“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” - Warren Buffett

“Rule number one: Don’t lose money. Rule number two: Don’t forget rule number one.” - Benjamin Graham
(Znote: It is interesting to note that this quote is widely, and incorrectly, attributed to Warren Buffett. This is a classic case study how misinformation or delusion can fly like a virus all over the world. When you become the world’s richest man, a lot of smart says get attributed to you. Warren Buffett himself repeatedly said that this is not Buffett but Graham. Yet the world is not listening. In this case, Warren Buffett essentially re-phrased a saying by Benjamin Graham which was used to dramatize the essence of the net-net-cash investment approach.)

“Buy good companies at cheap prices. Buy companies with high return on capital and high earnings yield.” - Joel Greenblatt

“Heads I win; tails I don’t lose much.” - Amar Bhidé

“This too shall pass.” - Chinese Zen Saying

“To distill the secret of sound investing into three words, we venture the motto, Margin of Safety.” - Benjamin Graham

“Investing is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.” - Benjamin Graham

“I am a better investor because I am a businessman and a better businessman because I am an investor.” - Warren Buffett

“The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.” - Albert Einstein

“A penny saved is a penny earned.” - Benjamin Franklin

“Being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale in doing some simple and logical thing will often dramatically improve the financial results of that lifetime. A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind, loving diagnosis involving multiple variables. And then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favorable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past. ” - Charlie Munger

“Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.” - Warren Buffett

“Go for a business that any idiot can run because, sooner or later, one will.” - Peter Lynch

“Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.” - Warren Buffett

“I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.” - Warren Buffett

“Know what you know. Know what you don’t know. That is the way to know.” - Confucius

“Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, the energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.” - Warren Buffett

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Do you have a wise investment quote to share? Please post a reply here.

So what is PIPE? PIPE stands for Private Investment in Public Equity. PIPE hedge funds seek to purchase a company’s common stock at a discount from the price in the public market. They may also invest in a convertible preferred or a convertible note, but the conversion price will be at a discount below the price at which the stock sells in the public market. Although they seek to make our return through the common, preferred or convertible instrument, they always try to get warrants as a sweetener and these warrants have the potential to dramatically increase the rate of return on the investment.

Superinvestor Digest recently spoke with Paragon Capital’s founder and portfolio manager Alan Donenfeld about his special situations PIPE strategy.

Q: How is your fund doing using the PIPE strategy?

Donenfeld: Since our inception in 2005, we have been generating an average annual return of about 45%. We follow the quintessential buy low, sell high investment strategy. Our strategy entails making opportunistic investments directly in public companies at a significant discount to their stock price while realizing gains quickly in many cases.

Q: What is your investment background?

Donenfeld: I’ve been investing capital for 30 years, and I’ve utilized dozens of different strategies, including private equity, leveraged buyouts and venture capital. But, for the past four years, I’ve focused on special situation investments where I buy public stocks at a significant discount to their market prices. This is the only strategy I’ve found that provides all of the upside return with true downside risk protection. I started Paragon to invest my own capital utilizing this strategy. As I began generating strong returns, my family and friends asked me to manage their money. Over the last couple of years our initial investment capital has grown, and we’ve built an audit, administrative and investment management team to handle it. We’re now accepting outside investors and capital.

Before starting Paragon, I managed a private investment company named Bristol Investment Group, which invested in over 60 companies, including Energy Brands, the maker of Vitaminwater, which was sold to Coca-Cola for $4 billion. Before Bristol, I spent 10 years at Bear Stearns, Shearson Lehman Hutton and SG Cowen, primarily in mergers and acquisitions. I have degrees from Tufts and Duke Business School.

Our investment management team collectively has more than 100 years of experience in investments, finance and law, having worked at top firms like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Bank of America, CIBC and Sidley Austin. We have degrees from leading schools, such as Harvard, Wharton, Duke, Vanderbilt and Tufts.

Q: What are the advantages of your strategy?

Donenfeld: The main advantage of our strategy is that it can achieve high returns while reducing downside risk. To accomplish this, we invest directly in public companies on highly negotiated terms that aren’t affected by gyrations in market conditions like the ones we’ve experienced recently. In general, our investments are similar to Warren Buffett’s investments in Goldman Sachs and General Electric in 2008, where he purchased convertible preferred stock and warrants. However, our investments are in smaller companies, and we typically use other structures, such as secured debt with additional terms that provide downside protection.

The centerpiece of each investment is the purchase of common stock or notes that are convertible into common stock at a price that is discounted 15% to 40% below the price at which the common stock trades in the open market. This discount provides a built-in hedge that helps protect us from downside risk. So to answer your question, we’re focused on generating outsized returns while limiting downside risk by investing directly into public companies via highly negotiated structures at substantial discounts to their market prices.

Q: How has your investment fund performed?

Donenfeld: We’ve had tremendous results and have generated a cumulative return of over 250% since inception in 2005 – without using any leverage. Our investment returns have significantly outperformed the NASDAQ, S&P 500 and DJIA in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008. We have every incentive to generate strong returns because more than 20% of the fund’s capital is our own money.

Q: Those are tremendous returns–if you don’t mind me asking, what third parties verify your performance?

Donenfeld: We use Best Practices in investment management with top industry service providers, including our auditor Eisner LLP (www.eisnerllp.com), our third-party administrator SS&C Technologies, Inc. (www.ssctech.com) and our law firm Seward & Kissel LLP (www.sewkis.com). We work hard to provide complete transparency and bona fide results.

Q: What type of transaction do you look for?

Donenfeld: We’re focused primarily on three opportunistic investment areas:
1) Structured and event-driven investments, including capital restructurings and private investments in public equities (PIPEs),
2) Reverse mergers and alternative public offerings, and
3) Registered direct offerings

And we’ve worked hard to gain expertise in these sophisticated areas. Our expertise has allowed us to generate strong investment returns in ever-changing economic and market environments.

Q: From a quantitative perspective, your performance is outstanding. From a qualitative perspective, is there a “secret sauce” to your investments that allows you to generate such compelling returns?

Donenfeld: First, we’re extremely selective in the companies that we invest in and the investment structure of the transaction. We source and evaluate more than 50 transactions a month, but typically only invest in the one or two companies per month that meet our key criteria. Minimum qualifications include: an attractive public growth company and having reasonable stock trading liquidity, which is important in order to ensure that we can realize on our investment.

Our typical investments are senior secured convertible debt instruments that pay a minimum of an 8% to 10% interest rate. In order to establish a built-in hedge, we require the company to provide us with the right to convert the debt to equity at a price that is below the price that the stock is trading at in the public market when we invest. If the price of the stock drops, say, 20%, we can still sell our position and make a profit. In addition, we receive warrants as a kicker to generate an even higher return. Along with enhancing our potential upside we often obtain downside protection with terms that include, senior collateralization to secure the debt we hold, full ratchet anti-dilution, make good provisions, lock-up of management stock and most favored nations status.

Q: What are registered direct offerings and how do you make money in these investments?

Donenfeld: In our registered direct offering investments, we purchase stock from public companies at a discount to the market price, often up to a 15% discount, and then immediately sell the stock so that we have no capital at risk. In these deals, we can reap the spread between the market price of the stock and our purchase price. More importantly, we also receive upside in the form of five-year warrants or options. Collecting pools of warrants for free can be lucrative because company valuations currently are extremely low. Since the companies doing these deals have aggressive growth plans, these warrants can significantly increase in value over their five year lives. We’re finding strong companies with market caps in the hundreds of millions of dollars offering the most attractive terms we have ever seen.

Q: Looking at your third investment area, how do you profit from investing in reverse mergers?

Donenfeld: In our reverse merger transactions, we take profitable private companies public. Private companies want to become public for many reasons, such as raising capital, compensating executives with stock options, making acquisitions with stock and having the valuable status of being a public company. Paragon earns a piece of the spread between a company’s value as a private company and its higher value when it becomes publicly traded. Many famous companies, including Texas Instruments, Radio Shack, the NYSE and Berkshire Hathaway went public through a reverse merger rather than an IPO. The economics of a reverse merger are very attractive to us–as we can usually receive 5% to 10% of their stock in exchange for our sponsoring the transaction.

Approximately 30% of the companies looking to go public through a reverse merger are Chinese companies. We have a strong reputation in China – this year alone, we have spoken on China reverse merger investing at The Reverse Merger Conference, The 2009 China Cleantech Forum and The International PIPEs Conference in Shanghai. Our team’s expertise in reverse mergers provides us with a huge edge over other investment funds that can’t capitalize on these lucrative deals. We have developed a pipeline of profitable Chinese companies looking to go public in the U.S. and we believe that we can generate substantial returns in this area.

Q: Why are companies seeking investment from your investment fund at such favorable terms to you?

Donenfeld: For small-cap public companies, PIPEs, registered direct offerings and reverse mergers are the best way to raise capital. They can’t obtain bank financing, especially in this market, yet they need capital to grow. Investment funds like ours are ready to invest on short notice and PIPEs transactions and registered direct offerings are quicker and less expensive than secondary offerings. We get great deal terms and the companies get the capital they require for growth.

Over the past decade, PIPEs have become an institutionalized business adopted by the major firms on Wall Street as an important and flexible financial tool to finance public companies. In recent years, the PIPE market has been booming–according to PrivateRaise and Sagient Research Systems, 2008 was a record year, with more than 1,000 PIPE transactions raising over $120 billion, up from $80 billion raised in 2007. There also have been changes in securities regulations that make it easier for small-cap public companies to pursue PIPE transactions. Given the sizable number of companies seeking PIPE transactions, our investment fund can be highly selective and invest in the most advantageous PIPE deals.

Q: How do you choose which companies to invest in?

Donenfeld: When we make senior secured convertible loan investments, we focus on profitable companies with excellent track records that are in industries and sectors that have a strong growth rate. Low entry valuations, advantageous deal terms, solid management teams, intelligent uses of capital invested and relatively quick exits are some of the key factors in our evaluation process. We steer away from red flag situations, such as companies with high amounts of debt, weak management, management that is incentivized by salaries rather than equity performance, high customer concentration, one hit wonder products or products that require the stars to align perfectly to be successful.

Each investment has to stand on its own merits and have a good risk/return profile–we aren’t interested in venture capital investments that produce one grand slam out of every ten investments with a lot of strikeouts along the way. That is a risky game and our goals are to limit downside risk and exit an investment as quickly as possible with a profit.

Q: Is there a particular geography that you favor?

Donenfeld: Although most of our investments have North American operations, we also invest in companies with overseas operations to take advantage of rapidly growing markets, such as China. Not only is the macroeconomic environment in China highly favorable, but we can secure tremendous deal terms and invest at valuations as low as three times net income. Many Chinese deals have a “make good” provision, which requires management to put a minimum of half of their stock in escrow with our attorneys. If they don’t achieve performance targets, usually expressed in terms of net income or earnings per share, then their stock is released to us. With this in place, management has a huge incentive to produce strong results. And they’re confident that they will exceed performance targets because they plan to use our investment capital to grow significantly.

Q: What are the advantages of investing in your investment fund instead of larger investment funds?

Donenfeld: First, we have the background and expertise to employ a successful niche strategy. We can focus on sub-strategies that make the most sense at a given time. And we’ve mastered our niche strategy of highly structured and negotiated transactions at discounted valuations.

Second, we invest in deals that are too small for larger funds to focus on. These deals often offer better terms and a significantly higher potential for huge gains.

Third, we don’t have so much capital to invest that we’re compelled to invest like the large funds that must deploy their capital, which often results in these large funds reaching for deals and investing on less than optimal terms. In contrast, we can be very selective in choosing deals, and we can often demand superior terms.

Fourth, because our typical investment is smaller than an investment by a larger fund, it’s much easier for us to exit our investments. In contrast, larger funds may end up “stuck” in investments and have a substantially more difficult time accessing gains.

Fifth, reverse mergers, which can produce significant returns, are typically too small for larger funds. For these reasons, we have far more flexibility and potential for higher returns than do larger funds.

Q: Why should investors be interested in investing with your fund now?

Donenfeld: The markets are so challenging that growing companies are experiencing unusually low valuations and are offering us some of the best terms we’ve ever seen. For example, companies that used to trade at P/Es of 15 are now trading at P/Es of 8. While these stocks may trade at these lower P/E levels, companies that need growth capital may offer us conversion price valuations at P/Es as low as 3 to 6. If the capital that we invest helps the companies’ earnings grow then the combination of higher earnings with a future higher multiple may result in a 50% to 100% return for us.

Important Disclaimer: Always do your own research before you invest. For more detailed full disclosure documents about Paragon Capital’s hedge fund, please call 646-388-0887 or email: info (at) zenway.com

Without the fat trading spreads in derivatives, JPM’s risk profile will substantially increase. The high-risk part comes in because JPMorgan is more exposed to commercial real estate and business lending than many of its competitors, says Chris Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics, who expects losses in both areas to rise dramatically in late 2009/early 2010.

That’s perhaps why famed investor Jimmy Rogers once told CNBC that he was shorting JPM.

Read more:
Click here to read more.

http://hk.biz.yahoo.com/090519/263/3drs5.html?s=1211.hk

Various Chinese media also reported BYD is now involved in a bitter legal battle of corporate espionage with Foxconn Technology Group owned by the third richest man in Taiwan. BYD was accused of stealing corporate secrets by hiring away top engineers from Foxconn. One of the BYD founders was briefly arrested in 2008 due to this criminal investigation.

In 2007, Foxconn sued BYD for the second time for misusing confidential information. Foxconn International Holdings Ltd. filed the new lawsuit against BYD Co. Ltd. seeking RMB 6.51 million ($866,152) in compensation for the misuse of confidential information, according to an announcement released by BYD.

See the following Chinese blogs about BYD being involved in patent infringement and corporate espionage legal battles. Some claimed that BYD has a history of making technological or product anouncements that the company later failed to deliver.

http://bbs.koubei.com/thread_224_30024_1.html

http://bbs.koubei.com/thread_40_6986_1.html

http://bbs.koubei.com/thread_229_124336_1.html

Warren Buffett said that the letter he received from Wertheimer is the best he ever received. Here in this Fox interview, Wertheimer said that his letter is simple and he focused on what matters, namely:
1. Who we are
2. What we do
3. What we are looking for
4. A brief description in words and graphics about the 19 year history of the business.

That simple, no-non-sense letter got Warren Buffett to buy the first foreign company in his career.

Famed value investor Thomas A. Russo, of investment advisor Gardner Russo & Gardner, gave his musings on “global value” equity investing at New York Society of Security Analysts [NYSSA] on May 22, 2008.

Liquidation value is often overstated.

Russo stressed the value of consumer brands and express serious doubts about liquidation value currently used many value investors as a downside protection. In today’s legal environment, when it comes time to close the business and tap into the liquidating value, you could have a whole lineup of exit costs eating into the cash pile, including environment dumping costs, labor-related layoff costs, retirement healthcare benefits, executive benefits, and so on. Besides, the book value of a dying business could be overstated. This echoes the doubt about liquidation value expressed by Warren Buffett, Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) (BRK.B), who had first-hand experience at liquidating some of Berkshire’s textile assets. The experience of firing thousands of employees was so painful for him that he moved away from the liquidation game ever since.

Brand value is usually understated on the books.

Russo’s fixation on consumer franchise was due to his training under the late Bill Ruane of Sequoia Fund [SEQUX] where Russo worked as an understudy after graduating from college. Value investors’ move from liquidation value to consumer brands was partly due to Charlie Munger’s influence on Warren Buffett. Charlie Munger, based on his legal work, realized early on that many consumer companies’ legally enforceable trademarks, patents and brands are not even reported on the balance sheet, yet those brands have real value because they can charge a premium for their products and bring in high return on invested capital. On the other hand, the liquidation value of the equipment for a commodity business is often questionable, not to mention replacement value, which can be a number in the air.

Consumer brands are easier to research.

It is also harder to estimate the liquidation value of equipment without flying around and seeing all the plants, whereas a consumer brand investor can feel and taste the products and watch the ads almost every day. Thomas Russo’s favorite research technique is to go into people’s homes and peek into their refrigerators. Looking around the refrigerator and the kitchen, Russo would ask: “Why do you prefer this brand rather than the others?”

Russo also talks to foreigners in theme parks and on planes. He would ask them about the various brands in their respective country and try to assess the pros and cons of various products. The more expensive research method is to fly all over the world to visit those companies.

Why value investors should focus on the big profits over the long term

“The scarcest resources of value investors is our time,” observed Thomas Russo. Therefore, his operating motto, as he puts it, is “Focus, focus, focus, focus.” By focusing on a few industries, you gain broad industry contacts and a global perspective about various competing brands. You would have deeper insights about the value proposition of various franchises.

With brand power as tailwind, you can afford to invest for the long term rather than praying every day that the liquidation can go through as early as possible in order to stop the bleeding of cash. Russo also stressed that he has the advantage of putting the unrealized gains to work when he has brands behind him. Russo subscribes to Warren Buffett’s idea of buying only 20 stocks during a lifetime and holding on to them forever. That way you can really focus.

Trustworthiness is at the heart of financial brands.

When discussing the brand value of Citigroup (C) and AIG (AIG), Russo pointed out that, when dealing with financial franchises, you really have to trust the people who report the numbers to you. He doesn’t do any global investing in the field of financial companies. He feels the physical distance between him and the managers are too far to overcome. He even feels very far away from the guys on Wall Street nowadays. The whole room laughed at his observation.

In front of a full room of value analysts at NYSSA, the intellectual home of the late Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing, Russo pointed out the paradox of value school of thought:

We all try to buy value, yet when we look at our portfolio carefully, all our big profits come from growth.

And all that growth often comes from powerful consumer brands spreading all over the globe.

Cigar butts obviously appealed to Buffett, but Buffett’s investment career was destined to coincide with a very different period in American financial history. There never was a better time and place to make money from optimism than in the American stock market since World War II. Had Buffett confined himself to the gloomy business of plucking wet smelly cigar butts off the ground, he would never have become Warren Buffett. And Buffett was built differently than Graham. He had emerged from his childhood both a pleaser and an optimist. Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends And Influence People apparently made a deep impression on him. When he looked at a company, he saw not just its asset value but also its possibilities.

Read more:
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=12ef5554-1023-4be9-ad93-681003b280ef

This is a very well written book that tried to explain the classic confusion among the society “What makes people successful?”. Is it really the DNA or Luck or a combination of factors that we never really had the time to analyze.

When Charlie Munger recommended this to his audience in 2009 Wesco meeting, I walked out with a determination to read it ASAP, not just skim it but read it cover to cover. I can say that it was time well spent. But then the question is; How do we apply what we learned here in this book to our lives and of course to our Investing careers.

Briefly about the organization of the book:
It has Nine chapters with an Epilogue at the end describing the Author’s family tree and it’s transformation and how his family members were presented with the opportunities that enabled him to be an Outlier. The book makes two distinctions; Opportunity, Legacy. He explains the factors of success through these two lenses. The notes at the end of the book summarize where the Author sourced his information from, and additional reading materials for reference. If you are interested you can read the studies that were presented in the book.

Highlights of the book:
This book brings forth a thorough analysis of all the factors of Success and explains the Lollapalooza effect that can rocket a human being into the orbits of success. We all know that Bill Gates is highly successful and changed the world with his Vision. But no one ever explained what were the factors that lead to the extreme success of Bill gates. We also know that Asian Americans are good at math and have high success rate in the colleges, but again no one tried to analyze why? He also explained the pitfalls in long summer vacation in American educational system and how tweaking that approach and having kids spend more time in school can prove immensely helpful and gives them a real chance at entering the college. All the explanations to the above theories were well laid out and supported with statistical research.

What the book teaches us?

Matthew effect:
“For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” In plain english you can find the explanation for this in Wikipedia. Here it is “The Matthew effect in sociology is the phenomenon that “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”. Those who possess power and economic or social capital can leverage those resources to gain more power or capital. The Matthew effect results in a power law distribution of resources”

He explains this concept with the cut off dates for Canadian Hockey (Jan 1st) and some academic institutions. When you finally look at the results of star atheletes, their birth dates are always crowded around the cut off dates and full term qualified candidates. For e.g. A player who completed 10 years on Jan 1st(cut off date) is physically and mentally more mature than some one who is born in Aug and is qualified for the game. He has proven this concept with some good statistics behind. It was really amazing to discover that. He also carries forward that concept to the academic competitions where students gain an unknown advantage over others by virtue of their birth dates.

10000 Hour Rule:
Every one stands a chance to succeed if they are willing to work hard for that. A person stands a better chance of succcess when they find out early what they are after, and put in the 10000 hrs to perfect the trade. No body can ever achieve excellence with out practicing a complex task for long hours and real hard.

As Warren Buffett famously said “any thing more than IQ 120 is not necessary” to be a better investor, while it is true, the success directly depends on the amount of practice that is put into the profession. He illustrates this theory with Hockey players, Olympic athletes, NBA players, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Beatles, and numerous others who put in long hours starting at the very young age. He calls it the 10000 hr rule. And he also mentions that it takes 10 yrs to put that time in. Hockey players who start intense practice at 6 years of age and Bill Gate’s obsession with programming at an early age give them an immense cumulative advantage. If you listened to Charlie Munger talk about Warren, we hear the mental database of Buffett because he has been reading since 8 years.

IQ and Cultural Legacy, and it is possible to shed your Legacy and work with change:

He argues that IQ may not determine the success of a person where as the Practical Intelligence is really important in the real life success. He cites extensive research and statistic examples by Lewis Terman and Annette Lareau to prove that high IQ does not really mean high success. At some point of life, practical intelligence takes over which depends on the family circumstances and the books one reads and the society he grows up with. He also illustrates that a student raised in a middle class family with additional summer programs and enahancement activities has a better chance to succeed and live a good life.

He also explains the effects of cultural legacy on one’s success. He laid out the story of Korean Airlines unusually high crash rate in 1990’s due to it’s hierarchical culture which prevented a proper communication in the cockpit between the Captain and the First officers. This was really an eye opening story. And once they changed the training methods and communication protocol, Korean Airlines went on to become one of the safest airlines to fly.

Asian Americans: Math and Rice Paddies in China:

He attributes the above average math skills of Asians to their cultural habits of hard work and not giving up on the problems. He also mentioned that in the International Olympiad for Mathematics, the Asian counties rule the top of the charts. Singapore, China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong all excel at Math due to their cultural background of hard work and their method of math learning with seemingly easier numbering system which requires only 1/3 of western Math’s memory requirements.

China’s rice paddies require meticulous analysis and execution and that can be directly attributed to the Asian American students’ success in MIT, Harvard and other institutions.

But he also cites a study which concludes that the Overall IQ does not show any advantage for Asian Americans. And it is the practice that matters.

Knowledge Is Power Program(KIPP):

This is one of the best takeaways from the book. KIPP is a social initiative started by David Levin and Michael Feinberg in TX and NY. They started schools for underprivileged kids with long hours and extra attention which proved that it is the practice and hard work that matters. These kids from KIPP Schools have all of them entering into college irrespective of their Color, Social background, Economic status.

Well, that was it. I wanted to keep it really short. Your best bet is to read the book. Here I tried to describe the KEY take aways from the book.

Some of the books suggested by the Author:

The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics
http://www.amazon.com/Number-Sense-Mind-Creates-Mathematics/dp/0195132408/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242611315&sr=1-1

Genius Explained
http://www.amazon.com/Genius-Explained-Michael-J-Howe/dp/0521008492/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242591815&sr=1-1

The Happiest Man
http://www.amazon.com/happiest-man-Borgenicht-Harold-Friedman/dp/B0007EJ6UY/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242591958&sr=1-2

Normal Accidents
http://www.amazon.com/Normal-Accidents-Living-High-Risk-Technologies/dp/0691004129/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242592014&sr=1-1

Culture’s consequences
http://www.amazon.com/Cultures-Consequences-Comparing-Institutions-Organizations/dp/0803973241/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242592066&sr=1-1