Category: Books/Reviews

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, Roam, Dan

One of the rules of thumb I learned in the early days of my consulting career was that your project wasn’t real until you had at least one napkin or placemat filed in your working papers with some sketch that captured the essence of what you were designing or trying to understand. Dan Roam’s new book, The Back of the Napkin, makes the same case and provides substantial insight and guidance on how to make those sketches more useful.

Artistic talent and skill is largely irrelevant to Roam’s discussion. He’s talking about drawing as a thinking tool and the value of simple pictures in understanding complex phenomena. While his work is rooted in deep understanding of how our visual system and brains work, Roam boils it down to simple and practical advice. He summarizes the book with an image of a Swiss Army knife. Here’s my very own sketch of that drawing:

The heart of Roam’s approach is a process of Look, See, Imagine, and Show. The distinction between Look and See is a bit subtle. In Roam’s formulation, Looking is somewhat more passive and is about taking in the raw materials of what is out there, while Seeing is a more active process of chunking and imposing order on those raw materials. Imagine moves away from our eyes to our mind’s eye where we can experiment with multiple representations of what we’ve seen and how we can make sense of it. Finally, Show is about working out ways to take someone else through the mental process that will help them see what we’ve come to see. Again, here’s my version of Roam’s model:

While a good picture may indeed be worth a 1000 words, Roam is no advocate of simply letting a picture speak for itself. He has two purposes with his book. The first is to equip you with better tools for using simple pictures to furthering your own understanding of problems. The second is to educate and convince you to put those tools to use in helping communicate your new understanding to others. Roam provides good advice about the kinds of pictures you should draw to address the classic journalistic questions (Who, What, Where, When, Why, How, and How Much). He also introduces a curious mnemonic, SQVID, which translates to Simple, Quality, Vision, Individual Attributes, and Delta. Each represents one pole in choices you can make when you are sketching a particular concept.

This is a rich and useful book. If you’re already a visual thinker, it offers a good organizing framework and collection of tools and techniques to add to your bag of tricks. If you’re not yet a visual thinker, this should provide you with the necessary encouragement to start.

  Your Inner CEO: Unleash the Executive Within, Cox, Allan

This book is a bit of an unusual hybrid, lying somewhere between a management text and a self-help book. While it’s being marketed as a business book, it’s applicable in a much wider range of settings.

Your Inner CEO is another entry in the long argument that self-knowledge is the core of effective performance. What makes this entry more intriguing, and more valuable than most, is the unique perspective that its author, Allan Cox, brings to the exercise. Allan works as an executive coach and consultant to CEOs, boards, and senior executives of large and small organizations around the world. His advice is rooted in the pragmatic experiences of years of working with demanding and skeptical audiences. 

He describes beginning new assignments with the following statement to his clients:

I’ve found, almost without exception, that by the time executives get married, take on a mortgage, raise kids, cope with the crabgrass, climb the corporate ladder, do their best to manage career pressures, and build their net worth and get into their forties, they’ve lost touch with what they believe in and care about most deeply. (p.20)

He goes on to quote Eric Hoffer:

That which is unique and worthwhile in us makes itself felt only in flashes. If we do not know how to capture and savor those flashes, we are without growth and without exhilaration. (p.20)

Your Inner CEO is Allan’s map for how to find and tap “that which is unique and worthwhile is us.” It’s organized into nine chapters:

1. Goals
2. Changes
3. Facades
4. Boundaries
5. Boards
6. Visions
7. Futures
8. Models
9. Mentors

Each chapter offers a series of stories and recipes for exercises that can help you and your organization do the necessary work of discovery. Allan takes his theoretical lead from the psychology of Alfred Adler, a contemporary of Freud and Jung, who emphasized a more social conception of psychological well being. I don’t know enough to say what the mix is between Adler’s theories and Allan’s distillation of them from his work in business settings. The result, however, is a collection of deceptively simple questions and exercises that can lead to deep reflection.

The core exercise is a quest to articulate what Adler termed “style of life,” an integration of self-image, world view, and central goal. These are drawn out by completing the following three sentences with two to three word answers:

• I am ____________________________________
• Life is ___________________________________
• My central goal is __________________________

While easy to state, digging for honest answers takes work. I’m several weeks into the effort and just now beginning to reach answers that feel meaningful.

In the chapter on Visions, Allan turns this same grounded approach to strategic planning in organizations. Consider the chapter opening quote from Yogi Berra, , “we may be lost, but we’re making good time,” a clue to Allan’s perspective. Allan challenges you to answer “who are we?” and “where are we headed right now?” as a necessary first step in formulating strategies with any hope of success. Dreaming about who we might like to be needs to be grounded in who and what we already are, either as individuals or organizations.

Allan’s approaches square with my own biases. I’d place Your Inner CEO in with Ellen Langer’s Mindfulness and Donald Schon’s The Reflective Practitioner as examples of the power of good conceptual frameworks grounded in rich data from the real world. You need to do the work, but the payoffs will follow.

 

 

  Spook Country, Gibson, William

I’ve been a fan of Gibson since discovering Neuromancer twenty years ago. A lot of people whose opinions I value have had great things to say about Spook Country and it’s been on the NY Times best seller list for a number of weeks. It even has it’s own Wikipedia entry.

Perhaps I am simply insufficiently sophisticated or old-fashioned in my literary tastes, but I struggled to finish it. I can’t entirely put my finger on why. For one thing, the parallel story lines felt so wildly disconnected from one another, that the implicit promise that they would connect at the end kept interfering with my ability to immerse myself in the flow. For another, I never managed to connect with any of the characters. Finally, in some strange way, I found that the clear skill and craft of Gibson’s writing kept intruding itself on me, instead of drawing me into the story itself.

Fundamentally, Spook Country, for all of its commercial success and glowing reviews isn’t one of Gibson’s best efforts. Interestingly, I found the mixed reviews at Amazon to be more representative of my experience with the book than the “official” reviews elsewhere.

  True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, Vinge, Vernor

Vinge is a mathematician turned computer scientist. True Names is one of those stories that gains additional relevance for me because of its influence over many of those who went on to develop the technology for real that Vinge dreamt up in his fiction. This particular volume makes the story readily available again and surrounds it with a collection of interesting essays on the influence this story had during the formative days of the net. The story stands well on its own, but the essays are also worth your time.

  Daemon, Zeraus, Leinad

I came upon Daemon courtesy of a rave recommendation from Rick Klau. I’d have to agree with Rick that

It’s not enough that Leinad Zeraus (the author – a pseudonym? I don’t know) gets all the tech details pitch-perfect, or that the plot is intriguing. It’s the implications of the myriad technological improvements we’ve experienced in the last few years that Zeraus foresees that makes this book such a mind-bender. Is it far-fetched? Yeah. But only in the aggregate: each component on its face is completely reasonable… and as he starts to stitch together where he thinks things might end up, things get scary.

Good storytelling can be one of the best ways to wrap your head around the implications of the technology change we are immersed in. But that depends on finding storytellers who combine the talent for story with a willingness and ability to understand the pertinent technologies. Zeraus qualifies.

Highly recommended.

  The Halo Effect: … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers, Rosenzweig, Phil

Phil Rosenzweig isn’t terribly impressed with the average business book. The bigger the best seller, the more likely Rosenzweig is to be concerned. This isn’t simply sour grapes on the part of another business school professor wishing he could command the speaking fees of a Tom Peters or James Collins.

Rosenzweig’s fundamental concern is with the disconnect between what constitutes solid and defensible research and compelling, but ultimately misleading, storytelling masquerading as research. The bulk of Rosenzweig’s efforts focus on dismantling the arguments claiming to explain the successes (and failures) of high profile organizations. He makes important points about just how hard it is to make connections between actions and outcomes in competitive organizations. The “halo effect” is the problem of starting with a collection of winners and trying to ascertain what factors explain victory after the fact. While you can always construct coherent stories looking backwards, you can’t distinguish between good stories and true stories. Even if you could, it isn’t clear what action advice you can actually extract.

Somewhere about three chapters into this effort. Rosenzweig has killed the horse. Rather than turning to the question of what to do about the problem, he opts to mutilate the carcass for several more chapters. If you stick through to the end, his advice is reasonable but comes off as too little, too late. The stories he would have us attend to are of managers like Robert Rubin and Andy Grove who appreciate the inherent contingency of most business decisions. These are managers who think in terms of risks and probabilities, who attempt to shift the odds in their favor when they can, but understand that they are always compelled to act on incomplete information.

If you are interested in how organizations perform and in how their managers learn to make more effective decisions, this is certainly a book you should read. There is a website for the book and Rosenzweig also has a blog there, although it doesn’t appear to be updated frequently.

  Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Weinberger, David

In Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger turns his attention to how unexamined assumptions about stuff in the physical world have constrained our attempts to organize information and the opportunities implicit in leaving those constraints behind in a digital world. An excellent storyteller, Weinberger takes us through tales of the Dewey Decimal system, Linnaeus’s taxonomic efforts, the history of UPC bar codes and why neither card catalogs or ISBN numbers shed as much light on Hamlet as we might think. He contrasts these with digital approaches such as Amazon’s multiple and multiplex paths to books you might want to buy, and Flickr’s and Technorati’s choices to create and exploit folksonomies in place of controlled taxonomies. While David occasionally veers a bit too close to his roots as a philosopher, he has assembled a rich and thought-provoking array of materials that warrant your attention. In keeping with his commitment to conversation, David has also created a rich website to ensure that there is a digital counterpart to accompany the physical container.

Weinberger starts by examining what he terms “orders of order.” Rooted in the physical, his first order of order emerges when we make choices about where to put a book on the shelves or how to stack dishes in the kitchen. Physical limits dominate; putting a book on one shelf means that we can’t place it on another, stacking the dishes limits their usefulness if we need to wash them or eat off them.

A library card catalog provides Weinberger’s archetypal example of the second order of order. By abstracting information from the physical object, and introducing a layer of indirection, you overcome some of the limits imposed by the physical object. For example, you can have more than one card catalog entry and file them in multiple places.

Weinberger posits a third order of order that arises in the digital world when the assets we wish to organize and their potential catalogs are both digital. Amazon’s multiple ways to help you find books that they will happily sell you provide his most straightforward examples. There’s no question that Amazon’s user reviews, lists, and recommendations of books to consider have all increased my book buying and reading habits well beyond the risks of browsing the physical shelves of my local bookstore.

On the other hand, I am not entirely convinced that this constitutes something worthy of labeling a new “order of order.” At some level, this revisits Nicholas Negroponte‘s argument of atoms vs bits. Relative to atoms, bits are cheap to manufacture, so we need to learn to start taking advantage of that when we design systems and services.

When I first started designing database systems (some thirty years ago), you might have to plan for 15-20% extra space for the database overhead. For every hundred characters of “real” data that you needed to manage, you’d need an extra 15-20 for indexes and catalogs. As disk space got cheaper and database designers more clever, that ratio flipped. Today, we call it metadata instead of overhead. It’s not unusual for metadata to take up 10 to 100 times the space of the “real” data in many systems. Sometimes this can seem counterintuitive, but I’m not sure that what Weinberger gains by labeling it a distinct order of order is worth the cost.

If you’ve never thought about the interplay between atoms and bits, Weinberger’s book offers useful and interesting new perspectives. If you’ve been immersed in that interplay, you’re likely to become frustrated that he doesn’t push on farther than he does.  On the gripping hand, every author has to make decisions about what ends up in the physical package and what gets left out.

Everything is Miscellaneous frames important questions, provides a wealth of raw materials, and will likely launch a wealth of productive discussions about new design tradeoffs. Weinberger’s focus is on digital services targeted at consumer audiences, which makes Everything is Miscellaneous more accessible to a general audience. The tradeoff is that Weinberger doesn’t have the opportunity to probe more deeply into the implications of his insights for meeting organizational needs. Perhaps he will in his next efforts.