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This is the third series of book review on How to Get Rich by Rich Karlgaard, which he has categorize 5 books under how capitalism works today.

How Capitalism Works Today

18. <Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes–by Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne;

Some comments:

• I enjoy demographic and trend books, like “Lattitudes and Attitudes,” and was slightly enchanted by Claritas urban/rural clusters, like “Shotguns and Pickups.” But this book is far better at discovering behavioral groups and driving home, with humor and data, the trends as well as the policy or business options to complement the highlighted behaviors.
• A book categorizing approximately 75 trends the author sees in the modern world (American-focused).
  Written so that the ideas presented can be processed in everything from bite-sized individual morsels to sectional chunks (e.g. Love, Sex, and Relationships).
• Microtrends is a collection of 75 microtrends Penn claims to have discerned from poll research. Penn defines a microtrend as an intense identity group that makes up one percent or more of the population and is growing. Without offering any evidence, Penn claims that such a group can have significant impact on society.

19. New Normal, The : Great Opportunities in a Time of Great Risk–by Roger McNamee;

Some comments:

• Roger McNamee writes compellingly and The New Normal helped me take a big-picture look at my career. We’re always hearing about leaders and followers, but McNamee talks too about individuals and our value in the world and marketplace.
• His investment theories offer good counsel to portfolio managers and college students alike (e.g. innovation comes in three phases: infrastructure, enabling technology, content & applications. Know what phase we’re in to avoid investing in good ideas before their time.). He seems like the kind of guy you’d want to invest your money (he stays in Best Westerns on the road!), serve as your mentor or professor, negotiate multilateral trade agreements, play guitar at your wedding or babysit your kid. Good read.
• The author is a very deep business thinker, almost as insightful as Peter Drucker, which is really saying something. The author is gifted in forecasting the future trends based on the present data. The 2nd half of this book wasn’t nearly as good. Maybe the author was writing fillers (as many authors are forced to do to meet page quotas mandated by the publishers).

20. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change Series)–by Clayton Christensen;

Some comments:

• This is a must read for managers in any industry. Dr. Andrew S. Grove, Chairman and CEO of Intel Corporation had this to say, “This book addresses a tough problem that most successful companies will face eventually. It’s lucid, analytical-and scary.”
• I think the innovator’s Dilemma is an excellent book. The ideas are empirically foudend and together they form a coherent theoretical framework. The examples from the computer disk industry, the steel industry and others, are very well-documented and interesting. The book is logically structured and reads easily.
• I better understand my own frustrations of trying to do new things in a large corporation given the further insight from Christensen that assets are really managed by customers, not our own managers. That is what makes this book scary. There seems little hope of any large corporation staying on top of disruptive technology unless they follow the prescription of segregating those innovations from the usual corporate overhead structure.

21. The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us–by Robyn Meredith;

Some comments:

• In “The Elephant and the Dragon” (245 pages), Robyn Meredith, a Hong Kong-based journalist for Forbes magazine, does an excellent job setting the table of what is going on these days in China (some of it was a repeat for me) and also in India, which I am less familiar with, and hence that peaked my interest.
• The real pay-off for this book, however, comes in the lsat chapter, “A Catalyst for Competitiveness”, in which the author addresses the challenges for the US head-on, and then makes a number of suggestions. The author demonstrates in a clear fashion how disastrous it would be for China to reevaluate its currency by 20-40 percent (or for the US to slap an import duty on that magnitude on Chinese imports), and that even if it happened, it would have little impact on the US job market, and furthermore how Americans are directly benefitting from the cheaper Chinese currency.
• The thing I liked most about this book is that on a topic already well publicized, “The Elephant and the Dragon” was able to deliver a new angle. It particularly had good coverage on India, which tends to get less media attention than China.

22. Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy–by Thomas Sowell.

Some comments:

• I think all high-school graduates with any sense should read this before signing up for credit cards or getting a job, and certainly any college student looking for work as well. A fantastic read, which is certainly difficult to do when one is speaking about the economy.
• Everyone without a degree in Economics should read this book. This is a very easy and practical way to understand basic economic principles. Sowell is a master at making seemingly complex concepts into something very understandable by removing all the unecessary jargon and replacing it with real life examples we can all understand.

If you have not pick up any of these book by now, I urge you to do it now as all these are very much relate to our day to day life and definitely has some influence to you one way or another in near future!

Do stay with me in the next book review on Instructional Tips, which cover author like William Strunk Jr., John Mauldin, Robert Kiyosaki and many more.

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