employers and institutions. Keep your expectations for analytical and economic analysis low, and enjoy hearing our story.
Grade: B
The Delivery Man: A Novel by Joe McGinniss Jr.
Beautiful Children: A Novel by Charles Bock
For some reason my December fiction reading centered around dysfunctional family live in Las Vegas. Drugs, sex, absent parents, strippers....what else can you recommend in the genre?
Grade: B for both
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