Traffic and Changed Priorities in London a few weeks ago.  Seen around the corner from Harrods in Knightsbridge.

My resolutions:

1. Block time to eat right and exercise
2. Increase the energy I invest in maintaining relationships

Both of these are about elevating focus on things that are important but lack any natural urgency to spur action (see Seth Godin or Steven Covey for more on prioritizing urgency vs. importance).

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Is it too early to wish for warmer weather?  I offer an inspirational passage from Anna Karenina:

“on the following Monday, in the evening, the fog parted, the storm clouds split up into little curling crests of cloud, the sky cleared, and the real spring had come. In the morning the sun rose brilliant and quickly wore away the thin layer of ice that covered the water, and all the warm air was quivering with the steam that rose up from the quickened earth. The old grass looked greener, and the young grass thrust up its tiny blades; the buds of the guelder-rose and of the currant and the sticky birch-buds were swollen with sap, and an exploring bee was humming about the golden blossoms that studded the willow. Larks trilled unseen above the velvety green fields and the ice-covered stubble-land; peewits wailed over the low lands and marshes flooded by the pools; cranes and wild geese flew high across the sky uttering their spring calls. The cattle, bald in patches where the new hair had not grown yet, lowed in the pastures; the bowlegged lambs frisked round their bleating mothers. Nimble children ran about the drying paths, covered with the prints of bare feet. There was a merry chatter of peasant women over their linen at the pond, and the ring of axes in the yard, where the peasants were repairing ploughs and harrows. The real spring had come”

I’m enjoying re-reading Anna Karenina in small bites – the last time I read it was almost 10 years ago.  My favorite feature of the Kindle service is being able to highlight passages and then quickly see all of your highlights in one place at kindle.amazon.com.  I’d like to be able to easily share my highlights with others…perhaps they work this out in another iteration or two.

Page 25 discusses historical cultural relations with the Vietnamese which eventually precipitated a purge by the Khmer Rouges:

Vietnam was the Cambodian bogeyman…They seemed to be everything the Khmers were not; a disciplined, vigorous, virile people, whose relentless, centuries-long southward migration had swallowed up Kampuchea Krom, or Lower Cambodia, in the area  of what would become South Vietnam, and now threatened a creeping takeover of Cambodia itself, aided and abetted by the French authorities, who encouraged large-scale Vietnamese immigration to staff the lower echelons of the colonial civil service and furnish the skilled manual labor which the Cambodians were judged incapable of providing.  The result was more than mere racial antipathy.  It was a massive national inferiority complex, which took refuge in dreams of ancient grandeur.  At a personal level, Khmers and Vietnamese might befriend each other…But the cultural fracture between the two peoples – between Confucianism and Theravada Buddhism, between the Chinese world and the Indian – was one of mutual incomprehension and distrust, which periodically exploded into racial massacres and pogroms.

Page 43 hints at French colonial policy:

Under the protectorate, the French had so neglected higher education in Cambodia that in the late 1940s, fewer than a hundred students a year left secondary school with the requisite qualifications [for a university scholarship]…This was especially true in the technical fields where even the humblest posts were filled by Vietnamese because of the lack of trained Cambodians…Although the numbers were rising, fewer than 250 Cambodians had been trained abroad since the beginning of the century [almost 50 years], including those sent by their families without government support.

Page 295 discusses backward bending labor supply curves:

Even Khieu Samphan estimated that on average Khmer peasants worked only six months of the year, and sometimes much less.  Theravada Buddhism has never placed much value on the acquisition and consumption of wealth.  Sihanouk has recounted the experience of an American aid expert in the 1950s who convinced a group of villagers to use chemical fertilizer, promising that it would enable them to double rice production.  ‘Sure enough, at harvest time, the yield was doubled.  Everyone was delighted…[but] when the official came back the following year he was horrified to find that each peasant had cultivated only half his land.  “Why” said the peasants, “cultivate the entire area when you can get just as much by cultivating half?”  Fifty years later, a Khmer businessman, seeking a regular supply of palm sugar for sweetmeat manufacture encountered exactly the same problem.  Once the peasant farmers he employed had earned enough for the year they stopped work, and neither blandishments nor the promise of more money could make them start again.  “From their point of view it was logical”, he acknowledged.  “Once they had paid their family’s expenses – seed for the next planting; fertilizer; clothes; offerings to the monks; school fees for the children – what would they spend it on?  There was nothing more they wanted.”…To Pol it was a roadblock obstructing his ambition to make Cambodia prosperous and strong…the Khmers Rouges had deliberately adopted policies of extremism to move “the inert peasant mass.

To be fair I read a similar characterization of the Vietnamese in The Last Valley except in that case it was used to explain how the Vietnamese could muster hundreds of thousands of rebel fighters since their primary jobs (growing rice) only took about 3 months per year, leaving them lots of free time.  There seems to be a "Vietnam is to Cambodia/Lao as China is to Vietnam" theme in the history I'm reading.

 The last part of the book (see page 420) is interesting; Vietnam eventually invaded Cambodia and the US subsequently elected to support the Khmer Rouges (in the midst of their governance killing something like 20% of everyone in Cambodia) because it was a way to punish the Soviets via the Vietnamese – very much the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” school of foreign affairs.

• Usually 50%-95% cheaper than a new copy
• Saves resources by recycling a book rather than making you a new one
• Encourages people who are done with books to pass them on to others who really value that book rather than just letting it sit around unused or gifting it to somebody who doesn't really care about it (but will take it because it's free).  In other words, your books will generally get better utilization if you find a buyer for them instead of just giving them away

So I haven't bothered to sell my old books yet (not worth the time to package/ship them) but I will try to buy used whenever possible.

Other highlights:

• Flashbacks/nostalgia for extremely powerful companies that have disappeared from public consciousness (Braniff, Pan Am, Eastern, People Express, etc.)
• Portraits of leading CEOs with lots of anecdotes about how intense/driven some of them are (apparently when TI/Braniff asked for injunctions from regulators to keep his airline from starting up Herb Kelleher clenched his teeth so hard he cracked 4 molars)
• Characterizations of the politics and organizational dynamics at the top of these companies
• Insight into the regulatory process that is so critical to the airline business
• Marketing insights including price discrimination, product placement on travel agent screens/systems, customer segmentation, rebates, etc.

The book was written in 1996; it seemed pretty recent to me until I realized that in 1996 most people hadn't heard of the internet and the revolutionary development of the online reservations business hadn't taken off.  Having said that anybody who has a passing interest in the history of the airline business should pick up the book.