Trevor Noah - Born a crime excerpt

From Trevor Noah's book: 

 A secondhand car was also the reason my mom got married. If it hadn't been for the Volkswagen that didn't work, we never would have looked for the mechanic who became the husband who became the stepfather who became the man who tortured us for years and put a bullet in the back of my mother's head--­I'll take the new car with the warranty every time. As much as I loved church, the idea of a nine-­hour slog, from mixed church to white church to black church then doubling back to white church again, was just too much to contemplate. It was bad enough in a car, but taking public transport would be twice as long and twice as hard. When the Volkswagen refused to start, inside my head I was praying, Please say we'll just stay home. Please say we'll just stay home. Then I glanced over to see the determined look on my mother's face, her jaw set, and I knew I had a long day ahead of me. "Come," she said. "We're going to catch minibuses." My mother is as stubborn as she is religious. Once her mind's made up, that's it. Indeed, obstacles that would normally lead a person to change their plans, like a car breaking down, only made her more determined to forge ahead. "It's the Devil," she said about the stalled car. "The Devil doesn't want us to go to church. That's why we've got to catch minibuses." Whenever I found myself up against my mother's faith-­based obstinacy, I would try, as respectfully as possible, to counter with an opposing point of view. "Or," I said, "the Lord knows that today we shouldn't go to church, which is why he made sure the car wouldn't start, so that we stay at home as a family and take a day of rest, because even the Lord rested." "Ah, that's the Devil talking, Trevor." "No, because Jesus is in control, and if Jesus is in control and we pray to Jesus, he would let the car start, but he hasn't, therefore--­" "No, Trevor! Sometimes Jesus puts obstacles in your way to see if you overcome them. Like Job. This could be a test." "Ah! Yes, Mom. But the test could be to see if we're willing to accept what has happened and stay at home and praise Jesus for his wisdom." "No. That's the Devil talking. Now go change your clothes." "But Mom!" "Trevor! Sun'qhela!" Sun'qhela is a phrase with many shades of meaning. It says "don't undermine me," "don't underestimate me," and "just try me."

Source: https://cpl.catalogue.library.ns.ca/Record/1305431/Excerpt

Notes From: Satya Nadella. “Hit Refresh.”(6/9)

November 16, 2017 (page 141)

“Historically, Microsoft has struggled at times to get this balance right. We actually had a tablet before the iPad; we were well along the path toward an e-reader before the Kindle. But in some cases our software was ahead of the key components required for success, such as touchscreen hardware or broadband connectivity”

November 16, 2017 (page 152)

“It’s estimated that in the 1450s there were only about thirty thousand books in Europe—each one handcrafted by someone working in a monastery. The Gutenberg Bible was the first book produced using movable type technology, and within fifty years the number of books grew to an estimated 12 million, unleashing a renaissance in learning, science, and the arts.

That’s the same trajectory we need for AI. To get there we have to be inclusive, democratic. And so our vision is to build tools that have true artificial intelligence infused across agents, applications, services, and infrastructure:”

November 16, 2017 (page 154)

“Peter Lee is another gifted AI researcher and thinker at Microsoft. In a meeting one morning in his office, Peter reflected on something the journalist Geoffrey Willans once said. “You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.” Goethe went further. “He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.” Learning or improvement in one skill or mental function can positively influence another one. The effect is transfer learning, and it’s seen not only in human intelligence but also machine intelligence. Our team, for example, found that if we trained a computer to speak English, learning Spanish or another language became faster.”

Notes From: Satya Nadella. “Hit Refresh.” iBooks. 

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itunes.apple.com/dk/book/hit-refresh/id1128878569?mt=11

Notes From: David Enrich. “The Spider Network.” iBooks. (6 /19 - 11/19)

November 18, 2017 

“Scott Peng dreamed of becoming an astronaut. He loved the idea of floating weightless above the earth, conducting trailblazing experiments that only a few dozen other humans had ever had the chance to perform.”

November 18, 2017 

“Then Chang Díaz learned something devastating about Peng: He was nearsighted. Chang Díaz hadn’t realised it earlier because Peng wore contact lenses. The brilliant Peng somehow had neglected to look up the credentials of successful astronauts.”

November 18, 2017 

“Peng joined the swelling army of engineers, mathematicians, and scientists heading to work on Wall Street.”

November 18, 2017 

“Peng typed up a quick five-page report, titled “Is Libor Broken?” To jazz it up, he stuck a modified Hamlet quote—“Something is rotten in the state of [Libor]”—at the top. Peng figured his report was going to cause a stir. After all, its clear implication was that banks were fudging their Libor data—an incendiary accusation, given Libor’s central place in the financial system. So he summoned his boss, an executive named Michael Schumacher, into a small meeting room. It was important to get his buy-in to ensure there wouldn’t be any blowback to Peng.

“I wrote something, and I think it might be a little controversial,” Peng said. Then he handed Schumacher the draft.

Schumacher scanned the report and then paused for a moment. “Go for it,” he said. The report was sent out to Citigroup’s clients, as well as a handful of reporters, on 10 April 2008.”

November 18, 2017 

“One of Peng’s colleagues angrily told him that he had just cost the bank $10 million. Plus, another official chimed in, the BBA was irate. Someone at the trade association had called that morning and was demanding that Citigroup retract Peng’s report. His colleagues were inclined to bow to the pressure rather than fight the powerful group. Peng replied that he would be happy to retract the report if anybody could identify inaccuracies in it. Nobody did, so the report stood. But that didn’t stop his colleagues from bad-mouthing him. “My personal view is that Scott Peng was rather distant to the whole process and would not really have known about the intricacies of Libor, not being an expert in the money markets,” Andrew Thursfield, Citigroup’s representative on the Libor oversight committee, would later declare.”

November 18, 2017 

“The entire BBA, for that matter, seemed out of its depth with Libor. At times, the frustration boiled over. Screaming matches erupted between the hapless Ewan and Mollenkamp, who perceived the BBA as trying to hide the increasingly obvious problems with its flagship product.

For her part, Knight wrote a typo-strewn e-mail to bank CEOs asking them to “secure specific posative comments” from research analysts and to make sure we “have them on side … We need to reinforce Libor.”

November 18, 2017 

“Maybe, she said, a trade group like the BBA shouldn’t be responsible for such an important financial benchmark? Perhaps regulators or central bankers should be involved in administering or at least overseeing it. She was greeted with blank stares. Nobody wanted to be responsible for this mess.”

November 18, 2017 

“For their next project, Mollenkamp and Whitehouse set out to prove that Libor was broken. They decided to look at an instrument called credit default swaps. These were basically insurance contracts between a bank and another party that paid out if a company defaulted on its debts. Investors used the instruments to protect themselves when they were buying corporate bonds.”

November 18, 2017 

“In any case, despite the increasing concerns about Libor, the Bank of England continued to rely on it. When it unveiled a new emergency lending program for British banks, it used Libor to determine the interest rates and fees banks would pay to participate. There was nothing the Americans could do—which is just how Hayes, his fellow traders, and the BBA liked it”

November 18, 2017 

“On the evening of 4 November, a senior official at the Bank of England, Paul Fisher, shot off a personal note to Ewan. It had been a long day at the central bank, with a global crisis raging. Fisher’s job included keeping tabs on the foreign-exchange market, which, thanks to the violent financial turbulence, had suddenly become a full-time occupation. But Fisher was preoccupied with an unrelated problem. He had read a Goldman Sachs research note earlier that day about Libor. Fisher was no expert on the benchmark, but he knew its definition: It was the rate at which banks thought they could borrow money from each other. The Goldman report had got the definition wrong, describing Libor as the rate at which banks loaned money to each other. When Fisher noticed the error, it got him thinking: How widespread was the confusion?”

November 28, 2017 

“There’s number one rule, if you go drinking, make sure you get in,” Aaron slurred. “That is the only rule…. It doesn’t matter if you go out drinking till four o’clock in the morning. Make it home, make it into work, and then people will send you home if you look like shit. But at least make the effort to make it in. That’s the only rule.”

Notes From: David Enrich. “The Spider Network.” iBooks. 

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itunes.apple.com/dk/book/the-spider-network/id1145710390?mt=11

Notes From: David Enrich. “The Spider Network.” iBooks. (6/19)

November 5, 2017 

“Hayes was so open about, and preoccupied with, his strategy that he would change the status on his Facebook page to reflect his daily desires for Libor to move up or down, a self-deprecating poke at his nerdy fixation. At night, he dreamed of the rate. When it didn’t move in a favourable direction, Hayes often lost his composure, ranting to Alykulov that he didn’t understand why rival traders didn’t accede to his and his brokers’ requests.”

November 5, 2017 

“And so Hayes decided to get his younger stepbrother, Peter O’Leary, involved. O’Leary had come into Hayes’s life when Hayes was eleven years old and his mother remarried. O’Leary and his brother, Ben, moved in with Hayes and his younger brother, Robin. Hayes liked his new stepfather, Tim, and got along well with Peter and Ben. Now Peter was looking to follow in Hayes’s professional footsteps.”

November 5, 2017 

“The next day, Hayes sent O’Leary a reminder, referring to Darcy as O’Leary’s “mate.”

“Will do,” O’Leary responded. “For the record he’s definitely not my ‘mate’!” O’Leary was feeling a bit sheepish about making the request. “Dunno if he’ll do anything on it seeing as he doesn’t really know me and is massively more senior than me,” he cautioned.

“Well, no harm in asking!” Hayes typed.

O’Leary banged out a quick instant message to his colleague. “high 6m yen libor owuld be gd according to my brother!” The reply came back: “WILL DO MY BEST.”

November 5, 2017 

“Jeffrey Laydon was a computer geek turned salesman who, after attending a technical college in Milwaukee and spending five years as a consultant at Southwestern Bell, had moved to Florida in the mid-1980s.”

November 5, 2017 

“Balding, with ruddy cheeks, wire-rimmed glasses, and a sandy moustache, Laydon had a couple of hobbies. One was sailing; he loved taking a boat out on Lake Monroe, where he was a member of the local sailing association. Another passion was investing. From the comfort of his home, he traded stocks, options, and futures via an online brokerage account. He was doing well enough that he toyed with the idea of quitting his job and becoming a full-time day trader, someone who could even help educate other wannabe investors.”

November 5, 2017 

“By 2006, Laydon had discovered a new area to wager on: Japanese interest rates. He didn’t know much about Japan, but derivatives linked to the yen were becoming increasingly popular after the Bank of Japan’s rate hike, and he decided to give it a go”

November 5, 2017 

“n the years leading up to the financial crisis, public pension funds had been growing increasingly bold and creative in the gambles they made with their members’ money. Markets were booming, and it was hard to resist the temptation to leap for the double-digit annual returns that hedge funds and other professional money managers were attaining. ”

November 5, 2017 

“Before long, the OPPRS—exactly the type of dumb-money clients that Hayes and his ilk battled for the right to do business with—was the proud owner of Japanese interest-rate derivatives. Sure enough, the bets soured—a result, the fund would later claim, of manipulation by Hayes and his pals. A similar scenario played out in California. ”

November 5, 2017 

“To survive, RP Martin had to be aggressive, going the extra mile for clients. Until 2010, Mustard resisted even having a compliance department; the basic guiding principle governing employee conduct should be common sense, he thought, not a rigid set of rules. When he finally bowed to reality and created a compliance group, he did what he could to marginalise its employees. Warning the new department’s chief not to inadvertently “destabilise” things, Mustard told him not to introduce any initiatives that would affect the brokers. The last thing Mustard needed was an intrusive internal affairs bureau causing his stars to jump to competitors.”

November 5, 2017 

“Stenfors grew up in a small town in Finland near the Baltic Sea. Athletic, with high cheekbones, brown sideburns, and deep-set brown eyes, he was the unusual combination of a runner and smoker.”

November 5, 2017 

“Stenfors cycled through some of the world’s biggest banks. In September 2001, he was working in London in the investment-banking division of Crédit Agricole when terrorists hijacked planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center in Manhattan. The French bank’s New York offices were on the ninety-second floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower—just below where the first plane crashed. (Sixty-nine Crédit Agricole employees perished that day.) Early that afternoon in London, footage of the disaster was broadcast on the wall-mounted TVs around Crédit Agricole’s trading floor. Stenfors and his colleagues kept doing business as if nothing had happened.”

November 5, 2017 

“Stenfors and Farr were tight. Stenfors thought the broker was friendly and honest, and it felt nice to do business with an underdog firm and an up-from-his-bootstraps broker who was making a fraction of what someone at a rival firm would earn.”

November 5, 2017 

“After clicking at the ICAP party, Hayes and Stenfors started trading together more and more. Hayes soon became one of Stenfors’s biggest trading partners, and they tended to automatically route their transactions through Farr, who pocketed fat commission payments for almost no work.”

November 5, 2017 

“To the frustration of some of his brokers, Hayes remained uninterested in being lavishly entertained. He preferred to sit at home with a bucket of fried chicken from KFC and a tall glass of orange juice, followed by a hot bath. One evening, a desperate broker showed up outside UBS’s Tokyo office and pleaded to let him take Hayes out to dinner; the broker needed to show his bosses he was entertaining the star client. Hayes finally relented—and then led him to a nearby Burger King, where the broker spotted a rat scuttling across the floor”

November 5, 2017 

“The irony was that, just as the Reads started to settle down, Hayes was thinking about returning to England. Ainsworth, after getting off to a fast start in Japan, now was entertaining a fantasy of opening a clothing shop back home. (“Independent woman,” Read remarked sarcastically. “Fantastic.”) Hayes, meanwhile, missed the food, his family, the ability to communicate relatively easily, the weather (he hated Tokyo’s hot summer days and longed for soggy England), and especially Queens Park Rangers. Maybe he could move back to London, enrol in business school, and pursue a profession less intense than trading. He gave himself at most another couple of years in Tokyo. “I will definitely need a rest,” he told Read.”

Notes From: David Enrich. “The Spider Network.” iBooks. 

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itunes.apple.com/dk/book/the-spider-network/id1145710390?mt=11

Notes From: David Enrich. “The Spider Network.” (5/19)

November 5, 2017 

“Excess was everywhere in the heady days before the financial crisis. Similar to UBS, BNP had started out back in 1848 as a run-of-the-mill French lender, but by now it had become a continent-leaping colossus”

November 5, 2017 

“Hayes had been in Tokyo a rough couple of months. There was, of course, the lingering ugliness surrounding his trading in his final weeks at the Royal Bank of Canada, but it seemed like nearly everything else had been a mess, too. After he had spent a few days working in UBS’s office, the human resources department got around to collecting his documentation and realised he didn’t have a work visa, only a tourist one. It therefore was illegal for him to be working in Japan. Hayes was ordered by a distressed HR officer to immediately leave for Seoul, South Korea, and to stay there until his Japanese visa came through. The mix-up didn’t inspire much confidence in UBS.”

November 5, 2017 

“The Team America puppets depicting Middle Eastern terrorists used the phrase “Derka derka Muhammad jihad” instead of speaking actual Arabic. Alykulov wasn’t an Arab, and Kazakhstan isn’t in the Middle East. No matter. “Haha, that’s great,” Pieri said when he learned of his subordinate’s nickname.”

November 5, 2017 

“ Hayes organised his bets around derivatives that would deliver profits if, at a specific date, the difference between two interest rates—say, those in the United States and those in Japan—narrowed or widened by very precise margins”

November 5, 2017 

“Hayes’s team was on a floor that also included specialists in trading currencies, commodities, and bonds. The entire group would go out for beer-and-bowling nights three or four times a year at the Tokyo Dome Bowling Center, next door to the indoor stadium where the Yomiuri Giants baseball team played. These were among the few work events that Hayes genuinely enjoyed.”

November 5, 2017 

“ Long before Hayes arrived in Tokyo, the submitters and the traders had realised they could help each other out. It had been common practice at UBS for traders to ask their deskmates to nudge Tibor in helpful directions, and to ring colleagues in other parts of the UBS empire for help moving Libor. Those colleagues didn’t have to comply—they could have reported something resembling the bank’s actual borrowing costs—but who wanted to be the martyr, the goody two-shoes, who interfered with traders raking in profits for the bank?”

November 5, 2017 

“One afternoon that September, Hayes was chatting electronically with a Tokyo broker named David Perfect.”

November 5, 2017 

“It’s “very, very hard to price stuff with the fixes”—trader shorthand for benchmarks like Libor—“being so manipulated and inconsistent,” he complained.

“The fixes are manipulated?” Perfect deadpanned.

“Yes, of course they are,” Hayes said, not picking up the sarcasm.

“Kidding,” Perfect clarified.”

November 5, 2017 

“And so on his first day of trading, as Hayes chatted with Terry Farr, he threw in a casual aside: “Do me a favour today and get Libors right up.”fn2

“I’ll do what I can,” Farr responded”

November 5, 2017 

“Around 7 A.M., he sent out an e-mail called a “run-through” to a slew of bank traders. The dispatch contained a simple spreadsheet—basically just a box of numbers—pasted into the body of the message. It listed where every tenor—the technical term for time periodfn3—of yen Libor had stood the past day or two and where Goodman expected it to end up that day. He called that last figure “Suggested Libors.” Each morning, he prefaced the data with the same simple note: “GOOD MORNING YEN RUN THRU.”

November 5, 2017 

“Relying on the run-throughs represented an enticing shortcut. And because of the inherent subjectivity of the Libor estimates, nobody was likely to notice.”

November 5, 2017 

“Once, when Goodman’s run-through contained a typo, suggesting six-month Libor at 1.10 instead of 1.01, Read noticed that Citigroup and WestLB copied it, even though it represented a huge leap from the previous day’s level. When Goodman corrected it the next day, the banks again followed suit. In other words, the laziness of a few bank employees—“sheep,” as Read sometimes called them—meant that ICAP’s run-throughs had a startling amount of real power. ”

November 5, 2017 

“Indian food being the preferred takeout option among London’s traders and brokers”

November 5, 2017 

“Over the next two years, Hayes—or Alykulov, who had eagerly accepted a job as Hayes’s deputy, hoping some of his brilliance would rub off on him—would ping Darin on hundreds of occasions asking him to move UBS’s Libor data in helpful ways. Darin often complied. Neither he nor Alykulov thought much of the requests, partly because it was so clearly common practice on the bank’s trading floors.”

November 5, 2017 

“The exchange reflected an important dynamic: There were limits to the extent that traders would tinker with Libor. You could move Libor within a certain plausible band to help yourself, but straying outside that range was at best unwise. Did that principle stem from a sense of propriety, a notion that while the definition of Libor was a bit amorphous, the submissions needed to have at least some integrity? Or was it simply that traders wanted to avoid detection as they rigged a vital interest rate? Years later, that question would be hotly contested.”

November 5, 2017 

“Hayes’s life revolved around his job. He typically arrived at work around 8 A.M. and stayed till at least 7 P.M. He came in when he was sick. He rarely ate lunch. An assistant fetched him afternoon tea.”

November 5, 2017 

“hough Hayes was obsessed, he was hardly miserable. For the first time in his life, he was popular with women. The fact that he was a well-paid rising star probably didn’t hurt. But he also felt more relaxed talking to Japanese women (those who spoke English, that is) than he did Western ones because he didn’t find the former to be physically attractive. Japanese women took an immediate liking to him, apparently because he seemed nonpredatory and sweet compared to some of his peers.fn6 One woman at UBS found his quirky personality adorable and bought him a pair of panda dolls. Propped up on his desk, they became his lucky pandas.”

Notes From: David Enrich. “The Spider Network.” iBooks. 

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itunes.apple.com/dk/book/the-spider-network/id1145710390?mt=11

Notes From: Satya Nadella. “Hit Refresh.” (5/9)

November 12, 2017 (page 123)

“Partnering is too often seen as a zero-sum game—whatever is gained by one participant is lost by another. I don’t see it that way. When done right, partnering grows the pie for everyone—for customers, yes, but also for each of the partners. Ultimately the consensus was that this partnership with Apple would help to ensure Office’s value was available to everyone, and Apple was committing to make its iOS really show off the great things Office can do, which would further solidify Microsoft as the top developer for Apple.”

November 12, 2017 (page 129)

“Just after becoming CEO, I joined Michael Dell in Austin, Texas, at his annual strategy day dedicated to answering questions from the press and stock analysts. In 2015, just after the EMC merger, a puzzled Emily Chang of Bloomberg News asked Michael and me to describe our relationship: “Are you friends? Are you frenemies?” It’s a simple question, and I offered a simple answer: “We are longtime friends who compete for and serve many of the same customers.” But the real answer requires a more in-depth description.”

November 12, 2017 (page 131)

“Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, is a competitor who I also count as a friend. After a series of very productive discussions and thoughtful negotiations between our two organizations, led by Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, Sundar and I surprised observers of the rivalry with a joint statement: “Our companies compete vigorously, but we want to do so on the merits of our products, not in legal proceedings.”

In pushing this change of attitude, I’ve been helped by the simple fact that I am a fresh face, new blood. Losing the baggage of history makes it easier for me to break down old walls of mistrust. But will it be enough?”

November 12, 2017 (page 138)

“Going back to my days as an engineer, I’ve used the following mental model to capture how I manage time:

Employees. Customers. Products. Partners. Each element needs time, attention, and focus if I’m going to create the value for which I am ultimately accountable.”

Notes From: Satya Nadella. “Hit Refresh.” iBooks. 

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itunes.apple.com/dk/book/hit-refresh/id1128878569?mt=11

Notes From: Satya Nadella. “Hit Refresh.” (4/9)

November 12, 2017 (page 100)

“I like to think that the C in CEO stands for culture. The CEO is the curator of an organization’s culture. As I had told employees in Orlando, anything is possible for a company when its culture is about listening, learning, and harnessing individual passions and talents to the company’s mission. Creating that kind of culture is my chief job as CEO. And so, whether it was through public events like the launch of Windows 10 or through speeches, emails, tweets, internal posts, or monthly employee Q&A sessions, I planned to use every opportunity at my disposal to encourage our team to live this culture of dynamic learning.”

November 12, 2017 (page 102)

“Innovation and competition don’t respect our silos, our org boundaries, so we have to learn to transcend those barriers. We are a family of individuals united by a single, shared mission. It is not about doing what’s comfortable within our own organization, it’s about getting outside that comfort zone, reaching out to do things that are most important for customers. For some companies this comes more naturally.”

November 12, 2017 (page 105)

“Because I’ve made culture change at Microsoft such a high priority, people often ask how it’s going. Well, I suppose my response is very Eastern: We’re making great progress, but we should never be done. It’s not a program with a start and end date. It’s a way of being. Frankly, I am wired that way. When I learn about a shortcoming, it’s a thrilling moment. The person who points it out has given me the gift of insight. It’s about questioning ourselves each day: Where are all the places today that I had a fixed mindset? Where did I have a growth mindset?”

November 12, 2017 (page 108)

“If you want to understand the culture inside a software company, show up at a meeting that includes engineers from different parts of the company. These are very smart people who are passionate about building great products. But are they plugged into what customers need and want? Do they include diverse opinions and capabilities when writing code? And do they act like they’re on the same team, even if they work in different groups? Answers to questions like these serve as a great barometer for the culture we need. Demonstrating a growth mindset. Customer-centric. Diverse and inclusive. One company.”

November 12, 2017 (page 109)

“The key to the culture change was individual empowerment. We sometimes underestimate what we each can do to make things happen, and overestimate what others need to do for us. We had to get out of the mode of thinking in which we assume that others have more power over us than we do. I became irritated once during an employee Q&A when someone asked me, “Why can’t I print a document from my mobile phone?” I politely told him, “Make it happen. You have full authority.”

November 12, 2017 (page 110)

“Another time, members of a chat group on Yammer, our corporate social media service for internal conversations, were complaining that people were leaving half-used milk cartons in the office refrigerator. Apparently people would open a fresh eight-ounce container of milk, pour some in their coffee or tea, and then leave it out on the counter thinking others would finish it. But no one wants to use a personal milk container opened by somebody else that is beginning to sour. It blew up on Yammer, and I used one of my video messages to employees to have a good laugh at it, showcasing it as a humorous example of a fixed mindset.”

November 12, 2017 (page 114)

“This episode led me to reflect on my own experience as an immigrant. Hearing racial slurs toward Indians after moving to America never stung me, I just blew them off—an easy thing to do for a man raised in the majority and with privilege in India. Even when some people in positions of power have remarked that there are too many Asian CEOs in technology, I’ve ignored their ignorance. But as I grow older, and watch a second generation of Indians—my kids and their friends—grow up as minorities in the United States, I cannot help but think about how our experiences differ. It infuriates me to think they will hear and grapple with racial slurs and ignorance.”

November 12, 2017 (page 116)

“A manager can be demanding, but must also have the empathy to figure out what will motivate employees. Likewise, an employee is right to put his or her head down and work hard, but they also have the right to expect a pathway to greater responsibility and recognition when they do. There must be balance.”

November 12, 2017 (page 118)

“A Harvard Business Review survey found that senior leaders inside companies spend less than 10 percent of their time developing high potential leaders. If even top executives cannot find the time to unlock employee potential, the growth path for most corporate team members looks pretty static.”

November 12, 2017 (page 118)

“I told these high-potential leaders that once you become a vice president, a partner in this endeavor, the whining is over. You can’t say the coffee around here is bad, or there aren’t enough good people, or I didn’t get the bonus.

“To be a leader in this company, your job is to find the rose petals in a field of shit.”

Notes From: Satya Nadella. “Hit Refresh.” iBooks. 

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itunes.apple.com/dk/book/hit-refresh/id1128878569?mt=11

Notes From: Satya Nadella. “Hit Refresh.” (3/9)

November 5, 2017 (page 66)

“After decades of steady growth in worldwide PC shipments, sales had peaked and were now in decline. ”

November 5, 2017 (page 66)

“To make matters worse, not only were PC sales soft, but so was interest in Windows 8, launched eighteen months earlier. Meanwhile Android and Apple operating systems were surging, reflections of the smartphone explosion that we at Microsoft had failed to lead and barely managed to participate in. As a result, Microsoft’s stock, long a blue chip investment, had been treading water for years”

November 5, 2017 (page 66)

“The company was sick. Employees were tired. They were frustrated. They were fed up with losing and falling behind despite their grand plans and great ideas.”

November 5, 2017 (page 67)

“Job one was to build hope. This was day one of our transformation—I knew it must start from within.”

November 5, 2017 (page 68)

“One of my favorite books is Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine about another tech company, Data General, in the 1970s. In it, Kidder teaches us that technology is nothing more than the collective soul of those who build it. The technology is fascinating, but even more fascinating is the profound obsession of its designers. And so what is soul in this context of a company? I don’t mean soul in a religious sense. It is the thing that comes most naturally. It is the inner voice. It’s what motivates and provides inner direction to apply your capability. What is the unique sensibility that we as a company have?”

November 5, 2017 (page 69)

“Steve Jobs understood what the soul of a company is. He once said that “design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” I agree. Apple will always remain true to its soul as long as its inner voice, its motivation, is about great design for consumer products.”

November 5, 2017 (page 69)

“How many organizations can say they achieved their founding mission? There is no way I would become CEO of a Fortune 500 company if it was not for the democratizing force of Microsoft all over the world. But the world had changed, and it was time for us to change our view of the world.

Worldview is an interesting term, rooted in cognitive philosophy. Simply put, it is how a person comprehensively sees the world—across political, social, and economic borders. What are the common experiences we all share? ”

November 5, 2017 (page 70)

“I simplified all of this and encouraged Microsoft to become “mobile-first and cloud-first.” Not PC-first or even Phone-first.”

November 5, 2017 (page 71)

“In 2008, the Linux-based Android smartphone gobbled up market share and today it runs on more than one billion activated devices.

Looking back, the Nokia deal announced in September 2013, five months before I would become CEO, became another painful example of this loss. We were desperate to catch up after missing the rise of mobile technology. ”

November 5, 2017 (page 72)

“A few months after I became CEO, the Nokia deal closed, and our teams worked hard to relaunch Windows Phone with new devices and a new operating system that came with new experiences. But it was too late to regain the ground we had lost. We were chasing our competitors’ taillights. Months later, I would have to announce a total write-off of the acquisition as well as plans to eliminate nearly eighteen thousand jobs, the majority of them because of the Nokia devices and services acquisition. ”

November 5, 2017 (page 73)

“What we needed most was a fresh and distinctive approach to mobile computing. Where we went wrong initially was failing to recognize that our greatest strengths were already part of the soul of our company—inventing new hardware for Windows, making computing more personal, and making our cloud services work across any device and any platform. We should only be in the phone business when we have something that is really differentiated”

November 5, 2017 (page 75)

“Over the first several months of my tenure, I devoted a lot of time to listening, to anyone and everyone just as I had promised to do in that Thanksgiving memo to the board.”

November 5, 2017 (page 75)

“To my first question, why does Microsoft exist, the message was loud and clear. We exist to build products that empower others. That is the meaning we’re all looking to infuse into our work.”

November 5, 2017 (page 77)

“My first title at Microsoft had been “evangelist,” a common term in technology for someone who drives a standard or product to achieve critical mass. Now here I was evangelizing the notion that we needed to rediscover our soul. The mission of a company is in many ways a statement about its soul, and that’s where I went first.”

November 11, 2017 (page 80)

“One of my favorites was to challenge conventional thinking more. Why is Xbox a box since traditional television and cable boxes are fading? What if Kinect, our”

November 11, 2017 (page 80)

“motion-sensing technology used for video games and robotics, came with wings or wheels so it could go fetch lost keys or wallets? Many wrote to me to say that after years of frustration they felt a new energy.”

November 11, 2017 (page 81)

“For anything monumental to happen—great software, innovative hardware, or even a sustainable institution—there needs to be one great mind or a set of agreeing minds. I don’t mean yes-men and yes-women. Debate and argument are essential. Improving upon each other’s ideas is crucial. I wanted people to speak up. “Oh, here’s a customer segmentation study I’ve done.” “Here’s a pricing approach that contradicts this idea.” It’s great to have a good old-fashioned college debate. But there also has to be high quality agreement. We needed a senior leadership team (SLT) that would lean into each other’s problems, promote dialogue, and be effective.”

November 11, 2017 (page 86)

“Every year in July some fifteen thousand customer-facing Microsoft employees gather for a global summit to hear the latest strategies and initiatives and to see demos of new tech products in development. The gathering would be my opportunity to update employees on our progress and enroll them in the changes under way.”

November 11, 2017 (page 87)

“The more I thought about it, the more I questioned what it was that had motivated us to create personal computers in the first place. What was the spirit behind the”

November 11, 2017 (page 87)

“first line of code ever written for the BASIC interpreter on that primitive computer, the Altair? It was to empower people.”

November 11, 2017 (page 87)

“And that was still what motivated all of our efforts: to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We are in the empowerment business, I said as I took the stage, and not just to empower startups and tech-savvy users on the American West Coast, but everyone on the planet.”

November 11, 2017 (page 90)

“Rediscovering the soul of Microsoft, redefining our mission, and outlining the business ambitions that would help investors and customers grow our company—these had been my priorities with the first inkling that I would become CEO. Getting our strategy right had preoccupied me from the beginning. But as management guru Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” As I concluded my talk that morning in Orlando, I focused on what would be our grandest endeavor, the highest hurdle—transforming the Microsoft culture.”

November 11, 2017 (page 93)

“As I continued my speech at the global sales conference, the empathy I felt for my kids and the empathy I felt for the people listening in that audience were on my mind and in my emotions.

“We can have all the bold ambitions. We can have all the bold goals. We can aspire to our new mission. But it’s only going to happen if we live our culture, if we teach our culture. And to me that model of culture is not a static thing. It is about a dynamic learning culture. In fact, the phrase we use to describe our emerging culture is ‘growth mindset,’ because it’s about every individual, every one of us having that attitude—that mindset—of being able to overcome any constraint, stand up to any challenge, making it possible for us to grow and, thereby, for the company to grow.”

November 11, 2017 (page 94)

“I told my colleagues that I was not talking bottom-line growth. I was talking about our individual growth. We will grow as a company if everyone, individually, grows in their roles and in their lives. My wife, Anu, and I had been blessed with wonderful children, and we’ve had to learn their special needs. That has changed everything for us. “It’s taken me on this journey of developing more empathy for others.”

Notes From: Satya Nadella. “Hit Refresh.” iBooks. 

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itunes.apple.com/dk/book/hit-refresh/id1128878569?mt=11

Notes From: Satya Nadella. “Hit Refresh.” (2/9)

October 15, 2017 

“This is not the book to describe the ins and outs of cricket, but it is a book that cannot avoid the metaphor of cricket and business.

Like most South Asians, I somehow fell in love with this most English of games on the dusty matting wickets of the Deccan Plateau in southern India.”

October 15, 2017 

“When I was ten I returned to Hyderabad, and for the next six years I truly and surely fell in love with cricket as a player for Hyderabad Public School (HPS)”

October 15, 2017 

“Cricket for me is like a wondrous Russian novel with plots and subplots played out over the course of multiple acts. In the end, one brilliant knock, or three deftly bowled balls, can change the complexion of a game.

There are three stories from my all-too-brief cricketing past that speak very directly to business and leadership principles I use even today as a CEO.”

October 15, 2017 

“The first principle is to compete vigorously and with passion in the face of uncertainty and intimidation.”

October 15, 2017 

“It showed me that you must always have respect for your competitor, but don’t be in awe. Go and compete.”

October 15, 2017 

“a second principle is simply the importance of putting your team first, ahead of your personal statistics and recognition”

October 15, 2017 

“There are of course many lessons and principles one can take from cricket, but for me a third is the central importance of leadership”

October 15, 2017 

“Our team captain in retrospect showed me what real leadership looks like. When my over had ended (that is, when I had thrown six balls), he replaced me with himself even though he was a better batsman than bowler. He quickly took the wicket—the batsman was out. Customarily taking a wicket that efficiently would argue for him remaining in as a bowler. But instead, he immediately handed the ball back to me and I took seven wickets of my own. Why did he do it? I surmised he wanted me to get my confidence back.”

October 15, 2017 

“I think that is perhaps the number one thing that leaders have to do: to bolster the confidence of the people you’re leading. ”

October 15, 2017 

“The arrival of our son, Zain, in August 1996 had been a watershed moment in Anu’s and my life together. His suffering from asphyxia in utero, had changed our lives in ways we had not anticipated. ”

October 15, 2017 

“My son’s condition requires that I draw daily upon the very same passion for ideas and empathy that I learned from my parents. And I do this both at home and at work. Whether I am meeting with people in Latin America, the Middle East, or one of the inner cities of America, I am always searching to understand people’s thoughts, feelings, and ideas.”

October 15, 2017 

“There’s a great scene in Sylvester Stallone’s Creed, the latest of his Rocky movie series. The champ jots down on a piece of paper a workout regimen for his protégé, who quickly snaps a photo of it on his smartphone. As the kid jogs away, Rocky yells, “Don’t you want the paper?”

October 15, 2017 

“I got it right here, it’s already up in the cloud,” the kid replies.

The aging Rocky looks skyward. “What cloud? What cloud?” Rocky may not know about the cloud, but millions of others rely on it.”

October 15, 2017 

“And while Microsoft was struggling with low market share in search, Steve had invested in it because it would require the company to compete in a sector beyond Windows and Office and build great technology—which he saw as the future of our industry. There was tremendous pressure for Microsoft to answer Amazon’s growing cloud business. This was the business he was inviting me to join.

“You should think about it, though,” Steve added. “This might be your last job at Microsoft, because if you fail there is no parachute. You may just crash with it.” I wondered at the time whether he meant it as a grim bit of humor or as a perfectly straightforward warning. I’m still not quite sure which it was.”

October 15, 2017 

“So one night, after a long day at work, I decided to drive over to Building 88, which housed the Internet search engineering team. I wanted to walk the hallways and see who these people were. How else could I empathize with the team I was being asked to lead? It was about 9 p.m., but the parking lot was packed. I’d expected to see a few stragglers finishing up their day but, no, the whole team was there working at their desks and eating take-out food. I didn’t really talk to anyone. But what I observed caused me to wonder: What gets people to work like this? Something important must be happening in Building 88.

Seeing the team that night, their commitment and dedication, clinched it for me. I told Steve, “Okay, I’m in.” What color was my parachute? I didn’t have one.”

October 30, 2017 

“we had to become great at consumer product design. We knew we needed great technology, but we also understood we needed a great experience, one you want to engage with time and again. ”

October 30, 2017 

“User scorecards determine which is the most effective. Sometimes, seemingly tiny differences can mean a lot. Something as simple as the color or size of a type font may profoundly impact the willingness of consumers to engage, triggering behavioral variations that may be worth tens of millions in revenue. Now Microsoft had to master this new approach to product design.”

October 30, 2017 

“Shortly after I took over, the company issued this statement: “Nadella and his team are tasked with leading Microsoft’s enterprise transformation into the cloud and providing the technology roadmap and vision for the future of business computing.” Steve had said the transformation would not happen overnight, but we were running out of time”

October 30, 2017 

“I also recognized this was a team that cared deeply about enterprises, those customers with exacting and sophisticated computing needs.”

October 30, 2017 

“Leadership means making choices and then rallying the team around those choices. One thing I had learned from my dad’s experience as a senior Indian government official was that few tasks are more difficult than building a lasting institution. The choice of leading through consensus versus fiat is a false one. Any institution-building comes from having a clear vision and culture that works to motivate progress both top-down and bottom-up.”

October 30, 2017 

“Microsoft had long held that the open-source software from Linux was the enemy. We couldn’t afford to cling to that attitude any longer. We had to meet the customers where they were and, more importantly, we needed to ensure that we viewed our opportunity not through a rearview mirror, but with a more future-oriented perspective. We changed the name of the product from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure to make it clear that our cloud was not just about Windows.”

October 30, 2017 

“The cloud business taught me a series of lessons I would carry with me for years to come. Perhaps the most important is this: A leader must see the external opportunities and the internal capability and culture—and all of the connections among them—and respond to them before they become obvious parts of the conventional wisdom. It’s an art form, not a science. And a leader will not always get it right. But the batting average for how well a leader does this is going to define his or her longevity in business. It’s an insight that would serve me well when an even bigger set of challenges was presented to me as CEO.”

Notes From: Satya Nadella. “Hit Refresh.” iBooks. 

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itunes.apple.com/dk/book/hit-refresh/id1128878569?mt=11

Notes From: Satya Nadella. “Hit Refresh.” (1/9)

October 10, 2017 

“...after years of outdistancing all of our competitors, something was changing—and not for the better. Innovation was being replaced by bureaucracy. Teamwork was being replaced by internal politics. We were falling behind.”

October 10, 2017 

“when I was named Microsoft’s third CEO in February 2014, I told employees that renewing our company’s culture would be my highest priority. I told them I was committed to ruthlessly removing barriers to innovation so we could get back to what we all joined the company to do—to make a difference in the world.”

October 10, 2017 

“Each week my senior leadership team (SLT) meets to review, brainstorm, and wrestle with big opportunities and difficult decisions. The SLT is made up of some very talented people—engineers, researchers, managers, and marketers. It’s a diverse group of men and women from a variety of backgrounds who have come to Microsoft because they love technology and they believe their work can make a difference”

October 10, 2017 

“I had been a member of the SLT myself when Steve Ballmer was CEO, and, while I admired every member of our team, I felt that we needed to deepen our understanding of one another—to delve into what really makes each of us tick—and to connect our personal philosophies to our jobs as leaders of the company. I knew that if we dropped those proverbial guns and channeled that collective IQ and energy into a refreshed mission, we could get back to the dream that first inspired Bill and Paul—democratizing leading-edge computer technology.”

October 10, 2017 

“Early one Friday morning the SLT assembled. Only this time it was not in our staid, executive boardroom. Instead we gathered in a more relaxed space on the far-side of campus, one frequented by software and game developers. It was open, airy, and unpretentious. Gone were the usual tables and chairs. There was no space to set up computers to monitor never-ending emails and newsfeeds. Our phones were put away—jammed into pants pockets, bags, and backpacks. Instead we sat on comfortable couches in a large circle. There was no place to hide. I opened the meeting by asking everyone to suspend judgment and try to stay in the moment. I was hopeful, but I was also somewhat anxious.”

October 10, 2017 

“Fear: of being ridiculed; of failing; of not looking like the smartest person in the room. And arrogance: I am too important for these games. “What a stupid question,” we had grown used to hearing.

But Dr. Gervais was encouraging. People began to breathe more easily and to laugh a little. Outside, the grayness of the morning brightened beneath the summer sun and one by one we all spoke.”

October 10, 2017 

“As I listened, I realized that in all of my years at Microsoft this was the first time I’d heard my colleagues talk about themselves, not exclusively about business matters. Looking around the room, I even saw a few teary eyes.”

October 10, 2017 

“I told them that we spend far too much time at work for it not to have deep meaning. If we can connect what we stand for as individuals with what this company is capable of, there is very little we can’t accomplish.”

October 14, 2017 

“My personal philosophy and my passion, developed over time and through exposure to many different experiences, is to connect new ideas with a growing sense of empathy for other people. Ideas excite me. Empathy grounds and centers me.”

October 14, 2017 

“Imagine you see a baby laying in the street, and the baby is crying. What do you do?” he asked.

“You call 911,” I replied without much forethought.

Richard walked me out of his office, put his arm around me, and said, “You need some empathy, man. If a baby is laying on a street crying, pick up the baby.”

October 14, 2017 

“ Zain was born at 11:29 p.m. on August 13, 1996, all of three pounds. He did not cry.

Zain was transported from the hospital in Bellevue across Lake Washington to Seattle Children’s Hospita”

October 14, 2017 

“Over the course of the next couple of years we learned more about the damage caused by asphyxia in utero, and how Zain would require a wheelchair and be reliant on us because of severe cerebral palsy. I was devastated. But mostly I was sad for how things turned out for me and Anu.”

October 14, 2017 

“Don’t get me wrong. I am anything but perfect and for sure not on the verge of achieving enlightenment or nirvana. It’s just that life’s experience has helped me build a growing sense of empathy for an ever-widening circle of people. I have empathy for people with disabilities. I have empathy for people trying to make a living from the inner cities and the Rust Belt to the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. I have empathy for small business owners working to succeed. I have empathy for any person targeted with violence and hate because of the color of his or her skin, what they believe, or who they love.”

October 14, 2017 

“At the end of the day, we all came to the same stark realization: No one leader, no one group, and no one CEO would be the hero of Microsoft’s renewal. If there was to be a renewal, it would take all of us and all parts of each of us. Cultural transformation would be slow and trying before it would be rewarding.”

October 14, 2017 

“This is a book about transformation—one that is taking place today inside me and inside of our company, driven by a sense of empathy and a desire to empower others. But most important, it’s about the change coming in every life as we witness the most transformative wave of technology yet—one that will include artificial intelligence, mixed reality, and quantum computing. It’s about how people, organizations, and societies can and must transform—hit refresh—in their persistent quest for new energy, new ideas, relevance, and renewal. At the core, it’s about us humans and the unique quality we call empathy, which will become ever more valuable in a world where the torrent of technology will disrupt the status quo like never before.”

October 14, 2017 

“I have come to understand that my primary job is to curate our culture so that one hundred thousand inspired minds—Microsoft’s employees—can better shape our future. Books are so often written by leaders looking back on their tenures, not while they’re in the fog of war. What if we could share the journey together, the meditations of a sitting CEO in the midst of a massive transformation? ”

October 14, 2017 

“After twenty-two years as an engineer and a leader at Microsoft, I had been more philosophical than anxious about the search process for a new CEO. Even with speculation swirling about who would succeed Steve, quite frankly, my wife, Anu, and I largely ignored the rumors.”

October 14, 2017 

“If only it were as easy as punching that little refresh button on your browser. Sure, in this age of continuous updates and always-on technologies, hitting refresh may sound quaint, but still when it’s done right, when people and cultures re-create and refresh, a renaissance can be the result. Sports franchises do it. Apple did it. Detroit is doing it. One day ascending companies like Facebook will stop growing, and they will have to do it too.”

October 14, 2017 

“When I was about six, my five-month-old sister died. It had a huge impact on me and our family. Mom had to give up working after that. I think my sister’s death was the last straw.”

October 14, 2017 

“Among the children of IAS fathers, it was a rat race. For some of the IAS dads, simply passing the grueling entrance test meant they were set for life. It was the last test they would ever have to take. But my father believed passing the IAS exam was merely the entry point to being able to take even more important exams. He was a quintessential lifelong learner. But unlike most of my peers at that time, whose high-achieving parents applied tremendous pressure to achieve, I didn’t face any of that. My mom was just the opposite of a tiger mom. She never pressured me to do anything other than just be happy.”

October 14, 2017 

“As a kid, I couldn’t have cared less about pretty much anything, except for the sport of cricket. One time, my father hung a poster of ...

“Karl Marx in my bedroom; in response, my mother hung one of Lakshmi, the Indian goddess of plentitude and contentment. Their contrasting messages were clear: My father wanted intellectual ambition for me, while my mother wanted me to be happy versus being captive to any dogma. My reaction? The only poster I really wanted was one of my cricketing hero, the Hyderabadi great, M. L. Jaisimha, famous for his boyish good looks and graceful style, on and off the field.”

October 14, 2017 

“I flunked the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) entrance exam, the holy grail of all things academic for middle-class kids growing up in India at that time. My father, who never met an entrance test he did not pass, was more amused than annoyed. But, luckily, I had two other options to pursue engineering. I had gotten into mechanical engineering at Birla Institute of Technology in Mesra and electrical engineering (EE) at Manipal Institute of Technology. I chose Manipal based on a hunch that pursuing EE was going to get me closer to computers and software.”

October 14, 2017 

“Unlike the stereotype, I was actually not academically that great. I didn’t go to the elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) that have become synonymous with building Silicon Valley. Only in America would someone like me get the chance to prove himself rather than be typecast based on the school I attended. I suppose that was true for earlier waves of immigration as well and will be just as true for new generations of immigrants.”

October 14, 2017 

“During the first semester at Wisconsin, I took image processing, a computer architecture class, and LISP, one of the oldest computer programming languages. The first set of assignments were just huge programming projects. I’d written a little bit of code but I was not a proficient coder by any stretch. ”

October 14, 2017 

“My focus was a computer science puzzle known as graph coloring. No, I wasn’t coloring graphs with crayons. Graph coloring is part of computational complexity theory in which you must assign labels, traditionally called colors, to elements of a graph within certain constraints. Think of it this way: Imagine coloring the U.S. map so that no state sharing a common border receives the same color. ”

October 14, 2017 

“Theoretical computer science really grabbed me because it showed the limits to what today’s computers can do. It led me to become fascinated by mathematicians and computer scientists John Von Neumann and Alan Turing, and by quantum computing, which I will write about later as we look ahead to artificial intelligence and machine learning. ”

October 14, 2017 

“In fact, I left Milwaukee in 1990 for my first job in Silicon Valley at Sun Microsystems. Sun was the king of workstations, a market Microsoft had in its crosshairs. Sun had an amazing collection of talent, including its founders Scott McNealy and Bill Joy, as well as James Gosling, the inventor of Java, and Eric Schmidt, our VP for software development who went on to run Novell and then Google.”

October 14, 2017 

“I had been recruited to join Microsoft as a twenty-five-year-old evangelist for Windows NT, a 32-bit operating system that was designed to extend the company’s popular consumer program into much more powerful business systems.”

October 14, 2017 

“The guys who had recruited me to Microsoft, Richard Tait and Jeff Teper, said they needed someone who understood UNIX and 32-bit operating systems. I was a little unsure. What I really wanted to do was go to business school. I knew that management would complement my engineering training, and I had been thinking about a switch to investment banking. I had gotten into the full-time program at University of Chicago, but Teper said, “You should just join us straightaway.” I decided to do both. I was able to switch my admission to the part-time program at Chicago, but then never told anyone that I was flying to Chicago for weekends. I finished my MBA in two years and was glad I did.”

October 14, 2017 

“I completed the MBA. It was an exciting time to be at Microsoft. Not long after joining I met Steve Ballmer for the first time. He stopped by my office to give me one of his very expressive high fives for leaving Sun and joining Microsoft. It was the first of what would be many interesting and enjoyable conversations with Steve over the years. There was a true sense of mission and energy at the company then. The sky was the limit.”

Notes From: Satya Nadella. “Hit Refresh.” iBooks. 

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itunes.apple.com/dk/book/hit-refresh/id1128878569?mt=11

Podcast notes: The Spider Network, about the LIBOR scandal and Tom Hayes

On the title:

• The longest subtitle in the business book list
• A product of some rare moments of vivid dreams between the editor and David Enrich
• Cover is like a children's book cover, actually portrays the story
• It's a complex story - but a challenge to get through

The story in a nutshell: 

• It's a story about a scandal, and also a story of the people behind it
• People know about scandals in general but not too much about any specific one in detail
• People just know the common theme, so the author tries to bring the details rather than repeat what's seen in the newspapers
• It's also about Tom Hayes, and his accomplices 
• There's a lot more subtleties and nuances than previously thought 
• People who get caught in scandals are more of a product of a system that is designed for bad behavior. Some small bad apples are punished, but most get away
• There's a very small number of people who were convicted, many still remain employed after the scandal
• LIBOR is the worlds most important #, because it determines the interest rate on so many things that impact our daily lives (in the US or otherwise)
• The scandal erupted because LIBOR is a # pulled out of thin air, and banks determine it together; It's just an estimate
• Bankers recognized that they could nudge it up and down by some collaboration 
• One thing that comes across clearly is that everyone passes the blame down to one person from top to down

On sympathy for the characters:

• The investigation was not a black and white issue
• Bad bankers manipulating the LIBOR and harming normal people; most of the media views it this way
• Hayes came from middle class beginnings, his mom was working for Gordon Brown
• Hayes was relate-able for the author as he was a striver and eager to find a job and put his skills to use
• People behave badly because they are incentivized by institutions
• A closed system existed - it was clear that these bankers were out to out-earn each other and everyone else in society
• Banks were designed to lubricate the economy in the past. Now banks, especially pre crisis, were casinos, and were malicious
• Dumb money clients, that's basic what bankers called ordinary investors. Brokers would use these clients as baits as they were easy to rip off. Victims is the money of all the individual investors. It was also a violation of what is a banks purpose

On business books: 

• Michal Lewis, When genius failed, Barbarias at the gate
• Is this book going to change anything? Will it prevent anything? As a journalist - the author is cynical
• The author wants to help normal human beings to get into this, and get a basic understanding of whats going on. The finance industry is designing itself to not to be understood. 
• People who design this stuff are smart but human
• Impact and progress is incremental - but that's OK
• Prosecuters were basically focussed on Tom Hayes. Yes, Tom was guilty, but was justice served? No
• Hayes was not the only one; the bosses were doing exactly doing what he does. He's serving 11 years, alone, so that's unfair
• What does Tom think about your book? he hasn't read it. His wife recommended that he not read it as Tom is in bad mental health

What other books does the author admire: 

• Huge fan of this genre
• David read all of Toms favorite
• Lewis entire library; Blindside is favorite
• Den of Theives - Milken is also a favorite
• In the course of reporting on this, he was given a hard drive, the prosecutors hard drive
• It was not easily structured, but it was not grouped at all. David ran through it all - not efficiently

Podcast link: https://www.ft.com/content/1b7f43cb-0062-429d-b3f9-9cb9cdf579a3

Notes From: David Enrich. “The Spider Network.” (4/19)

September 23, 2017 

“John Ewan was born five years after Minos Zombanakis fathered his interest-rate mechanism. But by 2005, his professional life revolved around Zombanakis’s creation. Ewan didn’t have any particular interest in finance or banking. Raised in a family of quasi-socialists, he aspired to be a scientist, majoring in biology at the University of Bath in southwestern England. Tall and with muttonchop sideburns, Ewan played the guitar and loved the theatre. But his real passion was travelling. ”

September 23, 2017 

“Back in England, the twenty-nine-year-old Ewan applied for a number of jobs. He eventually accepted one at the British Bankers’ Association and started working there in April 2005.”

September 23, 2017 

“The BBA wasn’t a bank. It wasn’t a government agency. It wasn’t even a company. It certainly wasn’t regulated. But it was probably one of the financial world’s most powerful institutions. And that was because the BBA controlled something called Libor.”

September 23, 2017 

“Zombanakis’s innovative method of calculating interest rates on large loans had quickly become popular, but for more than a decade, it had remained an informal mechanism. Whenever a group of banks teamed up on a loan, they essentially would arrange their own version of the benchmark. There was nothing etched in stone, no way to easily replicate the rate for day-to-day use.”

September 23, 2017 

“One impediment to accommodating these nascent markets was the lack of uniformity in how banks calculated interest rates that fed into swaps and other instruments; negotiating interest rates on a contract-by-contract basis was hardly efficient. At the request of the Bank of England, in October 1984 the BBA set up a committee of commercial bankers and powerful central bank officials to contemplate the issue. After extensive deliberations, the group hatched an idea: Each day, the BBA would collect from a group of banks—not just British ones, but also American and European lenders—data about how much it cost each of them to borrow money from each other, on a percentage basis down to two decimal places”

September 23, 2017 

“BBA would disseminate the average to the banks and others for use in various financial instruments. The number was dubbed “the BBA standard for interest rate swaps.” That didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so the group decided on a marginally catchier acronym: BBAIRS. That name didn’t last long. On New Year’s Day in 1986, the BBA for the first time published something called the London interbank offered rate—Libor, for short. Pronounced LIE-bore, it would soon be the basis for much of the modern financial world.”

September 23, 2017 

“By the 1990s, the phrase “London interbank offered rate” was buried in the fine print of an increasing number of American loan agreements. Before long, the fortunes of just about anyone who borrowed money in the United States and, to a slightly lesser extent, elsewhere in the Western world hinged on Libor.”

September 23, 2017 

“From the start, though, Libor was prone to problems. Chief among those was the potential for banks to manipulate it for their own benefit. Doing that was alarmingly easy. In the 1990s, junior bank employees would simply pick up the phone and call in their submissions to financial data company Thomson Reuters every morning around eleven o’clock. A low-level Reuters employee punched all the banks’ data into a computer and calculated the averages. Nobody of any seniority monitored the process. Virtually all it took for a bank to skew Libor was for it to skew its own submission.”

September 23, 2017 

“Big providers of financial data were among the entities paying licensing fees to use Libor. So were banks. But the largest, most lucrative clients were those (like the Merc) that were spending lots of time creating new types of derivatives. Those derivatives needed to be based on something, and Libor often seemed like a good bet. Ewan got to work expanding the menu of Libor varieties and licensing out the benchmark for use in what he called an array of “novel derivatives.”

September 23, 2017 

“Each spring, Ewan and Merriman or another colleague fanned out across the City of London and Canary Wharf to check in with the banks about how they thought Libor was working. As far back as 2005, around the time that Ewan started his job, the BBA had been hearing scattered complaints about Libor’s integrity. That year, Barclays was the main dissenter. Its concern was that Libor was too high; banks seemed to be reporting data that overstated their borrowing costs.”

September 23, 2017 

“For more than a century, UBS—its name an acronym for its predecessor, the Union Bank of Switzerland”

September 23, 2017 

“a conservative lender, not aspiring to anything more than being a trustworthy servant of its mostly Swiss clientele. It was considered the premier place to work in Switzerland. Like (of course) clockwork, bankers were rewarded with promotions every two years. When they reached the rank of vice president, managers got to line their new office with their choice of wood: mahogany, walnut, or pine. But the bank had started to stray from tradition during the last decade of the twentieth century. Enviously watching Wall Street firms, Union Bank embraced practices such as hedge fund investing.”

September 23, 2017 

“Smith, a Brit, hadn’t attended college, having gone straight into banking in 1989, joining a company that would one day be absorbed into UBS. In 2003, he was transferred from London to the Zurich office, where he was a midlevel trader”

September 23, 2017 

“There was a password-protected Excel spreadsheet into which he was supposed to enter data every morning about how much it cost the bank to borrow money from other banks. Then he would hit a “submit” button embedded in the spreadsheet, and off the data went. The system was an upgrade over the phone-it-in approach that the BBA had used in previous years, but it was still clunky and prone to crashing.

Smith had basically no clue what he was doing. ”

September 23, 2017 

“Even as a rookie on the desk, he understood what was going on. The traders had big positions whose values hinged in large part on Libor—precisely what Marcy Engel and Richard Ross had warned the CFTC would happen. A lot of money was on the line. So Smith generally followed their requests when it came to what he entered into his spreadsheet. He didn’t see any reason not to.”

Notes From: David Enrich. “The Spider Network.” iBooks. 

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