Technofile Europe

At last, book reviews for entrepreneurs

After much pestering by his friends and colleagues, my partner Javier Rojas has taken the plunge and started writing a blog: Seeking Growth.  My guess is it will quickly become an invaluable resource for bootstrapping (and capital-raising!) entrepreneurs.

I don't know anyone who devours books on business, history, philosophy and futurology quite so avidly as Javier does.  For his blog he promises to review the best of these, and to comment on the topics he has been obsessing about for 20 years: technology deals and entrepreneurship.

As digital book distribution takes hold and Kindles multiply like rabbits, it is becoming ever harder to choose good books.  And given that most of us allocate precious little time to reading, we don't want to waste it by getting halfway through a book that turns out to be crap.

Traditional Sunday newspapers are fine for reviews of new novels, history books and the occasional pop economics tome, but the longer tail of business books remains largely unreviewed.  Not only that, but if you've ever picked one up on the fly you know that quality is all over the map.

Javier has been bending our ears for years with weekly expositions and insights gleaned from new books, interviews with successful entrepreneurs, and hard-won experiences with his portfolio companies. His enthusiasm, positivism and problem-solving approach are both infectious and effective.  Now a broader audience will get to see the world through his eyes.

Welcome to the blogosphere Javier!

The last mercenaries (Book review#2)

The other book I read while waiting out the summer airport delays last week is Adam Roberts' The Wonga Coup.  You may remember the odd incident in 2004 when a planeload of supposed mercenaries was arrested in Zimbabwe.  A few weeks later it emerged that Mark Thatcher was tangentially involved in the plot to overthrow the tyrannical regime of Teodoro Obiang in Equatorial Guinea.  The story peaked when Jeffrey Archer was tapped as one of the financiers.  As the events emerged piecemeal, they seemed unreal and a throwback to the days when soldiers of fortune (like Bob Denard) cruised the Third World looking for oil-rich, impoverished microstates to overthrow.

Now Adam Roberts, former Johannesburg bureau chief for The Economist, has written a full account of the planning, bungled execution and aftermath of the 'Wonga Coup'.  It is based on the prolific paper trail left behind by the plotters, and on everyone's apparent eagerness to tell his own version of the story.  What emerges is a romanticized world of mercenary action derived from Frederick Forsyth's Dogs of War (in fact the inspiration for the coup), overlaid with arrogance, ineptitude and a total inability to keep a lid on it.  It is the story of grown (albeit quirky) men, experienced operators, many formerly with South African special forces, who were lured by greed and hunger for adventure into a disastrous military debacle.

Sadly for the ringleaders, Simon Mann and Nick du Toit in particular, the story ends in very grim Zimbabwean and Equatorial Guinean prisons respectively.  Luckily for most of the hapless, poor soldiers they recruited under false pretences, they were sent home after a year in Zimbabwe's notorious jail.

Mann's timing of the attempted coup couldn't have been worse.  Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe is competing with Obiang for the title of most brutal dictator in Africa.  Efforts to isolate him have -- surprise surprise -- brought the two tyrants close together.  Now, instead of releasing Mann as his sentence was completed in May, Mugabe has cut a deal to sell the prisoner to Equatorial Guinea, as the Guardian reports.  If Mann is indeed extradited he will almost certainly perish in Malabo's brutal Black Beach prison.  If not, he may well be caught up in the violent collapse of Zimbabwe's state institutions.  A high price to pay for an adventure.

Sadly for the consumers of this incredible tale, Adam Roberts' book is haphazardly put together and badly edited (or not edited at all?).  The writing is choppy, awkward and often repetitive.  Roberts is unable to parse the reliable accounts from those made up by participants for self-serving ends or under torture, and so he simply throws the lot at the reader.  It's a shame that such a gripping story is not better told, for it is both a high-rolling adventure (with enough great characters to populate several Hollywood films), and a political thriller.  Roberts touches on but fails to uncover the real roles played by the South African and US intelligence services, nor does he do enough to investigate the surprising depth of Spanish military and political support for the coup.  Let's hope someone else has another go at this story.

Can you trust doctors? (Book review#1)

I actually managed to read a couple of books recently, for the first time since 2006.  Two major projects have gobbled up most of my spare time this year:

and

 

The latter will -- inshallah!-- be done if not exactly dusted by September.

The book I read on the plane last week was recommended by my colleague Javier Rojas (who has several of the little critters and still manages to read a book a week!).  Complications takes the reader into the hearts and minds of surgeons in their everyday existence.  Atul Gawande is a doctor and writer who questions our most basic assumptions about what doctors know and how they use it.  This is a book about the fallibility of surgeons, and also about a healthcare system (and culture) that is often at odds with patients' best interests.  It's not a new book (here's a review from when it first appeared, in 2002).

Told through real stories of familiar situations (pregnancy nausea, deep vein thrombosis) and extreme conditions (chronic flushing, necrotizing fasciitis), Complications makes for a gripping but sobering read.  Gawande's has an amazing ability to write effortlessly and totally without pretension, tackling the difficult topic of doctor-patient relations in a way both can understand and learn from.  The stories are human, riveting, sometimes tragic and sometimes uplifting, and all have implications worth thinking about. You won't interact with doctors the same way again.