Do you think he should have recommended a book that was otherwise hard to get? I think people here, after reading this article, would have thought it ridiculous that the book wasn't available on Amazon.
My guess is that it is legitimately was his favorite book (he's known for his voracious reading and recommendations) and he wanted it to be read by a lot of people. So he pitched it to the publisher and the WSJ to get it done. I don't see what's so bad about that. I hardly think he's motivated by money or fame right now.
Indeed, if I got FU money there's a bunch of books I'd release as cheap sets, with corrections and updates, in multiple languages. (Around stats and science, mostly.)
This is sort of strange (but great) because at least once at every single Berkshire Hathaway meeting someone asks Buffett and Munger what they're favorite books are, and I have never heard them mention this one. There is 20 years of in in-depth content about Buffett in books, articles, meetings, and interviews. "What's your fav book" must be one of the top 5 questions he gets and I've never heard about this book. This is great.
Buffett is an investor though right? Whereas Gates built a company. The two closely related but not the same? So it doesn't surprise me they turn to different books.
Investors usually recommend books on security analysis, which would hardly have been useful for Gates in the 90's.
Actually it's a little known fact that Buffet built a company too. Yes He did invest in other publicly traded companies, and he's also acquired quite a few too.
You can think of those as acquisitions. It's sort of a lesser known fact that he made the majority of his money in insurance. Before anyone else thought of it, Buffett developed a Homeostatic operation that collected insurance premiums and then invested that float in other companies who had a history of spinning off large amounts of free cash flow. He'd suck off that free cash flow and buy up more companies. All while keeping a larger and larger amount of free cash on hand in the event that he had to pay out any large claims.
This is all easier said than done because if you price your premiums wrong you can blow up the whole business. He priced his premiums conservatively and sold odd insurance in the back of newspapers and trade magazines, covering things and making policies that no one else dare take on.
There's a lot more gun slinging and pivoting in the Buffett story than you'd read about today. He raised cash manually from groups of Doctors in the 60's for his first investor partnership (he was 26). It was no different than a 26 year old kid going out today and raising cash for a startup. And incidentally, he delivered. There's one story in the excellent Alice Schroeder bio about him (http://goo.gl/nZGrIX) He was around 30 years old living in suburban Omaha. One afternoon he casually asks his next door neighbor if he's ever thought about how he'll pay for his children's college then goes into a sales pitch asking him for $10,000 (in the 60's). The neighbor declined. Can you imagine? He had hustle, and street smarts, and swagger. That's a businessman. In fact he's one of the best businessmen. Even Gates would tell you that.
Before anyone else thought of it, Buffett developed a Homeostatic operation that collected insurance premiums and then invested that float in other companies...
That's exactly what I mean. Buffett is famous & successful for being a finance wizard. They are both businessmen, of course, but different sorts. At least, so it seems to me.
You can search on completed listings. Looks like only 2 copies were listed, both unsold. Also, it seems like a long way to get Bill Gates to write a guest column in the WSJ to make $260 (top bid $81 now).
"Beginning July 21, the magazine’s new and archived articles will be free to everyone, a move it hopes will attract more readers. […] The three months during which articles will be free, a promotion that will most likely be sponsored by a large corporation, will provide the magazine with data it plans to use in deciding how to position and price its “metered paywall” — allowing a certain number, or certain kinds, of free articles, but then charging its most avid readers through a subscription plan."
Will check out BA when I get a chance. But can't imagine it will displace what remains my favourite "business" book of all time, the Id Software creation yarn: Masters of Doom by David Kushner.
It was recently suggested to me that every entrepreneur should read Sir Richard Branson's autobiography. I was dismissive having read the LRB review of Bower's biography of "the stuntman": http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n06/david-runciman/the-stuntman.
Is "Losing My Virginity" worth a peruse? Or should we just wait for Gates himself to deliver his memoirs?
Bill Gates also recommends My Years with General Motors [1], calling it "probably the best book to read if you want to read only one book about business." I would second that recommendation.
Apparently not, but I personally am a huge fan of Business @ The Speed Of Thought. Even though I'm not a huge Gates fan, and definitely not a Microsoft fan, there's no question that Gates hit on some good stuff in that book. And amazingly, as old as it is, I'd argue that most businesses (heck, most organizations period) to this day have still not achieved anything quite equal to his idea of a "Digital Nervous System" (and yes, I know term didn't originate with Gates, but he did a brilliant job of articulating and popularizing it).
I still keep that book near my bed and re-read sections of it from time to time. From even an avowed "Micro$oft" basher from back in the Slashdot days when the GatesBorg image was The Thing, I have to give the devil his due - B@TSOT is solid stuff.
What is the deal with the embedded ticker symbols with popup stock info? I suppose they're trying to drive traffic to some of their other articles, but I can't help seeing those things as irrelevant distractions to an otherwise interesting article.
I'd be more interested in Steve Jobs' favorite business books. I know he was a huge fan of the Innovator's Dilemma, probably because he already naturally understood most of it from experience before having to read it, and he was probably fan of other similar books too, and I'd like to know which books those were.
I don't think Bill Gates ever understood a book like Innovator's Dilemma. Not really.
>I don't think Bill Gates ever understood a book like Innovator's Dilemma. Not really.
Bill's taking advantage of IBM's focus on their mainframe customers and under cutting them with Windows pcs seems almost the classic example of the things the Innovator's Dilemma is on about and probably the biggest one in history in dollar value terms. I suspect he understands that stuff.
What makes you think he didn't understand the Innovator's Dilemma?
When he was CEO some of the more innovative products not part of their core business included smart watches, internet TV (MSN TV), the XBox, and many others. Granted some were way ahead of their time, and I would agree to saying Ballmer didn't understand, but I wouldn't say Gates didn't.
Check out the Innovator's Solution, the follow up.
It explains why most of the profit (ability to charge your costs plus a premium) was dominated in the 90's by OS's, and not by the now notorious disk-drive companies.
Gates probably understood this (how to position yourself not be disrupted) and it's why we're all reading his favorite book - which is great by the way.
I haven't read Christensen's books, but the story Jill Lepore tells in that article sounds totally credible.
Disruptive innovation is a theory of history. Given any historical event with winners and losers, it reframes it as a contest between innovator and non-innovator with a preordained outcome. Microsoft succeeded and Xerox failed because PCs were the inevitable future, which Microsoft embraced and Xerox denied. Xerox should have seen that the PC was inevitable and planned accordingly, the theory says.
However, there is a problem when trying to apply the theory in real time, as Lepore points out: "Disruptive innovation can reliably be seen only after the fact." She explains the theory's circularity: "Christensen has compared the theory of disruptive innovation to a theory of nature: the theory of evolution. But... advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments. If an established company doesn’t disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be because it didn’t disrupt. When a startup fails, that’s a success, since epidemic failure is a hallmark of disruptive innovation. ... When an established company succeeds, that’s only because it hasn’t yet failed. And, when any of these things happen, all of them are only further evidence of disruption." It works well only in retrospect, and it can't be disproven. Like all theories of history, it only explains things that have already happened.
Separately Gates looks amazingly old in the last few years way beyond his age. Especially in that photo. That is not the skin of a man in his late 50's.
I've speculated that he has either to much sun exposure [1], smokes (but he doesn't?), or has some sickness that has caused him to age.
Actually when he retired from Microsoft I had thought that health might have something to do with it. (I don't remember many cases anecdotal of successful business people "retiring" as early as he has done. They usually continue strong until a ripe age.)
Obviously there is no known sickness that he has spoken publicly about but that wouldn't be that unusual.
[1] But he doesn't seem like the type that would be baking in the sun over the course of many years and he does live in Washington State not in Florida.
Edit: It's not off topic and it's not a comment made for vanity reasons (ie "jeez doesn't he look bad!"). The comment is made primarily because I think he possibly has health issues and I'm curious what others think (especially those on HN with a medical background).
He's likely done a lot of traveling and probably has a yacht or two- so he's had more sun exposure than the average Microsoft employee. His father is almost 90 and is still going. If someone could find some photos of his father as a 60-something we could probably make a rough determination if there's maybe some genetic factor involved in the sort of skin wrinkling Mr.Gates III shows now.
It's quite inappropriate to speculate on a person's private health matters in a public forum. It's little different than being in the same room as someone, then pointing at them and asking "What's wrong with that person's funny skin? Is anyone a doctor here? Let's have a discussion about it!"
"It's quite inappropriate to speculate on a person's private health matters in a public forum."
I don't agree at all. And what are you basing that on? Is there some "rules of public forum" that has been agreed upon and accepted by the internet rule setting committee? Is there anything in the HN faq that states this?
Even more importantly, Gates is a very public and well known person. I'm not making comments on some unknown individual who works in marketing at some YC company (or Microsoft for that matter). Or an HN commenter.
It's totally appropriate to speculate on his health [1] (and in fact the media does this all the time about many well known people). That is not the same as saying people on HN (such as yourself) might not find it inappropriate (obviously I'm being downvoted so many people reading this particular post don't seem to agree with me.)
Lastly, the richest or near richest man in the world doesn't need to be protected from some anonymous person's speculation.
[1] Not the same as saying HN likes the speculation or it's appropriate for HN. But you didn't say that. You said "health matters in a public forum".
The word "forum" is a Latin word, and I'm using it in its traditional meaning (ie: a "public venue"), not in the recent "internet message board thingy" meaning. And I think I'll just have to disagree with you as (1) I don't consider today's media as demonstrating exemplary values, and (2) it's not about whether or not a wealthy/public person needs protection; it's about whether a particular activity is right. Obviously my value system is different from yours in that regard.
Building Microsoft cannot have been a low-stress endeavor, and people always remark how quickly Presidents visually age during stressful political times.
I agree that Presidents age over the course of their term.
But there are many differences between being Potus and the head of Microsoft.
President is a short term job (in general) and it is entered into later in life after I would guess a less stressful (than being President that is) life.
Gates started Microsoft when young and grew into the job over time. Not to mention that being the captain of that ship is greatly different (in terms of the "masters" that you serve) than being a politician.
Not having done either it's hard to really decide what the real differences are. But my guess is that Gates obviously had a tremendous amount of support from people hand picked over the years to carry out his wishes and way more latitude to do what he wanted which a President doesn't have. I think that factor alone is good with reducing stress of a job. (Being more in charge of your destiny, being more in control).
Also although I don't have photos to show I do remember there was a demarcation point where he started to just "look older". That didn't seem to coincide with just normal aging.
Ballmer of course doesn't look bad for his age. (Not that that proves my point but I will point that out.)
Bill Gates brand suffered during this time, and it was definitely a high stress timeframe for him. He polished his brand by donating money (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundati... ) and he stepped down as CEO of Microsoft in January 2000.
Google image search "Bill Gates [year]" and compare how he aged over time.
It reminds me of photos I've seen of Latin American farmers. Leathery skin due to excessive sun exposure. Seems strange, but maybe he doesn't use sunscreen?
Why does anyone care what he looks like? I sometimes think Fancy boys are drawn to tech? Yea, down vote me; I don't care, nor even know what a down vote is? I don't think I
want to know either. I just found out what Hell-banning is--and it seems petty, and something a spoiled, angry, teen would do to someone.
The problem is that I'm easy, all too easy, and I fall for these ploys. And now I'm biting myself to buy the book :) Well done.
edit: what's available is a Kindle edition, that I suppose is from the same book http://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-Twelve-Classic-Str...