Author Archives: Douglas Brown

Adventures of Rategan, Volume 1

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The book I have been waiting for was worth the wait. Robin Benger is a noted documentary journalist whose travels have taken him to most of the world’s trouble spots, but his prior published work was  journal about some

months he took to et away from it all. Now we get a look inside the events that led to some of these tremendous stories. Benger notes in the foreword that Rategan is a fictionalized avatar for the author, one who says and does the things we wish we would have said or done in a particular situation. It is a little disorienting for the reader, since Benger himself did say and do many of those things and has it on tape to prove it.

What does Rategan get up to? Deep cover stories about the horrors of civil wars, oppressive governments, or dysfunctional societies. Rategan meets underground cells in Mozambique, El Salvador, and Peru. As a semi-voluntary exile from apartheid in his non-fictional life, the author’s biggest emotional moment is the opportunity to return to South Africa and meet the Mandelas whom he has long idolized from afar. For me, the most striking chapter was the coverage of a sub-culture within Toronto that was just as dysfunctional as any of those he found in far-flung battle zones. Throughout the book, Rategan’s driving need is to find the underdogs in unfair fights and broadcast their stories to the world, or at least to Canada. As narrator, Benger is sufficiently self-conscious of his idealistic urges and biases and allows himself and the reader regular doses of macabre humor and irony as Rategan is usually disappointed (if not dangerously betrayed) by the very people he has come to help.

Benger tells us that he split his sort-of memoir into 3 parts to make the books a readable length. Fair enough, but don’t make us wat too long for installments 2 and 3. If you take anything away from this book, it is that you just never know what is going to happen next, so you’d better make the best of a good thing while it lasts.

Link to this book on Amazon

Strategy OS

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Strategy OS: Implement an Advanced Business Operating System in Six Simple Steps (Entrepreneur Tools Book 3) by [Steve Preda]

Many managers who haven’t had access to the top layers of an organization imagine that strategic planning is either the product of a superior intellect and insight or, at the other extreme, some random musings and voodoo-assisted “visioning”. It’s true that a very small number of leaders have far more finely attuned antennae than the rest of us and are able to pick up on vibrations if not in the cosmos then at least in their industry that are not apparent to others until much later. Their success may look like magic at the time, although it can and will be explained long after the fact by dozens of consultants and academics. The vast majority of organizations are able to craft effective strategies with a structured process that applies known practices to the environmental signals that its leaders are able to identify.

This book provides the guide map to the generally-accepted practices that make up a useful strategic planning capability, and brings in several tools that aren’t seen as often. It would serve as a useful handbook for any executive or member of a planning team, and for the consultants seeking to advise them.

It’s not for every organization; many of the concepts require a relatively free rein in terms of markets and products, whereas many businesses, particularly the smaller ones (under, say, $20M annual revenue) wouldn’t be credible trying to reinvent their industry. Others, particularly in the public sector, may see themselves as too constrained by law and habit to make such shifts, but there is room to adopt the ideas behind the practices and find ways to make changes and improvements even within their sandboxes.  In addition, it’s not really an “Operating System”; it stops at the point that most organizational strategies fail: the designation of strategic initiatives and allocation of specific responsibilities, resources and milestones to make sure that what shows up on paper in the strategic plan will eventually occur in real life.

Link to this book on Amazon

All are Free to Write

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Journal blank books, writing prompts, etc. are not in our usual repertoire but sometimes fate hands you a good thing you don’t expect. Sheila Allee’s “All are Free to Write” is one of those. It is a vast improvement over the typical products in the “low-content” genre, and might even be considered a collection of very short stories. Its 52 stories are set up as a prompt for writing something once a week for a year, but unlike most such products, the prompts are not one-line quotes from famous people or motivational meme sentences. Instead, each section is carefully crafted to provide a vignette from the author’s experience and by the end of the year you will  know her as well as you anyone but your real lifelong friends (and probably better than many of those, because we don’t share all our secrets, do we?) The book is still useful even if you are not into journaling, because you can certainly use the thought for the week to prompt you on something you are involved with. For instance, the first piece of giving yourself permission to do something other than the daily routine spurred a business blog post on the need for companies to make investments in “sharpening the saw” if they wanted to stay competitive in a fast-moving world.

The Hottentot Room

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I had expected from the title and the dust jacket blurb that this book would be about the community of South Africans exiled, either voluntarily or required, because of their political views. Actually the South Africans themselves are almost irrelevant, or rather their national origin is; the book would have worked just as well by substituting any other repressive regime for “South Africa”.  So if you’re looking for the particulars of the South African experience, this book isn’t it. It is really about a Jewish emigre who go to ut of Germany ahead of the concentration camps, and the author adds some clever twists so that the book and plot are not obvious recitations of Nazi-era issues. It would be a spoiler to say much more bout the plot itself. As a book about South Africa you would be disappointed, but it is a very good read and introduces some of the overall challenges of being an emigre. It’s not as easy as it sounds living in a land where everyone is fat. dumb and happy when you’d really rather be in the place you think of as home, even if it can’t stand you any more.

Amazon  ink

Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency (series)

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This series will pull at the heartstrings if you’ve spent any time in southern Africa. If not, you should enjoy Mma Ramotswe’s problem-solving skills woven within the fabric of family and social events. As the series progresses (it now has at least 8 books as of the time this is written) the author adds in more and more exposition of the conflict between the modern world’s inevitable incursions and the region’s traditional tribal culture  That culture appears to be very consistent across all the southern Africa, except the even older tribes of desert bushmen). Alexander McCall Smith, actually a Scot, made good use of his years in the region to  capture the landscapes and patterns of speech. These are not shoot-’em-up private eye stories and quite often there is no real crime involved, just matters that need to be looked into. If you prefer TV to books, these may not be for you; otherwise, These books offer what is so often missing in the modern novel: a retreat to a peaceful world where the problems are few and the endings are nicely and happily tied together – although often in a welcome twist.

State of Wonder

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A riveting story of the potential for finding miracle cures in the depths of the Amazon. It is well-written with believable characters. Not having been there, I cannot attest to the accuracy of the descriptions of the jungle environment and the inhabitants, although the pure nature part sounds like a plausible build from the jungles of Panama with which I am quite familiar. This tale leans quite heavily on Heart of Darkness, although I suppose any story about an enterprise going off the grid might do much the same. Despite the obvious story arc that the situation compels, there are some interesting twists. While the author pokes throughout at Big Pharma, the story also takes a more philosophical twist in questioning whether you should really have what you think you wish for.

Amazon link

Corkscrew Solutions: Problem Solving with a Twist

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This short CorkScrew Solutions: How Great Leaders Solve Impossible Problems (Theory of Constraints Simplified) by [Clarke Ching]easy-to-read book is still somewhat esoteric. It is the first one I have found that explains how to use the “thinking clouds” method first presented by Eli Goldratt in his Critical Chain Thinking series. It provides an approach to clarifying the real issues when you are faced with choices to achieve two different, desirable but mutually-exclusive goals. In following Clarke Ching’s advice, you may be able to see alternative formulations of the problem, the pros and cons, or the objectives as you seek to reconcile your dilemma.

You don’t have to be an Eli Goldratt fan to gain value from the book, and the examples range from the strategic (UK national defense policy) to the personal (what to do about having to choose between two girlfriends). I doubt that this would be the only decision-making tool you would use in such situations, which could have critical and long-lasting consequences, but it does help to clarify what decision you are making.

You can find it on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/CorkScrew-Solutions-Impossible-Constraints-Simplified-ebook/dp/B08LKH5M3V

Graham’s Resolution Series

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The China Pandemic - eBook.jpgYou may well get your introduction to this series via an email offering you a free copy. Take it. It will be a PDF but you can mail it to yourself on Kindle. You’ll receive Volume 1 in the series, the China Pandemic. Settle down, all you over-politicized junkies, what is most remarkable about this book is that it was written in 2013, long before the COVID-19 virus ever made its way out Wuhan (however that may have occurred), and its plot unwinds the doomsday scenario that could have been – but was not – one of the forks in the road that may have occurred if the virus had been even more deadly than it was.

The hero is a university professor somewhat in the mold of Robert a (Da Vinci Code) who is more practical and stronger than he thinks. His wife has died in the pandemic and on his way to what he hopes will be a refuge until they can sort things out he acquires a small group of new almost-family members who have to decide whether they can trust each other while facing a brutal environment.

The writing and editing are sound. The style is matter-of-fact, with the horrific nature of this virulent disease spelling itself out without the author trying to explain what you should be thinking. For much the same reason, the characters are not fully developed in Volume 1. There isn’t a lot of room for emoting when you’re trying to figure out how to survive feral animal packs, random human survivors who have gone equally feral, and even other well-intentioned humans who may or may not have been infected or be asymptomatic carriers.

As with any apocalyptic work, there are always practical issues that  may nag at you. For me, I kept wondering how it was that with everything else falling apart and every business and most homes abandoned, how is it that the electricity and cell phone service continue to work?  Maybe we’ll find out in books 3 through N. As of now, the series stands at 6, presumably with more to come as long as they keep selling, as they deserve to do. The price of getting volume 1 for free on PDF is that you get on the mailing list, which will include weekly offers to buy the rest of the set or other sets with a discount coupon. I have no doubt that you’ll opt for the first step, which is a 4-book “boxed” set which if you wait for the right moment will come in at maybe $7.99 (as of 2021).

Aside from the email trail, Ms. Shaw sells the books direct to you (here’s the link: https://www.authorarshaw.com/books), although you can also buy the books on Amazon at twice the price if you want.

A Canadian in God’s Own Country

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A Canadian In God’s Own Country: Rambling, umpiring and golfing in North Yorkshire by [Robin Benger]I am fortunate to be able to say that I know Robin Benger – not well, as I have not seen him since we left high school 50 years ago, and I didn’t reach his orbit then. Where he was then is important to who he was, could have been, and became, and that puts the whole book into perspective. More on that below.

First, will you enjoy it?

If you don’t have a passing familiarity with the game of cricket, many of the scenes will leave you wondering what is going on. If you do know even a little about the game, you’ll be treated to some superb descriptions of the underlying tension in a sport in which on the surface nothing much seems to be happening. Unfortunately, looking up the game on Wikipedia, or reading the rather limited number of rules, won’t give you the picture. You might do better to find some cricket games on YouTube.

As far as the reading experience is concerned, this is a well-written book that does very well at keeping you turning the pages to see what happens next, especially surprising since it is about enjoying the most leisurely of activities (cricket, golf and country walks) and is more about trying to disconnect for a while. Although the subtitle says Yorkshire, there is a substantial chunk on a golfing side trip to Northern Ireland, and he is a spectator in several professional tournaments in the UK.

Robin has a flair for seeing the simple pleasures for what they are – the views of the hills and moors, the shade of a leaf. He is at his best when acknowledging the many occasions when the wry wisdom of a country sportsman or farmer proves the equal of the presumptions of the world-travelled sophisticate, and accepts these frequent lessons learned with good humor.

Now, why is it important to know that Benger is the real deal?

As you read, you can’t help noticing the irony that he loses a lot of the point of this visit to a softer world by continuing the typical left-winger’s desperate search for political overtones in every innocuous scenario. I would urge you to overlook these frequent asides and just laugh at them as they are so often proven wrong in reality.

Besides, Robin Benger is more than entitled to them.

Understanding his background requires understanding the British boarding school concept, which is roughly portrayed in the Harry  Potter series. The system features Houses (more than just dormitories, they are the family and team that each student is assigned to for the duration of their school days). Although the Houses had faculty members who bore ultimate responsibility and usually lived adjacent to the premises, daily leadership and administration came from a sub-set of the senior-class boys who are appointed as “prefects” based on their academic and athletic distinction and probably some other factors known only to the faculty. The most outstanding of those was the Head of House, and these had the additional power of being allowed to administer corporal punishment (and before you get the wrong idea, in 4 years, I never saw this being over-used). Robin Benger was the Head of School, primus inter pares. In addition to excellent academics, he was a varsity rugby and cricket player, at a level that qualified him for selection to the province (State) all-star team.

More background: the school was one of the top three or four in the country of South Africa, which then as now reveled in the prowess of its international teams.  Making a national team or even one of the province teams was a ticket to life-long recognition.  Beyond that, the school turned out superior results in the national school-leaving examinations, providing most of its graduates with places in the best universities and, with some coaching, into Oxford or Cambridge.

And then there was apartheid. A top sportsman with a degree from a leading university was assured of a lifestyle on a par with the elite of the western world (at least until the advent of billionaires). He had moved out of our immediate observation in our bucolic bubble, so I did not know what had happened to him eventually, but there was no reason to believe he would not follow the materially-rewarding path the school was set up to deliver.

Yet he did not. He took a stand to demand the inclusion of players of all races in he sporting system, and when it became obvious that his crusade didn’t have enough support to gain momentum, he abandoned all those advantages to emigrate to Canada. Many of those who attended that school in those days did the same. For some reason many gravitated to the film industry, and they form a substantial presence in that community around  Toronto. From there he went on to become a maker of international documentaries, and the nature of that business is to cover some of the world’s most oppressive situations. In this too he was very successful, but eventually age and crisis-fatigue set in, and he walked away from that too in search of an (almost) unplugged sojourn in the English countryside.

As you will see from the text, letting go of moral indignation isn’t easy to do, but if anybody has walked the talk, it is Robin Benger. So let him have his say on that, and enjoy the rest.

As a reader, just do what the book is about: take a relaxed pace, enjoy each moment, and stop taking yourself so seriously.

Link to the book on Amazon