andreweverett360 Book Review, Management

Systems Thinking for Business and Management


Systems Thinking for Business and Management
by Umit S. Bititci and Agnessa Spanellis

Organizations, markets, and economies are systems, analogous to ecosystems. This clearly-written, 278-page textbook written by professors from Edinburgh Business School and the University of Edinburgh introduces key concepts in systems thinking, including methods for modeling them and analyzing their behavior.

It is said that the purpose of higher education is to teach students to think. In this spirit, I believe future decisionmakers and policymakers would be well served by a course in systems thinking. I think every business school should include this subject in its curriculum.

“To understand the real value of systems thinking, we need to recognize that nothing in this world exists in isolation and that everything is connected to something else. Everything is affected by something and potentially affects something else. With systems thinking, one can begin to understand, explain, and predict why complex systems such as organizations, people, and societies behave the way they do.”

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andreweverett360 Book Review, Finance

Essays on Hayek


Essays on Hayek
Edited by Fritz Machlup

Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) received the Nobel Prize in Economics on December 11, 1974 for his theory of business cycles and the effects of monetary and credit policies. The following year, the Mont Pelerin Society held a conference at Hillsdale College covering various aspects of Hayek’s work. This book is a collection of the papers presented and discussed.

I find it noteworthy that Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom (1944) on the consequences of socialism in the same era that George Orwell wrote Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949).

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andreweverett360 Book Review, Management

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency


When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency
by Roger L. Martin

Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto from 1998 to 2013, writes about a fragile imbalance in the U.S. economy and the erosion of the middle class. Major themes include efficiency vs. resilience, reductionist thinking vs. complex adaptive systems, and gaming the system. He cites examples of companies where an obsession with efficiency was catastrophic, and conversely, where slack is the secret sauce. He offers policy solutions in such areas as antitrust, taxation, stockholder voting rights, and education.

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andreweverett360 Book Review, Finance

I, Pencil


I, Pencil
by Leonard E. Read

This is the story of how a simple pencil is manufactured using numerous raw materials from all over the world, as told in the first person by the pencil itself.  It was first published in 1958 to explain how free-market economies work and to discredit centrally-planned economies, such as the Soviet Union. While trade barriers are not expressly discussed in the story, the reader can infer potential consequences rippling through the supply chain.

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andreweverett360 Book Review, Finance

50 Economics Classics


50 Economics Classics: Your shortcut to the most important ideas on capitalism, finance, and the global economy
by Tom Butler-Bowden

Tom Butler-Bowdon has summarized 50 economics books spanning 240 years (1776 to 2016), however 40% of the books were published in the 21st-century, thus offering contemporary relevance with historical context. Indeed he notes in the introduction, “if there is anything that the financial crisis of 2007-08 told us, it is that economic and financial history matters.”

Each book is distilled to about six pages. Among the many topics covered are: the euro, the Great Depression, subprime loans and the 2008 financial crisis, the value of a college education, the economics of cities,  free trade, protectionism, globalization, the gold standard, income inequality, innovation and entrepreneurship, investing in the stock market, employment, technology, poverty, famines, crime, foreign aid, property, dead capital, and behavioral economics.

Here are some selected highlights.

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andreweverett360 Book Review, Health

Healthy Competition


Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It
by Michael F. Cannon and Michael D. Tanner

Healthy Competition was published in 2005, but I pulled it off my shelf and reread it in early 2017, in the midst of the discourse about how to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (ACA, also known as Obamacare). Both the ACA and the proposed replacement focus on insurance, ignoring the exorbitant cost of health care in the United States. In this book, Cato Institute scholars Michael Cannon and Michael Tanner examine how the basic economic principles of price transparency, competition, and consumer choice could lower costs, reduce waste, and increase quality of care.

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