A list of short Design, Communication, Innovation Book reviews

Author	Title	Ranked	ISBN
Wolf Schneider	Deutsch für Profis	*****	3442161754
The best book on good writing I know. Highly entertaining. German.
Donald A. Norman	The design of everyday things	*****	0465067107
This is THE insightful classic about design that works for humans. Affordances, making things visible, mapping, conceptual models, feedback, constraints and forced functions, and lots of beautifully obesrvant little examples.
Steve Krug	Don't Make Me Think	****	0321344758
A blissfully well designed book about web interface design, slim, with a bucketload of useful tips, and entertaining to boot. Covers how to set up a cheap usability testing rig, too.
William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White	The Elements of Style	****	020530902X
This is a classic little gem on how to write good English. The German 'Deutsch für Profis' is better, better structured, more detailed, and cites more powerful examples, however.
Roger von Oech	A Whack on the Side of the Head	***	0446674559
The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas (L. Pauling). This book tries to make you more creative. The premise is: mental rut blocks your creativity. Here are ways to breach it: 1. Find the second right answer. It might be better than the obvious first one. 2. Brainstorm, forget about logic, imagine and associate. 3. Play. 4. Explore into areas where you are not a specialist, if you have a trail leading there. 5. Break rules. Chances are, there is no good reason for them anymore. 6. Allow ambiguity. 7. Do not be afraid of errors. Learn from them, and improve. Finally, judge and organize the results of your creative process. If you came up with a good idea, put work into it and fight for it since everything new will hit a wall of opposition. This book is chock full of nice quotes, with Heraklitus' aphorisms at the end.
Isabel Garcia	Ich rede	***	3981284909
It probably does not have to be this one, but you should read one book on communication. A book on rhetoric also would be useful. Being able to communicate well is fundamentally helpful in so many ways, the time invested here is probably better invested than any reading of technical or management books. The most helpful advice I took from this was: 1. Do not interrupt. It is rude and offensive. 2. Speak slowly. Reduce what you want to tell, but don't rush trough it - you would not say 'I love you' quickly, nothing important should be rushed. 3. Use silence and pause, so your listeners have time to digest what you said, and believe that you took time to consider what they just said. It also gives them a chance to talk or say something else. 4. Breathing deep may help ground you before public speeches.
Gene Zelazny	Say it with presentations	***	0071472894
Zelazny was the guy at McKinsey responsible for presentation training. This book about holding a presentation and is presenting it's material surprisingly bad. The most interesting point for me was that you should present your take home message first, the evidence later. Much of the rest is about soft areas like using humor, and the advice is wish-wash, a la 'Use humor when it fits; Use humor that matches your personality'.
Wolf Schneider	Deutsch fürs Leben	***	3499196956
50 rules for good, understandable and interesting writing. Solid. Not as good as his excellent 'Deutsch für Profis' by splitting the smaller number of real rules arbitrarily into 50.