Three weeks worth of reading...

The last three weeks has been particularly uneventful for me. So I managed to get more reading done than usual.

• In Search of Excellence: Lessons from Americas Best-Run Companies
  
• The English Patient
  
• History of the Peloponnesian War
  

Apparently, it was "... named by NPR (in 1999) as one of the "Top Three Business Books of the Century," and ranked as the "greatest business book of all time" in a poll by Britain's Bloomsbury Publishing (2002)."

It's an old book for a different time in American business. It was rather lightweight and imprecise ... I don't know if how much I gathered from this book is any good. A lot of the theory seems logical. Treat employees better and they will find new ways to make the company money. (Well, the authors actually suggest something more cultish, but that maybe my own imagining.)

The most repeated criticism for this "timeless classic" is that most of the companies surveyed did rather poorly through out most of the 1980's. Many didn't survive.



I never did see the movie. The book was excellent. Most suprised were the short sentence in succession. They always tell you that it is more powerful. I never saw it in a novel till now.




I am still on book 1, so I should refrain from commenting. But fav quote so far comes from an Athenian:

We have done nothing extraordinary, nothing contrary to human nature in accepting an empire when it was offered to us and then in refusing to give it up. Three very powerful motives prevent us from doing so -- security, honour, and self-interest.