Rollercoaster Review

I’ve posted a review of Rollercoaster: The Turbulent Life and Times of Chris Gent and Vodafone over at Mobitopia. Check it out below.

Rollercoaster: The Turbulent Life and Times of Chris Gent and Vodafone is, tellingly, a book that doesn’t have any descriptions on the Amazon site, and the back of the book is covered with quotes for the author’s previous book (about Napster). However, a couple of review quotes do exist on the book’s page at Amazon, with one claiming that “it gives the reader an insight into their (Chris Gent & Vodafone) stunning achievement” (from Management Today). Now, I’ve never read Management Today, and frankly, if the quality of their book reviews is a taster for the quality of their other articles, I’m never likely to read it either.

The book is pretty much a series of news clippings about Vodafone, with a potted history stuck on the front, and all loosely linked with narrative of sorts. The author makes such a big show about the fact that he asked Chris Gent a question at a press conference once that it made me wonder if he’d actually ever interviewed anyone else for the book. Actually, that’s not quite true: the chapter about how Vodafone upset the population of their headquarters town (Newbury) has quite a lot of actual quotes from people, whereas the rest of the book relies on quotes from “sources”, which just adds to the tabloid-esque style of writing.

I’m not completely averse to that type of book, after all Breaking Windows is pretty much built in the same way, using court records of all the emails that Microsoft sent and piecing them all together with the time line of events surrounding the Internet and Microsoft’s decisions. But at least there, the author provides his own insights into the situations.

For an example from Rollercoaster, the book starts and ends with the press conference where the author asks his question (about how long Gent intends to remain at Vodafone). The conference that day is about how Vodafone had turned around their business from the previous 6 months (when they’d issued a GBP 13 billion loss), and now they had a really good set of figures. At no point does the book go into how they had managed to turn things around so well, so quickly.

This is not the sort of detailed book for a company which, for all its faults, has come an incredibly long way in a very short space of time.

Summary: Not the best 10 quid I’ve ever spent, and you, reader, should save your money.