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As Christmas approaches, it’s time to think of enlightening books for the businesspeople on your gift-giving list.
The timeless books highlighted here, with their lessons on tempering bold risks with caution and staying close to the customer, have become more relevant since their initial publication.
William Langewiesche (2009; Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
This is a rip-roaring story with insights on human ingenuity, fatal arrogance, and corporate cupidity on each of its succinct 193 pages.
Its two heroes are Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who safely landed his crippled Airbus A320 on the Hudson River in 2009, and Bernard Ziegler, the engineering czar at Airbus SE who made Sully’s miracle possible.
Ziegler convinced Airbus to adopt his invention of “fly-by wire,” a revolutionary automatic flight-control system that has helped the world’s more than 300,000 airline pilots save thousands of lives.
Airbus introduced fly-by-wire in 1983; it has since been adopted by Boeing and other aircraft makers. Ziegler, a former French Air Force fighter pilot who saw action in the Algerian war, knew that wise pilots acknowledge their fallibility.
But others, stricken by hubris, recommit to a mistake rather than admit error and correct it.
In telling the author his motive for making a plane as goof-proof as possible, Ziegler cites a widely applicable adage: “To err is human, but to persist is diabolical.”
Anne Kingston. (1994, Macfarlane, Walter & Ross).
This award-winning book tells the story of marketer Dave Nichol’s role in building Loblaw Cos. from a sleepy Ontario supermarket chain into one of the world’s biggest grocery retailers.
That transformation, starting in the early 1980s, was largely accomplished with the triumph of Nichol’s private label “President’s Choice” goods over pricier and sometimes inferior national brands, available exclusively at Loblaws and its sister chains No Frills, Fortinos, Provigo and others.
Nichol constantly refreshed the line of PC products with new and often improbable items like Memories of Szechwan Peanut Sauce and gourmet Italian dog food, obliging Loblaw patrons to visit frequently for the next talked-about PC products.
These were showcased in Nichol’s chatty and widely read “Insider’s Report” flyer. Kingston also opens windows to the often-secretive worlds of new-product development and the strategies by which food purveyors try to change consumer tastes.
Nichol’s Loblaws was a precursor to personality driven enterprises led by Elon Musk and his ilk, where the chief product is the ethos created by the marketer.
Thomas J. Watson Jr. and Peter Petre. (1990; Bantam Books)
This acclaimed memoir tells two important stories, of IBM’s bet-the-company investment in the mainframe computers that would become ubiquitous at public and private institutions worldwide in the mid-20th century; and the difficult relationship between the author and his larger-than-life namesake father, founder of the modern IBM, whose punch-card tabulating machines had about 90 per cent of the U.S. market.
Yet it was Watson Jr., CEO from 1956 to 1971, whose IBM would succeed where others failed in embracing a disruptive technology at the expense of a lucrative existing business destined for obsolesce.
Watson Jr. succeeded with a “family” of progressively more powerful yet compatible mainframes, dubbed System/360, by which customers could easily trade up as their needs grew.
The book offers a winsome model of visionary action that is disciplined by careful risk calculation. It also tells of the fights between father and son that the author describes as “savage, primal, and unstoppable.”
The story is relevant in a contemporary Canadian economy where family feuds over succession have jeopardized some of the country’s largest enterprises.
Robert X. Cringely. (1992; HarperBusiness)
Meet the young men, some almost frightfully immature, who helped launch the Information Age in which we now live.
This comprehensive history might also be the most entertaining saga of how computing devices became everyday appliances.
The revolution started with the desktop PCs that scruffy tech entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs kept tweaking until they became more powerful than the room-sized mainframe computers that had ruled computing since the 1960s.
The book is an immersive experience in which the reader is a first-hand witness to the fierce debates among inventors over their competing operating systems and hardware designs.
At times the geeks collaborated, at others they sabotaged each other, all the while outfoxing IBM and the other tech giants of their day.
There’s a lesson here on the speed and daring of innovation in a wide-open field.
Eventually the boys’ fledgling enterprises became today’s Microsoft, Apple and Oracle, bureaucratic near-monopolies with limited innovative prowess, just like the earlier giants they supplanted.
Happy holidays, and happy reading!
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