Made to Stick [Book]

by Chip & Dan Heath

I rate this book on how to create messages that stick, influence how people act and are retold as slightly above average as far as easy reading business books go. The material does not much suffer much from aging. The findings are reasonable albeit somewhat unsurprising. Even has a nice quick reference in the back.

Their main point is to overcome the Curse of Knowledge: it is extremely hard to forget everything you learned yourself about your specialty, put yourself in your listeners' or readers' shoes and create messages that work for them and their background knowledge.

According to the authors and studies they cite, good messages share some common attributes:

1. Simple. Good messages keep to the main point, like finding the headline for a newspaper article. What is the single most important thing? If you have 5 different messages, you have none. Express it succinctly. Images and Analogies to things the listener knows work well to get the idea across. Examples: Movie concept pitches, Commander's Intent, SW Airlines as "THE low-fare areline".

2. Unexpected. An element of surprise helps to capture attention. Asking questions to pique curiosity, delay answers to keep interest. Unexpected and audacious objectives. Examples:  pocketable radio, putting a man on the moon. There will be no school next Thursday. 

3. Concrete. It is hard to picture or remember abstractions or statistics. Again, images help, examples and prototypes help. Many hooks help (Velro theory of memory). Experiencing things helps. Map things to ones experienced at human scale. Compare fables, proverbs. BB bullets to show nuclear proliferation, blue vs brown eyes "the wave" experiement. White things vs white things in your fridge. Rookie orientation on AIDS. Visualize what it would be like.

4. Credible. Details help. Authorities help. Anti-Authorities, i.e. normal people just like the listeners help. The Sinatra test (one proof point that is all you need "If you can make it there you make it anywhere"). Testable credentials -- i.e. let the audience try it themselves / answer it for themselves.

5. Emotional. If you don't get moved by the message, you will likely forget it quickly. Use individuals, not groups (1 death is a tragedy, 10,000 is a statistic); use emotional stories that work for the audience's identity/self-image (rebellion for youth, toughness for rednecks); appeal to self-interest "What's in it for me?", but do not just appeal to Maslow's Basement.  Examples: "They laughed when I sat down at the piano ... but when I started to play!" mail order ads, Don't mess with Texas. 

6. Stories. We are wired to remember stories, not data. Keep your eyes and ears open for stories you can use. Typical plots: challenge - stepping up against near impossible odds, connection - family, friendship etc., creativity - surprising solutions to overcome challenges. Stories also often are emotional, visual/concrete, have details to make them credible, or unexpected twists. Examples: heart monitor, Jared and the subway diet

All of which combines to a cringe-inducing SUCCES acronym.

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.

Writing

The Rule

Think of the reader.

Make it easy for the reader, and do not bore him. If the reader likes what he reads, he will continue reading. If he is bored, disoriented, or can't follow your thoughts, he will stop reading. Your effort is then wasted. And you show that you are inept or lazy. To see if your text reads well, read it aloud. And if possible have someone else read it and give you feedback.

The Structure

The structure of your work shall match its content. To understand, one must order and relate ideas. If you organized your ideas well, the reader can understand them without effort. If not, you instead put that burden on your reader, and he will not be amused.

One thought per paragraph. The paragraph is the basic optical unit of text. The thought is the basic conceptual unit. Keeping them in parallel and build your text from logical units. Put several thoughts into one paragraph and you'll see how hard gets to figure out what point you are trying to make.

Don't rip a thought apart. Keep to your thought until it is done. Avoid ellipses, insertions, asides, parentheses, footnotes. An average reader can keep seven words in mind without effort. He can not know where you want to go and must follow you. Don't force him to hold your unfinished thought in mind through tiring false leads. You make your argument hard to follow and waste your reader's concentration.

Keep it short, remove chaff. Leave out the superfluous from your argument. Cut unnecessary paragraphs, sentences and words. You make your argument more clear and forceful, save space for important statements, and you save your reader's time.

Parallel form for parallel thoughts. Here form makes content easy to see. For long lists of parallel information, use a list.

Use sections. In longer texts, just plain text paragraphs are not be enough to get the overall logical structure. Use chapters, sections to organize your text. Headings help to make them visible.

Main point at the start, Emphasis at the end. The reader always will read the beginning of your text, so put your main message there. The start is distinct from the main body of text, so the reader remembers it more strongly. The same goes for the end which leaves the last and strongest impression -- if he readsit.

No monotony. Finally, don't apply any rule without reprieve. One short, positive, active sentence after the other gets boring, too. Spice up your text by variety.

The Sentences

Put main points in main clauses. Avoid dependent clauses that carry the main point, an additional main point, carry on the action or insert some thought that is unrelated. Use dependent clauses sparingly to break the monotony of chains of main clauses. Appending them is better then prepending them, and inserting them is bad.

Keep to one tense. Usually talk present voice. It feels uncoordinated and thoughtless if you are switching times all the time.

Use positive statements. They are more specific then negative ones, and easier to understand. Above all, avoid double negations. "They don't make it less difficult." -- see?

Use active voice. Say "He showed", not "It was demonstrated". Action is more alive than passivity. The sentences will shorter, and easier to understand. It forces you to know the actor, too, so helps you think things through.

Keep split-able verbs together. If you don't, the reader has to keep in mind half of the verb, while skipping over your sentence to find the other half. He will have less attention for what you say, and tire faster.

The Words

Short words. Short words are easy, long words are hard. It is that simple. The more syllables, the harder to understand. Short words often are less abstract than long ones, too. "Short words are the best and old words when short are best of all." -- Winston Churchill

Gripping, concrete words. Abstract words print no image in the reader's mind. Narrow, concrete words are more exact and less judging. Say hen, not chicken, say chicken, not poultry. Use pars pro toto to stay brief and vivid if you talk about general things.

Use action verbs. Verbs drive the action, they are stronger than nouns. Therefore, don't replace them with nouns if you can avoid it: don't say "hold a meeting", say "meet". It is shorter, too.

No adjectives. Adjectives they are fat on lean sentences. Adjectives soften the impact of their noun. Get rid of them. Try cutting all adjectives from a text, and you will be surprised how much more toned it will be. Adjectives distract from the idea the noun expresses. If you feel that you need an adjective, try first to find a more fitting noun.

No fillers. Get rid of filler words like little, pretty, quite, rather, very and of phrases like in this context or in my opinion. They add no information and weaken the statement.

The Orthography, Grammar, Form

Your text has to be correct, before you can worry if it is gripping and easy to understand. In the age of spell checkers, this is no real concern. Spell checkers may not be perfect, but they come close enough. Use them. Even more than the syntax, the form is nothing to worry about anymore in the age of computer typesetting.

Closing Remarks

These hard-and-fast rules for non-fiction writing do not always hold, but break them consciously to achieve a certain effect, not out of laziness.

In scientific writing abstraction, big words, and hard-to-follow sentences are all too common. People are either think this is required to appear "professional", or have not understood their subject well enough, or just do not care. I think there is no substance to it: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." --Albert Einstein

Many ideas in this document have been taken from "Deutsch für Profis'', partly from "The Elements of Style''. Both books are excellent. To anyone who understands German I highly recommend the first one - it is more thorough and more entertaining to read.

References

[Sch00] Wolf Schneider. Deutsch für Profis. Goldmann, 1999. ISBN: 3-442-16175-4.

[Str79] William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. Number 3/e. MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1979. ISBN: 0-024-18200-1.

My years with General Motors

By Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.

According to Bill Gates the single most useful book you can read on business. I agree it is great. This book states Sloan's business ideas in the unassuming voice of a personal memoir. Sloan must have been one of the best managers the world has ever seen. Read this book, and understand where all the stuff that Drucker wrote came from. Enough laurels, what does it say?

Sloan introduced organizational structures balancing central policy with decentralized execution (a lot of the most difficult issues he considers really come with size). He gave employees freedom to act guided by objectives and incentives. He was big on grasping reality, by collecting key operational data, by working out solutions by meetings of stakeholders. He looked ahead to preempt problems and see opportunities for innovation. And he did this on a level of success where it really becomes a bit scary.

Some concrete points:
Energy and logical action in accordance with facts and circumstances.

Purpose: The primary objective of the corporation is to make money, not just to make a product -- pay dividends and increase capital value. ROI is the unifying measure for each business unit.

Value: The future of the corporation depends on the ability to design and produce products of maximum utility in quantity at minimal cost. To succeed in business in the long run you must render service to the public.

Strategy: Companies compete in broad "policy" (i.e., strategy) as well as in products. Every enterprise needs a concept of its industry and the CEO must understand the industry. Think about what you are trying to do, in addition to the constraints imposed by customer demand, competition, technology, economic conditions and evolution. Establish principles and work from them.

Measurement: Measuring, organizing and presenting the significant facts about what is going on in and around a business is one of the chief bases for strategic business decisions. Finance can not exist in vacuum but has to be integrated with ops.

Consensus: Co-ordinate by committee. The executive committee is to pass policy in a clear cut way to supply the basis for authorized executive action, e.g. on quality standards, price schemes, market and competitive moves. It should have enough representatives from operations to come to realistic conclusions. The role of the executive is policy making. Have an operations committee of all unit heads. Gets all available data about performance, and includes executives. The goal: to bring about common understanding.

The Executive: There is a need need for authority of the chief. If possible have the boss be in charge of operations. A group can make policy, but only individuals can administer policy. If a company does not execute well, all policy is for naught.

Capital approbation for projects:
- what is the relative value of the project as compared to other projects in ROI and in necessity to support company operations as a whole
- does it work as a commercial venture?
- has it properly been developed technically?
- is it proper considering company interest as a whole (not just for the unit proposing)

Small projects can be authorized by the unit manager, large ones need a procedure and approval by top management/finance, and need to present their economic and technological benefit.

Organisational structure: Independent units coordinated by central management. There is need to separate divisional and corporate functions. The juncture between staff and line can be paralyzing if it turns into a battlefield. Have line representatives on staff committees to get buy-in and adequate representation of needs. Functions include development, engineering, production, sales, finance. There should be a separation between advanced product engineering and long term research.

Have representative members in parallel function from each unit get together to exchange and co-ordinate, give them authority and power so this coordination can be constructively applied. Confine the scope to problems/info exchange of common interest. Keep away from details, focus on basic problems. Keep sessions business like and to the point. Have a secretary to support the committee.

Personal productivity: Spend days with inspection and observation, nights with discussion. Only 5 direct reports to have time for large scale issues thinking. Put all your energy and experience into your work. Even at the cost of personal sacrifice.

The equation that couldn't be solved

By Mario Livio



Evchariste Galois was a genius and a romantic who forever changed maths by inventing group theory before he was shot at the age of 20 in a duel, and his life would make a fine subject for a hollywood movie a la "A beautiful mind".



The life stories of him and a bunch of other mathematicians who quested to solve quadratic, cubic, and quartic formulas and prove that there can be no general formulistic solution for the quintic make up the bulk. There is an explanation of what a group is (closure, associativity, identity, inverse) and a few simple examples of groups plus explanations that they are used to describe symmetry. There is a nice section showing that if you are looking for the best mate, but can't go back to earlier ones you separated from, sampling about one third of the overall you could have and then sticking to the first one better than all these after that is the best strategy - which means if the best one was in the first third, you'll have to try all and will get stuck to the last one ... I assume unless you'd turn out to not be their final choice and end up alone.

The economic naturalist

By Robert H. Frank

This popular economics book, is written by the academic who wrote the Principles of Economics textbook which I dearly love.
This book contains short essays that try to answer from first economic principles puzzling questions like "Why are round trip airfares from Kansas City to Orlando lower than round trip airfares from Orlando to Kansas City?", or "Why is it easier to find a partner when you already have one?", or "Why are soda cans not shorter and wider, and thus cheaper by using less alloy for the same amount of liquid?"

The principles invoked are scarcity, opportunity cost, price discrimination, supply and demand, the tragedy of the commons, externalities. In many cases they fall short of giving a good explanation, and the answers resort to speculation about human psychology. Some answers are altogether unsatisfactory. Soda cans remain a mystery to me.

The Logic of Life

by Tim Harford

Another entertaining "popular economics" book. Although not quite as good as the undercover economist, is covers a wide range of everyday experiences and explains why the apparently unreasonable makes sense - for example: why your boss is overpaid, why real wages in the world's large metropolitan cities are lower (hint: not mainly because you can go out in the evening), why divorce rates are high and eligible bachelors scarce, why rich neighborhoods have better streets and infrastructure (hint: not because they are chummy with those in npower or bribe politicians), why race discrimination at work is hard to stamp out even if employers don't have any personal preferences.

Usually it comes down to rational decisions that each individual makes, which in aggregate lead to irrational outcomes or freeze in bad situations.

Negotiate this!

by Herb Cohen

A book about negotiation, by Herb Cohen, a master negotiator. His main points are that you need to listen a lot and try to understand what the other party needs and what their limitations are, and that you should care, but not that much (it says so right on the cover), because if you can not walk from a deal, you will get the short end of it.

The book less structured than his first book You Can Negotiate Anything, and does not add much new insights. It is mostly filled with anecdotes, not so much a hands-on guide. I prefer the earlier one.

Persuasion

by James Borg

A tedious read. First, there is no red thread to the book. Part it is popular psychology heavy on theory from body language to Jung's personality types; part are practical scenarios like what to say on the telephone to get through a secretary. It is filled with pointless made-up dialogues that claim to show how failing communication attempts are transformed into easy victory by its wisdom. As if.

The good points I took from it were that you should show empathy and sincerity: respect the people you deal with, by not wasting their time, by listening and focusing your attention to them and putting yourself in their shoes to understand their feelings and needs. Take interest in them and their plans. And as everyone is different, not just extrapolate from yourself, but try to understand what they need to feel comfortable - be it socializing and praise, or detailed facts and numbers, or visions. Nothing new, though, that's straight out of Dale Carnegie.

The chapter about how to talk on the phone at least was practical and hands-on.

I found the chapter on attention interesting, how it and momentum get destroyed by interruption. So remind your partner where the discussion left off when resuming, or if possible postpone to discuss again later, and avoid rejection today. Also apparently, you should look people in the eye a lot.

It is fitting that the book, contrary to what it's cover says, is somewehere down in the nether regions of sales on Amazon.