Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman

Author: Robert K. Massie

I needed a book to occupy and distract me on a long flight to India. At 656 pages, this epic by Robert Massie is the perfect companion when you are confined to your seat in the sky with no interruption for hours on end. Massie spares no detail in describing the birth, life and death of Catherine the Great. As is often the case, truth is stranger than fiction and when you read about the first thirty odd years of Catherine's life, you will be amazed at what she had to deal with in her early years and how she bode her time preparing herself to be the great ruler of the Russian Empire.

Massie's unquestionable scholarship on Russia is evident all through the book. Without the quotes, the first half of the book reads like a novel as Massie is able to describe events as though he was present and taking notes during their occurrence. He is able to conjure up an image of life in the court of Elizabeth and then Catherine and bring to life the many different characters that inhabited their world. He describes each of Catherine's twelve "favorites" and how she moved from one to the other. In case you didn't guess, favorite was the term used to describe an established and formally recognized lover of the woman on the throne".

In the second half of the book, Catherine is influenced by all the modern thinking that is overtaking Europe and is soon going to result in the French Revolution. She maintained regular correspondence with Voltaire, Diderot, and Grimm. With the latter she developed a regular correspondence and exchanged a total of fifteen hundred letters that were a rich source of material for Massie. Diderot described her as "a ruler willing to apply the principles of Enlightenment to her government"

Towards the end of the book Massie loses his captivating story and meanders on with details that could certainly have been edited out. The description of the paintings that Catherine acquired were too detailed and unnecessary. However, they certainly helped underscore the point that Catherine was a lover of the arts and had a keen eye for appreciating and acquiring the up and coming masters in Europe. The book also goes into a brief description of the French Revolution and a view into the creation and consequence of the guillotine. Massie must have been fascinated by the guillotine since he goes off on a tangent exploring how long the brain functions after the guillotine has severed the head from the body.

Overall, the book is very comprehensive and authoritative in its chronicle of one of the greatest rulers of modern Russia. I highly recommend this to anyone with the faintest interest in learning more about the life and times of Russian Royalty.

Glock: The Rise of America's Gun

Author: Paul Barrett

I picked up this book since it had all the elements of a good business story. Smith & Wesson, Colt, Remington, were the incumbent firearm manufacturers. In less than a decade they were unseated by an Austrian man and his modest enterprise. I was eager to learn about the strategic moves he made that resulted in the huge success of the Glock handgun.

As in every successful business venture, first and foremost, you need a compelling product. Gaston Glock understood the product requirements of the Austrian Army and designed a handgun that in every way fulfilled those requirements. What is amazing is that none of the other established firearm manufacturers came up with anything similar until many many years after the Glock had established itself as the handgun of choice for law enforcement in the US.

Once you have a successful product, the next key ingredient to world domination is an aggressive salesperson who lives, breathes and thrives in selling his wares. Glock found such a person in Karl Walter who was responsible for bringing the Glock handgun to the United States.  In 1984, Karl Walter was browsing through a gun-store in Vienna when he laid his eyes on the Glock 17.  His initial reaction was that it was "ugly". However, he was intrigued by its success with the Austrian army and so took a trip to the Glock homestead in Deutsch-Wagram to test it out. Walter returned to the US and soon established a sales office in Smyrna, Georgia and the rest is history.

Unfortunately the business aspects of the book are done away with in the first couple of chapters. Barrett goes on to describe the NRA and gun control laws in the US.  In describing the overzealousness of the NRA to use the Second Amendment to remove any restrictions on the availability of guns in the US, Barrett reminds us of "the more generalized American instinct that anything worth doing is worth overdoing". 

In response to increasing gun violence, the US passed a gun control law that banned semiautomatic weapons with a detachable magazine and  two or more military style features. It also prohibited magazines that could hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition - the Glock 17 could hold 17 rounds. However, weapons that were manufactured before the passing of the law were grandfathered in, and this had the opposite effect of spurring the sales of Glock 17 as folks raced to buy up all the available inventory and stockpile them.

The book meanders along in the middle with general gun control and pro-gun themes and I was convinced that it wasn't worth finishing. However towards the end there is a return to Gaston Glock and his eccentricities. There were many interesting twists in the business and its employees, but Barrett has not done justice in describing these.

Overall, the book is entertaining and a very fast read. If you are curious about Glock, the gun, the man and the company, then read this.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Author: Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman is one of the most influential thinkers of our time with a long list of accomplishments and accolades. He was educated in psychology but has applied it to many economic problems and ended up getting the highest recognition in the field by winning the Nobel prize in economics in 2002. This book was highly anticipated by folks from all walks of life, and anyone who harbors illusions of being intellectual, must read this book.

The book summarizes Dr. Kahneman's discoveries from the last two decades on judgement and decision making. It is a scholarly work and reads more like a text book. Before you embark on this journey that will mess with your mind, make sure that you have plenty of time to digest the many different theories that Dr. Kahneman  lays out in this book.

Dr. Kahneman describes our decision making process with the help of two simple entities:

• System 1 : which is the fast process that we commonly refer to as intuition
• System 2 : our conscious attempt to process information, often with considerable effort.

The interplay between these two systems and the insights into their workings are the subject of a large portion of this book. 

System 1 is the   primary subject of the book, and is best characterized by this quote "A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped.  You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why;  you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it. Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain or defend."

System 2 is the conventional thought process that we are used to and requires focus and attention. Dr. Kahneman goes so far as to say that our System 2 operation is lazy and often-times eager to accept the results of System 1. The book highlights some cases where this happens, so we can be prepared for this, and guard against this type of error. For example there is the much celebrated case of Israeli parole judges whose verdict grant parole was highly correlated with their state of hunger.

In the limited experience of my life, I have come across many individuals ( and I am sure I am guilty as well) who have a strong tendency to associate an outcome with their view / belief of the individual's behavior. This book develops a  scientific theory and explains the psychology behind this kind of thinking in human beings. There are many interesting little puzzles and experiments that undescore the theory that is laid out. I list some of them here, not so much for the purpose of a book review, but rather to jog my memory in the event I come back to this at some point and try to recall  what I learned from this book.
  
One notion that is quite popular today is called "priming". For instance, if we have a "fill-in-the-blanks" type of test and conduct it with a subject who is hungry or been exposed to food related objects, there is a good likelihood that the words that will be filled in, will be related to food. The way to think about this is by imagining that the system 1 entity in our brain has an associative scratch-pad that it uses to process information. This scratch pad gets filled with sensory information around us and influences the result of a system 1 computation.

 When faced with a difficult problem, or insufficient information, System 1 will answer an easier question. What is remarkable is that it will make this substitution unbeknownst to System 2, which in its laziness will accept it as an answer to the original question. "We are far too willing  to reject the belief that much of what we see in life us random". Our brain has a tendency to see patterns in randomness and a desire to ascribe a notion of causality to random events.  The author describes the now famous encounter he had with a school of Israeli air pilots to explain the phenomenon of "regression to the mean".

Kahneman is most known for his work with Amos Tversky on Prospect Theory, which describes how we make decisions when we have to choose between alternatives that involve risk.  It turns out that we don't necessarily place equal weights on gain and loss and in general we have a tendency of risk aversion when it comes to gain, in contrast to a risk appetite when it comes to loss. The book goes into great depth exploring this behavior with several illustrative examples.

Another notion that is explored is that of "anchors". To put it in everyday terms, our bid on a house is influenced by the asking price. Our notion of whether something is a good deal at the store, is influenced by the "regular" price that is listed next to the item. When we need to make an estimate,  we subconsciously work our way (up or down) from the anchor.

There are many more interesting subjects that are dealt with in scientific manner in this very educative book. I highly recommend it to anyone who is a student of behavioral economics.

The Culture Code

Author: Clotaire Rapaille

I have recently read a couple of books that attempt to explain macro phenomenon by looking through the lens of the culture of its people.  "Boomerang" by Michael Lewis explains the financial crisis that is unfolding in many European countries and ties it to the cultural traits of their inhabitants. Rapaille on the other hand has written an entire book on interpreting the code for American culture and he brings this out by contrasting it with the culture of other countries, most notably France, where he was born.

Way back when Isaac Asimov ruled the Science Fiction world, he introduced the concept of "psychohistory" -- the idea that you cannot predict what an individual will do, but with a sufficiently large population, you can apply a probabilistic framework to predict the general flow of future events. When Rapaille describes the peculiarities of Americans, French or Italians, it is important to view it as a description of a large population and not a specific individual in that country. When viewed with that lens, the book offers great insight into cultural norms and how they can be tapped in developing and marketing a successful product.

Rapaille's writing style is lucid and is a pleasure to read. His opinionated observations are incisive and I found myself reading several parts multiple times to fully appreciate his view.  There are many memorable quotes and passages in the book like "you never get a second chance to have a first experience." This seems cliched, but when you read it again you realize he is talking about "experience" and not "impression".

While I did not find myself agreeing with all of Rapaille's codes, the explanations of seduction in different cultures was spot on and hilarious. Another insightful chapter was the differing notions of quality in various cultures. For example quality in US can be summed up as "IT WORKS" and this is quite a far cry from the notion of quality in Japan which is perfection!

Many reviewers that were critical of the book, seemed to have a hard time accepting all that Rapaille had to say without any real scientific evidence. While it is true that most of what is written here can be dismissed as one man's opinion, it will certainly get you thinking and more observant of cultural traits. I found myself in agreement with a majority of the observations and was quite amused at the way Rapaille presented them.

There is one aspect of the book that I found hard to swallow. The notion of distilling these observations down to a single code word seems a bit contrived. Rapaille goes the extra mile in finding all kinds of circumstantial proof that resonates with the code word to justify it. This is probably the weakest part of his thesis. However, if you take that with a grain of salt and view it as a way to anchor a theme and provide direction to a marketing campaign, the code words might serve a purpose.

Overall, I highly recommend this to folks who are in the business of building and selling products in the global marketplace.