BOOK REVIEWS


A good guide for beginners and intermediate investors     When it comes to investing, there are probably as many books on what not to do as there are on what to do. This is because the complexity induced by financial products—and the advice that comes while they are being...

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How To Simplify Things   Deborah Adler’s grandmother fell ill one day because it transpired that she had accidentally taken her husband’s prescription medicine instead of her own. She recovered. Adler wondered: How does such a mix-up happen? She took a peek into her grandparents’...

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What causes tunnel vision in organisations?   In late 1999, Nobuyuki Idei of Sony stood up to address the majestic Venetian ballroom in the Sands Expo and Convention Centre in Las Vegas, writes Gillian Tett, in one of her many gripping stories in this new book called The Silo Effect....

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Academic polish on how to haggle   Daniel Pink, in his bestseller To Sell is Human (reviewed in Moneylife), argued that we are all sales people, all the time in some situation or the other. Someone who wants to persuade you to buy a pair of shoes is no different from the parent who is...

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A classic book on trading re-issued   Alexander Elder grew up in former Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR), hated the system, and longed to escape. But emigration was impossible. He entered college at 16, graduated from medical school at 22, completed his residency and became a...

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How to be a contrarian. Firstly, neither follow the herd, nor go against it   Kenneth Fisher is one of the longest-running columnists in Forbes magazine and a self-made billionaire. With 1,000 people in one campus in Washington, 600 in California and 400 in the five other...

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There is a hard way and then a smart way   The subtitle of Smartcuts by Shane Snow, a New York-based writer and web entrepreneur, is, “How Hackers, Innovators and Icons Accelerate Success”. We know about innovators and icons but who are hackers? Welcome to a new Americanism (in case...

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Five centuries of bubbles and panics   In 1711, Britain was deep in debt following its debilitating war with Spain. It owed £9 million and had no means of paying it off. The prospects of government bonds being paid back were so low that they were trading at 50% discount. It made the...

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Glowingly recommended by two Nobel Laureates, it falls short   I have read many books on investing but have not come across one with such glowing recommendations. Praise for The Aspirational Investor by Ashvin B Chhabra comes from five extraordinary people. One is Dr Harry Markowitz...

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Who’s the typical reader of this book?   There aren’t too many books on valuation, shareholder value or wealth creation, in the Indian context. The Value Elephant, by Sanjay Kulkarni, is, therefore, an important addition to this slim sub-genre. Kulkarni was the managing director and...

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The medicine man, his roots, and how he looks at death   Many think that a doctor is the devil himself; or worse. To those who do, let us introduce Dr Atul Gawande. The man is more than a medicine man. He is a philosopher. He sees a malfunctioning system and does his best to correct...

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‘What stands in the way, becomes the way’—Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor   You cannot agree more with the way Ryan Holiday describes how we sometimes feel. “You could be too old, too scared, too poor, too stressed, no access, no backers, no confidence. Every obstacle is unique to each...

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Sanjeev Chandorkar 15 May 2015
An insight into ‘real’ political economy of micro-finance, told in the form of a novel    Micro-finance institutions (MFIs) were supposed to deliver a win-win solution: making money, by doing a public good. But these two objectives turned out to be irreconcilable. A reconciliation...

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Another book on the medium of exchange   There are plenty of books on money. A few years ago, Niall Ferguson wrote a gripping history (a Western one) of money in the book The Ascent of Money. Just off the presses is Coined, by Kabir Sehgal, a vice president with JP Morgan in New York....

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How do some products become habit-forming?   How many new ideas and innovations succeed? Maybe one out of 100. Or even less. Why is it that such few new ideas succeed, even among the ones that are supposed to, much to the disappointment of the innovator and early adopters? A paper by...

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A common trait over 2000 years: Ruthlessness   In the 1970s, I used to visit a client across from the Eros cinema in Mumbai. He was Sammy Lala, a top executive with a conglomerate. Some days, we had another visitor, a laid-back, colourful chap in jazzy clothes. One afternoon, holding...

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Go on the offensive, advises the respected management guru Ram Charan   Successful business founders are usually disdainful of management gurus. But not of the rare exceptions such as Peter Drucker (of an earlier era) and Ram Charan (today) who command near-universal admiration....

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High probability trades based on price and volume trends   There are many ways to trade in the markets. The most popular one is trend-following. Prices in all markets—commodities, currencies and stocks —tend to trend, from a few days to a few weeks. Trend-followers try to identify a...

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How to put India on the growth path   If you want the right solutions, you have to get rid of the myths first. Mihir Sharma, the caustic critic of Indian contemporary social and economic myth-making, spends 80% of his 354-page tome on the Indian economy on this. This book is the...

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Don’t aim to give up a habit. Try to change it   Every single one of us tussles with habits that we want to change. Habits of diet, exercise, addiction and so on. We rarely succeed. It is natural for human beings to lack the willpower to change their habits. Almost all New Year...

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