Confronting Reality was awful.  The celebrated authors of this book – Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan – should consider confronting the reality that the world does not need yet another tepid, uninspired business book that tries to create a “simple” construct (in this case, the notion of – tada – a “business model”) to “confront reality” and improve you business.  The construct is lame.  The examples, while somewhat interesting (EMC, Cisco, Sun, Home Depot, 3M, and Thompson) and by far the best part of the book, are still incredibly light weight stories of the transformation these companies went through recently.

I don’t know why I keep buying and reading business books like this.  They are usually such a profound disappointment.  I got suckered into this one because my favorite quote from Atlas Shrugged is “Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.”  Unfortunately, this time Bossidy and Charan faked me out.

I get a lot of questions about “the best entrepreneurship / venture capital books.”  Q106 promises to be a good quarter for them as Tom Evslin’s hackoff.com: An Historic Murder Mystery set in the Internet Bubble and Rubble ships, followed shortly by Tom Perkins’ Sex and the Single Zillionaire: A Novel.

The Tom’s are both well known in entrepreneurial circles – Evslin for his most recent company ITXC and Perkins for being one of the founders of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.  While Evslin has been innovative in publishing his book on the web in advance, Perkins has taken a more traditional approach, including a fun puff story in the Wall Street Journal. 

I can vouch for hackoff.com – it’s a page turner that has me addicted to my daily hackoff.com RSS feed.  Perkins – who is the ex-husband of Danielle Steele – will be a new experience for me, although the preview does feel somewhat Steele-ish.

I’m a huge James Frey fan – I loved both of his books  A Million Little Pieces and  My Friend Leonard. He’s recently been beaten up for embellishing his story as The Man Who Conned Oprah.  Richard Bradley also takes him to task on the always “entertaining and stimulating” Huffington Post.  James Frey and the story about his story have been on the Technorati Top 10 List for the past few days, once again demonstrating that all press is good publicity (I’m sure there were plenty of other books bought as a result of all the discussion.)

I’ve read through a bunch of this stuff out of a perverse curiosity about the whole situation.  The negative rhetoric seems to be “Frey wrote a memoir, stated that it was the truth, but he embellished a bunch of it and, when confronted, he and the publisher (Doubleday) lied (e.g. they denied the embellishment), causing millions of people to shell out money for a book that is a lie.”

The irony of this whole thing is amazing.  First, if you read the book, you know that the protagonist of the book (presumably 100% Frey) has a bunch of major issues with truth, trust, confrontation, and his own self image.  His climb out of a Hades-depth pit of despair is part of the brilliance of this book.  To think that his self-described pit was “precisely accurate”, his journey was “exactly correct” and his actions and emotional responses were “absolutely honest” is ludicrous if you know even a tiny bit about psychology.  As a friend said, “the dude is seriously fucked up” and – given this backdrop – you’d assume that there would be “some issues.”

Now – there were probably some tactical mistakes on the part of his editors and handlers at Doubleday for not (a) being proactive about saying “this is a memoir – some names and events might have been modified”, and (b) handling the backlash better (e.g. don’t issue an outright denial and hope the issue goes away.)  While there is an expectation that a memoir is “true to significant facts”, I’ve read my share of memoirs (and autobiographies) for people that I know of where I’ve got to believe there has been embellishment – I think it’s always hard to be precisely self-reflective – a person will exaggerate both the good (more good) and the bad (more bad).  And – these people aren’t – in the words of my friend – “seriously fucked up.” 

Even if you have the backdrop of embellishment in advance, these are still absolutely remarkable books which is the unfortunately point that gets lost in the rhetoric.  The noise around this makes me think of the rapidly shifting sentiment around the accuracy of published content.  I’ve always taken what I read in the newspaper at face value and it startles me to hear people saying things like “but it was in the New York Times – it must be true.”  C’mon – I recognize the value of an editorial process, but do you really believe that everything we see on Fox News is completely true and objective? 

I expect this issue will keep ping-ponging around for a while, especially if Frey (or Doubleday) tries to justify his position.  I’d recommend he add the appropriate disclaimer, apologize to anyone that feels deceived, and gets on with writing his next book (which I’m very much looking forward to, whatever it is.)

When I was in Aspen in December, I once again found myself sitting in a house with Internet access (via DSL) but without wireless.  This time there were only three of us competing for the Internet cable but that was two too many.  We all had wireless adapters in our computers so we grumbled to each other that there must be a better way.

I was determined to find an inexpensive, portable, easy to set up Internet wireless base station.  My primary computer is a Windows box so I went through all the logical network gear vendors.  Everything I saw was big, bulky, or stupid looking.  For some reason I wandered over to the Apple site and took a look at the Apple AirPort Express with Air Tunes.  It was love at first sight – perfect size, the functionality I was looking for, and a fair price.  I jumped over to the Amazon site and with 1–Click I bought it hoping it would work.

I installed it tonight.  It took 15 minutes and had only one issue – the CD-ROM installer choked during the install on my Windows computer because I had a “new version of iTunes.”  While that’s a stupid error, it was easy to fix by going to the Apple site, downloading the latest version of AirPort 4.2 for Windows, and installing again.

The setup was trivial and completely obvious.  The only tricky thing to know is that if you want to have an encrypted network that both Macs and PCs can access, you need to use WEP, which requires exactly a 13 character password (yeah – good luck – it took a little while to come up with a 13 character password I could remember.) 

While I’ve only tried this at home, it worked exactly as expected.  As a result, the Apple AirPort Express with Air Tunes gets Toy of the Month status.

My long time friend Scott Moody once told me that “old computers are like porn to me.”  I agree – over the years I’ve spend my fair share of money and time on eBay buying old video games and computers (many of which either reside at my office or at friends’ houses.)  One of the recipients of my old computer collection – Jenny Lawton (proud guardian of a TRS-80 Model 1) sent me a copy of Retro-Electric.  This beautiful book is the computer porn equivalent of Playboy’s 50th Anniversary Issue (actually – my guess is that Retro-Electric is much much better.)

The pictures are gorgeous and the text descriptions are remarkably interesting (although I mostly looked at the pictures.)  The book is broken into three sections: (1) Workstation, (2) Home Base, and (3) Playtime.  I’ll give you a sampling from things that I actually owned at one time or another.

Workstation: Sharp EL-8, HP-35, HP-65 (actually, I had the HP-58a), Apple II, Casio FX-2000 (my all time favorite calculator), Radio Shack TRS80 1, IBM Personal Computer, Apple Lisa, Apple Macintosh Classic, Apple Newton, Palm Pilot Personal, Apple iMac, and HP iPaq. The Clive Sinclair products (I never had any of them) dominate this section early on and provide a great history of the calculator business.

Home Base: Lava Lamp, Trimphone, Bang & Olufsen Beogram 4000 (I didn’t have a 4000, but I had something close), Polaroid SX70 Land Camera, Seiko LCD Watch, Sony Walkman, President CB Radio (I don’t remember if we had a President, but we had a model that looked just like this one), Philips VLP700 Laservision Player, Sony Watchman Pocket TV, Swatch Watch, Braun Voice Control Alarm Clock (I didn’t have the voice control, but I still use the same model from 1984 without the voice control), Freeplay Wind-Up Radio, and the currently ubiquitous Apple iPod.

Playtime: Magnavox Odyssey (I never had one but I had a friend that did and remember playing it for N hours where N = much too large a number), Atari 2600, Mattel Electronics Football (still my favorite handheld electronic toy), Milton Bradley Simon, TI Speak and Spell, Atari 400, Palitoy Merlin, Sinclair ZX-81 (ok – I had one Sinclair thing), Nintendo 64, Tamagotchi, Sony Aibo, Sony PS2, and a Microsoft XBox.

Thankfully, this is only about 10% of the items listed in the book – my electronic junkyard is already overwhelming.  I’ll just stick with pictures for the balance of them.

Another day, another question to answer that was stuck in my “answer this question on your blog” someday folder in Outlook. 

When I got my new IBM X41 tablet in September, I wrote a glowing review of it.  I recently was asked if I still like it – three months later I’m still loving it.  Laptops usually last me six months, so let’s see how I feel on April 1st.  Ironically, I’m not using it as a tablet much (occasionally when I’m lying on the couch reading while listening to music, I’ll flip it into tablet mode so it (a) takes up less space and (b) I can monitor my email without having to move around each time something arrives in my inbox.  However, as a standard, hardworking laptop, it’s great.

I took a break from Carnegie (which is amazing, but it’s massive – really two books) to gobble down some mental floss yesterday.  Stephen Frey’s new book The Protege is out.  Frey is on my regular rotation of mental floss and The Protege is a sequel to The Chairman.

If you are a VC or private equity investor, Frey (and these two books) are mental floss at their best.  Christian Gillette, the 37 year old Chairman of Everest Capital, is every private equity investors heroic figure.  Gillette is young, fit, rich, busy as hell but able to manage it with grace, and firmly in command of a huge private equity empire (Fund 8 weighs in a $15 billion for a chapter – after which the Wallace Family and it’s gorgeous 30 year old matron Allison contribute another $5 billion (of their $22 billion fortune) as long as Allison is made a managing partner.)  Like all great mental floss, the book quickly devolves into a complex plot with lots of misdirection, suspense, confusion, suspicious characters, the mob, private planes, security, an NFL franchise, Las Vegas, a kinky sex murder, yacht “adventures”, the CIA, nanotechnology, mysterious scientist deaths, and the exploits of our fearless hero (including a bunch of deals done in rapid fire fashion) as he saves the world while struggling to decide between two beautiful women.

Ah.  I feel better.  Back to Andy Carnegie.

Fooled By Randomness was unquestionably the best non-fiction book I read in 2005.  The author – Nassim Nicholas Taleb – is a magnificent writer, deeply intellectual, and delightfully blunt.  While one could interpret his style as arrogant, I chose to view it differently, especially given his endless self-deprecating remarks.  I don’t know Taleb, but I’m going to assume that he’s simply an enlightened guy that feels compelled to say exactly what is on his mind in the clearest way possible.

This book is subtitled “The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets” and – in my opinion – is a must read for anyone that ever thinks about probability or statistics (or has ever said a phrase like “sunk cost.”)  In college, I struggled with 6.041 – Probabilistic Systems Analysis & Applied Probability (it was the only C I got as an undergrad) and felt like I was a week behind the entire class (e.g. I eventually got it, just a week after the problem set was due, or the test occurred.)  As a grad student I breezed through 15.071 – Decision Methodologies for Managers not necessarily because I was smarter, but because MIT Course 15 classes are much easier than MIT Course 6 classes. 

When I grabbed Taleb’s book, I had some flashbacks to 6.041.  Fortunately, Taleb’s book was extraordinarily easy to understand, even though some of the subject matter was congruent to 6.041.  Fooled By Randomness tackles classic probability theory (or – in Taleb-speak “the philosophy of randomness”) in a way that anyone with a college degree can understand using the financial markets as the backdrop for discussion.  Taleb loves dramatic examples which is a great way to understand this stuff as you end up with an extremely memorable heuristic for understanding something that could easily devolve into complex theory.

Oh – and he’s funny as hell.  I rarely laugh out loud when reading a non-fiction book – Taleb got a few deep belly laughs out of me.  He manages to demonstration his range of interests by weaving some philosophy and history into the book, although each time I tested one of Taleb’s assertions about Hume or Popper on Amy, she went of on a rant that made me remember how difficult it was for me to read and understand this stuff.

Great stuff – I can’t wait for The Black Swan, Taleb’s next book.

Reading today’s episode of hackoff.com gave me the chills.  Tom has deeply woven the events of 9/11 in his story as Chapter 10 happens on 9/11 (and several of the main characters are in the World Trade Center South Tower at the time.) 

While I wasn’t in either tower on 9/11, I was in Manhattan having taken a red eye from San Francisco the night before.  I got to my hotel (The Benjamin) at about 7am and went to sleep to get a little more rest before my 10am meeting.  I woke up at 9:15 (to the clock radio – I remember it vividly – it was a fancy Bose clock radio like the one I had at the time in my bedroom at home) to an announcer saying that the World Trade Center had been hit by a plane and was on fire.  At first I thought it was a joke (I was completely zoned out from the red eye and generally tired from the events of the previous five years) so I got up and went to the bathroom as though nothing spectacular was occurring.  A few minutes later, when I walked back into the bedroom, the discussion on the radio has turned to panic, so I did something I never do – I turned on the TV in the hotel room.  I sat there for the next 30 minutes in a trance as I watched the towers fall.

My story is a much longer one, but as I read through George Harcourt’s email to his wife Janet, all I could think about was the phone call I got from Amy on her way to the airport (DIA) to fly to New York to spend the week with me.  She was in tears because no one knew what was going on and I hadn’t been answering my phone (I’d shut it off while I was sleeping).  I assured her that I was fine and safe in the hotel, that I had no clue what was going on, but she should go back home, not come to New York, and I’d call her as soon as I knew what was up.  That was the last phone call I was able to make the entire day, but I fired up my computer, connected to the hotel Internet, and remarkably was able to email and IM all day long.

The chills came from the story, knowing that Tom experienced something powerful that day, and unexpectedly remembering pieces of it.  There was no need to suspend disbelief on this one – Tom is really showing his skills as a writer.