Just as I was moving several weeks ago I got a call from my stock broker. He worked for a major brokerage and was leaving to form his own one-man investment advisory service. He wanted me to move my account with him. This scenario is fairly common in the investment world, at least in the so-call high net worth portfolios. I used to date a girl who worked for an investment advisory company as an assistant. The bulk of her frustrations (at least as she related them to me) were all about advisers who joined the company and their skills with regard to getting their former clients to become clients at the firm for which she worked.

I personally like my broker, but I’ve got a pretty fundamental difference with him about portfolio management. I don’t know to what extent he believes in the underlying theory, but I often got calls from him that I should probably sell or buy a security because it had reached it’s support or resistance level. These are terms used by so-called technical analysts, which should more properly be called trend analysis according to John Allen Paulos. A large segment of investment advisers out there follow this model. The classic mantra for the stock market is to buy low and sell high. Technical analysis is all about watching the stock price and using some mathematical rules about the stock price to determine when the price is low and when the price is high. Pretty much the only input to these rules is the stock price.

There’s some value to the technique, but in a worst case scenario of a flat but volatile market, a person will lose money due to all the transaction costs associated with buying and selling. More generally, technical analysis may not be much different in its results from investing in a broad-based Standard and Poor’s 500 index fund.

My philosophy is generally to invest in broad-based index funds spread out across a number of asset classes. Then you sit on it for a long time and occasionally re-adjust things to get it back to your overall percentages if some part gains a lot or loses a lot of money (throwing off your percentages). But I also like the idea of watching macro-economic trends, and using some percentage of my portfolio to make bets on those trends. For instance, I’ve watched the explosive growth in emerging markets (a.k.a. developing countries making the transition from the third world to the first world) and years ago decided that a portion of my portfolio needed to be invested there. Or earlier this year seeing the coming housing market meltdown, I put some of that money into a fund that shorts financial companies. Basically, betting that over the next year banks overall will take a lot of losses from bad mortgage investments.

Anyway, to refresh my thoughts regarding whether I should jump to the new firm or not, I decided to pull out A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market and read through it again. Mostly I focused on his chapters on technical analysis, fundamental analysis, and sections on the efficient market hypothesis.

The efficient market hypothesis is a theory that fascinates me. The hypothesis is that the prices on the stock market reflect all information about each stock. To illustrate, say the newspaper reports that the F.D.A. has approved a new drug by GlaxoSmithKline (G.S.K.). That would be good for G.S.K., right? And you’d want to invest in their stock, right? Perhaps not. The hypothesis is that almost immediately investors are going to start paying more for the stock. Meaning that if you go buy it now, the higher price offsets any extra money you’d make because of the drug approval.

Paulos repeats a joke though that shows that a market can’t be 100% efficient. Two efficient market theorists pass a $100 bill laying on the street, but don’t pick it up. Why not? If the $100 was real, someone (the market) would have already picked it up.

The implications of the theory to a common investor such as I am is that (if the theory is true) everything I do in the stock market is essentially gambling. It’s all luck. I am just flipping a coin as to whether I am going to do better than the broad market, or worse, with each individual bet I make. It doesn’t mean I can’t do better. It just means that I might as well not bother with almost any strategy at all. Picking stocks at random will have about the same effect.

Now, there are strategies that can lock people into certain paths. They essentially reduce the betting involved. But making it less random also means that you move in lockstep with other people pretty much.

One thing Paulos also writes about this hypothesis is that if everyone believes it, it can’t be true. In order for it to happen, there has to be a number of people snapping up tidbits of information to move the price of a stock. But if everyone believes the theory, they won’t bother, and the price never moves in accordance with new information.

My one big beef with the book is that a lot of it seems like argument by analogy. Here’s one thing about the stock market that looks a lot like something from mathematics. In other words, correlation. But just because two things are correlated doesn’t mean there’s a connection. In the future that past correlation may fall apart. It’s a point that Paulos brings up with regard to other aspects. But I’m not sure he sees it with regard to his own words. On the other hand, he may know more and know that there is an underlying causal connection, but just isn’t bothering to explain it because this is a book for non-mathematicians. For our purposes, showing the correlation may be sufficient.

Title: A mathematician plays the stock market
Author: John Allen Paulos
Imprint / publisher: Basic Books / Perseus
Format: Hardcover
Length: 216 p. (includes index)
Publication date: 2003
ISBN-10: 0-465-05480-3
Subject: Investments — Psychological aspects
Subject: Stock exchanges — Psychological aspects
Subject: Stock exchanges — Mathematical models
Subject: Investment analysis
Subject: Stocks
LC classification: HG4515.15.P38 2003

The Random House rep brought a couple of copies and no one seemed to want either of the ARCs, so because I love free books, I grabbed one. That may be because of the audience. In a big bookstore, very few employees are using email for business purposes. And despite the subtitle, the book is primarily about writing email in a business environment. Unlike my co-workers this spring, I’ve got some history with writing lots of email in a business environment. Plus, it’d be an easy read I thought.

First thing Send covers is the ubiquity of email and some of the temptations of using it for everything. The authors provide a pretty good rationale for avoiding the use of email in a lot of situations. Email has lots of drawbacks. It often lacks context. It’s easy and so often unnecessary. It provides a record of what you wrote. But even while originals of what you wrote may exist, others can alter what you’ve written (intentionally or otherwise) and misrepresent you. For instance, it’s much better to make a phone call (if you are angry or stupid, your words can’t be forwarded verbatim), or set up a meeting (much easier to figure out what multiple people think). However, some of their advice is misguided or wrong. They encourage using Adobe’s PDF format to send things that can’t be altered. PDF files can be altered, though perhaps not by as many people as could alter other formats. They also note that every email is an interruption (while asserting that a letter is not). This is misguided. Email is only an interruption to those who haven’t learned how to manage their inbox. This topic of managing your time with email isn’t covered in the book.

They have a couple of chapters covering the various parts of an email and how to use them to write effective emails. The parts on the use of the To, CC, and Bcc lines for addressing email needed to be required reading at my former employer, Expedia. There, within the 3rd or 4th iteration of any email thread, the number of recipients had usually grown to include everyone from the receptionists to the C.E.O. I think Shipley and Schwalbe missed that part of many office cultures where people get added to cover someone’s ass. The belief is that people who need to know will (or should) read everything that comes through their inbox and if they don’t and fail to object, then it’s not the underlings fault for going ahead. Which is bogus, but the tendency exists. They also have a tip for my pet peeve as someone who reviewed a lot of resumes: include your name in your resume filename. PhilipWeissResume.odf is a lot more useful than Resume.odf. I often had to rename resume files so person A’s resume file didn’t overwrite person B’s file.

I think the remaining chapters on the various forms of writing in email are less useful. Most business-people have a good understanding of when they are requesting something or responding to something. They have a good idea of their status within a company and how that affects responses. Most blather on anyway, but they are aware of it. The short chapter on the S.E.N.D. acrononym (for simple, effective, necessary, and done) I think is one of the few places where anything is really said about necessary. We’re a loquacious people. We think our opinions are important. I know I think mine is. A lot of people need to be told to just not write email because their opinion just isn’t necessary. My opinion here isn’t necessary either, but that’s your own damn fault for coming to my web site or subscribing to the feed.

Title: Send : the essential guide to email for office and home
Authors: David Shipley,Will Schwalbe
Imprint / publisher: Alfred A. Knopf / Random House
Format: Advance readers copy
Length: 240 p. (includes index)
Publication date: April 2007
ISBN-10: 0-307-26364-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-307-26364-3
Subject: Electronic mail messages
Subject: Business communication
Subject: Communication in management
Subject: Interpersonal communication
LC classification: HD30.37 .S5 2007

My business coach, Stuart Kaufman, sent this little book over earlier this week. Now, one of my issues is that I am a procrastinator. I didn’t procrastinate at work too much, because things had to be done. But at home, where I don’t have such severe consequences, I let things wait until the last minute, or otherwise wait until they just have to be done. Hence, with my business plan (oooh so mysterious, he mentions it again) I am making only slow progress. There’s a lot to it, and I know very little about how to write one, so I look at all the things needing to be done and mentally I take stabs at one or two items and then give up for a time. I don’t lose the business if I don’t do it, because I don’t have the business yet. That’s something that I believe Paulos writes about, our tendency to not value opportunity costs as much as tangible costs. Anyway, slow progress.

Now, there’s a metric ton of books out there on business leadership. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, etc. I’m generally not too fond of most of these books, for various and sundry reasons. I’m a big fan of short and simple instructions that one does. I don’t like complicated. I don’t like navel gazing. I like lists and pen and paper (or computer). My biggest problems are in my head: thinking to much, or pondering the wrong things, holding incorrect assumptions, etc. Self-help that requires a lot of thinking is putting me in exactly the wrong position, relying on the part of me that is already doing the wrong thing. One of the reasons why I like the original vision from Alcoholics Anonymous so much. It’s all about putting things down on paper, then following up with action. And that’s what Eat That Frog! is as well.

Tracy is another self-help/business guru like Tony Robbins or Stephen Covey. I don’t think I’d recommend his program whatever it is, because I tend to devalue such things when their chief proponents’ recent business experience is only about selling the program itself.

But the stuff in Eat That Frog! I do like. There are only 21 points, though even some of those are a bit duplicative. So it’s really even fewer. Each chapter ends with a short boxed paragraph of very specific instructions, none of which are particularly involved. Most include putting something down in black and white. Review your work list right now and put an A, B, C, D, or E next to each task or activity. It’s a prioritization, with A being the highest, and with very specific meanings for each priority. That part is explained in the chapter. Select your A-1 job or project and begin working on it immediately. Discipline yourself to do nothing else until this one job is complete.

In short, an excellent book of small concrete steps a person can take to get ahead.

Title: Eat that frog!: 21 great ways to stop procrastinating and get more done in less time
Author: Brian Tracy
Imprint / publisher: Barrett-Koehler
Format: Paperback
Length: xiv, 129 p.
Publication date: 2002
ISBN-10: 1-57675-198-8
Subject: Procrastination
LC classification: BF637.P76 T73 2001

I’m writing a business plan and my business coach suggested I read Michael Gerber‘s E-Myth Revisited. I have to say I’m somewhat disappointed. Not that the information is bad, but it seems pretty obvious to me. The gist of the entire book is simply that starting and running a business doing X (whatever X is) is very different than just doing X. Running a successful business requires a whole different set of skills that many folks who simply don’t want to work for someone else don’t possess. Gerber also suggests a system for running a business that he thinks will make any successful (or at least a great portion of them).

Anyway, to save folks the money, I’ll summarize the salient points of each chapter right here:

The Entrepreneurial Myth

Most small businesses fail. Most of those fail because they are run by people who decided to open a business mostly because they just didn’t want to work for the man anymore.

The Entrepreneur, the Manager, and the Technician

Each successful business requires someone who dreams, someone who says no, and someone who does the stuff the other two agree on.

Infancy: The Technician’s Phase

Early on, a person can do everything, but it quickly blossoms into a lot of work besides just doing the work.

Adolescence: Getting Some Help

When the work becomes too much, simply dumping the work on someone else and ignoring it is a recipe for failure.

Beyond the Comfort Zone

When they run into trouble, start-ups either try go back to being small or going for broke. Or sometimes they eke out a frustrating existence.

Maturity and the Entrepreneurial Perspective

Mature businesses are all about having a vision and directing the business toward that vision. It’s all about the big picture and setting up systems that move toward that.

The Turn-Key Revolution

McDonald’s and other franchises have it figured out. Their system works no matter who runs and operates it.

The Franchise Prototype

The prototype is the perfect business, in that it is trying to set up repeatable systems that can be copied lock & stock to other stores and be successful. Successful business prototypes are looking to create a repeatable system. These are the successful businesses.

Working On Your Business, Not In It

Your job is to create the repeatable systems at all levels.

The Business Development Process

Three things: innovation (try new things), quantification (measure everything so you can see if the innovation improves things), and orchestration (turn the innovation into something repeatable, with no choice allowed in the business operation).

The rest of the book describes the various levels within the business that the business development process described above can be implemented: Organization, Management, People, Marketing, Systems (Operations).

So, not necessarily bad. But it wasn’t so useful either. A large part of that is that at least half the pages of this short book are devoted to a fictional case study that is constructed to illustrate the authors program rather than something that actually happened. In other words, it’s a composite. And so everything in it matches up perfectly with Gerber’s theses. In addition, the case study is described by fictional conversations between Gerber and a mythical Sarah rather than simply stating the facts, problems, and solutions. For me, this seemed to fluff up the illustration and made it the sugar of case studies: empty calories.

Anyway, what came to mind a lot while reading this was the Davis book on dyslexia, where the book seemed mostly to be generalities geared toward getting you to purchase training and services from his company. I can’t put my finger on what makes them similar beyond that, but I definitely got that feel.

Fairly soon I’ll finish the second half of The Reality Dysfunction which I’m finding at least mostly enjoyable.

Title: The E-myth revisited : why most small businesses don’t work and what to do about it
Author: Michael E. Gerber
Imprint / publisher: HarperBusiness / HarperCollins
Format: Paperback
Length: xvi, 268 p.
Publication date: April 1995
ISBN-10: 0-88730-728-0
Subject: Small business — Management
Subject: Entrepreneurship
Subject: Success in business
LC classification: HD62.7 .G458 1995

Gah! I’ve been reading this polemic against… well… against everything since the middle of September on my cruise trip. It’s been my on break reading at work, so progress has been slow because I’ve been reading it in 15 minute chunks of time, and I’m not the swiftest reader anyway.

No Logo is a treatise in four parts: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, and No Logo.

Klein’s first section, No Space, covers the spread of brands in the culture of industrialized countries. The gist of it all is that there is really little cultural space left that has not fallen to the branding craze. Everything from branded stadiums to branded educational programming. In Klein’s world, this is bad. I tend to agree with her, but I think she does a poor job of explaining why branding is bad. I also don’t think the crisis is nearly so dire as she makes it out to be. In addition, the section veers from branding to encompass pretty much every kind of corporate misdeed possible. Nor does she explain why branding and multinational corporations have become so prevalent. I think these are all serious flaws, though to some degree they should be expected in a polemic. After all, this isn’t really a history.

Branding has its roots in trademark law. Originally, trademarks were a legal way for a business to exclusively identify their products, so that consumers could be assured they knew what they were getting. In other words, if I sold a widget, I could trademark a particular name for my widgets, the Widgerator™. No one else could use Widgerator™ on similar products, on pain of lawsuit. The protection was partially for me as a business owner, but ultimately for buyers of Widgerator™ widgets. Consumers would know that Widgerator™ widgets would work 95% of the time, rather than the normal 45% of the time. If anyone could use the trademark Widgerator™, businesses making the crappy 45% widgets would slap the label on them and everyone wouldn’t know which were the 95% widgets and which were the 45% ones. Make sense?

The brand (neé trademark) Widgerator™ is really a stand-in for the 95% success rate level of quality, and only secondarily meaning anything to do with widgets themselves. Sometime after World War II, companies began to realize that what the brand stood for was more than a quality level. For instance, the Marlboro® man was a rugged individual. Marlboro stands for rugged individuality, a quality that doesn’t really apply to any product. Instead, it’s a state of mind that can be conjured, and when associated with products, gets the consumer of those products to feel as if he/she is partaking of that idea. Was this intentional? To some degree, I’m sure it was. Disney® is your childhood. Nike® is athletic achievement. Porsche® is blow-jobs from models.

Klein rails against the lack of unbranded space. I think there is plenty of unbranded space. It’s simply consumer choice that brands are so ubiquitous. We want to partake in these feelings. And we want them the easy way, rather than going out and becoming them. A few hundred dollars (or a few thousand as the case may be) is a lot cheaper than spending the time and effort to achieve athletically, for instance. And we get all the benefits!

Or so we think. And that’s why I think that branding is bad. Like my days in a disease of the week 12-step meeting in 1990, my fix of good feeling doesn’t last very long and it isn’t sustained. But this isn’t the brands’ fault. By it’s very nature, the brand means nothing about me in reality. At best, it can only mean something about the product, and if I am too stupid or lazy to realize this, simply removing brands from the market won’t get me to a fulfilled life.

In the meantime, there are plenty of unbranded (or more rationally branded) products available. Lots and lots. It’s easy for me to avoid being a walking advertisement. Maybe not quite as convenient as being a brand consumer, but the extra work is not that formidable.

One of the problems with the book is a lack of focus. Rather than focusing exclusively on brands, their ubiquity and their problems, Klein spends quite a lot of ink railing against general corporate misdeeds. Those things must be touched on, particularly given the subjects of subsequent sections, but I think she jumps around so much it’s hard to tell what the real problems are in a logical fashion. Instead, I got a very vague sense of unease about branding and corporate issues. Others of a less skeptical bent might get an overwhelming anger at or distrust with multi-national corporations, but they are going to have a hard time focusing based on this treatise. Should they be against corporations? Or is it branding? Or is it worker rights? Or what? At the end of the No Logo section (and I’ll cover it when I get there), she expresses a good theme that could be a focus, but man I wish she had introduced that theme explicitly and kept tying everything to it.

In the section No Choice, Klein covers the idea that ubiquitous branding and transnational corporations are promising cultural choice, but in reality are limiting both expression and the means of expression. The former is pretty obvious to anyone who thinks about it. If my expression is limited or defined by brand name consumerism, the content of my expression is pretty limited. I’m defining, labeling, and compressing my ideas and being into a small set of labels. Now, other people are always going to label and compartmentalize me. I’m liberal, white, young, and urban. This is all true and serves as a quick way to identify the being known online as King Rat, but by no means is that the full extent of who I am. There’s a lot more nuance there than meets the eye of the labeler. But other people need shorthand for defining me, because if other people could contain the totality of me, they wouldn’t need me. They must distill me down to pieces they can contain, along with pieces of everyone else they consider. This is all necessary.

But by publicly aligning myself with certain brands, I am putting myself in a box. And worse yet, I am putting myself in a box defined and controlled by someone else, usually marketing an P.R. suits in a corporation. Not just to other people, but to myself. And there is no need for me to limit myself like others need to limit their view of me. Absolutely none.

Let’s assume I am an artist, perhaps an aspiring filmmaker such as a young woman I saw during the previews to a movie last week. She won a contest as an up-and-coming filmmaker, and she expresses this with a short film about… Coke®. She’s limited herself to a set of ideas that are approved by that corporation. And it shows.

The second aspect that Klein deconstructs is the attempts by corporations to control their brand images, and in the process restrict externally the speech and expression that people would like to deliver. Primarily by these corporations suing individuals who use brand images to criticize the corporations and brands themselves. She also covers other attempts by companies to restrict speech of students, for instance, by including language against negative comments in exclusive contracts with universities, or by using the malls’ legal status as private space to exclude dissent. On such attempts, I agree strongly with her assessment, but I disagree with the idea that a corporation’s tactics to prevent culture jammers from altering corporate branding images are anything more than a speed bump in the free speech road. By any definition, it’s an abrogation of free speech, for sure. But we’ve never really had free speech in any country, particularly the United States. Freedom in expression is a continuum, ranging from a point where all speech is compelled to a point where there are no consequences for anyone saying anything. That a person may be deterred by minor things such as paying damages tells me either that their speech isn’t very valuable to them, or that they aren’t very dedicated to what they say.

The other aspect of the legally prescribed speech that culture jammers face obstacles expressing is simply that it’s negative speech. Klein doesn’t touch on this at all. By negative speech, I mean that this speech is not something that stands for something, but rather it is speech that stands against something, usually the idea that the brand is trying to convey. For example, by modifying a cigarette billboard, my expression takes a stand against smoking. By it’s very nature, this kind of speech is less creative than positive speech. It defines itself primarily by what it is against. It as much as letting someone else make a statement, and then saying I disagree. The rest is details. I write this with the full understanding that this review is mostly defining itself against portions of Klein’s dissertation. My creativity is defined by Klein’s. To effectively create something new, I could instead write my own treatise on branding and corporate being (much of which might agree with her take). Such negative expression is valid, and imparts important information. But were I prevented from this mode, I could just as well write my treatise and run into no difficulties in its dissemination. But such a treatise is harder to do. Jammers who complain they can’t espouse a viewpoint in the face of opposition are either not as dedicated as they think, or not as intellectually hard-working as they think.

The point is valid though. It would be better were brands not so able to control the using of their brand images to their exclusive liking.

In No Jobs, Klein covers the shift of corporations from being product producers to being brand producers, who sell products on the side under the brands. As such, these companies can view labor as interchangeable and dispensable. They lay off their manufacturing workers and shut down factories. To sell the products from which they must make their money, these corporations contract out to companies who fill manufacturing orders. In the end, you can’t just license a brand; at some point it has to be attached by someone selling a product or service. Otherwise no one would make any money. Ordering their product from someone else means the multi-national doesn’t need to take on any responsibility for the effects of the manufacture of their products. That’s in someone else’s court, despite the exacting details that they control about the product they purchase. It’s simply a matter (to them) of them getting the product they want and not having to worry about the details.

The effect of this is obviously bad in many ways. There is a wholesale flight of manufacturing jobs from the United States, leaving many people here without a steady living wage job. Klein covers the flip side of the economic coin, cheaper goods for U.S. consumers. At least in theory that could be the case, though often the savings doesn’t go into cheaper goods. Instead it goes into P.R. and advertising campaigns, and also into the pockets of the owners of capital. But she doesn’t draw out the reasons for the failure of market economics in that case to provide cheaper goods. Conventional micro-economic theory would be that the pseudo-feeling imparted by the brand has utility to consumers. But is it really that valuable, or are human minds overvaluing this feeling much like we over-value the strange and unusual over the common-place? I’d suppose the latter, but this avenue isn’t explored.

Klein does detail in a better fashion a breakdown in the supplier side of the trade equation. She covers extensively export processing zones (E.P.Z.s) throughout the developing world, and why they aren’t delivering on their promises to the workers and populations they supposedly benefit. Such zones throughout the world receive many exemptions from local laws in order to draw business. Lower minimum wages, lower tariffs, anti-unionization regulations, and more. These things are all supposed to attract businesses and therefore provide an economic benefit to workers. But in reality these businesses use these exemptions to have free rein, and should they start to lose their free rein, they extort better exemptions or move to places that will. And in some cases, they simply close down and re-open under a new name and receive the same benefits.

So what allows this to happen? Someone must be getting a benefit from this beside the business owner. Klein didn’t really explore this either. Are local officials lining their own pockets? Or, as conventional economic theory would predict, are these conditions providing the best available opportunity for the workers? The standard theory would say that if they had a better opportunity, they would take it. I think in many cases, that is true. However, why aren’t their better opportunities? What could provide a better opportunity for these downtrodden workers? This is a policy prescription to which Klein doesn’t really venture. It’s not too surprising though, since Ms. Klein isn’t an economist, and her audience isn’t a group with a lot of training in economic theory.

Klein’s last section, No Logo is her longest and I think most effective section. Here she examines what has now become the anti-globalization, anti-branding, and anti-corporate movements. It’s a largely uncritical look, but three are some salient points. The most important, I think, is the idea that brands, by needing such a tight control over their image, are providing activists with weapons to bring them down. Nike® depends so much on the clean image that it projects, that sullying that image with pictures of the sweatshops and labor conditions under which its shoes are produced is a potent way to leverage Nike® into behaving in a much better fashion. Nike® comes with its own included method of controlling Nike®, if activists but know how to use it and the media. Much of this section details the activities of these movements. Some of it seems to impute much more importance to the results from these movements (particularly the group Reclaim the Streets), which seem to me to be less effective than she thinks. A lot of this section covers the anti-sweatshop movements, both in the developed world, and the labor organizers in the developing world, the ties between them, and the tactics they use. It’s inspiring in some ways because it shows the promise, and sobering in others because the real changes haven’t been large.

Klein concludes with something I wish she had introduced early and tied to her other sections more tightly. That is, that these movements should not be about better working conditions, better environmental actions, or anti-branding, but instead they should be about giving local people and workers the right to bargain for and determine their own choices. Essentially, for workers, the right to effective unionization. She talks about this in a scattered fashion throughout the book, but had she stated this position early, and explicitly tied every portion to this, I think she would have been more effective as a writer. She also could have shown how workers and citizens could effectively take control. Because, in the end, I agree with this conclusion. And few would disagree that workers should be able to unionize (aside from the idea of forced unionization) or that people should be able to discard brands should they so wish.

Title: No logo : taking aim at the brand bullies
Alternate title: No logo: no space, no choice, no jobs
Author: Naomi Klein
Imprint / publisher: Picador
Format: Paperback
Length: xxiii, 502 p.
Publication date: April 2002
ISBN-10: 0-312-42143-5
Subject: International business enterprises — Political aspects
Subject: International business enterprises — Public opinion
Subject: Brand name products — Political aspects
Subject: Brand name products — Public opinion
LC classification: HD2755.5 .K575 2000b

Hello again! I’m working on finishing three different books and it’s been taking a while to slog through them. Anyway, I have an idea for a business and I wanted to write a business plan for it before seeking funding, so I picked up some books on the topic. Three were specifically about writing business plans (I’ll review those soon), and this one from Entrepreneur Press is a general book about starting on in Washington State.

I have to say I’m generally not too impressed with this book, though it is useful. First, very little of it is tailored to Washington State. Second, there’s lots of information in it, but very little in the way of a plan. And I don’t mean a business plan. I mean that there’s no step-by-step guide to what you need to investigate and do. I imagine most of what needs to be done is covered in the various chapters, but it’s informational rather than how-to. And the editors present the information in an atrocious order. For instance, they first discuss the legal forms of businesses, which is probably not the first thing needing accomplished. In addition, the discussion of the pros and cons is very general and there definitely is not enough information to make a sound decision or to start a business of each form.

On the other hand, there is some very useful information on funding a business through the Small Business Administration. Now, I already knew I could use the S.B.A. loan guarantee program, but I had no idea how it worked. The book explains the various programs generally. It also has some good references to find more information. I also found the chapter on business plans to be decent, though I’m hoping that the books specifically about business plans will be better.

The short version though is don’t buy this book. It’s not worth the $25 list price. Though if you do want to buy it anyway cause you think I am too negative in my reviews, buy it through the Amazon advertisement that accompanies this review. Thanks!

Title: How to start a business in Washington
Imprint / publisher: Entrepreneur Press
Format: Paperback
ISBN-10: 1-932156-37-2
Subject: New business enterprises — Law and legislation — Washington (State)
Subject: New business enterprises — Washington (State)
Subject: New business enterprises — Washington (State) — Management
Subject: Incorporation — Washington (State)
Subject: Business law — Washington (State)
Subject: Business enterprises — Law and legislation — Washington (State) — Forms
LC classification: HD62.5 .H685637 2003