Magna and the CAW

I worked for Frank Stronach and Magna Int. for two summers. Watching the executive operations of a company was one of the luckier opportunities in my life. The highlight of both of these summers was occassionally bumping into Stronach, or listening to him wax to summer students in the boardroom, or watching him at the head of an employee meeting in a plant. He is strangely charismatic and so consistently unpredictable. This "Frank Factor" has, at times, probably discounted the stock of Magna. But it's hard to imagine what Magna would be without him. So, when this was announced today, I was greatly suprised. But I wouldn't bet against its long-term success.

Malcolm Gladwell, Mysteries and Puzzles, and General Tao

A lot of people like Malcolm Gladwell. He's written a couple of interesting books, as well as a mountain of magazine pieces. This is a good example. It's an interesting article, ostensibly about Enron but also about some sort of distinction between mysteries and puzzles. It's pretty entertaining, and chocked full of interesting anecdotes. But I think it just confirms what I suspected when I read Blink last spring (I read it cover to cover on a flight from Liverpool to Seville, so thankfully I didn't invest too much in it). Gladwell is taken by interesting theories from the social and physical sciences (in Blink it was the idea of heuristics and preconscious information processing), but not seriously enough to actually test them. Rather, he just fits evidence to them, and when that doesn't work, he just plays around with the definitions. It's actually quite unsatisfying. Unfortunately, his anecdotes are interesting enough that I get sucked in. It's like General Tao chicken: it's always a better idea at the start than at the end.