The New Economy is Poison: On Dan Lyons's "Disrupted"

I first came across this book as an excerpt somewhere on the on the internet. I forget where, or else I would claim it loudly and give support to the publication, lord knows that they all need the traffic. I ended up reading this quickly, but it wasn’t an easy read. Basically, if you have ever had one of those sorts of jobs where you had anxiety about going in every day then this will give you great memories of that as your read Lyons and his spot-on descriptions of his job. Lyons was hired onto HubSpot, a company that I’m still not sure exactly what they do after reading the book. He was a seasoned reporter but had the unfortunate thing of being a seasoned reporter in a time where deep-learning computers will soon be writing all of our news and until then you can hire an Ivy Grad for next to nothing to create the content you need.

What I did learn about HubSpot was that it was very poorly run and seems like a pyramid scheme. I don’t know how representative it is of the tech scene in a more generalized way, but it does show the folly of this thing we do where we fetishize the young founders and VCs throw money at them before they really have a sense of what it means to be a leader and to manage people and create a good product for consumers. Nevertheless, maybe I’m biased. There are founders who are able to scale up and create lasting businesses. However, my supposition is that for every Jobs, Zuckerberg, or Gates there are infinitely more people like these clowns. I think I remember seeing a stat that like 97% of the startups those venture capitals people invest in don’t end up making money for the investors. I’d bet HubSpot is on the losing end of that. It does seem though that there is a way for the founders to cash out even if the business is horrible - just hold on long enough for the IPO. This process is chronicled here in disrupted.

One funny thing is that the whole book is horrible PR for the company. Very few people come off as sympathetic, and that may just be that the whole experience biased Lyons against the people. What is funnier though is the postscript. After 200 pages of telling how bad this company is, he then tells of what they tried to do during the process of writing the book to avoid all this bad press – to the point of hacking Lyons’s computer and even going through his trash.

Basically, it comes down to this. The new economy is horrible because it is putting out old-line professionals who have age and experience. However, you can’t sell out and work for them because the people inside of them are all horrible people. I hope that it is less black and white than that, but I hope I never have to find out. Unless I’m a founder, and VCs want to throw money at me.

The Future is in Constant Creation: Alex Ross and "The Industries of the Future"

I have a feeling that right now you can see the robots everywhere but the productivity figures.

Since I am still relatively early in my career, I am trying to be smart and position myself in the best way to mitigate any possible redundancy – my wife likes to joke about the poor people who were synergies away. I don’t want that to happen to me. The best outcome would be for some sort of preemptive national legislation to make better the plight of people who have or will be made redundant. Thankfully, it is now threatening the educated classes, so people are starting to look at what can be done to make capitalism keep working. I have no specific answer, since even the advice you get to future-proof yourself keeps changing. It used to be learning Chinese. Then it was learn to code. I don’t know what the 2020s will bring, but I’ll be pretty red in the face when I have spent a good chunk of time learning to code robots in mandarin and that was the wrong path to have taken. Ah, they’ll say in their thinkpieces and explainers – you should have learned about Pre-Columbian Aztec Philosophy, that’s where the money is.

So as I said, since mechanization is now threatening the livelihoods of people who have put in time learning non-manual skills, several books have popped up looking at what the future will look like. Now we all know the difficulty of making predictions, especially about the future, several authors have taken stabs at it. I really liked Ford’s “Rise of the Robots,” and have glommed onto some more left-wing economist’s outputs, both Reich and Stiglitz have put books out in the past year both looking at the way the economy works and who it works for and how to make it work better for everyone. Most of these books exist on a spectrum from the future is awesome to the future is scary. Ross stands more on the future is awesome side. The book covers a lot of ground, and I was calling it in my head a sort of establishment gee-wiz sort of book, where there is a lot of cool stuff that we will see but ignoring for the most part the side of the coin where the people that will get to see these changes are not just consumers, but somehow must earn a living. This is weird to me since a large part of the framing is talking about the crew on one of his first jobs cleaning up after concerts as a college student in West Virginia. There are lines in here with huge implications that isn’t explored. For example, in looking at the future of bitcoin, he talks about how there may come a day when there are only four or five currencies. I think the current issues in the Eurozone can show a casual observer what a horrible idea that is. Ultimately, the book suffers because it tries to be too many things, exploring a lot at the higher surface levels but not getting into implications of how this technology will play out socially, economically, and politically. That was the strength of Ford’s book, where he looked at one version of the future and put a policy prescription to it, no matter how impossible it seems to get a UBI going.

Reflections on Concordia University College of Business in River Forest Illinois

So, I've just about graduated with my MBA. The hoops are jumped through, and I will walk next weekend and graduate for the first time in 12 years. Someone starting first grade when I graduated from WVU will have their own ceremony this year. I had a good experience overall. The professors were of high quality, I learned a lot, and my peers pushed and challenged me. Though I am still a bit mad that I didn't get voted an academic honor (why do they vote on those - I had all A's (and one minus, which they weigh, so my GPA was a 3.97 - boo)), I'll most likely reflect positively on the experience as that one bit fades. Below is a response to a couple of prompts sent to me by the university for a promotional video that I'm not sure I'l ever film since I sent some angry emails regarding the above situation.

What do you value most about the business education that you cultivated, earned and received at Concordia University Chicago’s College of Business?

 I came to Concordia for many reasons, and there are as many reasons for pursuing business education as there are students, if not even more than that. 

There is a great breadth the classes you get to take, but what I really liked was the specialization classes. I have worked in a nonprofit agency for five years now, but the classes I took as part of the concentration in nonprofit management allowed me to gain greater perspective on both my own agency and to think of possible moves for my own career. 

The classes, the professors, and my peers were of such a high quality that Concordia has to be the best value in terms of business schools for local professionals bar none. However, what I also really enjoyed was being able to work with peers from a diverse background. I was in work groups more than once with a foreign-born student and though it wasn’t always easy, I think that those situations are some of the ones where I had to think about myself and my own communication strategies and how we were going to work together with people from different backgrounds.

There’s so much more. I could go on and on about what drew me to the program and how it exceeded my expectations at every turn.

 Describe a situation/story in which your business education helped you advance toward a goal you had set for yourself.  This could be a new position, a project at work, a new role within your position an internship opportunity, etc.

 One of the reasons I came to Concordia was that I needed more education to move up in my company. After undergraduate study in creative writing, I went to graduate school for English. Neither of those gave me the exact qualifications I needed in the face of the recession after 2008. 

I was unemployed and subsequently went back to school and got certified for medical coding and billing. That led me to the organization I am now with. Nevertheless, without more education I would be stuck. Therefore, I mapped out a plan where I just kept going to school. I took basic business classes at Triton, and that helped me in my job, I was still at the same position I was when I started. 

In talking to my boss, it became clear that I would not be able to move up until I gained more subject-area knowledge. 

In the course of the last two years, I have learned so many things that have helped me be a more conscientious worker and better at my job and prepared to step into leadership roles. In fact, the interplay between what I have learned at Concordia and my own position has been so successful that I have been promoted twice in the last two years, ahead of the mental schedule I had set for myself. I’ve been in my current position for almost a year, and it is the one that I was hoping that I would be 

considered for with the MBA finalized. I owe much of that success to the MBA program at Concordia.  

Ted Rall’s “Bernie”

Of all the major party candidates in my lifetime, there has been none who have come as close to my politics as he has. I voted for him in my state’s primary. But I’m not passionate for him. I guess it’s the thing of having to be pragmatic and running in the two-party system that makes me mad. The electoral system is so rotten that even a sitting senator has to run within the party system to get media coverage and that weird circular legitimacy. Where you’re not important if you don’t have coverage and you can’t get coverage if you’re not important.

And I like Ted Rall’s work, so this book is right up my alley. Most of it is a biography of Bernard, but it starts out with a long gloss on the history of politics for the last 40 years or so. Rall’s trying to make the case towards someone like me, who is sympathetic but has doubts. Like I said, I voted for Bernie, but I haven’t volunteered or give him any money. Maybe I’m just being too cynical.  Maybe this will start a movement, or maybe the Republicans will win with Ted in the fall and the Democratic insiders will make the argument that the party needs more pre-surrenders on policy positons preferred by the far left.

On John Kay's "Other People's Money"

Kay’s book has one of the most honest parentheticals in the history of finance books. After a sentence on synthetic CDOs, he has an aside where he says quote: “(You really don’t want to know)” (p 60). 

 So you get a sense of the tone and intended audience of this book here. I liked about the first two thirds of the book, but he ends up after looking at all the problems with the finance industry that the issue with the industry is “too much government involvement in the financial sector, not too little” (p 203). 

And with me being a statist and an interventionist, I reluctantly followed him down the path for the last third where he approving cited Austrian school thinkers and even worse – he mentions Nassim Taleb approvingly (which is an impeachable offense in my Republic). So it is interesting to look at a thinker who can identify many of the same problems that you do but who has a vastly different prescription than you do, but the enjoyment level dropped from when I was reading as a compatriot to when I was forced to read as a critoc. Not everyone will follow that path and Kay is smart and a clear writer, so this is a book that I would mostly recommend.

The Only Thing That Will Save Capitalism from Itself is Socialism: A Haiku Review of Ford’s “The Rise of the Robots”

What if we look

into the mirror and see,

the robot is we?