What I've Been Reading(June 2023)
The best word to describe the book was “lurid,” but it’s a quick and fascinating read. Think of it as “Succession: the book.”
The story of media mogul Sumner Redstone’s last years. Redstone was a larger-than-life billionaire who controlled Viacom and CBS through his holding company, National Amusements. Toward the end of his life, with his health failing, his fiancé and one of his former girlfriends essentially took over his life, transferring tens of millions of dollars from his bank account to theirs and cutting him off from his family. It’s a good reminder of “more money, more problems.”
Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon by William Cohan.
Yes, I read the other GE book earlier this year, but I think this one is much better. Cohan worked at GE in the 90s and spent a bunch of time with former CEOs Jack Welch and Jeffrey Immelt as part of his writing process. There are all the same lessons from the other book (e.g., small mistakes compounding over time), but this went deeper into the interpersonal drama, such as the very public succession contest between Immelt (who won), Bob Nardelli (who then ran Home Depot), and Jim McNerny (who then ran 3M and then Boeing). The succession contest seemed very stressful - it was multiple years of working in the same office as other talented people all vying to be king while trying to convince board members and Jack Welch to like you more.
The succession story - where the “losers” all went on to run huge corporations and make lots of money - is a good reminder that to even “lose” at the highest levels is still an accomplishment. Sometimes we “lose,” because we’ve “leveled up” and are playing whatever game at a higher level (going from high school sports to college, getting into a prestigious law school and not getting chosen for the law review, “only” being a Rhodes scholar finalist, whatever).
GE was developing general managers in the truest sense - the expectation was that you’d spend a few years running a plastics factory in Ohio, move to Shanghai to sell aircraft engines, and then spend some time in HR overseeing HR or Marketing. It’s a different paradigm than a lot of folks I know today, who want to develop specific domain expertise (e.g., become a great software venture capitalist or make partner at a consulting firm serving clients in the financial services industry). But if you’re running a firm like the old GE - which sold aircraft engines, drilling equipment, MRI machines, and dishwashers while owning one of the US’s largest banks (GE capital) and running a TV company / movie studio / theme park business (NBC), specific expertise is less important than 1) being able to be an effective manager (“general management”) and 2) being familiar with the different parts of a sprawling conglomerate.
Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain and Purpose by Leigh Cowart
Kind of the inverse to Dopamine Nation: if Dopamine Nation was about how feeling good (when taken too far) makes us feel bad, Hurts So Good is about how feeling bad makes us feel good. Very fun and interesting book with a good mix of theory and real-life examples. Among other things, Cowart plunges into freezing NY Atlantic Ocean in midwinter, eats a “Carolina Reaper,” the worlds hottest pepper, and attends “Big’s Backyard Ultra,” in which runners must run 4-ish miles every hour until there is only one runner left (spoiler: it involves more than 60 hours of running).
One takeaway is that the difference between pain we enjoy and we don’t is choice: we choose to run marathons or take ice baths, we don’t choose to stub our toes.
I’ll just leave you with her description of eating the Carolina Reaper:
After recording the experience on my phone, I realized I was going to have to come up with a more reader-friendly way to describe the sensation than twelve straight pages of the word NO, repeated in different fonts and sizes, over and over and over again for as many pages as it takes to read only the word NO for about forty minutes, the approximate duration of my pepper journey. This is my attempt to use language to impart to you the sensation of eating the world’s hottest pepper, but please know that, in my heart, I am screaming no no no no no the entire time you are reading this. Until the part where my brain starts screaming yes.
I sit back in the car and try to take an accounting of my situation. I have never felt regret so clear, so unquestioned, or so sudden. The camera is still rolling, and I try to remain calm, but I know that any pretense to decorum is over, confident in the knowledge that the things this pepper is about to do to me are going to be unfathomable because, empirically, they already are. And we are just getting started.