Jamie Dimon's 2010 Summer Reading List for Interns

[Andy Nguyen]

When JPMorgan had a town hall for summer interns in June 2010, quite a few people asked Jamie Dimon (CEO) for a reading list. He e-mailed them back the following list of his favorite books "which includes a variety of business and history books."

Business

The World is Flat
Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors
Security Analysis - Classic 1940 Edition
The Intelligent Investor
Execution - The Discipline of Getting Things Done
Jack: Straight From the Gut
Sam Walton - Made in America
Double your Profits in 6 Months or Less
Built from Scratch
Only the Paranoid Survive
Built to Last

History Bio

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
Autobiography of Ben Franklin
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
Eisenhower: Soldier and President
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Washington: The Indispensable Man
Lincoln
Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant
Jefferson
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

History Other

A Short History of Nearly Everything
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future
The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are so Rich and Some so Poor

He also email them a copy of his commencement speak at Syracuse.

 

[bigbadwolf]

Where did he pick them from? The NYT bestseller list? A review of The World is Flat, by Mark Taibbi, can be found here. And a review of The Clash of Civilisations, by Edward Said, can be found here. I've read both books (bought the second book back in '96) and they're complete utter crud. Most of the other titles are pedestrian at best.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

I doubt he would have time to read all those books in the list. It sounds to me more like what he would like his interns to read.

Wait till I post the summer 2010 reading list of a few top CEO. Most of them have only 2,3 books on the list.

 

[quantie]

Where did he pick them from? The NYT bestseller list? A review of The World is Flat, by Mark Taibbi, can be found here. And a review of The Clash of Civilisations, by Edward Said, can be found here. I've read both books (bought the second book back in '96) and they're complete utter crud. Most of the other titles are pedestrian at best.

Both are excellent and thought provoking books. I don't agree with everything in them but would recommend them to anybody who wants to see the bigger picture of the world and economics.

Everything on the list seems pedestrian to you because there are no formulas and most ideas are expressed in relatively simple ways. It is not what a quant usually reads. The ideas, as simple as they may appear to you, are not simple at all. You don't have to agree with what they authors write, but you will benefit from reading the books.

Unless you want to look only at formulas and do C++ programming at a bank without seeing the bigger picture, it's good to read these books. The list can be very different but the types of books is exactly what many quants are missing in their education. If a book does not have formulas, it does not make it a bad book. If you've read a book and disagree witht he author, the time spent reading has not been wasted just because you end up disagreeing with the ideas and thinking they are stupid.

If I were Jamie Dimon (I am not), I would have a different list. The types of the books are going to be the same though.

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman is an excellent book that is very difficult for aquant to understand. One quant wants to say it's obvious and there is no need to write a book on it. Another quant wants to say that it's rubbish and obviously wrong.

If Jamie Dimon hasn't read the books himself and his assistants compilied the list, it's good too. I think he read them.

bigbadwolf, I don't mean to criticize yor post even though I happen to disagree. Maybe I am missing something here and you are right.

 

[ThinkDifferent]

quite a few of these are boring bestsellers books (e.g. the world is flat...which is btw quite outdated by now....)
not a very original list. but I guess is a good read for interns.

...also, what's with this obsession with american presidents?? thanks god he didn't include "George W. Bush on God and Country" in his list...

 

[bigbadwolf]

First of all, there are no "ideas" in Friedman's books. I'm not calling him stupid because I disagree with him -- it's because he has no ideas. In contrast, I also disagree with Huntingdon's reductionist and West-centric approach, which merely serves a neo-con world-dominating agenda (Huntingdon is a member of the neo-con cabal); but I won't call Huntingon "stupid": there are arguments -- of sorts -- that he is advancing. Friedman is a brainless cheerleader of globalisation; I doubt he knows what an argument or counterargument is. For that matter, you are not advancing arguments about what makes these books "excellent" either. Both are deeply ideological and propagandizing a certain weltanschauung, with all sorts of tacit and implicit assumptions.

There are any number of good books on the market. They just don't get publicised like the tripe of Friedman and Huntingdon. For example, one antidote -- among many -- to Friedman's garbage is William Greider's One World Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism. It was published in 1997 but still remains topical today. Looking at my copy, I can see favorable reviews from the Harvard Business Review, Foreign Affairs, and the Wall Street Journal.

Or to give an an online (and very recent) example -- Nitzan and Bichler's 33-page paper, Systemic Fear, Modern Finance and the Future of Capitalism. Now this is thought-provoking. This is what interns should be reading.

 

[Connor]

Anything else you would recommend bigbadwolf? I'm always looking for new things to read.

Perhaps a bigbadwolf reading list is in order.

 

[bigbadwolf]

Anything else you would recommend bigbadwolf? I'm always looking for new things to read.

1) Epic Recession: Prelude to Global Depression, by Jack Rasmus and published by Pluto Press. A demanding read.

I'm waiting for my local bookseller to get hold of a copy of

2) The Global Economic Crisis, edited by Chossudovsky and Marshall, and published by Global Research.

And if you have a taste for this sort of thing, this has been out for a couple of months:

3) Living in the End Times, by Slavoj Zizek, and published by Verso.

I'm a Zizek devotee yet have a love-hate attitude towards him: he is full of garbage and yet profound simultaneously. A charlatan and sage at the same time. You can catch him on Youtube. A review of Living in the End Times can be found here:

Terms like jouissance, the Real, the Thing, après-coup or the difference between desire and drive are not familiar to most readers and turning to Lacan's writings for an explanation does not provide an easy-to-comprehend solution. Hegel's dialectic might seem more familiar territory -- after all, we have all heard of the term and bring varying levels of understanding to its use -- but Žižek is informing us that the traditional interpretation of Hegel is seriously mistaken and so we are driven to unlearning what we thought we knew before embarking on Žižek's reading. When Lacanian and Hegelian ideas are densely interwoven, with a measure of Kant or other selected thinkers usually thrown into the mix, the result can be a giddying combination of exhilaration and perplexity, an addictive high-speed chase with bewildering changes in terrain that for the reader necessitate multiple gear shifts, sudden U-turns, three- and four-point turns, elegant loops and impossibly narrow angles to negotiate. And, in the midst of all this, the monster of the Real rearing up in frightening proximity.

 

[Connor]

Thank you bigbadwolf