Friedman, Yali - Pocket Biotech Industry Primer

Logos Press, 2008, [Business] Grade 4

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If you quickly need to gain a basic understanding of the biotech industry this is a very good place to start. Yali Friedman is the publisher of the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology, the head of data analytics at Scientific American and the founder of the site DrugPatentWatch.com. He should know what he is talking about.

To set the reader’s expectations right the book doesn’t aim to give deeper insights into investing in biotech stocks or to provide a multitude of detailed numbers on the market and its many segments from an economic perspective. The book aims to give a basic understanding of the basic functions of the biotech sector and in my view does a good job. Still, if you understand the sector it is then obviously a lot easier to invest successfully.

The author quite broadly defines biotech as “the application of molecular biology for useful purposes” and then on top of medical functions includes applications for farming, environmental remediation and industrial processes. Most of us still relate biotech to the development of drugs. Biotech pharmaceuticals are produced by living organisms like bacteria, yeast cells or animal cells and are often made up of longer molecular chains compared to the small molecule, chemically produced products of the traditional pharma industry. Then to be honest the two industries are gradually converging.

How can we then enlist living organisms like bacteria to produce the products we desire? To answer Friedman takes a step back and describes the foundations of molecular biology, i.e. how the information in our genes produces proteins with different structural and functional characteristics. By manipulating this process and combining DNA from various sources we can get the organisms to work for us and create targeted compounds in a process very different from the industrialized trial-and-error process of traditional pharma companies.

After an introduction the book starts with a historical representation of the birth and upbringing of the still relatively young biotech industry. It gives a good understanding of the historical reasons for the sometimes slightly odd features of the sector. The author’s long experience with the biotech industry shines through. The above-mentioned following description of molecular biology is short and basic but equally excellent. The author follows up with a strong chapter on the long and tedious drug development process that so dominates the day-to-day activities of biotech companies.

Then the book runs out of steam in the last two chapters. The chapter on tools and techniques gives a helter-skelter description of various industry related topics. Many of them are important but there is no storyline to keep the reader interested. In the final chapter on the applications of biotechnology more than half of the text is devoted to industrial and agricultural uses. While this gives a good broad overview it probably isn’t what the reader would expect.

Still, it’s hard to complain. The Pocket Biotech Industry Primer packs a lot of knowledge into a short format. The 83 well written pages are quite possible to read in one sitting. Fairly complicated issues are explained in a simple – but not too simple – manner and with no over-usage of industry jargon.

Granted, this is only a first glimpse into the exciting biotech industry. For the investor who complements with insights into the economics and market conditions for various therapy areas plus an understanding of biotech companies’ business models this book is still a useful tool.

Mats Larsson, October 28, 2017

Jennings, Marianne M. - The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse

St. Martin’s Press, 2006, [Business] Grade 3

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Successful investing in stocks is just as much about dodging the loser stocks as it is discovering and keeping the winning ones. The process of knowing what to avoid could focus on qualitative factors such as companies with high leverage, poor return on capital, weakening profit momentum, high valuation multiples or accounting ratios that indicate dodgy accounting. It could also focus on qualitative signs regarding the corporate culture. Marianne Jennings, at the time professor of business ethics at Arizona State University, has with the experience of corporate collapses during three stock market cycles written the latter type of manual. It’s not just a handbook in detecting companies approaching the abyss but the author also gives a number of suggestions for improving the culture, to be used by companies.

The structure of the book is simple. There is an introductory chapter and preface, there are two concluding chapters and in-between there is one chapter for each of the 7 signs that in the author’s view point to the risk of an ethical collapse in the company. Each of the 7 chapters starts with a discussion of the issue, a number of examples mostly centered on the corporate scandals of Enron, WorldCom etc. in the early 2000’s and then a comes number of suggested antidotes that are summed up in a list at the very end. Mild forms of one or two of these signs might not indicate an imminent disaster but extreme cultures and multiple warning signs should be taken notice of.

Which warning signs should we as investors or corporate executives be on the lookout for in Jenning’s opinion? The signs are: 1) “Pressure to Maintain Those Numbers” – an unhealthy and unreasonable obsession in meeting earnings numbers that in the end makes the temptation to make the numbers up too great, 2) “Fear and Silence” – a culture that offers no venues to air concerns or punishes those employees who try, 3) “Young ‘Uns and a Bigger-than-Life CEO” – iconic, idolized and charismatic CEOs surrounded by young and sycophantic executive managers, 4) “Weak Board” – a board comprising of inexperienced, incompetent or too-busy directors or directors with too many business or friendship ties with the management, 5) “Conflicts” – companies full of nepotism, mutual back-scratching and the extraction of benefits on the expense of shareholders, 6) “Innovation Like No Other” – differentiated, innovative and successful companies that over time come to embrace a view that they in their uniqueness stand above petty wordly obstacles like rules and 7) “Goodness in Some Areas Atones for Evil in Others” – CEOs that use shareholder’s money for public and self-glorifying philanthropy or engage in what’s called corporate social responsibility and by these good deeds permit themselves to lie and cheat in others.

Unfortunately, the structuring of the chapters could have been more stringent. Often the texts on suggested antidotes too much continue to describe and exemplify the proposed problem. The author’s writing is somewhat stilted and declamatory at the same time as the opinions and antidotes are in my view sound and fair. I also quite like that she spares no punches – for example, with regards to Jack Welch, the former CEO of GM: “Mr. Welch was often touted as the greatest manager of all times. Mr. Welch would perhaps be more accurately described as the greatest earnings manager of all time”.

I would further love to see the propagation of the virtues discussed by Jennings in business life – and even more pressing in the political life. The question is how to go from wishing to execution of that hope – the author gives no real hints. As a side note, the book is published 2006, today a decade later when corporate social responsibility has developed into an all-embracing religion, the author’s text regarding the seventh sign would be almost impossible for an academic to write.

Often it is reading the subjective, quantitative signs that separates the great investor from the ordinary one. Jennings offers one potential framework to interpret the signals of an approaching fall.

Mats Larsson, August 22, 2017

Cotton, David - The Smart Solution Book

FT Publishing, 2016, [Business] Grade 4

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Some books will hardly blow your mind but they can still broaden your professional toolbox and as such be very handy and practical. Independent on which line of business you are in you will have to solve problems and this book presents a number of tools for doing this. David Cotton is a former employee of Arthur Andersen and PwC turned freelance corporate trainer and author. The focus of many of the solutions Cotton discusses is to use the so-called wisdom of the crowd – or at least a small group – to generate the desired results or insights.

The book has a center part where each of the 68 problem solving techniques gets a short chapter. The tools are further divided into those that are more suitable for individuals and small groups, for larger groups and for groups engaged in business games. In reality though, many of the methods can be scaled up or down to work for groups of varying sizes so the division is hardly set in stone. Two introductory chapters and one closing chapter frame all these methodologies. In the introduction Cotton discusses which tools to use plus some problem solving essentials. The text on essentials I found to be perhaps the most rewarding part of the book as it looks to more overarching and general themes in problem solving such as the stages the process often contains and the problems that frequently occur. Then the closing chapter very briefly discusses how to share and implement the solutions that have been generated.

For each method Cotton starts the section with a description of the tool, when to use it and what is needed in terms of material. Then he presents a chronological checklist on how to practice it and finally brings forward the potential pitfalls in its usage. The recurring headlines make it very easy to get a grip of each tool but it also makes reading the book from start to finish a bit choppy. Each of the 68 tools is presented over 1 to 4 pages. Some are more elaborate but some are quite simple.

The author places a heavy emphasis on activities meant to foster free associations and to get everybody in a group to contribute their creativity – improved varieties of collective brainstorming. Often the methods are meant to get to the core of a problem or to bring forward details around it through harvesting the opinions of many and without letting dominating persons in the group biasing the solution generation process.

When there are so many tools to chose from it is easy to find a number of personal favorites. I appreciated some like Cartesian Logic (#7), GROW (#13), Osborn-Parnes’ Critical Problem Solving Process (#15), Deming’s PDSA Cycle (#21) and Challenging Assumptions (#29) that helps you structure the problem solving process; Reverse Brainstorming (#5), Appreciative Inquiry (#16), Who Else Has Solved This Problem (#31) and Retirement Speeches (#58) that allow you to change perspectives; and finally The Ripple Effect (#39), The Solution Effect Analysis (#43) and Action Learning (#49) which allow you to analyze the potential consequences of a proposed solution before it is implemented.

Still, the tools portrayed in The Smart Solution Book are in my view mainly targeting the internal or external person who is to lead exercises at corporate events. For me this is a bit too narrow to generate a top rating. For someone that is about to host such a session it could instead prove very useful. Indeed, simply finding one tool that solves the Gordian knot and delivers the business result required would obviously make the book a bargain.

Mats Larsson, August 06, 2017

Bowden, William G. - The Board Book

W.W. Norton & Company, 2008, [Business] Grade 3

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In any area it is almost always a good idea to learn from those with great experience. The late William G. Bowen (1933 – 2016) was certainly a person with an abundant familiarity with boards. The former president of Princeton University and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation served on the boards of a number of Americas largest listed companies as well as being a trustee for numerous non-profit organizations. This book aims to shine some light on the topic of how a board functions. It provides many wise and common sense opinions from an experienced person who has also taken the time to contemplate about the finer details of how board work should be performed.

Still, Bowen hasn’t written a boardroom primer. Instead The Board Book is a text where the author picks up on and discusses a number of aspects of a director’s work as he sees them after a lifetime of experience. Further, when writing the book he collected the opinions of other directors in his large network and concludes that consequently it should be seen as a collective endeavor as well has his own work. Although Bowen says that he doesn’t want to be normative but pragmatic, he still clearly argues for his opinions, like for example that a former CEO shouldn’t stay on the board of the company he once led etc.

The 8 chapters of a combined 170 easily read pages start with a more philosophical introduction around the role and purpose of boards. Then the next 4 chapters, comprising more than half the book, center on the board’s work towards the CEO. The discussions target the board-CEO relationship and how it has changed, the evaluation and compensation of the CEO and finally CEO transitions and how the process of succession planning could be developed. The latter activity is according to the author the aspect of board work that perhaps shows the most potential for improvement. The next 2 chapters are on the composition of people on the board and then the mechanics of board work follow. The book is then summarized in a concluding chapter where Bowden returns to the themes he thinks most important including the relationship between the CEO and the board.

In the preface Bowen notes how autobiographical most his and other peoples’ opinions are with regards to governance. What has worked out for someone is generalized as a good solution overall. This is both a strength and a weakness of the text. The reader gets personal advice from a veteran director but at the same time the book has a subjective feel and it might not be especially all-inclusive. Another significant trait of The Board Book also comes with Bowden’s career. He served on a mix of public and non-public boards and throughout the book there is ample space dedicated to discussing them both and the differences between them. Personally, I would have liked to see less space devoted to the non-profit area but that is my own preference.

The discussion that the author presents is clearly American. And while one reflection is that the trends around how board work is developing are international and the opinions of what constitutes best practice in the US have clear parallels around the globe, it also continues to astound me how weak the position of the owners is in the US. While references are made to creating value for shareholders, Bowden’s thoughts concerning the board are generally rather decoupled from the owners. The board is not seen as the owners’ representatives with regards to the governance of the company but as an autonomous entity. There is no reference made at all to the general meeting in the text and institutional investors aren’t seen as fully proper owners, they are more like surrogate owners. Even though the opinion is rather typical among directors, many institutions hardly have stepped up as business owners and it is never the less problematic.

Read this as a personal, likable and thoughtful complement to a more comprehensive primer on the workings of boards.

Mats Larsson, August 2, 2017

Clayton, Mike - How To Manage a Great Project

Pearson, 2014, [Business] Grade 4

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This is what the title implies, a step-by-step guide on how to plan and execute a project. With flattening organizations and a quickly changing business environment more work is done in projects and the value of project management skills are increasing. The audience for the book is the prospective project manager.

Mike Clayton is a UK author and public speaker who spent the 1990’s as a project manager at Deloitte and since 2002 gives coaching seminars for project managers. His books cover subjects like negotiation, influence, risk management, personal effectiveness, time and stress management, professional development and project management. The thesis is that “when you have the right process and follow it diligently, you will put yourself in the best position to succeed.” Clayton is obviously motivated by teaching and the book does its job with excellence but I think the reader should do more than just read it from cover to cover to benefit the most. More on that later.

The content is a “how to” manual on managing the four stages of a project; defining it, planning it, delivering on the plan and closing the project. After a preceding introduction that discusses projects and their management in more general terms, the stages form the basis for the 8 chapters of the book. A worry with the focus on strict adherence to a set process is that the content might feel ridged. This is not the case. With a long practical experience the author designs tools like contingency planning, risk management, change mechanisms, scheduled go/no go decisions and reviews into the process to allow for the complexities of a live project. With the book’s heavy emphasis on planning the author also stresses the importance of structure in projects.

An introductory “how to” manual is hardly read for its intellectual stature and wit but for its practical use. With a long experience of leading projects and coaching of project managers Clayton has chiseled out what is really important for project management and he delivers a useful book. It is easily read as the language contains very little project jargon and there isn’t too much text on each page. While the focus is on process the author is very open with that the main task of the project manager often is to juggle the tasks of the process with the feelings and wishes of people. How To Manage a Great Project was published in 2014 and even if this was somewhat before today’s ridiculous hype around “agile” projects the book might still have commented on the concept.

Would I recommend the book? Yes, clearly. However, the plot of the book is chronological while in projects many processes run in parallel. At some places I felt that this simultaneousness could have been emphasized as the reader otherwise might question the order of the topics described. To put the contents of the book to its best use I would recommend the reader and soon-to-be project manager to re-write his own short version of it where he takes out the parts that is relevant to him and the type of project he is to lead, where he perhaps switches the order of topics so they feel natural to him and so on.

For the experienced project manager executing large scale projects involving large teams and multiple stakeholders there are other more in-depth texts on project management but as a start for anyone that is about to manage smaller projects this is an excellent introductory guide – especially if the reader takes control of the content and makes it his own.

Mats Larsson, July 15, 2017

Barnevik, Percy - On Leadership

Sanoma, 2013, [Business] Grade 3

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Percy Barnevik is one of the more iconic corporate CEOs in Swedish history. Already in the preface he declares that it is the effective execution of business strategies that differentiates the successful company from the less so. While management literature often focuses on high level strategies the more mundane topics of how to handle organization, delegation, incentives and motivation to facilitate the carrying through of those strategies attracts less interest. It is rarely a secret how to succeed in a line of business, those who still don’t manage it generally lose due to their execution.

Percy Barnevik on Leadership contains 200 short paragraphs of a half to one and a half pages each. The many topics are loosely sorted under 20 headlines and the subtitle of the book is 200 lessons from 50 years’ experience. The short paragraph format brings to memory the stories often told about Barnevik, on how he generally presented a huge amount of overhead slides in a flow much too fast for anyone to fully grasp the message conveyed in the pictures.

Given the stated focus on execution the section covering this topic over 10 paragraphs and 8 pages obviously attracts interest. The short version of the content is that Barnevik thinks that the road to corporate achievement is 90% execution and 10% strategy. And out of those latter 10% about half is tied to analysis and half to gut feeling. A company must decide on a sufficiently good strategy and as long as the execution is energetic, fast and efficient enough they have a good chance of succeeding. The ability to follow through and see things to the finish line often go hand in hand with a sense of urgency. Individuals who go the extra mile can make a huge impact on their organizations.

A very broad description of the strategy is needed. Then work with the right people and powerfully move in the approximately right direction. Adjust the direction along the way as needed. “The success of a strategy is dependent on the force and speed of the execution process; this is perhaps my most important piece of advice of all.” In following through the execution of a strategy, project management skills are a hugely important craft. Keep things simple, don’t complain about circumstances and don’t waste time on endless investigations to try to do the optimal – instead do the “nearly right thing” and to it quickly.

Still, to execute and adjust along the way there has to be feedback and analysis. Things must be measured and followed up on. Barnevik is fond of ABC-analysis, uses straight forward tools like decision trees with subjective probabilities, SWOT analysis etc. and advices to prioritize and choose on the course of action with the 80/20-rule in mind – although he says it should perhaps be called the 90/10-rule. That’s it. The above is in a shortened form all what is being said under the key headline execution.

Yet, it isn’t all. Probably half of the paragraphs in this eclectic text under any of the other headlines are also related to the efficiency of the practical implementation of that particular subject and as such a part of the discussion on how to carry through what has been decided. Overall the bias of the topics is no doubt towards execution but they also cover almost anything and everything related to the business life of a CEO. However, not counting the paragraphs on personal efficiency and personal development, there are only one or two pages reflecting on Barnevik’s personal life. This is clearly not his memoirs – instead Barnevik is passing on the tricks of the CEO trade.

To a large extent Barnevik’s opinions are typical of a Scandinavian or European large company corporate executive. Although shortly put and sometimes a tad cliché, they are always well motivated and I largely agree with what is being said. The paragraphs are so brief that they barley scratch the surface of each individual topic. Still, in a relevant situation they can provoke thoughts that can help a leader. Personally I would have preferred a little more reflection by the author.

Mats Larsson, July 03, 2017

Levinson, Marc - The Box

Princeton University Press, 2016 (2nd ed), [Business] Grade 4

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If you haven’t spent much time thinking about shipping containers you should reconsider – they have revolutionized the world, as we know it. The “boxes” as they are called in the shipping industry are the building blocks of globalization. Economist Marc Levinson writes the autobiography of the box and by this vividly brings to life the phenomenon of containerization that is crucial for anything from e-commerce and just-in-time supply chains as well as trafficking and arms smuggling – very few containers are ever inspected.

The story of the box is to a large extent the story of US entrepreneur Malcom McLean. The trucking company owner McLean operating in a very regulated US 1950’s environment realizes that it is would be cheaper to load a number of truck trailers on a ship, transport them along the US east coast and have new trucks picking up the trailers for the last mile of transport. Further, if the frames and the wheels were to be removed, the square trailer bodies could be stacked on top of each other. In 1956 McLean’s containership Ideal-X makes its virgin journey between New Jersey and Huston carrying 58 boxes. What followed is a change that started out slow but over time gained momentum and turned into an avalanche. Along this journey no one had the overview to understand the full picture or really saw the secondary consequences. Plenty of mistakes were made but in the end economics won out. Sea freight shifted from loading, stuffing, unloading, reloading of thousands of loose items using general purpose ships and massive amounts of manpower to an automated seamless flow of anonymous steel boxes over trains, trucks and ships that all were purpose-built to handle same-size containers. Instead of being separate businesses, trains, trucks and ships are in the same business – transporting cargo.

As a result of the standardization and specialization freight costs today are a negligible part of most products' manufacturing cost, production chains have moved from being local to being global meshes where components from all over the world are shipped to a manufacturing site and the finished product again is sold anywhere in the world. Sourcing became global, competition did the same and while some companies adjusted others didn’t. With foresight enough to invest in large container ports, the containerization allowed East Asia with low labor costs to enter the global economy creating the largest wealth increase the world history has ever seen.

Shipping turned from a sleepy, locally regulated industry into a scale driven, high fixed cost, global commodity business where the lowest cost producer, in terms of the cost of transporting a box a certain distance, who can offer lower rates attracts more volumes, which in turn generates higher profits to invest further into larger ships that lowers the cost per box further. For each generation the ships grew larger and ports had to grow in parallel. To maximize the utilization of the giant vessels, unloading and loading is now so fast that the crew almost hasn’t time to leave the ship. And since ports have moved out of urban areas to giant transport hubs there wouldn’t be much to experience anyway. About 50% of all containers pass just 20 ports globally.

Levinson builds his story around McLean but skillfully blends earlier and later history into the narrative to explain how freight transport has changed. Further, the repercussions for adjacent businesses, waterfront neighborhoods, global trade and even the general industrial manufacturing process come to life. My only minor complaint is the length of the book. The second edition pocket certainly looks like a box in itself and while I don’t mind lengthy texts per se, some topics do get repeated here and there.

A prosaic metal box can be a disruptive technology. I gained a container load of knowledge from Levinson’s mighty tail. If you want to understand how the world works this is an important book to have read. It doesn’t hurt that it’s a good read as well.

Mats Larsson, June 28, 2017

Alvesson, Mats & Spicer, André - The Stupidity Paradox

Profile Books, 2016, [Business] Grade 4

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How is it possible that organizations filled with the best and brightest so often end up doing stupid things? Professors and organizational theorists Mats Alvesson’s and André Spicer’s explanation is that there are actually short-term benefits to stupidity both to organizations and to employees – although in the longer term the folly will often prove to be detrimental. Absolutely everyone that has been engaged in the inner life of large organizations will – with a sardonic smile – recognize numerous of situations from this book.

The key concept presented by the authors is what they call functional stupidity, by which they refer to the inability and unwillingness of organizations to let the staff utilize their cognitive and reflective capacity, apart from in relation to very narrow, technical and often repetitive tasks. But it also refers to the, presumably smart, employees’ willingness to self-stupidify. This results in a lack of reflection on the assumptions behind what is being done, in not asking why things are done to start with and not seeing the wider consequences of actions.

It might sound inconceivable that this inanity would be tolerated yet alone often encouraged by companies and public organizations and likewise sought after by the employees. Still, organizations benefit from employees’ stupidity since constant questioning creates doubt, uncertainty and conflict and by this is in the way of productivity. The authors even launch the concept of stupidity management as an organizational process of managing the balance between questioning and efficiency. In my meaning the expression probably gives an illusion of an explicit managerial control that doesn’t really exist. The employees benefit from their stupidity as they by not challenging social norms free up time and energy, they show loyalty and fit in. So stupidity comes with pros and cons. Still over time the process creates alienated and cynical staff with numbed cognitive abilities, it creates loads of non-productive work and worst case sets the company up for disaster.

The book has some structural issues. Although functional stupidity is described as also having positive aspects there is an apparent underlying axiom throughout the book that organizations that utilize the cognitive abilities of their staff will yield superior results. Still, with some exception it isn’t until the last chapter this is explicitly stated. The folly has gone too far and has to be combated! I think it would have been better to come clean with this up front. Similarly, the most comprehensive definition of the concept functional stupidity comes in the conclusion of the last chapter.

The start of the book is quite repetitive as the authors introduce the key thoughts in the preface, repeat them in the introduction and then again with a few examples throughout part one. Part two of the book, covering different types of stupidities, is more varied but also contains a fairly odd chapter on consumerism. The authors are clearly entitled to their opinions but the subject belongs to a different book and Naomi Klein has already written it. All in all there are 8,5 chapters of description and only 0,5 chapter of prescription – some more practical advice on what to do about the problem wouldn’t have hurt.

These issues are however easily forgiven. The authors are in my opinion dead right in their key insights and it isn’t often you bump in to new concepts that frames and explains a lot of what you intuitively know but additionally stimulates and provokes new thoughts. The book also has the extra attraction of making the reader feeling smart, of being one of those select few that have seen through the charade. Not least an intellectual snob like myself is easily seduced by this angle – I did buy the book. There are many texts on the biases of individuals or the madness of crowds in manias but fewer that explain the more mundane day-to-day irrationality of organizational processes.

This is an important and thought provoking book that deserves a wide audience among corporate managers and knowledge-workers alike.

Mats Larsson, May 23, 2017

Ellis, Charles D. - What It Takes

John Wiley & Sons, 2013, [Business] Grade 4

What It Takes offers a roadmap of how the premiere professional services firms in the World has distanced themselves from their competitors. Charley Ellis is a legend. He is the founder of Greenwich Associates - a strategy consultancy focused on financial clients where he served for... Further reading... Link to Amazon...

Kuhlman, David C. - Leading Firms

SelectBooks, 2013, [Business] Grade 3

Management of professional services firms is clearly very different to that of traditional product manufacturing or services firms – seldom has the metaphor about herding casts been more apt. To cater to the specific nature of these firms David Kuhlman, with 25 years of experience as a... Further reading... Link to Amazon...

Osterwalder, Alex et al. - Value Proposition Design

Wiley, 2014, [Business] Grade 4

This is a follow-up to the best selling Business Model Generation from 2010 and the sequel drills deeper into two out of the nine parts that made up the Business Model Canvas previously presented. Value Proposition Design aims to help the reader find a good fit between the value... Further reading... Link to Amazon...

Reeves, Martin; Haanaes, Knut & Sinha, Janmejaya - Your Strategy Needs a Strategy

Harvard Business Review Press, 2015, [Business] Grade 4

Fortune magazine are seeking suggestions on books that have changed someone’s mind on an important topic for their December issue. This book is my humble suggestion. Your Strategy Needs a Strategy perhaps hasn’t reversed my view on what corporate strategy is but it... Further reading... Link to Amazon...

Tindell, Kip - Uncontainable

Grand Central Publishing, 2014 [Business], Grade 4

Only one thing prevents this book from being invited to the same table as “Straight from the gut”, “Good to great” and other business biography luminaries. And that one thing is, unfortunately, the ultimate success for the employee- and customer satisfaction based... Further reading...  Link to Amazon...

Inkpen, Andrew & Moffett, Michael H. - The Global Oil & Gas Industry

PennWell, 2011, [Business] Grade 4

This might be the best text around on the business aspects of the oil and gas industry. The authors are two business professors who also serve as co-directors of the Thunderbird Center for Global Energy Studies. They aim to write a single source nontechnical book for amongst others... Further reading... Link to Amazon...

Downey, Morgan - Oil 101

Wooden Table Press, 2009, [Business] Grade 4

If you seek a well-crafted technical guide to the production of oil and gas suited for the non-engineer this is a hot contender. The author used to be the Global Head of Commodities at Bloomberg after being a commodities trader at Standard Chartered, Bank of America and... Further reading... Link to Amazon...

Yergin, Daniel - The Quest: Energy, and the Remaking of the Modern World

Penguin Books, 2011, [Finance] Grade 4

This is a monumental tour of the economical, political and technical history of energy and oil. Daniel Yergin is one of the world’s premier energy policy experts. After being a lecturer at Harvard he in 1984 co-founded Cambridge Energy Research Associates that in 2004 was... Further reading... Link to Amazon...

Lacalle, Daniel & Parrilla, Diego - The Energy World Is Flat

John Wiley & Sons, 2015, [Business] Grade 3

Two portfolio managers offer their view of the energy markets in a forceful manner. Their opinions would have few supporters a year ago but after the recent declines in oil prices the followers have probably increased in numbers. Madrid born Daniel Lacalle entered the financial... Further reading...  Link to Amazon...

Kim, W. Chan & MauBorgne, Renée - Blue Ocean Strategy

Harvard Business School Press, 2005, [Business] Grade 4

During the summer InvestingByTheBooks will review some older books that we never got around to writing about although we think they are important. With their innovative and fresh perspective on strategy the two INSEAD Professors Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne has... Further reading...  Link to Amazon...

Rappaport, Alfred - Creating Shareholder Value

The Free Press, 1998 (1st ed 1986), [Business] Grade 4

During the summer InvestingByTheBooks will review some older books that we never got around to writing about although we think they are important. Alfred Rappaport’s Creating Shareholder Value from 1986 is a yardstick for the shareholder value movement. The author shows how...  Further reading... Link to Amazon...

Johansson, Sven-Erik & Runsten, Mikael - The Profitability, Financing, and Growth of the Firm

Studentlitteratur, 2014, [Business] Grade 4

This book is a Swedish institution that deserves wider international acclaim. It portrays the firm as a financial system with a number of inter-relationships between 1) the acquisition and generation of resources, 2) the capital needed for the ongoing business operations and for... Further reading...  Link to Amazon...