– Tim Ferro

It’s not long and though it’s heavy on the Veganism, it’s still an entertaining and interesting read. I could not believe all of the things it reported about the meat, dairy, and sugar substitute industries. It was eye opening. No, I am not turning into a Vegan but I am glad I know all the information. Even if you don’t change a thing, it’s still good to know all the facts. This was interesting enough that I am reading the book for males called Skinny Bastard.

– Tim Ferro

Yes the market tanked. Yes we got screwed by others’ mistakes. Yes the market is less reliable than it ever has been. No, you should not take your money elsewhere. Now is the time to be in the market, and this is the book that will tell and show you how. Jim Cramer’s Getting Back to Even is the must read financial book of 2010 for every investor.

Jim lays out his financial advice in easy to follow steps and tells the real deal about the market. I have incorporated his advice into my own portfolio and have already seen gains. My advice is to read the whole book and latch on to certain investing strategies that can help short and long term. For the advanced investor, the chapter on options is a MUST READ. Once explained, it is both simple and genius. Long term, Jim’s advice on high dividend stocks and China are crucial to your strategy.

This book will help you make more money than any other book you read this year so move it to the top of your reading list!

– Tim Ferro

Truer words were never spoken, especially on the topic of credit and debt. In Jack Cashill’s Popes & Bankers: A Cultural History of Credit and Debt, from Aristotle to AIG, Cashill educates, entertains and enlightens the readers with numerous historical stories about the progression of credit and debt starting with Aristotle and ending with the epic failure of AIG.

This must read book will give everyone a new perspective on the history of credit, debt, and finance. If you want to know how we got into this most recent crisis, this book will not only explain that but also the thousands of years that led up to it. I could not believe how many times history has repeated itself. The most in depth parts of the book dealt with American financial history and the chapters about the foundation of the Federal Reserve and J.P. Morgan were especially interesting.

This book is incredibly well written and researched. Cashill’s style, though he utilizes his massive vocabulary, is easy to read and understand. This book is for both finance buffs and history buffs. I enjoyed every chapter and back story.

– Tim Ferro

First and foremost is privacy. I have seen places where a cube farm would be a step up. Imagine a long table with multiple computers and monitors all in a row. That’s ridiculous! There is less than zero privacy in a place like that. Offices that have five desks that should only have two is another wonderful example. These are clearly extreme examples of having no privacy but they actually exist as well as many many lesser ones.

Following on with privacy would be peoples’ personal habits. Please be aware of how your personal habits affect others in the work place. Talking loudly or often in some areas, all kinds of body issues, any smells or old food items, etc. are just some of the personal habits that can be super annoying to others.

There was a time when “ergonomics” was a big issue in the IT world. It seems to have gone to the back burner, just like Six Sigma. However, ergonomics should be a main focus when setting up office spaces because it can prevent a number of long term work injuries such as carpal tunnel and back pain. Along with that, acquiring new technology such as an ergonomic keyboard and mouse and adjustable office chairs shouldn’t be an issue, yet those are rarely purchased without justification.

These are just the tip of the iceberg for Work Area issues. Please comment more and I will update!

– Tim Ferro

Now the parts of the book, though brief, that deal with the topics depicted in the title of the book are very good but it left me wanting more. A follow up sequel is desperately needed as the book leaves off during the peak of the financial crisis of 2008. I respect George Soros and I know that he is definitely a financial genius but I just cannot recommend this book. A second edition or sequel would possibly change my mind; in fact, I volunteer to ghost write it with him. If you do pick up this book, I suggest you skip ahead where he suggests you do and just read the financially focused sections.

Has anyone else read this book? What did you think? Can you recommend any better books on the same topic?

– Tim Ferro

“In times like these, employees want to know more about their status and it promotes the ‘Where do I stand and how does this affect me?’ [type of] questions,” Thompson said. “Slow markets force managers and leaders to have more of these tough conversations. Unfortunately, they may not be equipped [and will likely] take the path of least resistance – and that really causes a lot of turmoil and dishonesty.” – Source

“The good managers are saying, ‘If we’re going to be in a recovery sometime soon, I need to make sure my A-players know they’re my A-players, and that I’m providing them with career development opportunities to make sure they’re ready for the recovery,” he said. – Source

“Investment can be time, attention and development; it can be making someone a mentor; it can mean including somebody on a task force; it can be taking somebody to lunch,” he said.  – Source

Managers already have their hands full leading their teams through uncertain and turbulent times. Even worse, more than a quarter of employees would like to see them get fired.   – Source

Honestly, 25% seems like a low number to me, but I digress. I don’t want this blog post to come off as just another “Gen Y is spoiled and wants this” or “Gen Y demands the system to change”. It’s not just Gen Y, it’s ALL EMPLOYEES!

Let me repeat that. It’s not just Gen Y that wants a change for the better in the workplace, it’s ALL EMPLOYEES! All employees want to be treated better. All employees would like a better work environment. All employees want better management. In at least half* of the articles on the internet where someone gets on a soapbox about Gen Y feeling entitled and wanting more, ask yourselves “Wouldn’t every employee benefit from this?”. Why does Gen Y get a stigma about entitlement when all we’re asking for is something that everyone wants but most are too scared to speak up about?

– Tim Ferro

* a statistic I made up for the purposes of this post

This is a very interesting and inspiring eBook. Check it out!

My favorite quote from the book is this one:
“success is creating a lifestyle that allows you to surf on a tuesday and save the world on a friday” – Greg Rollett

When you own stock in a company, you should be doing your due diligence as an investor to keep up with SEC filings, conference call transcripts, and general information from the internet. Jim Cramer recommends “an hour a week” per stock and I completely agree. It is much more labor intensive to own stocks than it is to own mutual or index funds, but the rewards are far greater. If you had invested in an S&P 500 index fund 10 years ago, you would have lost 19.92% of your money. Owning stocks and doing the necessary research will put you in the financial driver’s seat.

If you are not committed to checking your stocks every day for prices and news, then don’t buy them. If you are not willing to read every 8-K, 10-K, and 10-Q, then don’t buy them. If you are willing to do that work as well as read some financial books and sometimes watch Mad Money, then you are ready to start investing in your future.

Disclosure: Long Verizon (VZ)

– Tim Ferro

January

“In the midst of the most serious financial upheaval since the Great Depression, legendary financier George Soros explores the origins of the crisis and its implications for the future. Soros, whose breadth of experience in financial markets is unrivaled, places the current crisis in the context of decades of study of how individuals and institutions handle the boom and bust cycles that now dominate global economic activity. “This is the worst financial crisis since the 1930s,” writes Soros in characterizing the scale of financial distress spreading across Wall Street and other financial centers around the world. In a concise essay that combines practical insight with philosophical depth, Soros makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the great credit crisis and its implications for our nation and the world.” – Amazon.com

February

“In his new book, Cramer offers the most detailed guidance he has ever given on how to invest in a changed market. Savvy investors will not just survive; they will thrive. Cramer begins with six rules for protecting the money you have and making sure that you have the money you need. (Rule Number 3: Skip the first four stages of portfolio grief: denial, anger, bargaining, and depression.) Your portfolio won’t fix itself; you have to do that. It’s easy to close your eyes and pretend that it all never happened, but you’ll never get back to even that way, much less profit from the opportunities that this new market offers to investors who know where to put their money. One key to making investment decisions is to watch what the mutual-fund managers are doing and — better yet — to anticipate their moves. Cramer tells you how to do this. Their decisions will move markets, and you want to profit from these moves.” – Amazon.com

March

“Just like the original Catch-22, this sequel opens with Yossarian in a hospital bed, flirting with the nurses. Now in his seventies, Yossarian is depressed by his perfect health: things can only get worse. He lives alone in a Manhattan apartment not far from most of his old war buddies, including Milo Minderbinder, a defense contractor straight out of Dr. Strangelove. Yossarian and company mourn the decline of New York City and American culture in general and look back longingly to the golden age of prewar Coney Island. The symbolic center of the book is a surreal wedding extravaganza held at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and hosted by Minderbinder, who recruits highly paid actors to portray derelicts and prostitutes. This work attempts the same sort of giddy black humor that made its predecessor a classic, but the underlying mood is somber, almost elegiac. A profoundly disturbing novel, if not quite up to the standard of Catch-22; recommended for all fiction collections.” - Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles

April

“Part Fast Food Nation, part Bobos in Paradise, STARBUCKED combines investigative heft with witty cultural observation in telling the story of how the coffeehouse movement changed our everyday lives, from our evolving neighborhoods and workplaces to the ways we shop, socialize, and self-medicate.

In STARBUCKED, Taylor Clark provides an objective, meticulously reported look at the volatile issues like gentrification and fair trade that distress activists and coffee zealots alike. Through a cast of characters that includes coffee-wild hippies, business sharks, slackers, Hollywood trendsetters and more, STARBUCKED explores how America transformed into a nation of coffee gourmets in only a few years, how Starbucks manipulates psyches and social habits to snare loyal customers, and why many of the things we think we know about the coffee commodity chain are false.” – Amazon.com

May

“A wry literary masterpiece, God Hates Us All is a coming-of-age tale for the apathetic generation. Hank Moody’s self-loathing yet darkly likeable narrator is a college drop-out-turned-accidental-drug-dealer enveloped in a world of contradictions. His boss — a bong-hitting, dreadlocked Pontiff figure — runs a remarkably organized and ingenious illegal trade patronized by, among others, a sweater-set-wearing Upper East Sider, a Wall Street hotshot, and a wannabe rock star with a hard-to-resist model girlfriend. The lonely narrator yearns for more than the tenuous but intimate thread he shares with his clients. To escape his mother’s desperate expectations, his father’s endless disappointments, and his certifiably insane ex-girlfriend, he moves to the city’s mecca of ambitious slackers — the Chelsea Hotel — where the pursuit of lust (and the rock star’s girlfriend) sends him on a series of well-intentioned misadventures that lead him right back where he started. Told in a unique and subtle voice, God Hates Us All is ironic, optimistic, and unforgettable.” – Amazon.com

June

“With his first book, the seminal anti-war novel Catch-22, Joseph Heller became one of American literature’s most important 20th-century writers. The posthumous collection, Catch As Catch Can: The Collected Stories and Other Writings, shows Heller’s early development as a writer, but in essence provides the “outtakes,” “B-sides,” and sketches related to Catch-22, and several nonfiction pieces regarding it, mixed with juvenilia. A more appropriate title might have been The Making of Catch-22.” – Amazon.com

July

“In this important analysis of the past fifty years of international (largely American) aid to Africa, economist and former World Bank consultant Moyo, a native of Zambia, prescribes a tough dose of medicine: stopping the tide of money that, however well-intentioned, only promotes corruption in government and dependence in citizens. With a global perspective and on-the-ground details, Moyo reveals that aid is often diverted to the coffers of cruel despotisms, and occasionally conflicts outright with the interests of citizens-free mosquito nets, for instance, killing the market for the native who sells them. In its place, Moyo advocates a smarter, though admittedly more difficult, policy of investment that has already worked to grow the economies of poor countries like Argentina and Brazil. Moyo writes with a general audience in mind, and doesn’t hesitate to slow down and explain the intricacies of, say, the bond market. This is a brief, accessible look at the goals and reasons behind anti-aid advocates, with a hopeful outlook and a respectful attitude for the well-being and good faith of all involved. ” – Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

August

“New Day Revolution shows you how small changes in your daily routine can make a big difference. Next time you throw out the juice carton, take five seconds to compact it and save space in the landfill, or grab an extra box of crayons for your local school when you buy a box for your child. For people who feel they have little time, this first book from the duo that launched CoolPeopleCare.org gives helpful hints, practical tips, and step by step instructions on how to make a big difference in the local community and the world at-large with whatever time you have. We can’t all be Jack Bauer, running down bad guys and defusing bombs – but we can all make an impact where we are with what we’ve got.” – Amazon.com

September

“In bestsellers such as Purple Cow and Tribes, Seth Godin taught readers how to make remarkable products and spread powerful ideas. But this book is different. It’s about you – your choices, your future, and your potential to make a huge difference in whatever field you choose.

There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there’s a third team, the linchpins. These people invent, lead (regardless of title), connect others, make things happen, and create order out of chaos. They figure out what to do when there’s no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.

Linchpins are the essential building blocks of great organizations. Like the small piece of hardware that keeps a wheel from falling off its axle, they may not be famous but they’re indispensable. And in today’s world, they get the best jobs and the most freedom.” – Amazon.com

October

“Based on cutting-edge research by leading corporate critic Louis Lowenstein, The Investor’s Dilemma: How Mutual Funds Are Betraying Your Trust and What to Do About It reveals how highly overpaid fund sponsors really operate and walks you through the conflicts of interest found throughout the industry. Page by page, you’ll discover the real problems within the world of mutual funds and learn how to overcome them through a value-oriented approach to this market.” – Amazon.com

“A valuable text for passive investors.”–Barron’s

November

“Amazon Best of the Month, October 2009: Jonathan Lethem, the home-grown frontrunner of a generation of Brooklyn writers, crosses the bridge to Manhattan in Chronic City, a smart, unsettling, and meticulously hilarious novel of friendship and real estate among the rich and the rent-controlled. Lethem’s story centers around two unlikely friends, Chase Insteadman, a genial nonentity who was once a child sitcom star and now is best known as the loyal fiancé of a space-stranded astronaut, and Perkus Tooth, a skinny, moody, underemployed cultural critic. Chase and Perkus are free-floating, dope-dependent bohemians in a borough built on ambition, living on its margins but with surprising access to its centers of power, even to the city’s billionaire mayor. Paranoiac Perkus sees urgent plots everywhere–in the font of The New Yorker, in an old VHS copy of Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid–but Chronic City, despite the presence of death, politics, and a mysterious, marauding tiger, is itself light on plot. Eschewing dramatic staples like romance and artistic creation for the more meandering passions of friendship and observation, Chronic City thrives instead on the brilliance of Lethem’s ear and eye. Every page is a pleasure of pitch-perfect banter and spot-on cultural satire, cut sharply with the melancholic sense that being able to explain your city doesn’t make you any more capable of living in it.” -Tom Nissley

December

“The legendary 1951 scroll draft of On the Road, published word for word as Kerouac originally composed it

Though Jack Kerouac began thinking about the novel that was to become On the Road as early as 1947, it was not until three weeks in April 1951, in an apartment on West Twentieth Street in Manhattan, that he wrote the first full draft that was satisfactory to him. Typed out as one long, single-spaced paragraph on eight long sheets of tracing paper that he later taped together to form a 120-foot scroll, this document is among the most significant, celebrated, and provocative artifacts in contemporary American literary history. It represents the first full expression of Kerouac’s revolutionary aesthetic, the identifiable point at which his thematic vision and narrative voice came together in a sustained burst of creative energy. It was also part of a wider vital experimentation in the American literary, musical, and visual arts in the post-World War II period.

It was not until more than six years later, and several new drafts, that Viking published, in 1957, the novel known to us today. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of On the Road, Viking will publish the 1951 scroll in a standard book format. The differences between the two versions are principally ones of significant detail and altered emphasis. The scroll is slightly longer and has a heightened linguistic virtuosity and a more sexually frenetic tone. It also uses the real names of Kerouac’s friends instead of the fictional names he later invented for them. The transcription of the scroll was done by Howard Cunnell who, along with Joshua Kupetz, George Mouratidis, and Penny Vlagopoulos, provides a critical introduction that explains the fascinating compositional and publication history of On the Road and anchors the text in its historical, political, and social context.” – Amazon.com

So that’s my list. I am excited to read them all. Clearly I have a bias toward financial books but other than that, it’s a mix of classic and new. Gen Y, what’s your 2010 reading list?

– Tim Ferro