\u201cNever confuse movement with action.\u201d \u2013 Ernest Hemingway<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you don\u2019t know where you are going, any road will take you there.\u201d — Lewis Carroll<\/p>\n
T<\/span>here is a difference between speed and velocity.\u00a0 Physics teaches that speed is the rate at which you move; velocity is speed in a particular direction.\u00a0 Years of sailing, kayaking, and canoeing impressed on me the difference of those words\u2014so have years of advising students on career choices.\u00a0 The two epigrams to this post mock those who favor speed over velocity. \u00a0Velocity is what matters.\u00a0 In sailing, it takes a centerboard and a good rudder to be able to tack into the wind.\u00a0 In careers, it takes a good rudder to tack into the stuff that life throws at you.<\/p>\n The year, 2020, threw a lot at us (a pandemic, a financial crisis, a recession, a polarizing election, and civil unrest to name a few).\u00a0 The newspapers have been full of stories of people who were thrown off course by these events.\u00a0 Regaining velocity is not just a matter of living and working harder (i.e., regaining speed), but rather of living and working more purposefully (gaining velocity).<\/p>\n In previous years, I have extolled the importance of reading to sharpen one\u2019s purpose as a leader (see \u00a02011<\/a>,\u00a02012<\/a>,\u00a02013<\/a>,\u00a02014<\/a>,\u00a02015<\/a>,\u00a02016<\/a>,\u00a02017<\/a>,\u00a02018<\/a>, and 2019<\/a>).\u00a0 Thus, reading good books can help you shape your direction.\u00a0 The best books don\u2019t tell you what to think; they may calm you down or rile you up; but they confront you with ideas that stimulate your own sense of purpose.\u00a0 I\u2019m leery of the vast self-help literature, very directive stuff that reduces purpose to banal checklists.\u00a0 Instead, start from your own interests.\u00a0 During difficult times, self-directed personal reading can help you get a grip on your rudder.<\/p>\n Get some good books (as defined by your interests and by people whose judgment you respect); don\u2019t read junk.\u00a0 Set aside a few hours each week to read and make notes about the parts you like\u2014I underline, dog-ear, and highlight mercilessly (only in books that I own!)\u00a0 Pay attention to what resonated with you and follow the trail to more good books.\u00a0 Give any book the first hundred pages to hook you, after which you either finish it or quit and go on to another. \u00a0If you can, read a book with others and discuss it. \u00a0Serious reading is intentional.<\/p>\n I read a lot, mostly because I like to, and partly because it\u2019s my job.\u00a0 A wise guy student once asked, \u201cWhy do you read?\u00a0 Don\u2019t you know everything already?\u201d Nope.\u00a0 As 2020 showed, the world keeps changing.\u00a0 I owe it to my students and colleagues to hone my mastery continually.\u00a0 Abraham Lincoln once explained that if he had six hours to chop down a tree, he would spend the first four sharpening the axe. Think of reading as sharpening your axe.<\/p>\n In 2020, I sampled widely across medicine, history, public policy, fiction, and leadership.\u00a0 The following items resonated the most and carry my strong recommendation.\u00a0 Best wishes to you for reading in 2021!<\/p>\n Medicine<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n This pandemic highlighted the heroism and ingenuity of medical professionals.\u00a0 It has also forced one to confront the limitations of modern medicine.\u00a0 A common trope is \u201cIf we can send a man to the moon, why can\u2019t we cure X, Y, or Z?\u201d\u00a0 The X, Y, or Z that I hear most often is cancer, the second-leading cause of death (after heart disease).\u00a0 According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, cancer death rates have decreased every year for the past two decades, yet in terms of our understanding it remains the most inscrutable leading killer.\u00a0 In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer; it has yet to be won.\u00a0 Siddhartha Mukherjee\u2019s, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer<\/em><\/a> explains why in language that the layperson can understand.\u00a0 The origins of the disease remain elusive; the disease itself takes many forms (Mukherjee calls it \u201ca whole family of diseases\u201d); the technology and treatments are esoteric and yield idiosyncratic results; and the medical and scientific communities struggle to prove the effectiveness of new therapies.\u00a0 Mukherjee discusses the history of research and treatment and toward the end of the book presents some moving portraits of his patients (Mukherjee is an oncologist.)\u00a0 The powerful impressions of this book include the sense that specialists are playing whack-a-mole with an especially deceptive adversary.\u00a0 Mukherjee writes, \u201cTo keep pace with this malady, you needed to keep inventing and reinventing, learning and unlearning strategies.\u201d \u00a0Another impression is that in the absence of truly effective therapies, the most effective investments for society are in the areas of prevention, detection, and in early treatment.\u00a0 Mukherjee writes, \u201cour goals could be more modest\u2026death in old age is inevitable, but death before old age is not\u2026It is possible that we are fatally conjoined to this ancient illness, forced to play its cat-and-mouse game for the foreseeable future of our species.\u00a0 But if cancer deaths can be prevented before old age, if the terrifying game of treatment, resistance, recurrence, and more treatment can be stretched out longer and longer, then it will transform the way we imagine this ancient illness.\u201d<\/p>\n In a previous post, I commended the writing of Atul Gawande, an endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women\u2019s Hospital in Boston.\u00a0 His book Complications: A Surgeon\u2019s Notes on an Imperfect Science <\/em><\/a>is a collection of 14 articles published in Slate<\/em> and The New Yorker<\/em> that explore the fallibility of modern medicine.\u00a0 He draws on personal experiences to illustrate the ambiguity of diseases, the difficulty of treatment, and the profound ethical dilemmas that physicians face.\u00a0 Rather than doubt and fear, this book instills greater respect for medical professionals.\u00a0 Arresting insights, fluid prose and gripping anecdotes commend this books as a valuable briefing for the sophisticated consumer on the realities of health care services.<\/p>\n History<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cTo know who we are, we need to know where we come from,\u201d said economist Michel de Vroey.\u00a0 The book by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States<\/em><\/a> is an excellent one-volume introduction.\u00a0 Written in easy language, laced with interesting anecdotes, and grounded in solid research and evidence, the authors take the reader through some 243 years of capitalist history.\u00a0 Greenspan is the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and marshals economic data with a light touch.\u00a0 Wooldridge is a senior editor at The Economist <\/em>and brings the irony and critical mindset of the Schumpeter <\/em>column that he penned for years.\u00a0 Here, they sketch the emergence of the modern American capitalist economy: huge, diverse, open, inventive, disruptive, and prosperous.\u00a0 At the same time, they acknowledge its shortcomings, the support that some capitalists gave to the slave trade and suppression of Native Americans, the rise of monopolies, and in recent decades, the stalling productivity growth.\u00a0 They are clear about the episodic downturns that sweep away less efficient firms and open the field for new firms, the process of \u201ccreative destruction.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 The same process motivates government to intervene in managing the business cycle.\u00a0 They note the \u201cmood of pessimism\u201d in the country today but conclude \u201cYet whenever America has flirted with national decline in the past\u2014in the 1930s, for example, or the 1970s\u2014it has always grappled with its problems and come back stronger.\u00a0 The underlying vigor of the national economy, and indeed of the national character, has always trumped failures of policy making.\u201d<\/p>\n Andrew Browning\u2019s, The Panic of 1819: The First Great Depression<\/em><\/a>, is a deep dive into a sorely neglected episode of creative destruction.\u00a0 He tells a story that should be familiar to business people.\u00a0 Changes in the banking system seeded an expansion of credit.\u00a0 Easy money fueled a bubble in real estate.\u00a0 Then a volcano in the Dutch East Indies blew up and worsened the weather in the Northern Hemisphere, impairing harvests, and driving food prices higher. \u00a0Next, Britain clamped down on food imports when the weather (and harvests) improved.\u00a0 Thus, the export market in American foodstuffs dried up, farmers couldn\u2019t service their debts, and banks collapsed.\u00a0 The Second Bank of the U.S., a proto-central bank, called in loans and restricted the circulation of its banknotes worsening the crisis.\u00a0 The aftershocks of this crisis extended to the disastrous Missouri Compromise of 1820 that permitted the westward expansion of slavery, and the advent of Andrew Jackson to the White House in 1828.\u00a0 I enjoyed this book because of its depth of research, its linkage of the crisis to institutional changes before and after, and its rich narrative of events.<\/p>\n One of the dominant puzzles of our age is why Russia failed to make the leap to liberal democratic capitalism after the collapse of the USSR in 1990.\u00a0 Robert Service\u2019s A History of Twentieth-Century Russia<\/em><\/a> helps to explain why.\u00a0 From the revolution in 1917 to its demise, the USSR entrenched norms and institutions that proved to be brittle in the face of change and that when change came, morphed into new forms of oppression and dominance by an elite.\u00a0 This book affirms the importance of institutions (norms, rules, laws, ways of interacting) that the citizens in developed economies seem to take for granted.\u00a0 Such institutions include the rule with the consent of governed, trial by jury of one\u2019s peers, independent judiciary, sanctity of contract, freedom of speech, etc.\u00a0 The stark tyranny of Lenin, Stalin, and their successors provides the playbook for tyrants today.\u00a0 Service withholds no criticisms toward tyranny then and now.<\/p>\n Over the years, I have read installments of Robert A. Caro\u2019s brilliant multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson<\/a>, the final book of which is being written.\u00a0 Thus, I noted the announcement that Caro had written a reflection on how he writes history.\u00a0 His recent book, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing<\/em><\/a> offers wonderful perspective on the incredible effort required to write a masterpiece.\u00a0 He began his career as a journalist, where he learned the virtues of dogged field research\u2014this is a valuable reminder to writers (especially academic scholars) that there is usually more to any story than the preliminary facts suggest.\u00a0 \u201cJournalism is the first rough draft of history,\u201d said Philip Graham, former Publisher of the Washington Post. <\/em>\u00a0Caro\u2019s book essentially argues that there is a lot<\/strong> more research necessary to produce a final draft of history.\u00a0 Caro\u2019s research has yielded important findings.\u00a0 Caro was the first biographer to document that Johnson\u2019s rise as a powerful Congressman was based on secret corporate donations from Texas oilmen: \u201cBefore the campaign was over\u2014in that single month, October, 1940\u2014Lyndon Johnson had raised from Texas and had distributed to congressional candidates campaign funds on a scale that dwarfed anything ever given to Democratic congressional candidates from a single, central source.\u201d\u00a0 Caro also discovered that LBJ\u2019s 1948 Senatorial election victory was based on fraudulent voting.\u00a0 Caro attributes his success as a writer to some early advice he received as a rookie journalist: \u201cTurn every page.\u00a0 Never assume anything.\u00a0 Turn every goddamned page.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Political Economy<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n Two books address in didactic fashion America\u2019s declining growth rate and rising inequality.\u00a0 Robert J. Gordon\u2019s, The Rise and Fall of American Growth<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> is the best one-volume overview of the growth in economic output from 1870 to the present.\u00a0 And it is rather downbeat: he argues that the most transformational inventions are behind us.\u00a0 For instance, he points to the invention of the automobile, telephone, public sanitation, transistor, and penicillin as truly pivotal events, after which the inventions have been derivative and incremental.\u00a0 What\u2019s worse is that an aging population, deteriorating educational system, and rising debt will be a drag on future growth.\u00a0 The Upswing: How American Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again<\/em><\/a> by Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett takes a different perspective than Gordon\u2014they focus on a variety of social indicators that suggest growing national stress.\u00a0 Measures such as social trust, household formation, economic inequality, social mobility, individualism and communitarianism improved from 1914 to about 1968 and have worsened since.\u00a0 Yet the thrust of this book is more hopeful.\u00a0 The authors argue that measures of social stress have swung pendulum-like over time.\u00a0 They summarize the swings from \u201cI to We to I\u201d\u2014from individualism to communitarianism and back again\u2014and that thus \u201cWe<\/u> can do it again.\u201d\u00a0 The book is long on historical survey and shorter on prescription, but given the authors\u2019 love for the New Deal and Great Society programs, it is no surprise that they advocate greater intervention by government.\u00a0 Whether or not their prescriptions appeal to you, the survey of social trends over the past century gives an excellent frame of reference for the problems we confront today.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most upbeat recent overview of social trends is Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World and Why things are Better than You Think<\/em><\/a> by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronnlund.\u00a0 Hans Rosling was an expert in public health and observed the incredible improvements in global life expectancy, poverty, nourishment over the past several decades.\u00a0\u00a0 Documenting these improvements, the authors explore why people tend to ignore them and claim inaccurately that trends are getting worse.\u00a0 They offer 10 factors\u2014casts of mind\u2014that affect our ability to make appropriate inferences from data.\u00a0 Such factors include false dichotomies, poor benchmarks, and loss bias.\u00a0 Factfulness\u201d is the ability to avert these cognitive effects.\u00a0 The authors wrote, \u201cBeing always in favor of or always against any particular idea makes you blind to information that doesn\u2019t fit your perspective. This is usually a bad approach if you like to understand reality.\u201d\u00a0 Some critics have charged the authors with blind optimism.\u00a0 But given the negativity of much of the literature on current social trends, this book is a welcome counter-balance.<\/p>\n Readers of my earlier best books blog posts will note that I am a fan of the work of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.\u00a0 Their recent book, Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty<\/a>,<\/em> resonates with themes of their earlier Why Nations Fail <\/em>and addresses why liberal democracy is so hard to create and sustain.\u00a0 Their thesis is that successful democracies entail two countervailing forces.\u00a0 One is the \u201ccage of norms\u201d or strict social and economic conventions that ensure order.\u00a0 The other is a buoyant and open society featuring a critical free press, turbulent commercial activity, and high innovation.\u00a0 The two forces check and balance each other.\u00a0 Successful nations walk the narrow corridor between these two forces without giving in to either.\u00a0 What I liked best about this volume (as I did the earlier volume) is its wealth of anecdotes and cross-country comparisons.\u00a0 However, I was less persuaded by rhetoric in the book that seemed aimed at the presidential campaign of 2020.\u00a0 Yet as a stimulus to serious thinking about the sustainability of democracy this book succeeds quite well.<\/p>\n Anne Applebaum\u2019s Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism<\/a><\/em> addresses threats to democracy from nationalists and authoritarians on both the Left and Right.\u00a0 She identifies as a center-Right journalist living in Poland, part of a cohort of writers that in 1999 \u201cPoles call[ed] the right\u2014the conservatives, the anti-Communists\u2026Free-market liberals, classical liberals, maybe Thatcherites.\u00a0 Even those who might have been less definite about the economics did believe in democracy, in the rule of law, in checks and balances, and in a Poland that was a member of NATO and on its way to joining the European Union.\u201d\u00a0 Twenty years later, that same group had shattered into opposing groups of nationalist authoritarians and now center-left liberals. Such a split has undermined democracy not only in Poland, but throughout Eastern Europe and many of the developed economies.\u00a0 She concludes that \u201cGiven the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy.\u00a0 Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all our societies eventually will.\u201d\u00a0 Her second chapter, \u201cHow Demagogues Win,\u201d gives a sobering narrative of the decline in democracy in several nations.\u00a0 What drives the appeal of authoritarianism is not closed-mindedness, she says, but \u201cIt is better described as simple-mindedness: people are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity.\u00a0 They dislike divisiveness.\u00a0 They prefer unity.\u00a0 A sudden onslaught of diversity\u2014diversity of opinions, diversity of experiences\u2014therefore makes them angry.\u00a0 They seek solutions in new political language that makes them feel safer and more secure.\u201d\u00a0 Of course, the internet and social media have made easy the dissemination of extreme views and the curation of comforting identities.\u00a0 She quotes Jeanne Kirkpatrick, President Reagan\u2019s UN Ambassador, \u201cTo destroy a society, it is first necessary to delegitimize its basic institutions\u201d\u2014Applebaum goes on to say, \u201cIf you believe that American institutions are no different from their opposite [i.e., authoritarian nations], then there is no reason to defend them.\u201d\u00a0 The denial of a sense of shared moral purpose underlies the decline of democracy.<\/p>\n Fiction<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n Looking for classic books to inform my understanding of the pandemic, Gabriel Garcia Marquez\u2019s, Love in the Time of Cholera<\/em><\/a>, caught my eye.\u00a0 Yet cholera is mentioned only at a few points in passing, as a condiment to the main course. \u00a0A clue to the relevance of cholera in the story is Marquez\u2019s line, \u201cthe symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera,\u201d which alludes to feverishness.\u00a0 \u00a0It\u2019s a classic story of boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, and then boy-gets-girl\u2014all spread over 70 years.\u00a0 \u00a0If you start this book, definitely give it the 100-page trial before giving up: it\u2019s a complex story (I counted 41 characters), set in a fictional land (probably Colombia), and with quirky protagonists, none of whom draw the reader\u2019s empathy.\u00a0 \u00a0Yet the plot creates a tension that pulls the reader along: is this a tragedy in which the two protagonists fail miserably, or a comedy in which the flawed and bumbling figures finally succeed in love?\u00a0 The character development is incredibly rich with exquisite details.\u00a0 The protagonists are iconic and memorable\u2014and their differences heighten the tension about the basic nature of the story.\u00a0 The author\u2019s irony sets this apart from a typical romance.\u00a0 Everyone is skewered, occasionally in laugh-out-loud fashion.\u00a0 And the writing is lush, with profound observations sprinkled like hidden gems along the way.\u00a0 For instance, \u201cHe was still too young to know that the heart\u2019s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.\u201d\u00a0 Despite the crazy characters, the tortured relationships, and the cloud of irony overhanging this tale, this is an optimistic book about love.\u00a0 Written by a Nobel Laureate in literature, and itself the recipient of numerous plaudits, the book has the pedigree of a classic.<\/p>\n Hilary Mantel, The Wolf Hall Trilogy<\/em><\/a> (consisting of three substantial books, Wolf Hall<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Bring up the Bodies<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>and The Mirror and the Light<\/em><\/a>).\u00a0 These books of historical fiction chronicle the life, career, and death of Thomas Cromwell, who rose from poverty to become the equivalent of prime minister to King Henry the Eighth of England.\u00a0 Typically regarded as Henry\u2019s evil hatchet-man (see Robert Bolt\u2019s play, The Man for All Seasons<\/em>)<\/a>, Mantel\u2019s Cromwell emerges as a likeable, rational, ethical technocrat, who sought to protect England from foreign meddling and the King\u2019s rash impulses.\u00a0 Mantel sketches well the geopolitics of Renaissance Europe: the jockeying among France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Catholic Church for dominance. \u00a0The threat of foreign invasion looms over the entire story.\u00a0 So does the threat of regime change prompted by the surly Plantagenet family, whom Henry\u2019s grandfather (a Tudor) displaced on the throne. \u00a0Henry\u2019s desire to prevent civil war and firmly establish the Tudor dynasty by means of a male heir prompts him to cycle through six wives\u2014in turn, this prompts England\u2019s split from the Catholic Church.\u00a0 I found the historical background to be fascinating.\u00a0 And the insights about palace intrigue and the jockeying of advisers for influence are well worth the price of the book.\u00a0 The trilogy is like a practicum in dealing with an authoritarian leader, rich in psychological lessons.\u00a0 Cromwell reflects on Henry: \u201cYou will see Henry, profound in deception, take an ambassador\u2019s arm and charm him.\u00a0 Lying gives him a deep and subtle pleasure, so deep and subtle he does not know he is lying; he thinks he is the most truthful of princes.\u201d If you are unfamiliar with the history of Renaissance England, I recommend that you first watch Wolf Hall<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>a serialized video produced by BBC and streaming on Amazon Prime.\u00a0 The novels justly deserve the many accolades, including the Man Booker Prize of 2009 and the National Book Critics Circle Award of 2010.<\/p>\n In my earlier best books blogs, I have confessed my love of crime fiction.\u00a0 In 2020, I read seven novels in Michael Connelly\u2019s, series based on the fictional detective, Hieronymus Bosch<\/a>.\u00a0 I\u2019m up to novel #10 out of 22.\u00a0 Pulp fiction these are not: the characters are credible, the crimes and dilemmas are ingenious, the writing is tight (as is true of other great crime writers such as Raymond Chandler), the pace is fast, justice tends to prevail, and the insights that Connelly tosses to the reader are deep.\u00a0 For instance, in the most recent novel, The Narrows<\/a>, <\/em>he wrote, \u201cYou can become unhinged and cut loose from the world.\u00a0 You can believe you are a permanent outsider.\u00a0 But the innocence of a child will bring you back and give you the shield of joy with which to protect yourself.\u201d\u00a0 My wife and I read these novels together and enjoy discussing the clues along the way.\u00a0 For a sampler of the Bosch stories, see the video series on Bosch streaming on Amazon Prime<\/a>.<\/p>\n Leadership<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n Erik Larsen The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance during the Blitz<\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0 This is an extraordinary portrait of a leader at the height of his gifts and in the depths of crisis.\u00a0 Winston Churchill gained the premiership of Britain in 1940 just as the Nazi war machine was rolling into Holland, Belgium, and France.\u00a0 With the retreat at Dunkirk, Britain seemed to be next.\u00a0 Some British leaders quietly advocated settlement with Hitler to avoid invasion.\u00a0 Churchill staunchly opposed what would amount to surrender.\u00a0 So Germany commenced a campaign of bombing in an effort to soften the will of the British\u2014this was the famous \u201cBlitz.\u201d\u00a0 Larsen\u2019s book describes Churchill\u2019s style and policies as a war leader.\u00a0 He emerges in the story as a man with idiosyncrasies and failings, but also as a spirit that can best be described in one word, \u201cindomitable.\u201d\u00a0 Interleaved throughout the book are portrayals of Churchill\u2019s family: a ne\u2019er do well son, one daughter in an unhappy marriage, another daughter coming of age, and a wife who is the icon of patience.\u00a0 The development of these characters is rich, at the level of a masterful novel.\u00a0 I\u2019ve read a great deal of Churchillian history and can attest to the new insights embedded in this book.\u00a0 Strongly recommended.<\/p>\n