Hello, and how are you doing?
Did you survive the Ides of March, or has this month cast some kind of spell on you?
I hope it’s the former, and that you’ll relish these assessments of two books that intersect–however tangentially–with the business world!
Bad Blood
by John Carreyrou
Knopf, 2018
At nineteen, Elizabeth Holmes founded Silicon Valley’s most promising start-up: Theranos. Her revolutionary idea? A fast new way of testing blood that would turn the medical world upside down.
In its very first year, Holmes’s company received financial backing from Larry Ellison–the Oracle co-founder who also financed Musk’s Twitter takeover–as well as venture capitalist Tim Draper who, without asking any big questions about how the technology works, wrote a check for $6.9 million.
Next, it was the Walton family’s turn–then Rupert Murdoch’s and Betsy DeVos’s. In the first years of its existence, Theranos obtained $700 million in funding for, eventually hitting a valuation of $9 billion.
Elizabeth Holmes’s portrait was featured on every business newspaper, magazine, and homepage. She gave TV interviews galore, including to the ethically challenged Bill Clinton.
But Holmes’ business turned out to be based on nothing but falsified test results and lies; Holmes terrorized her employees in a wanton effort to conceal her fraud.
Enter multi-award-winning Wall Street Journalist John Carreyrou, who unmasked Holmes. À la Watergate, Carreyrou’s Theranos investigation blew the lid off Holmes’s blood-for-money scheme–and gave us this breathtaking book about the madness of greed.
This is a true story that reads like a thriller, full of weird details (Holmes has been known to speak in a voice as high as Mickey Mouse’s and as low as Marilyn Monroe’s when singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.”) and unanswered ethical questions (Why did no one blow the whistle on Holmes sooner?).
Bad Blood is also a case study in Silicon Valley’s psychotic business models. Can’t get enough of the Theranos story? Check out the Netflix series Dropout–and keep your eye on Amanda Seyfried.
Thank You for Arguing:
What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion
by Jay Heinrichs
Crown, 2020
How do you make your child understand that going to school wearing only that trendy T-shirt and jeans jacket–while it’s snowing outside–is not such a hot idea?
How do you tell your husband to turn down the volume of that heavy metal band–without triggering a shouting match?
And how do you get your boss to promote you–when you’ve spent the last three years “working at home”–watching YouTube on your couch?
According to author Jay Heinrichs, you need rhetoric, the art of persuasion. He explains, “Rhetoric is the art of influence, friendship, and eloquence, of ready wit and irrefutable logic. And it harnesses the most powerful of social forces, argument.”
Heinrichs–a self-described “author, speaker, publisher, ghostwriter, and magazine fixer”–teaches us how to circumvent the pitfalls of communication. Heinrichs teaches us the Machiavellian rhetoric used by the greats: politicians and speechwriters, TV personalities and film stars. Why bother to learn rhetoric? To get what we want, of course.
In Thank You for Arguing, there’s no shortage of examples. Heinrichs cites one of Jack Kennedy’s spectacular triumphs: when Kennedy intoned, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,”—thousands of Americans joined the Peace Corps.
Read this book if you want Homerisms (not Homer as in The Iliadand The Odyssey–Homer as in The Simpsons); if you want to learn how to speak like George Bush (really?); or if you want to charm a policeman in three minutes to avoid getting a speeding ticket. Most importantly, Thank You for Arguing can teach us how to draw inspiration from Macbeth to manage conflict with a bullying colleague.
For more on arguing, we recommend watching the video in which Heinrichs explains “How to Argue with a Cat”.