It's amazing that they live for so long-the oldest tree in the world is over 4,800 years old!-despite being stationary." There's a certain elegance to how trees fit into their ecosystems. "You don't need any special knowledge to follow the story, but it left me super curious about the subject. "The book made me want to learn more about trees," Gates writes in his review. "The Overstory," which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, is an ode to trees by way of nine stories of characters whose lives are in one way or another affected by them. "In reality, those generalists often didn't understand the specifics of the industries they had to manage and couldn't navigate trends in their industries." 'The Overstory' And GE successfully persuaded people that its generalists could avoid the pitfalls that had tripped up big conglomerates in the past," Gates says. "Investors bought into the notion that the company's world-renowned training made it better at managing things than anyone else, and that GE could produce consistent profits even in highly cyclical markets. "My second big takeaway from Lights Out is that GE didn't have the right talent and systems to bundle together a dizzying array of unrelated businesses-including moviemaking, insurance, plastics, and nuclear power plants-and manage them well," Gates writes. Gates also learned GE was trying to do too much. "In Gryta and Mann's words, 'Problems hidden for the sake of preserving performance, thus allowing small problems to become big problems before they were detected.'" "It turns out that culture of making the numbers at all costs gave rise to 'success theater' and "chasing earnings,'" Gates writes. "For many years, investors loved GE's stock because the GE management team always 'made their numbers'-that is, the company produced earnings per share at least as large as what Wall Street analysts predicted."īut there was a downside. "My first big takeaway is that one of GE's greatest apparent strengths was actually one of its greatest weaknesses," Gates writes. On Gates list, "Lights Out" takes a look at General Electric's fall from grace, as told by Wall Street Journal reporters Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann. "When GE started using Microsoft software in our early days, that gave us a huge boost in the market, because GE was such a bellwether company." "GE is a mythic corporation," Gates writes. 'Sometimes I'd fantasize about walking out the east door and down the driveway, past the guardhouse and wrought-iron gates, to lose myself in crowded streets and reenter the life I'd once known,' he writes." 'Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric' "But overall, the memoir left me with a surprisingly melancholy impression of what it's like to be the president. "Obama makes it clear the positives of the job-especially the opportunity to make lives better- outweigh the negatives," Gates writes. The tome goes through Obama's life through the 2011 operation that killed Osama bin Laden. It's a terrific read, no matter what your politics are." He isn't trying to sell himself to you or claim he didn't make mistakes. "A Promised Land is a refreshingly honest book. Fortunately, President Obama isn't like most politicians," Gates writes in his review. "You have to be a pretty self-aware person to write a candid autobiography-something that politicians aren't exactly known for. Gates admires former president Barack Obama's memoir for its deftness and vulnerability. "We're also developing new ways of understanding the impact we have on nature-including computer models that can predict how mosquito populations will respond to various attempts to kill them off." 'A Promised Land' As the standard of living rises, population growth levels off and people start devoting resources to preserving and cleaning up the environment," Gates writes. "I don't think it's inevitable that humans will keep degrading the environment forever. But I wish she had also explored whether the risks are worth taking, or what the alternatives might be," Gates writes in his review of the book.īut Gates says he is likely "more of an optimist" than Kolbert. "I'm glad that smart writers like Elizabeth are reminding us of the risks of trying to intervene in nature. Kolbert looks at issues like saving the coral reefs, gene editing and geoengineering, which involves making temporary changes to the atmosphere or oceans in order to control the temperature of the earth. With this book, Kolbert takes a look at whether human innovations can be the salvation for the planet they have damaged. Author Elizabeth Kolbert is a Pulitzer Prize winning staff writer at The New Yorker and this is her third book after Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and The Sixth Extinction.
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