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Obliquity: Why our goals are best achieved indirectly |  | Author: John Kay
Publisher: Profile Books
List Price: £10.99
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Rating:  15 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 1846682886
EAN: 9781846682889
Publication Date: March 18, 2010
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Product Description
Shows why the most profitable companies are not always the most profit-oriented; why the richest men and women are not the most materialistic; and, why the happiest people are not necessarily those who focus on happiness.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 15
 Almost as good as promised July 6, 2010
Paul Rutherford (Berkshire, UK)
Kay is a terrific writer and a man with enough experience of life to know that theory is always superceded by reality. So this should have been - and is very nearly - as good as the best Handy or Gladwell. And yet it just misses a beat, because having brilliantly established and illustrated its premise, it doesn't really go anywhere, nor have a 'killer pay-off'. Which is a great shame, because there's a lot in here to which many of our leaders - political and corporate - should pay great attention. A very good book; not quite a great one.
 Lacking in rigour? June 24, 2010
Martin P. Fowler (Brighton, UK)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I bought this book following a largely favourable review in Financial World. The fulsome plaudits on the cover - including one from the Governor of the Bank of England - led me to believe that the author's thesis was both important and insightful. I was disappointed.
The main thrust of the book is that both profit & pleasure tend to be the by-products of the pursuit of greater goals; and that a direct approach that seeks to micro-manage every aspect of activity is likely to fail as unforeseeable developments unfold.
These points appear to be self-evident, yet the author devotes some 179 pages to making these points. He cites a number of examples where an indirect approach - the obliquity of the title - has succeeded; but I can recall no instances where he applied a proper academic rigour, and considered examples where that indirect approach has failed.
There are many such examples. The author asserts that natural evolution is a good example of an indirect approach, that `Tigers are good at being tigers because adaptation has honed them to be well adapted to the daily life of tigerdom.' The author takes into account neither the period of time required for that adaptation to take place, nor the many creatures that proved to be evolutionary blind alleys: those that were not fortunate enough to develop the necessary genetic mutations; and which are now, as a consequence, extinct. It is hardly worth remarking that every remaining species of tiger is now considered to be endangered. Tigerdom changed more rapidly than tigers could adapt, and now features threats to which tigers could never adapt through evolution.
This apparent lack of rigour may also be seen in the author's assertion that great cities evolve, and that planned cities are less blessed: `Paris grew by muddling through, Brasilia by design; Paris is a great city, Brasilia is not.' Baron Haussmann's renovations of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century are not mentioned. I doubt that a comparison of pre-Haussmann Paris - with its disease and congestion - to Brasilia would have been quite so favourable to Paris.
The book raised an unintentional smile at page 94. `The bikers of the 1950s had been hostile, rebellious characters of the kind portrayed by Marlon Brando in The Young Ones.' I suspect that the author intended to refer to the Marlon Brando film The Wild One.
To sum up, this book is not entirely without merit, and there may be the germ of a good idea within it; but it would require a deal of research and work to establish if that were indeed the case, and to express that idea clearly. In its present state, this is not a book that I feel able to recommend with much enthusiasm: there are many works out there that are more deserving of your time and attention.
 Excellent June 19, 2010
Aileen Blackett
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I bought this book for my son's birthday and he is delighted with it. He says "John Kay is one of the few economists who can write in English".
 Sound & Fury May 12, 2010
Stan Ford (West Yorkshire, UK)
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
It sounded OK when reviewed by Andrew Marr on Start the Week and I'm furious that I bothered to buy it. What John Kay had to say was true - people justify their so-called rationality after they've already made up their minds! The overall message is that life is so complex it is impossible to grapple with all the variables; trust your intuition when you have reviewed as many aspects as you can bother with!
This book should have one page May 4, 2010
Ozzy D. (Manchester, UK)
34 out of 37 found this review helpful
People should really stop writing books only because they have an idea. The book should have one page and it would be the cover page: Our Goals are Best Achieved Indirectly. The End. It is made of pointless rhetorics, states the obvious using anecdotes and irrelevant examples ("Computers don't solve problems the way people solve problems" and "Footballers don't play football like computers would play football"). The man asks wrong questions and tries to come up with 'logical' answers. He also doesn't understand few fundamental truths about functioning of our world (Enron) and he misinterprets historical facts (McNamara and Vietnam War example). He seems not to understand basic mechanisms of modern business and he draws illogical conclusions (Apple / Microsoft example). It is a pseudo-philosophical book about issues that have nothing to do with real problem solution strategies and are not applicable in real life (ICI, chess and English politicians throughout the whole book).
In order to get to the important bits I was skipping small paragraphs, after a while I found myself skipping whole pages. I "read" the book in few hours. Some interesting bits here and there but for someone who reads a lot there isn't much interesting in it.
Reading this book feels like listening to a Monty Pythonian bank accountant at a bus stop telling bystanders about a dream he had last night. You can't really pay attention and you just switch off nodding politely.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 15
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