Factory – DaneCobain.com

Title: Linchpin

Author: Seth Godin

Type: Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 246

Rating: 4/5

Seth Godin – Linchpin

All of Seth Godin’s books are pretty good and so it’s hard to rate them anything below a 4/5. This one wasn’t his best, but it was enjoyable enough. Even though some of the references were occasionally out-of-date, the actual lessons inside it are still just as relevant as ever.

The idea behind Linchpin is that we have a responsibility to ourselves to become indispensable. Historically, we’ve been taught to fit in and to be nothing more than cogs in a machine. That approach might have worked when everyone was working blue collar factory jobs, but it doesn’t work in today’s complicated business landscape. That’s where linchpins come in.

A linchpin is an indispensable employee, the kind of person that a company can’t easily do without, and Godin’s book talks about how to become one and what to do should you be lucky enough to hire one. Packed with examples, it makes for an enlightening read, and while it doesn’t necessarily offer a map for people to follow, that’s a good thing.

Godin himself explains that it’s not just a set of rules you can follow, and he talks about how that way of thinking is rooted in the old ways of doing business. If your job involves following a set of rules then you need to find yourself a new job before you’re replaced by robots and artificial intelligence.

Seth Godin

Click here to buy Linchpin.

Andrew Johnson – Factory Farming | Review

Title: Factory Farming

Author: Andrew Johnson

Type: Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 274

Rating: 3*/5

Andrew Johnson – Factory Farming

The first thing to mention is that I read this book as part of the research for a new novel that I’m writing called Meat. Meat is set on a factory farm, and so I picked up this book as one of the half-dozen or so most well-reviewed non-fiction books I could find about factory farming and its effects.

There were two main problems with this book. The first was that it was perhaps overly technical, which caused by eyes to glaze over from time to time and which stopped me from absorbing as much of the information as I potentially could have. The author has a very dry writing style which conveys a lot of facts but which doesn’t really bring them to life. The other problem was that by now, it’s quite a few years out of date. I haven’t checked the publication year, but from the legislation that it covers I’d guess it was written in 1989 or so, around the time I was born.

Still, I did learn some fascinating stuff, predominantly around the different tests that have been carried out on the capacity of animals to feel pain. There was one test that found that cows would rather brave the cold at -20C to sleep on straw rather than sleeping in the warm on a metal grid, and another that found that chickens get so bored that given the choice between completing a task (such as pecking a target) for food and simply being given it, they’d rather work for it.