Author Archives: Ben Casnocha

Book Short: Creative Capitalism by Michael Kinsley

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Have you ever read a well argued essay or op/ed on a topic, felt yourself persuaded, but then wondered, “I wonder how a really informed person on the opposite side of the argument would respond?”

I ask that question a lot. It’s disappointing there are not many books which, in their format, enable a multi-voice conversation that’s full of respectful disagreement.

Creative Capitalism by Michael Kinsley is, however, one of these essay-books. It opens with Bill Gates’ Davos speech on how the free market doesn’t perfectly serve the world’s poor, and what for-profit companies should do about that. Then there’s a conversation between Warren Buffett and Bill Gates on the topic of CSR and related themes. Then there’s a slew of essays in response by all sorts of super smart people like Richard Posner, Gary Becker, Brad DeLong, Robert Reich, Larry Summers, and of course Kinsley himself (who’s always worth reading). Best yet, Kinsley gives people the opportunity to respond to responses — Posner rebuts Gates, Ed Glaeser challenges Posner, Posner responds again.

If you’re interested in whether a for profit company should try to “do good,” what Milton Friedman meant by the invisible hand, and whether capitalism needs to be tweaked in some way to make sure the world’s poor are best served, check out Kinsley’s book.

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Quick Impressions of Qatar

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It was my first time to the region and my time in Doha was all too brief, but I will share a splattering of thoughts:

  • The people of Qatar I met were friendly, hospitable, ambitious, and keen on continuing to improve their country. The world cup arrives in 2022. That event creates a natural timeline by which they want to achieve big things before they enjoy the global spotlight.
  • The talking point within Qatar that I heard a lot is that the country needs to become a “service economy.” They are also looking to foster entrepreneurship in order to diversify their economic base.
  • By day, the Doha skyscrapers juxtaposed next to the desert landscape looks bizarre. And because of the heat, no one is walking on any sidewalk…anywhere. By night, with the buildings lit up, the landscape takes on an alluring, Vegas-like quality. And with the cooler evening breezes, the foot traffic on sidewalks picks up to a normal pace.
  • When I sat down to lunch with some local businesspeople from the region, I asked where everyone was from. I should have known better. Apparently, it’s easy to tell someone’s home country by how they wear their hijab (headscarf). As it was explained to me, Saudis wear a red patterned hijab. Omanis wear a hat, no scarf. Qataris fold their hijab a certain way; folks from the UAE fold it a different way. Walk down the street of Doha, and you’ll see all kinds of hijabs.
  • Doha’s critics say the city is trying too hard to be like Dubai: too many sky scrappers, too many five star western hotel brands, a national airline in Qatar Airways too hell bent on being more luxurious than Emirates. Doha strives to be better than Dubai on these fronts but isn’t, they say. By forcing an apples-to-apples comparison, Doha gets relegated to second class, instead of a place like Muscat which aspires to be something different. I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with this view — I’ve never been to Dubai nor spent serious time in Doha. I’m simply repeating it because I found it interesting in terms of how a city’s identity gets constructed vis-a-vis another city’s.
  • When women are covered up except for their face, it makes the face the singular signal of beauty. There’s nothing else to go by. I saw many beautiful faces.
  • I flew Emirates, SFO-Dubai and then Dubai-Doha. I loved that the ceiling of the plane turned into a star-filled sky during sleep hours. Also, the window shades opened/closed electronically, and they were all shut automatically during sleep hours. (It’s annoying when someone leaves the window shade open and sun creeps in when you’re trying to sleep.) The weakness of Emirates (in my brief experience) was around staff friendliness. The flight crew just didn’t seem as uniformly professional and friendly as a Cathay Pacific or Japan Airways crew, for example. I wonder if the diversity of the flight crew on Emirates matters in this regard. The four Emirates flights I took were multi-ethnic to an extreme degree; when they announced the languages spoken by the crew, I truly had never heard of a couple of the languages. I love diversity generally, but for within crew maybe the cultural differences translate into inconsistent hospitality styles. The person serving food approaches the relationship with the passenger differently than the person handing out customs forms. On a 16 hour non-stop flight, these little things become a little noticeable.

All in all, big thanks to my hosts in Qatar for the opportunity to meet and share ideas, and I look forward to getting back to the region soon to spend a more significant chunk of time.

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Rahm Emanuel’s Ideas for Improving Higher Ed

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From this profile of Rahm Emanuel in the Atlantic, there’s this excellent nugget on how he’s reforming Chicago’s community colleges:

IN HIS 2006 book, The Plan, Rahm proposed that all Americans go to school for at least 14 years. Like Presidents Clinton and Obama, he has long seen community colleges as crucial to preparing the American workforce for global competition and to saving young people who would otherwise be condemned to poverty. But Chicago’s city colleges have become dysfunctional, with graduation rates a pathetic 7 percent. (Nationally, only 15 out of 35 community-college systems graduate more than 50 percent.) “We have 9.4 percent unemployment, 100,000 job openings, and I’m spending a couple hundred million dollars on job training,” Rahm tells me. He pauses to let the absurdity of this sink in. “So we are going to reorganize it.”

Rahm fired almost all the college presidents, hired replacements after a national search, and decreed that six of the seven city-run colleges would have a special concentration. Corporations pledging to hire graduates will have a big hand in designing and implementing curricula. “You’re not going for four years, and you’re not going for a Nobel Prize or a research breakthrough,” he says. “This is about dealing with the nursing shortage, the lab-tech shortage. Hotels and restaurants will take over the curriculum for culinary and hospitality training.” Already AAR, a company that has 600 job openings for welders and mechanics, is partnering with Olive-Harvey College; Northwestern Memorial Hospital is designing job training in health care for Malcolm X College. Equally important, the city colleges are overhauling their inadequate guidance services and contacting the 15,000 students most likely to drop out. As of March, all 120,000 students are being tracked, and those in danger of slipping through the cracks will be counseled. Thinking big, Rahm wants Chicago to be the national model for rescuing the middle class.

Makes a ton of sense. If a kid is in a community college trying get trained for work in a restaurant or a hotel, why the heck wouldn’t the potential employers of those students have their hands all over the curricula? Hopefully Rahm’s model inspires imitators.

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Steve Jobs Focused on Network Intelligence

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I read Adam Lashinky’s new book Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired–And Secretive–Company Really Works on my flight to Doha, and I picked up a bunch of nuggets. Here’s one section that jumped out:

An unsung attribute of Steve Jobs that Apple also will miss is his role as a masterful networker and gatherer of information…He furiously worked the phones, calling up people he’d heard were worthy and requesting a meeting. No one turned down the chance to meet with Jobs, of course, and he used the opportunity to soak up information. His uncanny insight into trends in business and technology weren’t a fluke. Jobs worked hard for his market intelligence.

It follows with a story of Jobs hearing that Lytro was a cool company, calling the company’s CEO and inviting the Lytro CEO over to his house to discuss cameras and product design. According to the Forbes cover piece on Dropbox, Jobs did something similar with the founders of Dropbox. And surely countless other entrepreneurs.

Some of these conversations are of course driven with M&A in mind, but I follow Lashinsky’s point that much of this is Jobs’s instinct to always be pulling intelligence from his network about what’s happening in the world in order to be a more effective and informed professional.

Jobs took advantage of the density of Silicon Valley. He could summon the best young entrepreneurs, like Drew Houston, to his office on a day’s notice. He went on walks with Mark Zuckerberg. This is probably one reason he evangelized the region so much–increased density equals increased network intelligence for those living in the density.

Jobs was tapping networks inside Silicon Valley but outside of Apple corporate–and this was crucial. Lashinsky writes, “The rest of the crew at Apple is either too busy to schmooze or was always discouraged by Jobs from doing it, lest they get too big for their britches or too distracted from their Apple work.” Jobs once said he didn’t want to let exec Scott Forstall “out of the office” — which is great if someone needs to just put their head down and execute, but tunnel vision is not super helpful for fresh ideation.

Lashinksy asks who at Apple will be gathering this outside-the-company network intel with Jobs gone. It’s a good question. Meanwhile, we can all be asking ourselves a similar question in our careers: How are we pulling network intelligence from diverse sources in order to be better at the job we already have or to find a new opportunity? That’s a key theme of The Start-up of You.

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Free Webcast Thursday Night

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This Thursday March 29th at 6:30 PM pacific time — join Reid Hoffman and me for a live, free webcast to discuss the Start-Up of You and hear us answer your questions related to careers and the future of work. You should join the webcast if you’ve read the book or are thinking about reading it.

There’s a limited number of spots, so be sure to click here and then click “Register” to claim your spot. (If you’ve already submitted contact info on a Wufoo form via another blog, no need to do anything more.)

Look forward to talking to you on Thursday evening.

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At SXSW the other week, an artist drew an illustration of our presentation as we were talking. I’ve pasted it below. Click to enlarge. I’m amazed it was done in real time.

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