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Past Week's Offers | October 2009 | September 2009 |
It wasn't looking good. They were behind for most of the bout, and were now trailing by 30 points with only six minutes left in the game. I thought the Milwaukee cause might be lost, and was beginning to worry about the car ride home the next day, driving three very disappointed and very likely hungover roller girls all the way home from St. Paul.
The book we have for you today is Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr.'s Questions of Character. Badaracco's approach is different than most in the business genre, in that the stories he uses to inform us aren't taken from research and real-life success stories, but pulled from the pages of great literature. "How does serious fiction help us understand leadership?" he asks. "It open doors to a world rarely seen ... It lets us watch leaders as they think, worry, hope, hesitate, commit, exult, regret, and reflect. We see their characters tested, reshaped, strengthened or weakened. These books draw us into leaders' worlds, put us in their shoes, and at times let us share their experiences."
Irving Fisher, like many others beside him, lost pretty much his entire fortune in the stock market crash of 1929. That's not the story of Irving Fisher, though... his is much more complicated. You see, more than 20 years earlier, in 1906, he wrote The Nature of Capital and Income, one of the first books to ascribe reason and scientific order to markets. Fisher's work has had a great deal of influence on economics in academia over the years, and his work is part of the foundation of complex financial mathematics and instruments we see on Wall Street today. In a recently released book, The Myth of the Rational Market, Time magazine editor-at-large Justin Fox tells the story further:
He is perhaps not the father, but certainly a father of modern Wall Street.
Hardly anyone calls him that though. Economists honor Fisher for his theoretical breakthroughs, but outside the discipline his chief claim to lasting fame is the horrendous stock market advice he proffered in the late 1920s. Read almost any history of the years leading up to the great crash of October 1929, and the famous Professor Fisher serves as a sort of idiot Greek chorus, popping up every few pages to assert that stock prices had reached a "permanently high plateau."
Well, if by "permanently high plateau," Fisher meant "about to fall drastically, plummeting the country into a prolonged depression," he was spot-on.
The book we have for you today, Roger Lowenstein's When Genius Failed, is a more recent example of academic faith in the rationality of markets going disasterously awry. It tells the story of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), a hedge fund started by John Meriwether that lured the best and brightest minds of American academia to Wall Street—Nobel Laureates of economics Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton among them.
