  | Book Details Title: The Passion Economy: The New Rules for Thriving in the Twenty-First Century |
Book DescriptionReview “Adam Davidson is a master storyteller. . . An engaging mix of Michael Lewis-style reporting and a Shark Tank-like focus on how to succeed in business, [The Passion Economy is] an upbeat spin on what’s ahead for us in the new, gig-and-hustle environment.”—Deanna Isaacs, Chicago Reader“Exuberant. . . With his distinctive voice Davidson winningly blends case studies of fervent, enthusiastic believers – creators of amazing ice cream, expensive pencils, menswear – with a set of counterintuitive rules so that work lives and our deepest passions can merge to make people better off financially, and personally.”—National Book Review “Davidson’s case studies are excellent, but the heart of the book is a set of rules worthy of committing to memory. . . Fine inspiration for entrepreneurs that should be required reading in any business school curriculum.”—Kirkus (starred review)“[Davidson’s] anecdotes are captivating with shrewd lessons on management, marketing, and strategy. . . Readers with a start-up yen will find useful and inspiring insights here.”—Publishers Weekly“The Passion Economy is exactly what everyone needs today: examples of how to thrive in an economy that can seem overwhelming, and crystal-clear explanations of how to succeed. The book is an enormously fun, exciting adventure story that takes us from the wineries of Napa to the laboratories of Google to far-off chocolate makers. This is the book about how to live (and work) a more passionate life.”—Charles Duhigg, bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better “Adam Davidson is one of America’s most accomplished business journalists — and this book reminds us why. With a reporter’s eye and a storyteller’s grace, he has traveled the country to find regular people who have cracked the code of the modern economy. Reading their stories will reveal the secrets of successful careers. It might even restore your faith in the American Dream.”—Daniel H. Pink, author of When and Drive “Move over Malcolm Gladwell. In The Passion Economy Adam Davidson upends the conventional thinking about how to succeed in our topsy-turvy, seemingly unforgiving post-industrial economy by sharing the stories of regular people who followed their dreams. You won’t soon forget the wisdom Davidson conveys in these pages.”—William D. Cohan, author of House of Cards“I love Adam Davidson’s book. This is the golden moment for the marriage of passion and excellence, a time for optimism, not pessimism. The opportunity to create great businesses you love and which your customers come to love lies around every corner. The heart of every economy is small enterprise, not large. We have waited a long time for this book, and brother does it deliver. Bravo!” —Tom Peters, author of The Excellence Dividend Read more About the Author ADAM DAVIDSON is the cofounder of NPR’s Planet Money podcast and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he covers economics and business. Previously he was an economics writer for The New York Times Magazine. He has won many of journalism’s most prestigious awards, including a Peabody for his coverage of the financial crisis. Read more Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. When I think about the change in the economy, the change that has shifted the United States and most of the rest of the world from one sort of economic system to an entirely different one, I think about my dad and my grandfather and how hard it was for them to understand each other. My father’s father, Stanley, was born in 1917 and died a century later, still a tall, proud man with a thick head of hair that was naturally black until his last decade. Stanley looked to me like Superman: strong chin, chest pushed forward, posture erect. He didn’t have time for frivolity. He was a serious man who did serious work. With his young grandchildren, he had a routine: a firm handshake followed by a gift of a twenty-dollar bill and some vague homily about doing good work, after which we were dismissed. I cannot remember ever speaking to him when I was young; I only recall smiling, shaking hands, and rushing off. When I became an adult and, to his surprise and mine, a reporter covering economics, I was able to talk with him about the one topic he truly loved: business. My dad (also named Stanley, though he has always gone by his middle name, Jack) could not be more different. He is an actor who, for as long as I can remember, has told me that the most wonderful part of his profession is that you remain child- like your entire life. As I write this, my dad is eighty-three and has maintained an imaginative, exuberant view of the world. He is riveted by children and loves to hear every word my young son says, after which he calls out, “Did you hear that? He made up an amazing story!” My dad has always been fascinated by pretty much everything—science, the news, art, history, sports. There is only one subject he has always found unbearably boring, perhaps a bit evil, and entirely unworthy of discussion: business. In a sense, this book is a reconciliation of the conflict between these two Stanleys, these two men who lived in the same country at the same time but might as well have been on entirely different planets. For most of the twentieth century, the overwhelming majority of men and women were forced to make a choice when it came to work: follow the money or follow their passion; become like my grandfather or become like my dad. But now, more than ever before, business and art, profit and passion, are linked. They have come together in a way that would have made no sense to either of the Stanleys in the past. To illuminate the transition, I describe and celebrate in this book, let me tell you more about my grandfather, since he is a pretty representative stand-in for the entire twentieth- century economy. Stanley Jacob Davidson, Sr., was born in New England to young parents who were cut off from their own families. His father was a Jewish immigrant whose parents had disowned him—even practiced mourning rituals as if he had died—when he impregnated and then married a Christian dance-hall girl. The dance-hall girl was, herself, alienated from her family—a rough clan barely eking out a living in a remote corner of Maine. The new broke and broken family in Worcester, Massachusetts, faced unending crises, culminating in Stanley’s father’s death of tuberculosis when my grandfather was only five. His mother, overwhelmed, put Stanley and his brother in an orphanage for much of a year before taking them out again with the provision that, even as grade schoolers, they would need to work and bring money to the family. Decades later, Stanley was still prouder of his childhood business (he bought hens, built an incubator, and sold eggs to neighbors) than of anything else he would go on to accomplish in his life. Before he was twenty, while the Great Depression was ravaging the country’s economy, Stanley was married with a young son (my dad), soon to be followed by three more children. He was lucky to get a factory job that paid sixteen dollars a week. The factory made external grinders: large machines that spin two parallel cylinders of metal, coated with an abrasive, sandpaper-like surface. The cylinders could grind a metal cube into a perfectly smooth sphere in seconds. This is how ball bearings are made. It was brutal, dangerous work. This was the era of big men in blue overalls working in hot factories dodging sparks, their bodies covered in a mix of sweat and grease. For those who worked alongside Stanley, the tiny particles of metal dust made coughing and sneezing a sharp, painful, often bloody agony. But overall, the ball bearing business was good for Stanley, especially with the start of World War II. “You can’t fight a war without ball bearings,” Stanley used to say. And it’s true. Every moving piece on every war machine—the tires, the guns, the gun turrets, the tank treads, the tank rifles—moves because it has ball bearings at its joints. Stanley worked two shifts a day, often six days a week. The postwar economic boom was even better for the ball bearing business and for Stanley. America had a lot of building to do—the interstate highway system; suburbs filled with houses, roads, and sewers; cities that grew much bigger; factories getting larger and more efficient—and every bit of building required ball bearings. They were in the wheels and gears of tractors and cranes and the machinery inside the factories and in the elevators and escalators in those tall buildings. Stanley worked hard and was promoted, again and again, and eventually ran the factory. He was smart and good at strategic thinking. But his core management ability was that he was tough. He saw a factory floor as a machine and each man (it was almost entirely men) as a cog in that machinery. They could be annoying cogs, always complaining about this or that, but a strong manager knew how to shut their complaining down and get them back to work. Did Stanley love ball bearings? Did he have a particular passion about them? No, he most certainly did not. He got the job because his father-in-law knew a guy, and he stayed in the job because that’s what you did when you had a job: you stayed and tried to get promoted. He retired after fifty-four years, having worked at the same company his entire adult life. Every moment of his life reinforced the same lesson: hard work is how people take care of their loved ones, how countries stay free, how life improves for everybody. Stop working, even for a moment, and everything will fall apart. He worked. His wife took care of the kids. And those kids barely knew the man who was rarely at home and, when there, was often angry and impatient. My dad says he had no idea what Stanley did for a living, only that whatever it was seemed awful. From an early age, my dad had passions. He loved telling stories; he loved making people laugh; he loved daydreaming about a life much more fun and expansive than the grim, plodding one of his father. In the Worcester of the 1940s, a boy like Jack—a bright but indifferent student who cracked jokes and hung out with friends instead of working—could be assessed only one way: he was trouble. He would either be tamed or become a lifelong loser: broke, drunk, maybe in prison. My father internalized this view. He drank and smoked and got into fights and was suspended a dozen times before the principal expelled him. When Stanley learned of the expulsion, he told my dad that he could no longer live at home. He washed his hands of him. My dad was on his own, working at a shoe factory, at sixteen. It was miserably boring work, nailing heels onto shoes one after the other, all day long. He can remember saying to himself, “My life is over. Already.” His father, it seemed, had been right. Men who follow their passions go nowhere. My dad certainly couldn’t think of any grown man he had met who had successfully built a life of fun and personal expression. That was for wealthy people and drunks. Over the next several years, my dad had a series of unlikely experiences that led to precisely the life he wanted. He joined the marines, thinking it would transform him into the man his father wanted him to be. After his discharge, he managed to get into the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He didn’t do well and was about to flunk out when a friend asked for a favor. The friend was putting on a play in the school’s theater department, and one of the actors had pulled out at the last minute. Could Jack, please, fill in? It was an easy role: my dad just needed to act like he was drunk and lurch across the stage. His first step in front of the curtain drew a huge laugh from the audience, and that was that. My dad had found his life’s work. He would be an actor. He had never met a professional actor. He had never seen a play. But he transferred to Boston University and entered the theater school. For Stanley, the announcement of this career was absurd, enraging. Why not be a butterfly chaser or a unicorn rider? An actor? You’re going to pretend that you are someone else for a living? You’re going to play dress-up as a job? That is not what a man does. A man works, for money, and then uses that money to pay for a home for his wife and children. Who ever told you work was supposed to be fun? Who is going to pay you? Actors make no money. They don’t get regular paychecks. They are not men. My dad nonetheless pursued his dream and has been a working actor for almost sixty years. We were never rich, and there were some worrisome months here and there, but for the most part, he made enough of a living to raise two children in New York City. We understood—because he told us all the time—that he had made a conscious choice to pursue his passion, his dream, instead of pursuing money. And he would say he did that to be a good father, to be a model for his children, to show them that they, too, could pursue their passions and their dreams, even if they were never going to get rich or, at times, maintain financial stability at all. We lived in Westbeth Artists Housing, a building in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. It was created in 1970, the year of my birth, by a group of philanthropists and the federal government to offer subsidized housing for artists. It’s still there—my dad lives in the same apartment I grew up in—and houses about one thousand people: painters and dancers and poets and musicians and actors, other artists and their families who pay rent far below the market rate. It is a special place, a community of people doing, roughly, the very opposite of what Stanley believed was right. When I began my adult life in the 1990s, I believed the stories the two Stanleys told. I believed that I had a choice to make: money or passion, financial comfort or fulfillment. It made sense. That was the economic reality of the previous hundred years and a message I had received over and over. I wanted to be a playwright, but I also wanted more financial stability than that life could offer. So I took what felt like a middle-ground job: I became a journalist. I could write and learn, travel and explore. But I could also get a paycheck and have a retirement account and all those sensible things. Growing up in artists’ housing in the 1970s, I had heard from grown-ups that every- thing is worthy of exploration—sex and drugs and personal expression. There was only one area of inquiry to be avoided: money. Money was the opposite of art, the opposite of passion. So I rebelled in, perhaps, the only way I could. I became an economics reporter, covering business, finance, markets, and other forbidden topics. As I learned how the economy works, I came to under- stand the world of my Stanleys with even more rigor. There is a clear economic logic to the twentieth-century triumph of ball bearings over acting. Ball bearings are a fundamental product, necessary for almost all other economic activity. They don’t require passion or invention. A ball bearing in 1999 had the same essential function as a ball bearing in 1919. The difference was that companies had gotten better at making more of them more quickly and cheaply and reliably. That was the heart of my grandfather’s career: removing inefficiencies so that the same thing could be made more cheaply and overseeing research and development so that the products became ever so slightly better each year. That was, in fact, the heart of the twentieth-century economy. Economists call it production-side growth, which means that most companies, most of the time, made their profit by cutting the cost of production. This efficiency extended to the ways our economic goods spread around the country and the world. At the beginning of the twentieth century, most markets were local; most people bought things made nearby. But with the expansion of rail and then the highway system and then commercial air travel and the hyper efficiency of containerized shipping, markets became national and, eventually, global. Increasing trade across state and then national boundaries meant that one ball bearing maker could sell ball bearings all over the world and would have to compete with other ball bearing makers all over the world, so everybody worked even harder to become even more efficient at making the same thing more quickly and cheaply. If a worker proved an ability to do this routine work and to spot inefficiencies and get rid of them, that worker would make a better living. That’s what my grandfather did. The widget economy excluded people like my dad. A factory can’t be efficient if each worker is pursuing a distinct passionate view of how best to work. The economic logic fed our culture and our educational system. People who followed the rules and accommodated the needs of a large organization thrived; those who didn’t, failed. Of course, there have always been passionate outsiders like my dad. A few of them did remarkably well. Bob Dylan, Diana Ross, Marlon Brando, and Joan Rivers, for instance, were able to pursue their own passions, be unrelentingly themselves, and still thrive economically. But, tellingly, they succeeded through a very widgetized distribution system. The music and television industries had a lot in common with ball bearings. They transformed creative work into mass production, distributing the work to as many people as possible at the lowest production cost. Most creative, passion-fueled people lived lives roughly equivalent to my dad’s. He spent most of his career on the stage, performing roles in relatively small theaters off-Broadway or at various regional stage companies around the country. It is a rough way to make a living, traveling from job to job, going to auditions, getting rejected, hoping a casting person says yes. Even when you get work, it doesn’t pay a lot. Live theater isn’t scalable in the way that a television show is. Performing on a stage in front of real people is intimate, personal, and, at its best, incredibly passionate. But it can reach only those physically present. (His income was sporadic, although there were enough big paydays from movies, commercials, and the occasional Broadway show or guest spot on a television program that, as I said earlier, we never suffered. Still, he was an exception. Few of the actors he started with are acting today. When he went to the fifty-year reunion for the Boston University School of Theatre class of 1963, he learned he was the only graduate there still making his living from acting.) My father and his father had an uneasy relationship for most of my life. Each man looked at the other with pity and disappointment, and they rarely spoke or spent time together. I became a bit of a translator. I understood both worlds— business and art, responsibility and passion—well enough that I could talk with both men and feel proud of both of them, even if they had succeeded in such radically different ways. But they never really understood each other. How could they? Now the era of the warring Stanleys is over. That is what this book is about. Our economy can no longer be described with the simple binary of the twentieth century, where on one side is money, stability, and routinization and on the other is passion, personal expression, and financial uncertainty. The two Stanleys are now one. To succeed financially we must embrace our unique passions. We have to pay close attention to those interests and abilities that make each of us different. Becoming diligent about doing the same thing in the same way as others is the surest path to financial mediocrity or even ruin. That does not mean that this is now the era of my dad, where self- expression is sufficient for a successful career. We need a fair bit of my grandfather’s business sense, too. Simply pursuing one’s passion is not enough. We must pay close attention to the marketplace, seeking out novel ways to match our particular set of passions with those people who most value them. At the core of this book are stories of people who have figured this out and have been able to model an entirely new way of living, one that combines the financial goal of my grandfather’s work with the personal passion and joy of my dad’s. Read more Customers Review: A business/economics journalist, Adam Davidson does a lot of speaking and a lot of writing, but this seems to be his first book. He is the founding cohost of NPR’s Planet Money podcast. He also apparently gives paid speeches and writes for the New Yorker magazine. He’s got enough cachet that Charles Duhigg, Daniel H. Pink and Tom Peters all blurbed his book, and those are pretty good blurbers. And I heard him interviewed today on NPR’s Here and Now where he could describe and plug his book.Adam Davidson’s basic idea is that many of us can find a niche in today’s economy where we can profit from our passion. Unlike a few decades ago, we aren’t limited to an industrial economy of scale where we are just fungible cogs in a giant corporate wheel. Instead we can take advantage of human-scale opportunities where we offer more crafted products or services at a premium price to a discriminating clientele.It’s a good idea, optimistic and inspiring, and Adam Davidson has found plenty of examples to back up his idea. The stories he tells about those exemplary people are compelling. But his approach is a lot like that of Malcolm Gladwell (though his writing style is rather different). That is, he gives his thesis, tells his stories, and thinks the latter adequately support the former. But they don’t.That’s the trouble with stories. You can find stories to support almost any idea. It’s like the stump speeches we hear political candidates give. They will tell stories about voters they talked to who had exactly the problem that the candidate has the perfect solution to. That’s all very fine, but any candidate can find and tell those stories. The stories seem to mean something, but they don’t.If you like to read stories and don’t care much about learning new things and applying them to your life, this book is good for that. Plenty of good stories, told well. It’s a quick and easy read, and I’m glad I read it. I agree with the basic idea — I think the modern economy does give us more of a chance to build a unique career path where we can make money doing things we think are important.Still, that’s a very hard thing to do. Ideas like this one are easy in the abstract but hard in the real world. It’s always that way. Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s execution that is rare. Getting inspiration from a book like this seems valuable, but what happens when you try to find your niche and you spend all your money and time and find nothing but failure instead? What then?Again, I think of political candidates. Elizabeth Warren, for example, likes to tout her plans. An issue comes up, and “I’ve got a plan for that”, she says. But so what? As boxer Mike Tyson said, “everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face”. Plans never work — you can’t live your life according to plan. As John Lennon sang, “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” (though John Lennon took the quote from someone else).So this book might inspire you to follow your passion and get you going, but when the going gets rough, this book will be little help. The book gives some practical guidance, but the rules are general and amorphous. Like set your prices high. Find a low-competition, high-margin niche market (that rarest of beasts!). Fire bad customers as well as find new ones.Not that that advice is that bad, but for entrepreneurs the main foe to fight is failure. Most new ventures fail. Learning how to overcome difficulties and how to pivot to avoid pitfalls are the best lessons to learn. But nobody wants to read or write stories about failure. Too depressing.Trouble is, reading success stories and rules that blaze a path to success generates unwarranted optimism. This is harder than it looks. Much harder. However strong your passion. | |
7 reviews