Category Archives: Books

Presentation Zen: the Book

Books

If ever there were a message the business world needs, it’s better presentations, please. Do a quick Web search and you’ll find ample writing by several smart people — you can start with Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki — on how to do presentations better than the “death by PowerPoint” style, also known as boring bullet points.

One of the most visible and most vocal people on this theme is Garr Reynolds, whose blog is Presentation Zen, and whose new book is also Presentation Zen, now available for pre-ordering on Amazon.com.

I’m really looking forward to getting this book. Here I am recommending it before I’ve even read it. I feel confident making that recommendation because I’ve been reading that blog and I feel like I understand what  the author is saying.

If you’re ever doing slide presentations with PowerPoint or Keynote,  and you haven’t had a chance to look  at and think about presentation techniques, then  do yourself and your audience a favor. Take a look at some of these blog posts,  consider this book.

Watching the Kindle

Books, Current Affairs, Technology

So response to the Kindle is heating up. I ordered one and discovered they’re back ordered, not promising to deliver before Christmas. I’ve seen a thoughtful post suggesting that Amazon will regret not making it a more open system. And reviews on Amazon are only lukewarm.

The delay is okay with me, it wasn’t a gift, I just want it. I rationalize that I’ll be able to blog about it, but that’s just MBA rationalization, I ordered it because I want it. I did that in June with the iPhone, paid the $600 to get it the first day, and I don’t regret it.

But you realize of course that I will have to tell you about it when I finally get it. I’m looking forward to it. In fact, I already didn’t order a hard copy book from Amazon today, because I see it’s available on the Kindle, and I want to wait for the Kindle version.

I’ve been an ebook fan long before the Amazon Kindle. I’m proud of that. I like the idea of an ebook reader. I bought the old Rocket ebook reader five years ago (or so) and I was glad I did. Before that I bought my first PDA — maybe seven years ago — for its ebook capabilities, and I actually read several full-length novels on it before I went on to something else.

In the interest of full disclosure, that Rocket ebook was a gift for a teenage daughter with a reading addiction, at the rate of two or three books a week. It was in part a defense against "Dad, can we go to Borders?"

"Download it dear, download it."

The reception of the Rocket ebook reader was underwhelming. I thought my daughter was possibly the only user, so I wasn’t surprised when the content stopped coming, but I just did a Web search and found somebody else who owned a Rocket ebook reader … and liked it:

I owned the first Rocket Reader(NuvoMedia) in Grad school and loved it, absolutely loved it. I found it versatile (I could also sink my own documents to it, as well as free ebooks I found at Project Gutenberg. I could add notes and bookmarks). I read my first Dan Brown book for under two dollars, Angels and Demons, before he was discovered by the world.

Rocket Ebook Reader

That seems odd because apparently the Rocket was not a success. They stayed away in droves. I thought my daughter was the only user, so I was glad to see Rebecca’s post, but that doesn’t make it mainstream (sorry, Rebecca, but then you do call your blog "the eclectic musings of an oddball").

And yet, times change, technology marches on, and here comes Amazon with a new thing. The big gimmick is that you’re not tied to the computer, you can download the books from anywhere that has a cell connection.

Meanwhile, David Weinberger suggests the new Amazon Kindle may be "a textbook example of how the strengths of closed platforms can quickly turn into a weakness." 

One thing Amazon has going for it is that Kindle ebooks are cheaper than real bound paper books. Just a bit cheaper, unfortunately. They certainly aren’t taking Seth Godin’s recommendation for really disruptive marketing, which he titled You Won’t Find Me on Amazon’s New Book Reader.  He makes a good point, but actually, I think I will find him there.

Meanwhile, on the Harvard Business Online site, David Weinberger says Kindle is going to fail because it’s a closed system.

Amazon’s Kindle e-book may turn out to be a textbook. A textbook example, that is, of how the strengths of closed platforms can quickly turn into a weakness. From a product perspective, Kindle addresses every key weakness of its predecessors …

But Kindle operates in a closed universe, and that’s why it probably won’t succeed in the long term as currently constructed.

Interesting coincidence, he finishes that piece by asking "How about iTunes? Where do you see openness encroaching next?" Meanwhile, I’ve just this week switched my music buying patterns from iTunes, which annoys me by controlling how many computers I listen to purchased music on, to Amazon, which doesn’t. That’s right, Amazon is the open system vendor that switched me from iTunes. So it goes full circle.

Book Recommendation: Made to Stick

Books

What makes some ideas work and others not work? Made to Stick is one of those books that you end up recommending to everybody you know, and particularly to everyone you know who has anything to do with small business (embraceable business) and marketing. Why is it that some urban legends spread like epidemics and stay forever? How and why were some spectacularly effective marketing campaigns developed? How does that relate to what you’re doing today?
Madetostick
Authors Chip and Dan Heath are brothers. Chip teaches organizational behavior at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and Dan is a consultant with Duke Corporate Education. What they do together is pull apart the mechanics of "sticky" ideas and put them back together in a logical, organized, useful, and ultimately, fascinating book.

I particularly liked a portion near the end that points to stories as one of the better way to make ideas stick.  Obviously that’s a bit of self interest, because I believe in stories for communication of ideas and it’s not for nothing that ‘stories’ is a part of the title of this blog.

The website for this book has excerpts worth reading. 

You wouldn’t think a 59-year-old lifetime West Coast person (me) would particularly enjoy driving a rented car alone on a Friday evening from Philadelphia to Cape Cod. However, audible books can really turn something like this around, and this book did that for me. 

I actually ordered the Microsoft Reader ebook version after finishing it, because this is one of those books I want to be able to browse through as needed. It’s also a great companion piece to some other books I’ve recommended on this blog.

— Tim

Read Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink”

Books

I finished Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking last weekend. You don’t need me to tell you this because the reviews have been fabulous everywhere, but still, read Blink. If you’re running a company, you need to know what this book will tell you. The power of thinking without thinking.Copy_of_blink_2

Then there was a comment mentioning Blink yesterday in response to my post here on happy companies and happy employees. That was a reminder that I wanted to recommend that book here.

Here’s some teasers: the amazing history of marketing colas by taste test, and how that relates to marketing politicians, and why CEOs are almost always tall. It’s about the way we think, and the way we perceive. This book is fascinating, a page turner, and it’s important. Read it.

— Tim

Growing a Business

Books, Growing a Business

I realize it’s a bit out of date, a 1987 b00k, but Paul Hawken‘s Growing a Business is still my favorite business book.  Growing_a_business It’s the first one I recommend.

Hawken tells real stories of real businesses wrapped around people doing what they like because they like doing it, they think it should be done, and the doing of it flows simply into the logic of filling needs and offering value. Two guys in Vermont get involved with their ice cream. They start selling it. It ends up being Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. It’s a great story.

They aren’t all bearded ex hippies. The stories include a bank in Palo Alto, Patagonia (outdoor clothes), Apple computer, etc. What they have in common is a sense of organic, natural growth from the foundations of doing what you want to do, when that’s something that other people want to have done.

It helped for me that I was a customer of the bank in Palo Alto, and of Ben and Jerry’s, Patagonia, and Apple Computer, and my wife loved buying at Smith and Hawken. I believe in the underlying idea that businesses depend on value — value to the customer — and values — the people in the business have to believe in it. 

The business in this book isn’t what you learn in business school. It’s what you want to do. It isn’t about building a business to make money, but rather building a business because it should be built and you want to do it. With that kind of foundation, it seems — and I’ve seen for years now, with hundreds of different business — it grows.

— Tim

ps: I shared the podium with Paul Hawken in the late 1980s, at Apple, when I was speaking on business planning and he was speaking about the ideas behind this book. He seemed a man whose persona was based on ideas, on the underlying values. I’m not surprised at the way his career has gone since. 

Kurt Vonnegut, Music, Proof of God

Books

"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music."

Kurt Vonnegut died on April 11.

The quote is from Man Without a Country, his last book, my favorite. The same thought appears in some of his earlier books.  Here’s a picture of a page from Man Without a Country:

Extended_families_kurt_vonnegut_3

He wrote many great books. My favorites are Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Player Piano, and Welcome to the Monkey House.

Some of his quotes are put together into Confetti Prints, at www.vonnegut.com.

The work above is Copyright 2007 Kurt Vonnegut & Origami
Express LLC.

Distant Neighbors

Books

I just finished a post about visiting Mexico, which reminds me of a good book about Mexico in the 1970s, the Echeverria presidency, the devaluation, discovery of new oilfields, the national disillusionment over Jose Lopez Portillo. The book is Distant Neighbors, by Alan Riding.

I was there as the story Alan tells in that book unfolded. He covered it for the New York Times while I covered it for Business Week. I wish I’d written that book, but damn, he’s good at it, was then and is still now. I went to business school, Alan stayed with the New York Times.