Fairhaven, The River

Book Review: A Brilliant Invention: Inventing the American Constitution

"A Brilliant Invention: Inventing the American Constitution" is an interesting perspective on the creation of the US Constitution.  It concentrates on the people and process of creation, rather than provide historical analysis of causes and effects.  It's a fairly brief book at 210 pages.

It starts by setting the stage of the political context.  This is not a historical analysis with explanations and reasons.  It's a statement of what was happening politically and why the constitutional convention was called.  It covers the political context of why some people favored or opposed, attended or avoided the convention.  It also covers the technological limitations of the period, e.g., the need to organize your business affairs for being out of touch for several months because there is no telephone, telegraph, or fast post.  News and post took a few weeks to travel between cities.

Next, it covers the organization and process of the convention.  This is unusual, because it is an explanation of the organizational dynamics, not a discussion of how the convention affected history.  It explains how the documents were created, how the committees are structured, how the meetings are structured, and how this is affected by the personalities involved.  I was especially amused by the name of "Committee for Postponed Items", which reminds me a lot of DICOM's Working Group 6 in terms of it's internal structure.  You don't need to be an organizational dynamics expert to read this section.  It's at a level that the novice can understand. 

Finally, it covers the conclusion and publication, without too much extrapolation into reasons for subsequent historical events.

I noticed one interesting difference between the political structure of the American Revolution and the current structure of world governments.  They had no great leader.  Today's governments are all structured around a single leader. 

The American Revolution and the creation of the constitution were driven by experienced politicians with strong legal expertise and decades of experience, but nobody was the leader.  There were always multiple leaders with their own specialties.  All of the leaders also had major weaknesses, there were powerful arguments and disagreements, and they worked out an acceptable compromise because the alternative was defeat and destruction.  The closest to a single leader was George Washington, but he resolutely stayed out of the political process.  For the rest you have names like Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, etc. 

They expected the country to be led by a similar structure in Congress, with multiple powerful politicians but no single leader.  They expected an efficient but subservient executive similar to George Washington, who expressed his opinions but carried out the policies decided by Congress.

They would probably have been very surprised by how long it took for this structure to collapse in the US.  It was not until the 20th century that the US shifted to it's current process of selecting a single leader to make all important decisions.   They were wondering whether the Constitution would survive for more than a few decades.

Book Review: Makers, by Cory Doctorow

This book is worth reading.  It will appeal to adult engineers and others.  It is a more adult form of SF than his earlier books.  There is of course a plot and various cute ideas, but they are not the core of the book.  This book is about the lives of some adults, and secondarily about the other aspects of plot and the images of a similar but different society.  It could have been one of the common "how would society be different if ...."  Instead, this is about some adults.  They have ideas, make mistakes, learn some things, don't learn others, change in some ways, don't change in others.

I found it very interesting to follow the characters evolve, the society change, and watch how other aspects of humanity remained the same.   The tech is OK.  There are plenty of inside jokes and allusions; and I'm sure that I missed a great many.  I caught some of those relating to silicon valley players and locations.  I'm sure I missed others related to Disney and elsewhere.  These can be entertaining as you catch them.

I did read the whole thing in one burst, which meant dinner was late today.  That indicates that the story and characters are sufficiently gripping that I preferred to keep reading rather than cook dinner.

Throughput Accounting

Throughput Accounting, Thomas Corbett, ISBN-13: 978-0884271581, is a book worth reading.   People who are concerned with making good management decisions are the target audience, not only accountants.  I found the underlying concept to be very interesting.  It's clear that this approach to accounting should be superior to traditional cost accounting for manufacturing and transport businesses.  With some adaptation it is probably better for other industries.

I read accounting theory books because accounting is a critical part of any information management and decision making system.  The accounting theories specify how to summarize the millions of little bits of information from individual transactions and activities into forms used for decision making.  Accounting is a crucial part of the information flow and feedback system.  As illustrated in some of the examples in this book, inappropriate accounting theories lead to bad decisions.  (This use is quite different from the regulatory demands that particular accounting methods be used for tax and other regulatory reasons.  It's one reason that most companies have multiple sets of accounting books.  An accounting system designed to compute taxes is rarely good for decision making.)

In throughput accounting the information gathering views the process flow of a business focusing in particular on choke points.  This is in sharp contrast to the focus on cost allocation methods found in traditional accounting.  Throughput accounting treats costs as a secondary rather than a primary factor.  The production flow is primary, and one core element of analysis is understanding the impact that changes will have on production.

The simple example used to illustrate the difference between cost accounting is a simple factory with five stages.  The product flow is simple, being stage 1 to stage 2 onward to stage 5.  Stages 1, 2, 4, and 5 have capacities of 10, and stage 3 has a capacity of 1.  Suppose you have two options available:

1. Invest 500 to reduce the cost of production of stage 1 by 10%, or
2. Invest 500 to increase the capacity of stage 3 by 100%, with no cost savings.

Traditional cost accounting shows option 1 to be worthwhile, and option 2 a bad investment.  Throughput accounting shows option 1 to be a bad investment, and option 2 to be an excellent investment.  The difference is that option 2 doubles capacity, allowing a doubling of production, thus doubling sales, thus increasing profits substantially.  Option 1 does not change production and does not change possible sales.  There is some possible savings even with static sales, but abandoning growth is usually part of an exit strategy.  From an overall business point of view, throughput accounting makes better recommendations.

The book works through a variety of simple examples to illustrate commonplace issues.  In real world systems the production systems will be much more complex but the same issues arise.  The fundamental concept is to understand the process flows, identify the bottlenecks, and consider the impact of decisions on the production capacity of the system rather than allocate costs.   You may choose to adjust product mixes, increase production, shift production when markets are saturated, etc.  There is a lot here to think about.

The book does suffer from editorial problems.  There are some serious typos in the examples, for example.  Despite these, the basic concepts are made clear.  This book is a slim inexpensive paperback that conveys the basic concepts.  There are other much larger and more expensive books that look appropriate for accountants and managers who actually want to put this kind of system in place.

The Wikipedia article on Throughput Accounting is a decent enough summary, but the examples and discussion of the book help understanding a lot.

Book Reviews (Tempting Faith, Mao, and Vachss)

Tempting Faith by David Kuo.

This is a fast easy read.  The book is mis-represented by most of the reviews that I have read.  They greatly over-emphasize the fact that politicians exploit the religious.  The reviewers use this as more proof of the evil of Bush.  The sense of the book is more that this is inherent in all politicians (both left and right) and that both the Democrats and the Republicans have exploited their religious supporters (the religious right and the black churches respectively).  There is not a sense of outrage.  There is a sense that this is the inevitable nature of politicians, and that the religious should understand this and not fall into the politicians traps.

Kuo points to the "Screwtape Letters" as a prime example of how this exploitation was clearly visible to CS Lewis as well.  It is the stronger message of Kuo and Lewis that the religious should not look to politics as the path to build a better world.  They should build a better world through their own efforts, using politics as a secondary or defensive mechanism.  He looks at the many politically oriented messages and finds very little of the Christian virtues that he loves.

Mao, the untold story
This is a massive tome.  The tone is very hostile towards Mao, who is uniformly a narcistic, evil man. His life seems to be that of the successful psychopath, leaving misery in his wake.  He has even less personal appeal than Hitler or Stalin.

It does make clear the extreme obsession with "secret communist sympathizers" found in the 1950's cold war.  A great deal of Mao's final success in seizing China rested on having fully penetrated the Chinese Nationalists with sleeper agents who were activated after many years of secrecy.  The origin of the success was the chaos after the collapse of the Chinese empire into a mass of competing warlords.  The creation of the Chinese republic out of this chaos left many openings for the planting of sleeper agents.  I had earlier thought this as irrational behavior.  It now seems just to be an over-reaction to the Chinese experiences.

It is well written, easy to read, and a good overview of Chinese history during the Mao period.

Mask Market, Vachss

Another Burke book.  This is a lesser effort.  It's worth reading as a continuation of the Burke series, but it is not as powerful or involving as most of the earlier books.  It is not a good introduction to either Vachss or the Burke series.

Book Report: The Unquiet Grave

The Unquiet Grave : The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country by Steve Hendricks. The writing of this book is OK, perhaps slightly above average. The content and style reminded me of all the stories that I read about the lynchings, police misconduct, governmental suppression, etc. of the American South in the 50's and 60's. Only this is the Dakota plains and instead of the FBI being the "good guys" investigating the oppressive government the FBI is now one of the bad guys.

None of this will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with COINTELPRO or the oppression of war opponents in the 1960's.

As a history, there are better ones on COINTELPRO. But it does cover one niche of that era.

Book Review: The Diamond Cutter

The Diamond Cutter is one of the better business self help books that I've read in a while.  This means less than you would think at first blush.  About 90% are so terrible that I skip through the pages and then skip the book.  This one is in the top 5%.  It uses real sentences rather than sound bytes.  It is even dominated by complete coherent paragraphs that are fully on topic.

I found several good ideas in it, and about half of it was worth reading.  I found the Tibetan Buddhism aspects rather difficult to follow, but easy enough to skip.  If you are interested in Buddhism, read some other book.

In one way it reminds me of the core operating principles for Polaroid.  It had a simple four part corporate master policy.  The purpose of the company was to:

1. Earn a reasonable profit and deliver dividends to the shareholders.
2. Sell high quality products that are of value to the customers for a fair price.
3. Provide a rewarding work environment for the employees.
4. Provide benefits to the community.

It was recognized that managing one of these four was easy.  The management challenge is to meet all four goals.  (For a while Polaroid actually succeeded at this balancing act, but eventually management was not up to the challenge and they went bankrupt.)

Book Review: The Moral Center, David Callahan

A very disappointing book. I didn't bother finishing it. It started with a little bit of evidence that the author has an understanding of the non-liberal, non-progressive viewpoints. But it almost immediately degenerated into a long series of: anecdote, conclusion, anecdote, conclusion, ....

There is almost no real discussion of evidence, nor any significant analysis or evaluation of theory. It's just anecdotes and assertions.  What a waste of time. 

(First of various book reviews. My now retired doctor (henceforth RDoc) claimed that part of maintaining health was reading at least one book per month. According to RDoc this needed to be a real book, not magazine or newspaper articles, and not something read for work. This was to maintain mental alertness and skill.)