Unbound Roundup

In reviews this week.... it's mostly Buffet, and we're not talking Jimmy. (Despite all that talent, turns out they're not related.) 

At NYT, the new biography about Warren Buffet, The Snowball: Warren Buffet and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder, gets a positive review. Reading about Buffet visiting Wall Street and talking stock picks to celebrate his tenth birthday reminds me of this book. In hardcover non-fiction best-sellers, the only business book in the top ten, albeit numero uno, is Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How it Can Renew America. Topping the second tier is T. Boone Pickens' The First Billion is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future. Interesting that both these business books are focused on our energy problems. Well, so is Peter Tertzakian, coming up at the end of the month. 

WSJ's Buffet review gives some insights into how the book was written. First-time author, Alice Schroeder, who met Buffet in the early 90s as an analyst, got $7.2 million for the North American rights alone, an enormous amount of money for a book not penned by Clinton, Oprah, or the Pope. But Schroeder's biography was with Buffet's cooperation, and she carried around a personal note from him to open doors everywhere. Buffet, however, wanted the publishers to be clear on the fact that he was not a c0-author or stealth-author and would not engage in any promotion of the book. (The WSJ piece compares that to the tireless publicity work Jack Welch did on his Straight from the Gut.) Though Buffet claims it treats him "better than he deserves" and he wants to see it do well if he ever came out and disputed the facts that could really hurt sales. An odd arrangement and a big risk for the publisher Bantam. You can see Schroeder talking about the book here. 

In other WSJ reviews, Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn From the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years is a timely book on business mistakes, detailing bad moves by such companies as AOL Time Warner, Kodak, and Motorola. And in another timely book, and an apparent rebuttal to Mr. Friedman, it turns out The World is Curved and that's why we're experiencing upheaval in our financial markets.  

At The Economist, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business looks like an interesting IT update of Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds and tells us how open source and wikis are changing business. Finally, Goldman Sachs: The Culture of Success tells the history of the firm and shows it has faced adversity before.