Book-Summaries

The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham is considered the bible of investing.

The book is an interesting take on what it takes to attain a happy marriage and why only ~30% of us end up in happy marriages. The book is divided into three sections - what is love, why we fail in the game of love and what can we do differently to succeed at it. The nature of love Why happily ever after is so hard to find In the western world, 50% of marriages end up in divorce, ~10-15% are separated without divorce and ~7% go along with an unhappy marriage which implies only 30% live happily ever after. Being “in love” is equivalent to having a “liking” (fairness, kindness, loyalty) and a “lust” (sexual desire). Post-marriage, liking declines at about 3% annually while lust declines 8% annually (in first 7 years of marriage) => from a long term perspective, it’s better to invest in liking than lust. Children’s fairy-tale belief about love is a beautiful girl falling in for a brave hero and they fall for each other in minutes. This is far from what happens in reality

While the book is overall a good one, unfortunately, it contains a lot of generic financial advice which I decided not to include in the summary. Choose a sound financial lifestyle Borrowers borrow money from the future in the form of credit loans till the lifestyle collapses, consumers consume money paycheck to paycheck, keepers focus on accumulating wealth over time. The focus on net worth mentality over paycheck mentality actively works in keepers favor.

The book talks about various psychological tactics used by compliance practitioners like salespeople, waiters, car dealers, and fundraisers to influence us into saying yes to something to which ideally we would have said no. The author went and took sales jobs as a car salesman and waiter to see these tactics in action. He referred to these tactics as six weapons of influence. Each of them forms the basis of a chapter in the book. Weapons of influence Weapons of influence consist of identifying fixed action patterns and exploiting them. Compliance practitioners use them as a basis for influence.

The book is an impressive collection of unusual stories aimed at promoting a non-conventional way of approaching problems and solving them.

Some salient notes from the book If there’s an elephant in the room, introduce it. Even if you are in the position of strength, be fair. Have something to bring to the table, people would be more welcoming of you to join in then. Get the fundamentals right, fancy stuff does not work without that. When you are screwing up and nobody says anything, they have given up on you (that’s a really bad place to be)....

The book talks about inflection points which if not handled carefully, are drastic (10x) enough to put a company out of business. Something changed In 1994, Intel’s Pentium processors suffered from a floating-point bug. Surprisingly for Intel, once the consumers became aware of the bug, rather than reaching out to manufacturers, they were calling Intel directly. It became obvious at that point that Intel has become a household name. Even though it’s selling to enterprises, consumers think of it as a consumer electronics company and have the same expectations of customer service.

The book is an excellent collection of rules which the author discovered while finishing his Ph.D. and transitioning into a full-time faculty position. Working right trumps finding the right work.

The book presents Clayton’s counter-intuitive thesis on how firms with good management practices and a sound understanding of their customers’ needs eventually fail at disruptive innovations while still succeeding at sustainable innovations. The book emphasizes that its not engineering but management oversight that leads to the demise of incumbents in the face of disruptive innovations. One-line summary: At some point, the incumbent’s product’s performance exceeds the demand of most customers. Then the “edge” that these performance metrics provided is lost, and the customers’ value proposition changes. They start valuing some other metrics, along which a disruptor’s product has better performance. The disruptor has an early mover’s advantage as well as leading to the demise of the incumbent. The following are the salient ideas raised in the book.

The book emphasizes heavily life education, glorifies college dropouts, and questions college education except for specialized fields like law and medicine.