5 posts tagged “books”

Needless to say, having a wee bit of imagination is a good thing. Unlearning to learn some visual tools and skills seemed appropriate so here is what I have just picked up and reading currently.

More on it when I get through it but I can tell you that after about 40 pages, I am buying a big whiteboard for the home.

Swimmy, Stripes and Orbitting the Giant Hairball are all excellent hand drawn visual presentations of very powerful messages. Furthermore, with coffee shops being a part-time habitat for me, napkins are always plentiful.

Matt Richtel has a very neat article in the New York Times here called "In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop"

Some quotes from his article:

"Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

It is unclear how many people blog for pay, but there are surely several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands.

I am definitely not paid to blog but if you want to read what they have to say, there are some posts here and here

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch had a post independent of this article that says a lot about the world of professional bloggers here called "Six Months In, And 600 Posts Later...The Worlds Of Blogging and Journalism Collide (In My Brain)". Some related quotes from this post are:

"It is mostly breaking news, reporting facts and providing analysis. At TechCrunch, I am completely focused on blogging, 24/7"

That is because the blogging never stops. Just ask my wife and kids, who now mock me by repeating back my new mantra: “I’m almost done, just one more post.”

But we live or die by how fast we can post after a story breaks, if we can’t break it ourselves.

I won't be surprised if Matt Richtel's story was inspired by Erick's post.
 
It tied in really well with my earlier post "Who Is Your Chauffeur" here. It was in response to a post on entrepreneurs but applicable to everyone and then of course, there was this post way back, which probably fits the best. The pictures of Stripe climbing (from the book Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus) away says it all.

It is really amazing how really simple things communicate the best. I have three books that use that extremely effectively and they all have one thing in common - they use presentation formats that appeal to children, not boring adults.

They all are:

• Simple
• Tell One Story and
• VERY importantly, Fuuuuuun!

Two books that I referred to in the past on this blog are:

1. Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus recommended to me by my colleague, Tom Rolander here at CrossLoop.
Two caterpillars, Stripes and Yellow are the main characters, who go on to explore the 'more' in life

2. Orbitting the Giant Hairball by Gordon McKenzie recommended to me by a mentor of mine.
The Hairball is a reference to all the policies and rules that grow and thrive at corporations. You can see many of those in personal lives through patterns and a daily rut

3. Swimmy by Leo Lionni . My most recent favorite that I picked up is from Robert Kalin, The Founder and CEO of Etsy. It is extremely applicable to startups but can be applied to the power of relationships - professional and/or family.

Watch Robert reading it below and you get the distinction of being one of those few who have read at least one book this year:

Imagine: Being FUNomenal

I am a little into creativity - actually maybe more than a little ... borderline obsessed with it. Why?

• It allows one to break conventional wisdom - some also call that wisdom of the crowds or herd mentality
• It enables one to easily differentiate
• It can have a revolutionary (creation) or evolutionary (improvement) outcome
  
• It enables one to explore the unknown and embrace failure, not fear it. If you fail fast, you get faster to your goal and eliminate more steps to your goal
• It magnifies discovery
  

With the above in mind and the following observation by Cathie Black (that I picked up - Yes - in The Wall Street Journal), I just ordered The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp, a choreographer.

"My favorite lines are about the importance of naïveté, which she sees as a great advantage. Tharp renames it "forever the child" or "the ability to not know." She writes: "You do not know that failure can hurt, or even that you can fail." Not a bad state of mind, in work and in life."

Being a relatively new father and watching my daughter grow closely, I could not agree more.

Furthermore, one of my all time favorite books is Orbiting The Giant Hairball - A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace by Gordon MacKenzie - another artist. He brings out the significance of naivete and all the advantages of being a child. At what age, did you stop raising your hand?

  Imagine: A blog about all things you DO NOT know

In the spirit of Halloween - Woo! Woooooooooo. Win Others Over

A while ago I had an article on how we are all selling - whether we know and like it or not. One of my all time favorite books on that has been Robert Cialdini's "Influence - the Psychology of Persuasion".

Here is a recent one that seems to be very interesting from a corporate perspective - 'The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas.'

I could not agree more that 'selling starts at home' - literally and figuratively. It is probably harder than selling externally. No idea or brilliance has value until it is executed upon.

The 4 steps they seem to advocate are:

1. Use social networks to reach decision makers
2. Addressing the five barriers:
   
• Unreceptive beliefs (Change is a common culprit here)
  
• Conflicting interests (Are the company
  

  The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas

  G. Richard Shell
  and people's goals aligned and clearly communicated?)
  
• Negative relationships (Ccorporate culture and social intelligence?)
  
• A lack of credibility (Reputation?) and
  
• Failing to adjust one's communication mode to suit a particular audience (Do you ever talk in Greek to those who only understand English?)
  
3. Presentation that is compelling. This does not have to be powerpoint only - timing, relevance, context and problem solving help
4. Securing individual and organizational commitments. A biggy- especially the last one and there you need the buy-in of the top dawg

I assume they assume that one is passionate about what one is selling, 'own' and live it.
 
One factor that is common across the board - its about people all the way.

Wharton has more details on the book here

Imagine: Social Intelligence offline