It was only Lewis' third book that I was reading. Given how semi literate I am not competent to admire his writing, especially when Malcolm Gladwell is supposed to have remarked, "I read Michael Lewis for the same reasons I watch Tiger Woods. I'll never play like that."
Lewis researches his subject very well. Reading his books therefore leaves you with a good sense of the domain that he deals with.
What I find more engaging though is the human side of enterprise that he brings out very well.
I read Liar's Poker during the early years of my career in the investment industry. I learned a fair bit about the investment banking industry and the trading room in the USA. Lewis describes the origins of the securitisation of mortgages very well in that book. In some sense that securitisation was the genesis of what eventually led to the crisis of 2008.
Little did I anticipate as I read it then that securitisation would end up being the nemesis of the financial services industry one day.
Far more engaging was the story of John Gutfreund who backstabbed his own mentor to whom he owed his meteoric rise in a board room intrigue, to take the CEO's job from the latter. The story leaves you with pure disgust for the man. It made his excesses with the expense account of Salomon Brothers to please his wife look like a minor peccadillo in comparison.
Ironically, not long after I read this, I had the occasion to host Gutfreund and humour him to see if he would invest in the venture fund that my employer was trying to put together. His visit and my interaction with him has to be the subject of another exclusive blog post.
The investment banking industry has changed a great deal since Liar's Poker was written. But I think the human element of the industry, with the naked pursuit of power and money and the greed and lust that motivated the professionals remains pretty much unchanged even today.
Lewis's other book, The New New Thing is pretty much the story of James Clark's life in Silicon Graphics and thereafter his engagement with Netscape and its founder Marc Andreessen. Again, Lewis' portrayal of Clark's character is one of the main draws of that book, that I recall of what read nearly nineteen years ago.
Clark was totally self built, coming from a somewhat troubled family in a small agricultural town. He was almost entirely brought up by his mother. He believed in the centrality of the engineer to a technology enterprise. His approach to managing an enterprise was based on that core belief.
His fight against the then predatory Microsoft is a tribute to Clark's feistiness, although he does end up having to sell Netscape to AOL to escape falling into the hands of MS.
Lewis' cleverness lies in how got me to buy into Clark's belief in the importance of the engineer. Though not an engineer myself I believe to this date that in the world of technology entrepreneurship, both in India and elsewhere in the world, thanks to short sighted venture capitalists, the engineer who builds the core of the enterprise does not get the place he deserves.
Flashboys was the third book and the motivation for this post.
Of the three books I must confess that it was the book I appreciated the least. All that I learned from that book can be summarised in three or four sentences. And I will spare you the agony of that too.
That is more of a comment on comprehending capacity than on Lewis' narrative capability. Over the years I am sure I must have lost the ability to distill the many ideas that are scattered all across the 276 odd pages of that book.
Lewis however works his people magic in this book too. To my mind the most memorable character is not Brad Katsuyama, the main protagonist. It is Sergei Aleynikov, who is not even a supporting character in the plot. I think Lewis brings in the story of Sergei just to bring out the persistent ruthlessness and brutality that has prevailed in the world of managing money for decades.
The title of the chapter in which he narrates Sergei's story, sums it up. It is "The spider and the fly", the spider being Goldman Sachs and the law and enforcement agency in the USA.
Sergei was a Russian Jew who had emigrated to the USA. He was a software developer whom Goldman Sachs wooed and pampered - till one day when he decided to leave them they thought that he was about to harm them. And they unleashed legal action which pretty much ruined Sergei's life for many years thereafter. And thus the metaphor of a spider and a fly.
Till this experience, Sergei was like any other young and upwardly mobile professional. He enjoyed all the good things in life, except for being vegetarian by choice, married a trophy wife in the form of a Russian model and traded up the fancy home in which he lived. Until of course the spider decided to crush him like a fly, when everything vanished!
By the time that he was first sent to jail his wife had left him, taking their three young daughters with her. He had no money or no one to turn to. Out of a sense of solidarity with a fellow Russian and a sense of pity Masha Leder who was his lawyer had to step up to be his power of attorney.
So that is a fairly straightforward story of a dream gone bad. If you scour the streets of corporate India with the alertness of one of our millions of rag pickers you will find plenty of them. I can fill you with them even from my limited experience over a whole night.
The victims of Corporate India may not have ended up jail only because it takes many years for anyone in India to go to jail - unless they have been caught having in their hand the knife that they stuck into someone else's anatomy. Or unless they are poor people whom the local sub inspector throw them into jail on trumped up charges to exonerate some wealthy or influential criminal.
The bit that captures one's attention though is how Sergei responds to the tragedy.
At the trial, one of the jurors asked Sergei why he was not angry. He responds, "But what does craziness give you? What does negative demeanour give you as a person? If you know that you are innocent you know it. But at the same time you know you are in trouble and this is how it's going to be. To some extent I am glad that this happened to me. I think it strengthened my understanding of what living is all about."
He tells his lawyer later, "When I was arrested I could not sleep. When I saw articles in the newspaper I would tremble at the fear of losing my reputation. Now I just smile. I no longer panic. Or have panic ideas that something that could go wrong."
Lewis closes the chapter with an excerpt from Sergei's memoir, which begins like this: "If the incarceration experience doesn't break your spirit, it changes you in a way that you lose many fears. You begin to realise that your life is not ruled by your ego and ambition and that it can end at any day at any time. So why worry? You learn that just like on the street, there is life in prison, and random people get there based on the jeopardy of the system. The prisons are filled by (sic) people who crossed the law, as well as those who were incidentally and circumstantially picked and crushed by someone else's agenda. On the other hand, as a vivid benefit, you become very much independent of material property and learn to appreciate very simple pleasures in life such as the sunlight and morning breeze." (Emphasis mine)
Sergei Aleynikov was no saint in the normal sense of that word. He was a man of the world. In his reaction to his circumstances in life though he demonstrated a stoicism that may not be common even among saints. His sense of resignation resembled spiritualism in many ways. It seemed to accept the sheer inevitability of the flow of events in a man's life, no matter how pleasant or otherwise.
As I reflected on his story I felt that this was the best of whatever little that I had read of Lewis' writing. Hence the title to this post, which gives no indication that this post is about Lewis' books.
As I write this post, the thought that comes to my mind is a prayer to the Lord to give me the same sense of resignation that Sergei had. Life has this habit of throwing lemons at us. Sometimes these are lemons that we court, one of which I did recently, and as I have on two or three occasions in the past.
Fortunately, I have not been thrown into jail. My wife has not deserted me, taking my children with her. I am not penniless or friendless. God has been munificent to me on those counts.
But the pain I suffer is not trivial, even if it be of my own making, even if I have been the spider and the fly all rolled into one. As I write this post my prayer to the Lord is to give the sense of resignation that He seemed to have blessed Sergei with.
Nanni....Namaskaaram...
Lewis researches his subject very well. Reading his books therefore leaves you with a good sense of the domain that he deals with.
What I find more engaging though is the human side of enterprise that he brings out very well.
I read Liar's Poker during the early years of my career in the investment industry. I learned a fair bit about the investment banking industry and the trading room in the USA. Lewis describes the origins of the securitisation of mortgages very well in that book. In some sense that securitisation was the genesis of what eventually led to the crisis of 2008.
Little did I anticipate as I read it then that securitisation would end up being the nemesis of the financial services industry one day.
Far more engaging was the story of John Gutfreund who backstabbed his own mentor to whom he owed his meteoric rise in a board room intrigue, to take the CEO's job from the latter. The story leaves you with pure disgust for the man. It made his excesses with the expense account of Salomon Brothers to please his wife look like a minor peccadillo in comparison.
Ironically, not long after I read this, I had the occasion to host Gutfreund and humour him to see if he would invest in the venture fund that my employer was trying to put together. His visit and my interaction with him has to be the subject of another exclusive blog post.
The investment banking industry has changed a great deal since Liar's Poker was written. But I think the human element of the industry, with the naked pursuit of power and money and the greed and lust that motivated the professionals remains pretty much unchanged even today.
Lewis's other book, The New New Thing is pretty much the story of James Clark's life in Silicon Graphics and thereafter his engagement with Netscape and its founder Marc Andreessen. Again, Lewis' portrayal of Clark's character is one of the main draws of that book, that I recall of what read nearly nineteen years ago.
Clark was totally self built, coming from a somewhat troubled family in a small agricultural town. He was almost entirely brought up by his mother. He believed in the centrality of the engineer to a technology enterprise. His approach to managing an enterprise was based on that core belief.
His fight against the then predatory Microsoft is a tribute to Clark's feistiness, although he does end up having to sell Netscape to AOL to escape falling into the hands of MS.
Lewis' cleverness lies in how got me to buy into Clark's belief in the importance of the engineer. Though not an engineer myself I believe to this date that in the world of technology entrepreneurship, both in India and elsewhere in the world, thanks to short sighted venture capitalists, the engineer who builds the core of the enterprise does not get the place he deserves.
Flashboys was the third book and the motivation for this post.
Of the three books I must confess that it was the book I appreciated the least. All that I learned from that book can be summarised in three or four sentences. And I will spare you the agony of that too.
That is more of a comment on comprehending capacity than on Lewis' narrative capability. Over the years I am sure I must have lost the ability to distill the many ideas that are scattered all across the 276 odd pages of that book.
Lewis however works his people magic in this book too. To my mind the most memorable character is not Brad Katsuyama, the main protagonist. It is Sergei Aleynikov, who is not even a supporting character in the plot. I think Lewis brings in the story of Sergei just to bring out the persistent ruthlessness and brutality that has prevailed in the world of managing money for decades.
The title of the chapter in which he narrates Sergei's story, sums it up. It is "The spider and the fly", the spider being Goldman Sachs and the law and enforcement agency in the USA.
Sergei was a Russian Jew who had emigrated to the USA. He was a software developer whom Goldman Sachs wooed and pampered - till one day when he decided to leave them they thought that he was about to harm them. And they unleashed legal action which pretty much ruined Sergei's life for many years thereafter. And thus the metaphor of a spider and a fly.
Till this experience, Sergei was like any other young and upwardly mobile professional. He enjoyed all the good things in life, except for being vegetarian by choice, married a trophy wife in the form of a Russian model and traded up the fancy home in which he lived. Until of course the spider decided to crush him like a fly, when everything vanished!
By the time that he was first sent to jail his wife had left him, taking their three young daughters with her. He had no money or no one to turn to. Out of a sense of solidarity with a fellow Russian and a sense of pity Masha Leder who was his lawyer had to step up to be his power of attorney.
So that is a fairly straightforward story of a dream gone bad. If you scour the streets of corporate India with the alertness of one of our millions of rag pickers you will find plenty of them. I can fill you with them even from my limited experience over a whole night.
The victims of Corporate India may not have ended up jail only because it takes many years for anyone in India to go to jail - unless they have been caught having in their hand the knife that they stuck into someone else's anatomy. Or unless they are poor people whom the local sub inspector throw them into jail on trumped up charges to exonerate some wealthy or influential criminal.
The bit that captures one's attention though is how Sergei responds to the tragedy.
At the trial, one of the jurors asked Sergei why he was not angry. He responds, "But what does craziness give you? What does negative demeanour give you as a person? If you know that you are innocent you know it. But at the same time you know you are in trouble and this is how it's going to be. To some extent I am glad that this happened to me. I think it strengthened my understanding of what living is all about."
He tells his lawyer later, "When I was arrested I could not sleep. When I saw articles in the newspaper I would tremble at the fear of losing my reputation. Now I just smile. I no longer panic. Or have panic ideas that something that could go wrong."
Lewis closes the chapter with an excerpt from Sergei's memoir, which begins like this: "If the incarceration experience doesn't break your spirit, it changes you in a way that you lose many fears. You begin to realise that your life is not ruled by your ego and ambition and that it can end at any day at any time. So why worry? You learn that just like on the street, there is life in prison, and random people get there based on the jeopardy of the system. The prisons are filled by (sic) people who crossed the law, as well as those who were incidentally and circumstantially picked and crushed by someone else's agenda. On the other hand, as a vivid benefit, you become very much independent of material property and learn to appreciate very simple pleasures in life such as the sunlight and morning breeze." (Emphasis mine)
Sergei Aleynikov was no saint in the normal sense of that word. He was a man of the world. In his reaction to his circumstances in life though he demonstrated a stoicism that may not be common even among saints. His sense of resignation resembled spiritualism in many ways. It seemed to accept the sheer inevitability of the flow of events in a man's life, no matter how pleasant or otherwise.
As I reflected on his story I felt that this was the best of whatever little that I had read of Lewis' writing. Hence the title to this post, which gives no indication that this post is about Lewis' books.
As I write this post, the thought that comes to my mind is a prayer to the Lord to give me the same sense of resignation that Sergei had. Life has this habit of throwing lemons at us. Sometimes these are lemons that we court, one of which I did recently, and as I have on two or three occasions in the past.
Fortunately, I have not been thrown into jail. My wife has not deserted me, taking my children with her. I am not penniless or friendless. God has been munificent to me on those counts.
But the pain I suffer is not trivial, even if it be of my own making, even if I have been the spider and the fly all rolled into one. As I write this post my prayer to the Lord is to give the sense of resignation that He seemed to have blessed Sergei with.
Nanni....Namaskaaram...
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