Miami, Moscow and London. A fluent Russian speaker, he holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University.
Hecker applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia, and reported the following:
Clinging tenaciously by a toenail to the bottom of page 99 is one of the more important topics of Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia.Visit Charles Hecker's website.
Page 99 is where the book starts to discuss the collapse of the Soviet Union and the stampede of adventurous international executives into the newly emerged Russian Federation. In the space of two-and-a-half paragraphs at the very bottom, page 99 also shows how the opening of the Russian market slotted directly into a rapidly globalizing world. Countries that were once too far, too opaque or too dangerous for business were rapidly becoming economic hotspots. Russia in the 1990s fit that trend perfectly.
That said, page 99 will not give you a comprehensive view of the scope of Zero Sum. Missing from the page, for example, the story of what happened to all those intrepid executives once they left the all-you-can-drink comfort of business class and disembarked at Moscow’s squalid Sheremetyevo airport. Also missing is the story of the stampede in reverse, as executives fled Moscow’s skyscrapers at the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. All of that is described in vivid detail in Zero Sum, both before and after page 99.
The top half of page 99 describes the amount of money ricocheting around the world during various peaks of international economic activity. Did you know, for example, that until 2004, when record amounts of money crossed international borders at the speed of light, the world was most globalised in 1914, on the eve of the First World War? That’s right, it took almost ninety years for the world to be as globalised as it was when international connections were facilitated primarily by the telegraph.
--Marshal Zeringue
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