Beyond Brainstorming

Brain Rules... Rules!

John Medina has written one of the best brain books I have read. He is a molecular biologist and director of Brain Center for Applied Learning at the Seattle Pacific University. He explains the latest research on the brain, and there have been a lot of advances recently on how the brain works. He boils them down to 12 rules that will help you in all walks of life. If you want an owner’s manual for the brain then this is probably the one that should be handed out with every new-born.

The Audience
Everyone and I mean everyone should read this book! As long as they have a homo-sapien brain, if you have one of the older models; homo erectus, neanderthal you should probably wait for evolution! This is truly an owner’s manual for the brain! If you are a student or knowledge worker you should run; yes running will actually help you digest the material in the book better (Rule #2 – Exercise – exercise boosts brain power); to buy it and read it! Medina outlines some of his own thoughts on how to leverage the rules in the home, school and work.

The Details
John Medina has written one of the best brain books I have read (Rule #5 Short Term Memory – repeat to remember, Rule #6 Long Term Memory – repeat to remember). There are many books out at the moment that talk about the latest research on brains but John’s is undoubtedly the best. Neuroscience has taken some giant leaps in the understanding of how the brain works in the last 20 years. I was researching AI back in the early 90’s and since then there has been a lot of new research in this area. For the last year I have been catching up and reading everything I can find on neuroscience and that was how I stumbled across Medina’s book. I nearly put it aside since it seemed too basic but boy am I glad I didn’t. This book is fun to read and I learned a lot. I love John’s approach of only including research that follows certain criteria. For a study to appear in this book it has to pass the Medina Grump Factor (MGF) – (John refers to himself as a grumpy scientist)
1) Research must be published in a peer-reviewed journal
2) The research must be successfully replicated
Even though the material in this book is based on cutting edge research you should not feel intimidated. This book is well written and the material is presented following many of rules that are outlined. The book is actually a pleasure to read!
Following these rules has lead Medina to not only structure the book so it is easy to digest; adding stories, chunking information, providing summaries etc but he has also included a DVD with videos and an accompanying website with more information and references. This is truly a full sensory experience (Rule #4 – Attention – We don’t pay attention to boring things!, Rule #9 – Sensory Information – Stimulate more of the senses, Rule #10 Vision – Vision trumps all other senses)

If you want to understand your brain and improve it; and everyone should want to understand their brain and improve it; you should read this book.

The Take-Aways
I can’t say enough good things about this book. John Medina has written an excellent book leveraging all the latest research about the brain and turning it into a set of rules to remember. Your brain will never feel the same again! Read and then follow Medina’s advice on how your brain remembers new information and how often you should review it (Rule #5 Short Term Memory – repeat to remember, Rule #6 Long Term Memory – repeat to remember).

Personality Not Included - Book Review

Personality Not Included (PNI), a new book by Rohit Bhargava, SVP of Digital Strategy at Ogilvy, is about why companies lose their authenticity and how they can get it back by injecting, what he calls, personality. Through examples from companies with and without personality Rohit lays out the foundation for this new macro trend that encapsulates many of the best ideas in business today; authenticity, word of mouth and social media.

The Audience
This book will appeal to readers that have loved books by Seth Godin and Chris Anderson; it is part call to action and part practical guide. People interested in the current trends in business today from social media to word of mouth will find a fascinating macro trend that will add a new dimension to the current business environment. Unfortunately I think the people that most need to read this book; companies in desperate need of personality; will miss this book since it doesn’t fit into their business-as-usual world. Buy this and send it to the next faceless company CEO that treats you, the customer, as a nobody hiding behind corporate platitudes.

The Details
PNI is about the end of the faceless corporation. In this age of social media, long tails and word of mouth the consumer wants products and services from companies with “personality”. No longer is it acceptable to focus on metrics, efficiency and scalability if it’s at the expense of customers.
PNI doesn’t just highlight the problem but walks through a set of tools to imbue personality into organizations; not to say that if you are making a crappy product you can add personality and make it a best-seller.
This is one of the most unique business books I have read in a long time and contrary to its title has a lot of personality included! Rohit takes much of his own advice and has created a business book with a difference. The book lays out the ground-work behind the idea of ‘personality’ walking through real-world examples that illustrate the key points, but then spends the last third of the book, not just driving the point home with case study after case study, but providing techniques, guides and tools that are immediately implement-able. The uniqueness of the book doesn’t stop there, you can tell that Rohit has put a lot of thought into this book and the personality jumps out throughout the book; there are easter eggs hidden throughout the book (checkout the ISBN page of the book for an alternate introduction --- which is very cool!). Instead of the standard format of most business books, Rohit decided to take a slightly different tack on the examples; they are all based on 2 research techniques that he outlines in the book: 1) Conversing – the stories are based on direct conversations with the people involved, 2) Consuming – all the products and services in the book have been consumed or experienced. These 2 elements make for a truly down-to-earth and authentic book. Every part of this book including his research and writing are made completely transparent which is what he preaches to corporations. Don’t hide behind the policies and business-as-usual techniques; what your customers want is to see a real human being behind the products and services.

The Recommendation
I can’t recommend this book enough! Here are some reasons to read this book:
- Personality is a macro trend – the 3 hottest topics in business today are; social media, word of mouth marketing and authenticity. Personality is the underlying theme behind all of these elements.
- Real world experience – Rohit is an expert in branding and marketing and as part of his job working for one of the largest marketing agencies in the world, he gets to put into action his advice. He is not a business theorist, but someone that practices what he preaches in business today
- Real-world stories – the book is chock full of real-world stories explaining the concepts and highlighting good and bad examples.
- Theory to Practice – the book’s overall format is designed to take someone from theory to action through the most expedient path. You will feel compelled to take action after reading this book and you will have the tools to do it.
- Lost-In-Thought (LIT) – this is what I classify as a ‘Lost In Thought’ book. You can’t just passively read this book. While reading this book, you find yourself lost in thought, thinking about the ideas you have just read. Keep a pen, highlighter and post-its handy while reading this book, you don’t want to lose any of the ideas that this book will stimulate.
- Fun – it’s not often you can say a business book is fun to read, but this really is! I felt as if I was interacting with the book, not only the ideas as mentioned above but also the examples I had to go look up on the internet and the easter eggs.

This book goes up there with some of my favorite marketing and business books. If you liked books by Seth Godin, Chris Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell then you will enjoy this book.

I loved this book so much that, as part of a promotion, I am giving away free copies of this book with the Innovation tool I invented. Check it out at:
http://metamemes.typepad.com/beyond_brainstorming/2008/04/free-stuff-for.html

Special Limited Time Offer in Celebration of Creativity and Innovation Day

Today is Leonardo da Vinci’s birthday! Da Vinci was born April 15^th 1452; yes, it has been 556 since one of the most creative individuals in history was born. Happy Birthday Leonardo!!

It’s not a coincidence that today also marks the one week count down to World Creativity and Innovation Day (CID), April 21^st. CID was first celebrated in 2001 after a decade of collaboration between four Canadian faculty members at the Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI) in Buffalo, NY. Their passion for promoting creative thinking has turned into a multinational event that embraces the human creativity and innovative solutions to global challenges.

The goal of CID is to encourage people in schools, communities, businesses, families, organizations, and countries to:

1. Generate new ideas

2. Use imagination

3. Make new decisions

This spirit of this day aligns so well with our mission (bringing people and ideas together) we couldn’t resist doing our part. We brainstormed some ideas of how to give people the tools to generate more ideas, use their imagination, and make new decisions.

I had just finished reading Rohit Bhargava’s new marketing book called Personality Not Included. Rohit tells companies to stop being faceless and leverage techniques and tools to instill personality into every interaction they have with their customers. It’s a great book and, as I do with every book I love, I collect the best ideas to add to my idea library. Well that inspired an idea for the perfect gift to share with our customers! It goes something like this:

SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL OFFER
The first 100 ThinkCube orders placed between April 15^th and 21^st, 2008 will receive a free copy of Personality Not Included and 6 bonus ThinkCube cards with ideas from the book.

ThinkCube Personality Included Special CID Offer

Please note, orders placed during promotional period may require extended handling time. Any order placed with expedited shipping will receive ThinkCube as specified, and then the promotional materials in a separate shipment.

As the CID tagline goes, “Admit it. You’re Creative.” Help us celebrate CID; generate ideas, use your imagination, and make new decisions!

EveryThing is Miscellaneous: Book Review

In Brief

David Weinberger’s new book is a hard book to categorize, which is also the irony, since it’s central premise is about categorizing information. I place this book in the company of other books about the internet and information; Ambient Findability – Peter Morville, Wikinomics – Don Tapscott, Wealth of Networks - Yochai Benkler. To me it’s about the changes wrought by current trends on the internet. Weinberger is deeply familiar with internet and all it’s implications, since he is one of the original authors of Cluetrain Manifesto which was probably the first book to outline the game changing nature of the internet. Here he tackles how to cope with the seeming chaos of digital information that we are deluged with.

This is a thought provoking book and will make you look at organizing information in a different way. It will help you understand some of the current trends on the internet and put it into historical context.

Audience

I highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in internet trends especially as it relates to organizing information. If you are at all interested in the history of information and how we as humans have struggled to come to terms with the world, then this book is one of the best I have come across. It is well written and a pleasure to read.

Details

David Weinberger, internet visionary, has again synthesized an intellectual romp through another important topic – Information. We, humans, are obsessed with defining, categorizing and organizing information as our way of bringing some order to the chaotic world we live in.

Weinberger explores our obsession with information from Plato and Aristotle to our modern-day digital explosion of information.

He frames this exploration by defining 3 orders of organizing information:

1. 1^st Order organization is of the physical world, manipulating physical objects and organizing them,
2. 2^nd Order of organization is the use of metadata to organize and categorize physical objects i.e. library card catalogs. This is still limited by physical constraints.
3. 3^rd Order of organization is the world we live in today, as we move from the physical to the digital, organizing information becomes freed from physical constraints allows us to simultaneously define, categorize and organize information into a million different taxonomies.

The 1^st and 2^nd orders of organization are covered as Weinberger explores the history of our obsession with categorizing information; from Plato’s ‘Joints of Nature’, to Aristotle’s ‘Trees of Knowledge’. We have been lumping and splitting information for thousands of years. Until recently we have been constrained by the laws of physics, it is hard for objects to be in two places. It is also hard to categorize the real world into orderly taxonomies i.e. what category does a duck-billed-platypus fit into?

The 3^rd order organization is what Weinberger is referring to in his title, ‘Everything is Miscellaneous’. In a world where we can organize information any way we want, nothing needs to be categorized per-se and everything can live in a state of limbo in the miscellaneous category until we need it and then, and only then, does it need to be grouped, filtered, sorted for our immediate consumption.

The 3^rd order world has freed information and people to categorize information anyway they want. It is no longer an academic exercise to come up with taxonomies. With tools like Digg, del.icio.us, Flickr etc. we slice and dice the world of information to our personal needs. Understanding this digital disorder we live in and how we cope is the ultimate point of this book. True to form, Weinberger has given us a wealth of information to ultimately understand where we are today and how to build the tools to cope in the future.

Key Take-Aways

You will come away from this book understanding the following:

-         Our historical struggle to organize information from the physical to the digital

-         That we live in a new reality where information is freed from its physical constraints.

-         The world of information is now available to all of us and can now be organized any way we want.

Summary

If you enjoyed any of Weinberger’s previous books (Cluetrain Manifesto, Small Pieces Loosely Joined) you will not be disappointed. This is a pleasure to read and will make you think – my two most important attributes when it comes to books. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in information and the current trends on the internet. Weinberger has been right on the money with his observations of the internet and this book is no different; organizing information in the age of the internet is an important subject. Read why there is more to information than search alone.

Founders at Work (Book Review)

The Summary

Jessica Livingston has written an amazing book. If you want to read the stories behind some of the most well known software companies in the last 30 years, you will find it in this book. But Livingston hasn’t just covered the usual suspects (Google, Microsoft), she has included a diverse collection from Steve Wozniak (Apple) to David Heinemeier Hansson (37 Signals), Dan Bricklin (Visicalc) to Blake Ross (Firefox). It covers a lot of ground from the early 80’s software boom to the Web 2.0 starts ups. But there is more than just stories about starting companies, there is real advice from the frontline trenches of software start-ups. Keep your post-it notes and highlighter handy, if you are like me you will be annotating and highlighting a lot!

The Audience

If you have ever considered a start-up you should definitely read this book. It’s like picking the brains of some very experienced entrepreneurs. Anybody that has already tried their hand at start-ups will recognize the value of this book. Most will probably feel like I did, and wish that they had had this book before they started their first company. It could have saved me many painful lessons (both financially and personally). Reading these interviews is like having 32 mentors.

The Details

Like many people I am always a little skeptical of ‘success stories’. Just because someone did x, y and z, doesn’t mean that I could follow these very steps and be as successful.  Just because Aunt Ethel, who lived to be a 100, attributes her long life to drinking a glass of whisky every day, doesn’t mean I can drink a glass of whisky every day and live to be a 100. Instead of a collection of fluffy ‘creation myth’ stories written about software companies, Livingston has put a lot of thought into how she approached these interviews and has collected some real gems of insights from these entrepreneurs. She has uncovered a gold mine of valuable advice and information about starting a company. As you read these stories you start to see some patterns emerging. Some of these patterns I recognize from my own experiences, but others were new to me. Sometimes you see contradictory advice from different founders; one tells you, you need to focus on the technology and somebody else explains that it’s more important to focus on business/market opportunity. There are definitely multiple paths to starting a company, but some advice is repeated story after story, and these seem to be universal truths.

The Ideas

Here are some of the universal truths that I culled from the interviews:

- Iterate through ideas, the first idea isn't always the best

- Business plans are important - but be prepared to change it many times

- You need to be naïve – “unencumbered by reality”

- Persistence makes all the difference

- Passion – you need to be really excited about what you are doing and think it's really important

- Understand and listen to your end users

The book is full of ideas and advice like this.

The Take-Aways

Overall, I can’t say enough good things about this book. Obviously it’s aimed at entrepreneurs, but I know there are going to be many people just interested in the stories behind their favorite companies or people. Personally I loved the interviews with Ray Ozzie, Joel Spolsky, Joe Kraus and Steve Wozniak. I was also fascinated by the stories behind companies like: 37 Signals, Six Apart, del.icio.us and Craigslist. I was even surprised by the story behind ‘Hot or Not’, it’s not as shallow as you might think.

Entrepreneurs -- wanna-be, new and experienced –- you NEED to read, think, digest and act on the advice in this book and your next/current entrepreneurial venture will go much smoother.