MBAs, Media & the Middle East.

Film in Lebanon.

Reviews of three Lebanese films: Caramel, West Beyrouth and A Perfect Day.
Not unexpectedly (Beirut has been a vital cultural force in the Middle East for a long time), the films suggest that Lebanon has much to offer the Middle Eastern film oeuvre.
All the filmmakers share an evident and pronounced love for their city (and Beirut, so very lovable, is particularly photogenic, cinematic and receptive in this regard).

social book networks.

Amazon’s recent acquisition of ABEbooks has by extension given it a 50% stake in Library Thing which is a little awkward as Amazon was an early investor in competitor Shelfari.
Facebook’s feature creep threatens to make both Shelfari and LibraryThing superfluous.

Fooled by Randomness [Nassim Nicholas Taleb]

nassim nicholas taleb, the improbable best selling author of the black swan believes that success is illusionary (at times it seems he believes everything is illusionary – it’s all random, all luck!). his main thesis is that luck is often behind what we normally perceive to be success and that humans are hard-wired to under-estimate the role that randomness plays via various biases.

China Shakes The World. James Kynge.

James Kynge, former china bureau chief of best newspaper in the world (The Financial Times), won the FT / Goldman Sachs business book of the year award in 1996 with ‘china shakes the world’ which is a superb, concise introduction to how and why china is shaping our world.
the first half tells the condensed history of china’s post-cultural revolution rise and illuminates its leading position during much of the last six thousand years.
the book starts off recounting the mysterious disappearance of manhole covers all over the world (with plenty of reports of unsuspecting pedestrians falling into the suddenly-there holes from Mongolia to Montreal) as a signal of when the direction of the world – China relationship switched: the view of China flipped from how the outside world was changing China to how China was affecting the rest of the world. China’s voracious appetite for almost every conceivable resource including the scrap metal that those manholes were destined to become was just one signal that the causal direction was switching.
James has plenty of engaging first-hand accounts from his two decades living in china through which it often seems we are witnessing China’s economic transformation unfold through his eyes.

Some of the major themes / ideas that run throughout include:

* businesses everywhere are finding it harder to compete (manufacturers in particular), the sustainability of europe’s welfare state model is in question as the industrial base there is hollowed out.
* china out-competes and out-capitalizes everyone, especially America.
* Chinese possess the impressive combo of intelligence and second-to-none work ethic.
* china through lowering the cost of goods and its insatiable appetite for us treasuries (in part to manage its currency) has fueled the low-iinterest rate driven housing boom and general drive for yield that has resulted in the current sub-prime, credit-crunch, free-fall dollar mess we’re in.
* 400 million people have been lifted above the poverty line over the last 28 years of above 9.5% economic growth.