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For whom?

5. Be careful with puns, innuendo and double meanings. Search engines, spiders and robots have no sense of humor. Keep this in mind when trying to attract their attention.

So states SEO “tip” number 5 of Berkshire Hathaway’s BusinessWire.com, a neat new on-line press release engine, as clean as Google’s home page, with no ads. It is all business, and that means it is wired, well connected, and engineered to distribute and deliver text to multiple news wire services, stock markets, media.

And when it tells us how to write, it tells us to write for the search engines, the spiders and the robots.

How sad.

Money To Burn by James Grippando, narrated by Jonathan Davis

Michael Cantela is the youngest winner of the Investment Advisor of the Year at the elite investment firm of Saxton Silvers. He has a knack for making rich people richer, an apartment on Sutton Place, an unemployed wife, and an eight or nine figure personal portfolio. That is, until he checks his balance. Which is zero.

Imagine it: a hotel room at the Pierre, your wife is newly undressed and waiting for you who are on line looking at a zero balance. Your portfolio has been liquidated. All your stocks sold, and the total transferred to somebody else’s account on the Cayman Islands.

A short look at the short success of a straight man among the crooked and the greedy, with a little torture thrown in, for spice.

Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie read by Rosemary Leach

Gwenda gets off the boat at Plymouth, hires a car, looks for village to live in. And finds one: a perfectly charming cottage with aga, a kitchen garden and flowered wallpaper. Gwenda moves in with her rosewood, her mahogany, her papermache, her chintz and all the fabrics of domesticity. She feels from the start that the house and the garden are familiar; she knows in advance where the doors are and where they ought to be, she imagines the wallpaper of a room and then discovers the very same wallpaper in a boarded up cupboard. There is something uncannily familiar about the house from the start.

By the end of the first week she has had one or two hallucinations, and thinks perhaps that she is going mad. She meets Miss Marple who suggests that there may be another way to explain her familiarity with the house. Perhaps she has lived in the house before. Which is of course a perfectly sensible English alternative to Freud: “You are not mad; your house is old, your ancestors are ugly, your hallucinations are memories and best avoided.” But this is impossible. Gwenda is from New Zealand, and she is curious.

What she finds unsurprisingly is murder.

Warren Buffet’s Management Secrets by Mary Buffett & David Clark. Performed by Mary Buffett.

A catholic tailor used his life savings to go to the Vatican. When he returned his parish gathered to find out what he had seen. “What kind of a fellow is the Pope?” they asked him. “44 Medium,” he said.

This is the kind of obsession Buffet is looking for in his managers. “In Warren’s world it is not so much about how smart we are, but how obsessed we are,” says Mary Buffet, in her sweet voice. Find an obsessive with ‘recurrent and persistent thoughts, impulses or images which cannot be ignored or suppressed’ (DSM 300.3). And make sure that he is obsessed with your business.

This is a sweet book read by a sweet voice, easy to hear and easy to understand. Indeed, sometimes it reads like a recipe book, with generous margins for adding ingredients. Sometimes it reads like the ROMPER ROOM list of Do-bees and Don’t-bees. DON’T be greedy when choosing a job. DON’T borrow money. DO delegate. DON’T criticize your employees. Do what you love to do and hire people who love what they do. DO be obsessed. DO choose the right company.

When a company owns a piece of the consumer’s mind, it never has to change its products. That means more profits, and more managerial bonuses. It is good to work for such a company.

When a company sells a unique service, like H & R Block, it doesn’t have to worry about falling demand: “There is never a recession in the tax filing business.” It also doesn’t have to worry about spending lots of money on capital. It is good to work for such a company.

Below-cost buyers and sellers like Walmart’s and Costco also have a competitive advantage; but beware — the stress on keeping prices low puts a great deal of pressure on managers. Still, these chains offer good managerial opportunities.

Sometimes it reads like a macroeconomics textbook, and sometimes like a handbook in human psychology (We all have a deep and honest need to be appreciated.). Or etiquette (When meeting someone for the first time, behave in a friendly way. ).

But mostly this is a manual of common sense with instructions on how to be a good human being, not only a good manager.

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Meet the Giants: An Interview with Ziad Abdelnour

Schumpeter once wrote that the Stock market is a poor substitute for the holy grail. In other words, capitalism is more or less incapable of producing belief in itself. And yet, there are people who do believe in it. Ziad Abdelnour is one of them.

For Ziad, business is war. And what is at stake in this war is the creation and destruction of worlds.

“The lifeblood of capitalism are the entrepreneurs, the financiers who make things happen.”

The drive to make things happen is not inherited, is not taught, is not capable of being transmitted by a propaganda machine. “It has to be in your DNA” says Ziad. Because of this, the profile of Blackhawk Partners has not changed for years:

I don’t back industries. I don’t back ideas. I back people.

These people — these capitalists, the billionaires who change the world — are rebels. Only by backing rebels, can you re-create the world.

This is what Ziad’s capital does: it empowers the rebels (re-bellare) to start the war all over again .

Elvi Rhodes A House By the Sea read by Anne Dover

How fun to be a stubborn, sensible English widow who takes up decorating or hotelkeeping or moves to Brighton. The kind of fun that takes time: not like those television garden shows that demonstrate

“how to transform an entire garden in a matter of five hours while the lady of the house [goes to] visit her mother in the next town. …A team would move in. They would spend an inordinate amount of money on mature plants, containers, garden furniture, trellising and ceramic slabs… Towards the end there would be moments of panic because the wife was due to walk in the door in precisely seven minutes time…”

No, Caroline has fun slowly. She sells her old house at Bath slowly, she moves to Brighton slowly, she fixes her old house slowly, and then converts a new house into flats, slowly. Meanwhile she discovers that she’s “…got a wonderful eye for fabrics, window treatments, lighting, decorating, color schemes and so on … even furniture.” Then, very slowly, she turns her builder into her friend and her friend into her partner, slowly, sensibly, with a happy division of labour:

I’m asking you to design while I carry out the practical part.

How fun.

Drive by Daniel Pink

This looks like a book, but its an ad for the guy who’s going to talk at your next off-site. Welcome to the Motivational Operating System and it’s “sets of assumptions and protocols about how the world works that run beneath our laws, economic arrangements and business practices.” It is called an operating system rather than a ‘common sense’ because the language of IT lends credibility to a non-science of social behavior. Also and because it is an “operating system” it can be tweaked, and Pink is here to tweak it.

With “autonomy boosts” — because the language of nutritional energy drinks turns a boring moral notion something measurable, blendible and drinkable. Boosts have an immediate effect. They make it to possible to increase “flow” which describes something in between enlightenment and a serotonin fry-up. “Flow” resonates both eco- and ego-culture, it sounds liquid and monetary and vaguely green. And very credible, from the Latin credo, lending itself to belief, and credit.

What becomes clearer and clearer in Pink’s ad is the generation gap between operating systems. The generation hiring believes that labour is and should be unpleasant, while the generation they are hiring believes that labour should flow, feel good, and produce something monetary and vaguely green.

Sometimes Pink is here to play Nanny: the next generation of Americans needs to be given “Goldilocks Tasks” — tasks that are neither too challenging nor too boring, pre-packaged, and served with a straw. A kind of Jobucino. Sometimes he simply proclaims, with that relentless enthusiasm born of sun and Mexican labour, what companies need to do to keep their employees happy.

Crash Proof 2.0 by Peter Schiff read by Sean Pratt

Don’t buy anything. Don’t borrow anything. Don’t open any kind of e-trade account, or invest in any kinds of funds, or buy any kinds of currencies, or pay any kind of broker. Read this book, cover to cover. Then write a letter of praise to Peter Schiff for his clarity of thought, his easy to understand explanations of economic realities, and his ability to map out alternatives for Americans with a little bit of good sense.

The Traffickers by W.E.B. Griffin read by Scott Brick

Matt Payne is back, attracting bullets and bad guys and the failed sons and daughters of old Philadelphian society, and WEB Griffin is in fine form in the digital age, as romantic and jolly as always. But instead of showing us into the salons and bedrooms and backbenches of a secret world, he tells us about a city disfigured by Mexican cruelty, flooded by illegal Hispanic labourers and monetized by Meth and underaged vaguely Central American sex slaves. Instead of histories lived out among captains and sailors and adventurers he reads the plaques of unread public monuments, walking through a live city but seeing a museum. WEB Griffin’s huge heroes are missing, as are his lovely, laughing women, and his young apprentices and hearty institutional bosses. I miss them all.

A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie

There are very few perfect beginnings to a story. Beginnings which move through images at the same rate as they move through text, rolling into a plot detectibly, sensibly, unhurriedly. A boy, for example, making the rounds on his bicycle, delivering the daily papers:

…At Colonel and Mrs Easterbrook’s, he delivered The Times and the Daily Graphic. At Mrs Sweatenham’s he left The Times and The Daily Worker. At Miss Hingecliff’s and Miss Murgatroyd’s he left The Daily Telegraph and The News Chronicle. At Miss Blacklocke’s, he left The Telegraph, The Times and The Daily Mail. At all these houses, and indeed in practically every house in Chipping Cleghorn, he delivered every Friday, a copy of the North Benom News and The Chipping Cleghorn Gazette, known simply as The Gazette. Thus on Friday mornings, after a hurried glance at the headlines in the daily paper…. most of the inhabitants of Chipping Cleghorn eagerly opened the Gazette and plunged into the local news. After a cursory glance at correspondence, in which the passionate hates and feuds of rural life found full play, most of the subscribers then turned to the local column.

We can easily sketch in our mind a series of houses, in front of which stand assorted sizes of mailbox, and in which kitchens sit the inhabitants of this happy English village, eating their singular English breakfasts, reading the headlines, the correspondence, the local news, and then, more likely than not, the Classifieds, in which are published up to the minute or almost up to the minute ads, as relevant and localizable as Tweets.