Designer, Food, Book

John Heskett's Toothpicks & Logos, Design in Everyday Life, is a beautiful book. The title, displayed in tasteful violet on a flat black cover, conjures up memories of Don Norman's classic Design of Everyday Things. The cover quotes Terence Conran saying "the best book I have read about the design process." Riffing through the pages, the paper feels good and the wide leading of the type gives a clean, engaging look. Photos of design icons such as the Aeron chair, the map of the Underground, and the FedEx logo adorn the inner pages. It's a pity that a delicious package holds so little substance on its pages. Inside is a dull, academic tract.

I highlight text as I read. In the opening pages, I marked this sentence:

In contrast, Anthony Bourdai's
A Cook's Tour : Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines is a great read. This guy is a gonzo gourmet. Like Hunter Thompson, he's so out of control that it puts you on edge. He thinks nothing of eating a few birds' heads or fugu or some snakes, often crouching with the peasants in the marketplace to do so. All in all, a delightful book. Not recommended for the squeamish.

eLearning by Doing

Designing World-Class E-Learning : How IBM, GE, Harvard Business School, And Columbia University Are Succeeding At E-Learning
by Roger C. Schank

Roger's a provocateur. He's brash. But if more designers took the approach he advocates, people would learn a lot more.

A chapter toward the end of the book, "Let FREEDOM Ring: Seven Criteria for Assessing the Effectiveness of an e-Learning Course," is really about assessing the design of a course. Outcomes define effectiveness, not course characteristics. I'm skeptical of packaging learning as courses. Nonetheless, the FREEDOM mnemonic is catchy, and I like the design philosophy behind it.

F is for Failure. A good course must enable failures that surprise the student. (Or at least don't meet student expectations.)

R is for Reasoning. A good course encourages practice in reasoning. (That's application.)

E is for Emotionality. A good course must incite an emotional response in the student. (Use people to stoke the emotional level if it's not inherent in the content.)

E is also for Exploration. A good course promotes exploration and enables inquiry.

D is for Doing. A good course encourages practice in doing.

O is for Observation. A good course allows students to see things for themselves. (Roger cares primarily about memorability. If you've visited the Center for Visual Learning here, you know I'd throw in understanding, simplification, speed, and a bunch of other things.)

M is for Motivation. A good course supplies it. (This would be Relevance but FREEDOR is simply not that catchy.)

For the uninitiated, Roger's philosophy in a nutshell:

The primary problem in corporate training is the same problem you have in any educational system: the idea that if you tell somebody something, they know it. It's a very sexy and appealing idea ? it's just wrong.

Stand-up training has never worked very well, and corporations are beginning to see that. So along comes the computer, and they think maybe it'll be cheaper. Yes, it might be cheaper, but that's not what's interesting about computers. What's interesting is that you can build something that looks and feels like the real thing. Instead of telling someone to fly a plane and hoping they can do it, you can have them actually practice flying a plane.

From Inside Technology Training, January 2000

Stephen Wolfram

This evening I took BART into San Francisco to hear Dr. Stephen Wolfram talk about the ideas in his A New Way of Science. I’m about ½” into the book and have found it a relatively easy read for a science book but not that relevant to my interests. The most engaging aspect is Wolfram’s audacious stance, that the rest of the scientific world has been barking up the wrong tree since the Renaissance, if not earlier, and he’s seen what’s been there in plain sight, that everyone else overlooked, and it forces a revision of virtually every scientific discipline from physics to economics.

Wolfram’s doing a whistle stop tour to promote the book and to lay the foundation for his new science. Tonight he spoke at the Herbst Theater across Van Ness Avenue from San Francisco City Hall.

If you haven’t heard Wolfram’s story, check the Wired articlefrom June 2002. If memory serves (I read the Wired piece when it came out), Wolfram arrived at Oxford in his early teens, attended one day of first-year classes and decided he’d had enough of that. Next day, he attended second-year classes and found that below him, too. He stopped attending class. When exams came around, young Stephen scored top in his class. Graduated with a PhD in theoretical physics from Cal Tech at the age of 20. Bright kid. You might also check Michael Malone's piece on Wolfram in Forbes ASAP, God, Stephen Wolfram, and Everything Else, which was the first time I'd heard of the guy.

A discussion with Stephen Wolfram

Stephen was making inquiries about cosmology, how structures evolve in our universe, and was surprised to find that particle physics had remarkably little to say about nature. We were using human constructs (Newton’s Laws, Kepler) to interpret nature. That got him started on computer programs.

Were you to look into the world of programs, what would you say these programs really do? It’s like exploring a new part of the world, with new flora and fauna. You start with simple things, you expect to get simple results. In fact, you find that you get very complex behavior.

Here’s his favorite, rule 30:

Click for larger version.

This is really complicated. There’s no easy way to describe it. Statistical methods would tell you a line from the top down would be completely random. And this is the result of a few very simple starting rules.

Stephen looked at cellular automata for a number of years. These are simple little programs built of rules like “when you find a white square, change it to a black square unless there’s black square above it.” He realized that there’s a much larger world of possible programs out there.

One of Wolfram’s rules is that if you really need a better tool, you’d better make it yourself. This is where Mathematica came from. Having developed the tool, he returned to his initial field of inquiry. In 1991, when Mathematica came out, he just sort of “pointed it out there.” He discovered that what he’d found in cellular automata had much broader implications. He looked at physics, biology, chemistry, and so on. He found something wrong with most of these basic areas. What he’d believed simply wasn’t true.

What’s the simple rule that governs the growth of a snowflake? He discovered an explanation. Same for explaining fluid turbulence. Is there some explanation that doesn’t call for outside intervention? Yes. Rule 30 gets you there. Things may look random but they will reliably come out the same again and again. The randomness is built-in, not added on.

Simple rules can lead to extremely complex and random behavior. Add a color and things don’t change. A new rule doesn’t make things more complicated. It’s already as complicated as it ever may be.

Wolfram, speaking rapidly with an Oxford accent, is wearing light gray Nikes, a pink shirt, black chinos and a dark brown tweed jacket. Very much at ease.

If one wants to find complex things in the world, biology is a good place to look. It seems as if natural selection must have been at work over the course of geological time. You assume it took a lot a time to develop complicated things. In reality, human engineers work on things in areas where they better be able to foresee the result. Nature is not under this sort of constraint. Nature’s not just Darwinism.

Take mollusk shells. Something quite similar to the Rule 30 diagram appears on a shell Stephen pulls out of his pocket.

Charles Darwin? There’s come to be a belief that Natural Selection is sort of an all-compelling force. But this is not really where all the complex stuff comes from. Darwin’s belief was more limited and correct than what his interpreters have passed along. One of the most important roles of natural selection is to simplify, not to make things more complex.

We all know about the fundamental unifying theory of physics. Laughter in the audience. (“I learned about it when I was a kid,” says Wolfram).

For instance, space. We usually think of space as background. But if you really want to understand space, you’ve got to look at it as something by itself. (Missed a couple of sentences here.) The collective effect of these things sort of reflect what we feel about things like space and time. (Huh? Those must have been important sentences; this makes no sense.)

If one believes the rule for the universe is really simple, it changes the way you look at the universe. If you start by asking, rule by rule, “Is this a rule for the universe?”, you usually find, “No, this is not a rule for the universe.” The universe has had a long time to go through its calculations.

Determinism? If I think, “I’m choosing to be yellow or black,” but in reality the model is dictating it… There are these issues outside of the realm of science. The concept of mathematical irreducibility, as with the predictability of the behavior of robots, doesn’t really constrain the eventual results. Remember, a few simple rules can generate randomness. Logic is but one of many modalities.

Implications for technology? If you are trying to do mechanical things, you get a tool, e.g. a hammer to pound in nails. But in the realm of intellect, the computer can go after it. It’s odd that this has had little impact on the foundations of natural science. Making a universal computer, millions of gates and lots of work in Silicon Valley, you might think this takes an amazing amount of effort. Actually, it may not be so tough. A molecule might implement these rules. That’s one direction.

Stephen sees himself producing new ways of making things. These are fundamental new elements you could use in growing new morphologies.

Stephen just spent 10 years (and 100 mouse-miles) writing the book. The guy’s into measuring things. He knows that a 40,000 keystroke-day is a good day, a 10,000 keystroke-day hasn’t been very productive.

There isn’t a “Journal of Big Ideas” where one publishes these rather rare happenings. Hence, he squirreled away for ten years to produce his book. It was probably the biggest project he’ll ever do.

The first thing Stephen is doing is recovering. Next will come building more tools. He needs them for studying other fundamental questions.

This has been sort of a one-person operation this far. How do you grow a science? He’s building a community. Lots of enthusiasm. 15,000 inbound email messages. Stephen would like to architect the new science.

Q&A. Math is simple. The axioms take but two pages in his book. The axioms are simple but the explanations are lengthy.

In the early nineteenth century, the belief was that any math issue could be shown to be true or false. Godel disproved this. His stating point was “This statement cannot be proved.”

I tried to ask a question but couldn’t get the attention of the people carrying the remote microphones in the auditorium. (I was sitting in seat A-1, the closest box seat to the stage, apparently undesirable but great as far as I was concerned.)

Had I the opportunity, I intended to ask Dr. Wolfram’s thoughts on today’s news that 96% of the universe is “dark matter.” Tough to identify those laws of the universe if most of it is invisible.

90 minutes after things kicked off, the audience applauded and Wolfram disappeared from sight.

So, is Wolfram a genius or a very confused individual? Probably the former although only a few results of his findings generalize to my work.

1. Simple things can have complex outcomes.
2. Random can arise without outside intervention.
3. Human concepts make scientific explanations overly complex.

Maybe I’ll wake up with new insights in the morning. Perhaps playing with Wolfram’s software will clear things up. Or maybe you’ve got this figured out. If so, please make a comment below. Thanks.

Ray Kurzweil's not convinced:

Some of the phenomena in nature (e.g., clouds, coastlines) are explained by repetitive simple processes such as cellular automata and fractals, but intelligent patterns (e.g., the human brain) require an evolutionary process (or, alternatively the reverse-engineering of the results of such a process). Intelligence is the inspired product of evolution, and is also, in my view, the most powerful "force" in the world, ultimately transcending the powers of mindless natural forces.

In summary, Wolfram's sweeping and ambitious treatise paints a compelling but ultimately overstated and incomplete picture. Wolfram joins a growing community of voices that believe that patterns of information, rather than matter and energy, represent the more fundamental building blocks of reality. Wolfram has added to our knowledge of how patterns of information create the world we experience and I look forward to a period of collaboration between Wolfram and his colleagues so that we can build a more robust vision of the ubiquitous role of algorithms in the world.

some of the historical notes from the book

Links

This is a new meme in blogging: a persistent page. I plan to keep adding links on this page, sort of a catch-all. Also, it will soon be joined by some semi-permanent "living" pages of reference material. Life comes in more than last-in/first-out day-by-day entries.

Blogroots is home to the book We Blog. The chapter Using Blogs in Business is online, as is Navigating the Blog Universe. Don't miss the Resources Center.

infed.org, The Home of Informal Education, is simply awesome. Check out The Encyclopedia of Informal Education. As an example, see the section on Communities of Practice. The Top50 reads like a book of essentials. Includes many seminal texts. I found this site via elearningpost; thanks, Maish!

ERCIM, a quarterly journal in support of the European Community in Information Technology. Pan European. Recent issues have covered Semantic Web, eGovernment, Ambient Intelligence, HCI, and robotics. The current issue is about Imbedded Systems.

The Muse in the Machine

The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought by David Gelernter was published eight years ago but its message still rings true: Emotions are part and parcel of thought. AI must include them.

I'm more interested in the application of this viewpoint to human learning. Gelernter posits that we think differently when attentive than when unfocused. As we turn down the focus knob:

Authentic Happiness

Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment by Martin Seligman

I haven't finished Authentic Happiness but half-way through, I'm convinced it's a valuable book.

Check out the companion website. You can take the self-tests that appear in the book.

Positive Psychology is so uplifting compared to the usual approach of studying crazies and depressives. It brings a smile to my face to read Marty explaining his own growth. His five-year old daughter asks him to stop being such a grouch – and he does.

H = S + C + V, translated as your enduring level of Happiness is a function of the Set range (your genetic disposition to happiness), modified by your life Circumstances (e.g. being a blind orphan in Bangladesh) and by Voluntary, that is, things under your control.

Circumstantial changes that can contribute to happiness are:
1. live in a wealthy democracy
2. get married
3. avoid negative events
4. acquire a rich social network
5. get religion

But don’t bother with these ineffectual things:
6. make more money
7. stay healthy
8. get more education
9. change your race or move to a sunnier climate

To the extent that you believe the past dictates the future, you will allow yourself to be a passive vessel and not try to change its course. I think past history in general is overrated. Savor the good and de-emphasize the bad. Show gratitude for the good, forgive and neutralize the bad.

MORE to follow

Hoot Hoot

Hoot

Normally, I love Carl Hiaasen's books, what with the former governor turned eco-terrorist who subsists on road-kill, the villain with a weedwhacker instead of a hook where his hand used to be, or the theme-park sleazeball trying to peddle a dead Shamu as catfood. Hoot is something else again.

"Has Carl forgotten how to write?" I wondered. "Too much time in the Florida sun?" Hoot is more Jerry Lewis than Dennis Miller, move Bill Murray than John Belushi. Slapstick. Middle of the road. Simplistic.

Only upon finishing the book did I notice that this was Hiaasen's first novel for "a younger audience." An Amazon review notes, "Carl Hiaasen is riding the wave of adult fiction writers down-shifting their word processors to 'Kid Lit' in the wake of Harry Potter."

I find it confusing when an author messes with his brand without informing his customers. How about a big "Kid Lit" sticker to let us know what we're getting?

The 22 Laws... of Branding

The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by Al Ries, Laura Ries.

That's about as deep as this book gets. The "Laws" could be termed the "Observations." Most of them say one thing, "Focus." Less is more. Don't try to be all things to all people.

Oh, by the way, don't name yourself this:

Clear Sky, Pure Light

Clear Sky, Pure Light

I must say that I do not know what made me leave the pond. I left it as unaccountably as I went to it. To speak sincerely, I went there because I had go read to go; I left it for the same reason.

I learned this, at least, by my experiement: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavoers to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him,, or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the uniververse will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

---

Asked upon his deathbed if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau replied "I did not know we had ever quarrelled."

Color

This evening I read Bill Horton's Illustrating Computer Documentation, the Art of Presenting Information Graphically, On Paper and Online. (1991)

What a practical book! Now out of print, you can buy an electronic copy for $20 from Bill's website. Such a deal.

Bill goes on to give lots of information about color, some of it, ah, eye-opening. What freaks me out is how little use of color one finds in books, cases, "white" papers, and so forth.

The next chapter, Enriching Graphics, describes such things as how to number graphics and captions. Captions! Authors will spend hours getting the words just right or diddling over a comma, but dash off captions as if they were a useless bother. I have news: People read subheads, then captions, and then, if they're still on board, the body copy.

So many reminders. Page design. Cultural nuances. Symbol libraries. On and on. Illustrating Computer Documentation is chock full of rules of thumb and practical advice.

What Management Is

What Mangement Is

In 220 pages, What Management Is explains what's important: creating value, strategy, organization, the real bottom line, innovation, and managing people. Don't bother if you have a recent MBA. Otherwise, read this book.

Amazon's review nails it:

I read this one cover to cover. Value comes from the outside. "Determining who the relevant outsiders are may be management's single most critical decision." When GE went through this exercise, it found that its customers wanted short-haul, easily-maintained locomotives, not the behemoths GE had been selling them. "...the shift in mindset from inputs to results, from product to solution, was like flipping a light switch."

Information Architecture

Information Architecture, 2nd edition.

Yesterday I read this book online, my first pic from the Safari service at O'Reilly. My first month at Safari will cost $15 for 10 books. Information Architecture retails for $28 at Amazon. Such a deal. While it may not spread beyond the technical sphere, Safari fits my needs for computer books like eLearning is practical for IT skills training.

The book gave me the final nudge into accepting that the new Internet Time site will separate form and substance. I've begun defining new .class items for CSS, e.g. "highlight" and "summary" and other elements to add clarity and improve usability. I'm going to have the system put breadcrumbs atop each page for navigation. The plan is to do a lot of coding upfront and almost none as time marches on. I bet this eliminates 10,000 font tags.

Surfin' Safari

It is HOT here. My office is 86 degrees and rising. So I just came downstairs to the back deck. A fat squirrel made his way along the trellice and stared at me for a while. (I don't do this often enough.) I swept the dried leaves fro the Japanese maple that shades the back deck. The noise spooked a large buck that was lolling around in the backyard. I kid Uta that we're letting the back return to its primordial state.

I'm rebuilding my website and I decided that it's time to bite the bullet and put together a new framework with cascading style sheets, consistent look & feel, templates, and other goodies that have come out since I put the original together with NotePad and HotDog.

Reading Macromedia's Dreamweaver and Flash sites told me more than I wanted to know about some of the things I'd like to do and not enough about others. (I'd really like a good default site to customize but I haven't been able to find one.)

Some of the O'Reilly books have caught my eye. There's a new version of Information Architecture out; the first edition is one of the more valuable web books of the four or five dozen I've read. There's a whole book on Cascading Style Sheets. There are PHP and Perl books. All adorned with those cute drawings of polar bears, meerkats, and other animals. I want a wheelbarrow full but at $25+ a pop, that's not in the cards.

Reading a review of Information Architecture II, I came upon an ad for Safari, an online book-licensing deal from O'Reilly.

Get your first 14 days free when you subscribe to Safari Tech Books Online, with nearly 1,000 of the best technical books available from O'Reilly and other top publishers. Select up to ten books to search, bookmark, and annotate; cut and paste code examples; find your answers fast.

People kvech about reading on screen but it doesn't bother me that much, especially if it's a technical book I want to be able to search.

What IS information architecture? The authors define it thus:

in·for·ma·tion ar·chi·tec·ture n.

1. The combination of organization, labeling, and navigation schemes within an information system.

2. The structural design of an information space to facilitate task completion and intuitive access to content.

3. The art and science of structuring and classifying web sites and intranets to help people find and manage information.

4. An emerging discipline and community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

Business, the Ultimate Resource This

Business, the Ultimate Resource

This one may take me a while to read. It's two thousand pages of concentrated articles and checklists and factoids that make up what Daniel Goleman, in the introduction, calls "business intelligence."

I'm becoming a fan of these Cliff's Notes business books. I've read Consulting Demons and The Witch Doctors, each of which boils down and denigrates management consulting jargon and fads. The Guru Guide heaps praise on many of the same people. I'll write a review of the utility of this new one after digging into it.

I could use some exercise, and

A New Kind of Science

In Sydney I visited an

In Sydney I visited an amazing bookstore, Books Kinokunita. Racks and racks and racks of books, and then you find there's an entire other wing filled with Japanese books and Chinese books. Deep section on design and graphics. Absolutely fantastic and if you're a booklover, not to be missed.

Doc Searles pointed me to Adina Levin's Bookblog. One way to squeeze more out of a book: read what other people are saying about it.

Another notch on the gun: On Dialogue, an essay in free thought by Robert Grudin. His premise: dialogue, even in one's own mind, is consciousness-raising and liberating, and hence that dialogue is an essential component of liberty.

"Pathways, designed for swift access from point to point, ignore the untrodden areas between and beyond them. Systems of any sort tend to grow self-protective, unfreindly to the new. Vast systems that seem just and effective can turn out to be huge conspiracies of collective ignorance, or cynical artifices of power."

"...the mind cannot be liberated from constraint until it is freed from its own inner tyrannies."

"When we see and move linearly, we are actually in the midst of another life, multidimensional and oceanically rich. Sometimes this other life makes itself visible to us, in a natural event or family tragedy or rite of passage or sudden flow of emotion. But monstly it remains hidden, obscured by the rush of our daily affairs, our lack of practice in focusing on it, our shyness in confronting its vastness. Yet this obscurity does not annul its power. Indeed, the multiple dimensions of our lives often exert a power over us that is directly propoortional to our ignorance of them."

"The dialogic mind is cosmopolitan in terms of ideas. It accepts the premise that a given idea or experience can be viewed from a variety of perspectives and that while some of those various perspectives may be mutually complementary, others may disagree with each other. The dialogic mind derives it sophistication, its play of irony and excitement, from acceptiong this variety and stress."

Some subjects, however, do not always admit of inclusive and coherent treatments. They are what you might call shaggy subjects: topics so ful of contradictions and ramifications that it would be barbaric and unfair to package them in essayistic treatments. Free thought and dialogue are among such subjects."

Mammals of Australia Terence Lindsey

Mammals of Australia
Terence Lindsey

The monotremes, platypus and echidna, egg-laying mammals that use the same orifice for sex and defection (mono-treme). The marsupials, which nuture a barely formed young 'un in a pouch, and include roos, wallabies, wombats, quokkas, Tasmanian devils, bandicoots, bilbies, numbats, koalas, possums, bettongs, potoroos, pademelons, almost all of which we saw in Tasmania and/or the Sydney zoo. A great little pocketbook that answers the important questions like

Are echnidnas smart?
Is the Tasmanian Tiger extinct?
Which large Australian mammal leads a subterranean lifestyle?
How do possums communicate?

A fine little book -- IF you're going to Australia.

Australia's Living Heritage, Arts of

Australia's Living Heritage, Arts of the Dreaming
Jennifer Isaacs, JB Books

I read this picture book/essay while on vacation in Australia. It describes Aboriginal art from baskets to rock carvings to bark painting to body painting to decorated weapons to sculpture.

"All Aboriginal art is symbolic; much of it is geometric of non-figurative." In fact, it's quite a surprise that the art of the oldest continuous culture in the world (40,000 - 60,000 years old) expresses itself in a form that could be mistaken for "modern" abstract art. Lots of circlues and dots and wavy lines, generally recounting one's personal creation myth and ancestor stories.

Western eyes often miss the frame of Aboriginal art, for it often incorporates found objects from nature. A pile of rocks two blocks down the road from a painted boulder may represent the eggs of an emu.

The Book on the Bookshelf

The Book on the Bookshelf by Henry Petroski goes from papyrus scrolls to hardbound codex to chained book, kept in armoires, triple-locked chests, and lecturns by the monastery windows. The name of the book hasn't always appeared on the spine, and early on, the spines faced inward. A wonderful collection of book trivia.

The Four Agreements by Miguel Ruiz implores you to be impeccable with your word, not to take anything personally, not to make assumptions, and to always do your best. Miguel tells you this over and over and over. That's the Toltec way, I guess.

In a Sunburned Country by

In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson, recently retitled Down Under, is a humorous trek around Australia with an incurably curious funny guy. I read this on the plane to Australia and during our first days in Sydney, chuckling along and thoroughly enjoying Bryson's quirks. Not much about urban life. I started but ran out of time with Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore, the story of the early days. An engrossing book, but not one I have much use for now that I'm back in California.

the haiku anthology, a delightful anchor paperback from 25 years ago, purchased for a nickel at the Albany Library book sale earlier this year. The 5-7-5 structure is total nonsense, given that the Japanese don't have syllables so much as thought-bites. In English, it's permissable to shorten things:

tonite northing to write


but this

The silence in moonlight

of stones

The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual

The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
by Thomas A. Stewart

The Wealth of Knowledge is easily the best business book I've read in several years. The logic is sound, the metaphors communicate, and the prescriptions are practical. Some of the goodies I high-lighted follow.

Used books Every year at

Used books

Every year at this time, the Albany (California) Public LIbrary holds a user book sale. This year's event, at least the first of two days, was no where near a rich as years past. Nonetheless, I picked up the following tomes for a grand total of $4:

The Haiku Anthology
On Not Being Able to Paint
Time to Teach/Time to Learn
Measuring the Impact of Training
Art as Experience (John Dewey, 1934)

Books, books, books. Today I

Books, books, books.

Today I wandered through Black Oak Books while waiting for a prescription to be filled at the pharmacy at the other end of the block. (Black Oak actually inhabits the space vacated by the pharmacy when they moved into the former quarters of a Lucky Supermarket that could no longer hack it in the Gourmet Ghetto.)

I love browsing bookstores. The titles spark associations in my mind. Just running my eyes over the spines of book shifts the cerebral machinery into high gear. Among the books at Black Oak I'd read if time permitted:

Future Evolution
The Forgetting (David Schenk, on Alzheimer's)
A Brain for All Seasons (Wm. Calvin)
The Future of Spacetime (Hawking et alia)
Making Sense of Life
The Dawn of Human Culture
The Moment of Complexity
The Living Clock, The Origins of Biological Rhythms
What Evolution Is
Links
Synaptic Self
What Just Happened (James Gleick)
Oaxaca Journal (Oliver Sachs)
The Future of Life (Wilson)
Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About (Donald Knuth)
Trail poems of Gary Snyder

I'm about halfway thourgh Wanderlust: A History of Walking, by Rebecca Solnit. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Soren Kierkegaard did almost all of their thinking on foot. Pilgrimages, whose walkers make it hard, and Wordsworth, who lived for this then-peasant activity. I'm currently reading of moutaineers, the founding of the Sierra Club, hiking, and long-distance walks. This is a fun read.

I'm also at the midpoint of Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web by David Weinberger. If you're not a web person, this is an important book. I've been reading Weinberger's stuff for several years so this is old ground. He's a very entertaining writer, nonetheless, so I'll make it through this one.

I found Linda and Richard Eyre's Teach Your Children Values for fifty cents. Since I'm such a fan of Richard's Spiritual Serendipity, I had to give it a shot. I've just started.

Gonzo Marketing by Christopher Locke

Gonzo Marketing by Christopher Locke

It took me a while to dig through Gonzo Marketing. It's fun. It's easy. It's highly entertaining. But if you know Chris Locke from Cluetrain, from Entropy Gradient Reversals, and from outrageous email from Rage Boy, it's not new.

Don''t get me wrong. I love this stuff. Hunter Thompson and Tom Peters rolled into one. Marketing needed a wake-up call, and Chris is an ear-shattering alarm clock.

The fact that Locke got Harvard Business Review to run an article entitled Gonzo Marketing, Winning Through Worst Practices, is simply staggering.

In the midst of writing my book on Implementing eLearning, I find myself quoting Chris a lot more than Philip Kotler.

At an architecture bookstore on Michigan Avenue, I found myself drawn to a slender tome by Kimberly Elam entitled Geometry of Design.

When I was in grammar school I must have been absent on the days they covered the Golden Section and Fibonnaci numbers.

The Golden Section is a rectangle with sides in a ratio of 1:.61803. Offer people a line-up of various rectangles and this one always wins the popularity contest. Take the Fibonnaci series, divide a number by the prior number in the series...and the results converge to the Golden Section!

The Golden Section also defines the proportions of the human body, the face, the body of fish, the facade of the Parthenon, and the posters of A.M Cassandre.

I find it utterly amazing that things like this lie beneath the surface of our everyday lives yet can go unnoticed. A fascinating read.

Mapping Hypertext : The Analysis,

Mapping Hypertext : The Analysis, Organization, and Display of Knowledge for the Next Generation of On-Line Text and Graphics
by Robert E. Horn (Paperback - February 1990

This is a gem. I don't know how I missed it these dozen years past. Horn foresaw many of the problems of hypertext...and what to do about them...before HTML became commonplace.

He also presents Information Mapping (his invention) in very concise fashion.

And I hadn't realized how much Doug Engelbart had contributed. What a guy.

Antigua Guatemala : The

Antigua Guatemala : The City and Its Heritage
by Elizabeth Bell

Read this if you're going to Antigua; otherwise skip it. Marvellous story: Pedro Alvarez, a lieutenant of Cortes, butchers Guatemalans, establishes his capital near present-day Antigua, and is killed when a horse tumbled off a ledge and squashes him. His wife literally paints the town black, mandates ten days of mourning, and declares herself empress of America. Rains turn into torrents into floods, and the entire town, empress and all, are washed down the river, cleaned out so well that for hundreds of years people mislocated its site.

Michelin NEOS Guide Guatemala-Belize, 1e (NEOS Guide)
by Michelin Staff (Editor)

A handy pocket-sized guide that was generally right on target. None of the guides, Neos included, had current skinny on hotels in El Peten; things are changing too fast. All-in-all, the best guide on Guatemala travel I could find.

When the Going Gets Weird,

When the Going Gets Weird, the twisted life and times of hunter s. thompson by Peter O. Whitmer

I noticed this on the shelves of the Albany Library. Seeing as how I'm half-way through Gonzo Marketing, I couldn't resist. Hunter is a drunken nutcase but his very irresponsibility keeps you on edge. Hunter's always in his own movie, and the reader never knows when the drugs will kick in and he'll lob in a smoke grenade or load up his shotgun. Alas, the man is less interesting than his writing.

Kotler on Marketing How to

Kotler on Marketing
How to create, win, and dominate markets
by Philip Kotler

I read this to help get my thinking together on Lance's and my book, tentatively titled Marketing eLearning. It's a good "marketing for dummies" tract.

Meeting customer expectations will only satisfy customers; exceeding their expectations will delight them.

"Neanderthal marketing" includes "equating selling with marketing, emphasizing customer acquisition rather than customer care, trying to make a profit on every transaction rather than trying to profit by managing customer lifetime value, pricing based on marketing up cost...."

Developing a Winning Marketing Plan

Developing a Winning Marketing Plan by William A. Cohen 1987

I wanted to contrast a traditional marketing mix to what I'd put together in today's networked world. The Albany Library could offer only this book.

Developing...Plan is over the hill. Published 1987. A surface skim of the topic.

Cohen cautions us to use only one typist to prepare the plan. (Typist?) Customer relationship management, product obsolescence, offshore competition, time-based competition, etc. --- not mentioned. Save your money. I'm sorry I took this one home.

The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual

The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
by Thomas A. Stewart

I am really looking forward to this book. Intellectual Capital was a breakthrough book, easy to read but astounding in its power. At first, the title intimidated me. How wrong could I be. Figures that a lucid Fortune reporter would write something quite understandable.

When he searched for "intellectual capital" on the web five years ago, the seventh item brought up by a search engine was, "Rome is the intellectual capital of Italy."

Hammering obsolete accounting for the nonsense it is, he points out that, "Management also has no place in traditional economics--economists simply leave it out, as if all management is the same and ocunts for nothing." (Bravo!)

Regarding fads, "Too often, companies lurched into knowledge management, e-commerce, and other Information Age management ideas before they had business reasons for their actions."

"It is time, once and for all, to drive a stake through the heart of traditional accounting, which is draining the life from business."

That's a journey I want to be part of.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
by Dave Eggers

Amazon's review says:

At the age of 22, Eggers became both an orphan and a "single mother" when his parents died within five months of one another of unrelated cancers. In the ensuing sibling division of labor, Dave is appointed unofficial guardian of his 8-year-old brother, Christopher. The two live together in semi-squalor, decaying food and sports equipment scattered about, while Eggers worries obsessively about child-welfare authorities, molesting babysitters, and his own health. His child-rearing strategy swings between making his brother's upbringing manically fun and performing bizarre developmental experiments on him. (Case in point: his idea of suitable bedtime reading is John Hersey's Hiroshima.)

Dave Eggers takes us on a tour of what's going through his head, usually something along the lines of "God I sing great in the shower" or "Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. The babysitter is probably cutting my brother into tiny chunks and preparing to roast them, with onions, on the barbeque. Fuck." Dave's inner dialogue sounds real. It's so rare to encounter what's really going through one's mind. I recall sitting on the floor of my dorm room sophmore year at Princeton, taking apart a broken stereo receiver just for the hell of it. When a roommate asked what I was doing, I explained that I was dismantling the guidance system of a Nazi submarine and I had to get it done before it launched its torpedos. Dave would share something like that. Fuck yes.

I read A Heartbreaking Work because of a personal connection. When Dave and his brother Christopher's parents die, they move to Berkeley. Christopher ("Toph") enrolls at Black Pine Circle school. In my son Austin's class. Uta remembers Dave, Toph, and their sister Beth. At first they share a house a couple of blocks from here. Dave and Toph shoot baskets at the hoop three minutes from my house. They walk the streets I walk. Dave talked about an Open House at Black Pine that I attended, too. Cue "It's a small world after all."

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.

The true purpose of Zen is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. Zen practice is to open up our small mind.

Time constantly goes from past to present and from present to future. This is true, but it is also true that time goes from future to present and from present to past.

If your mind is related to something outside itself, that mind is a small mind, a limited mind. If your mind is not related to anything else, then there is a dualistic understanding in the activity of your mind.

You should not be bothered by your mind. You should rather be grateful fo rthe weds, because eventually they will enrich your practice.

The point we emphasize is strong confidence in our original nature.

Schools That Learn by Peter

Schools That Learn by Peter Senge & friends, reviewed elsewhere.

Organizing Genius The Secrets

Organizing Genius

Time invested: two or three hours. Evaluation: worthwhile. Conclusion: A good touchstone for thinking about Meta-Learning Lab’s organizational issues.

The Knowing/Doing Gap by Jeffrey

The Knowing/Doing Gap

by Jeffrey Pfeffer, Robert I. Sutton

"Did you ever wonder why so much education and training, management consultation, organizational research and so many books and articles produce so few changes in actual management practice?" ask Stanford University professors Pfeffer and Sutton. "We wondered, too, and so we embarked on a quest to explore one of the great mysteries in organizational management: why knowledge of what needs to be done frequently fails to result in action or behavior consistent with that knowledge."

Why do some organizations know what to do but don't do it?
(1) TALK substitutes for ACTION - making presentation instead of doing the actual stuff!
(2) MEMORY is a substitute for ACTION - limited by one's own thought and could not make a leap forward by implementing.
(3) FEAR prevents ACTING ON KNOWLEDGE - Yes! This is what bothers me for years!
(4) MEASUREMENT obstruct GOOD JUDGMENT
(5) Internal Competition turns FRIENDS into ENEMY.

"Unfortunately, using complex language and ambiguous terminology confuses people and inhibits action. One organization we studied gave employees laptop computers to provide them access to e-mail and the Internet, but describe this as a transformation to a virtual organization. This jargon confused people ... resulted in weeks of spreading rumors (e.g. our office is closing ...)"

Center for Workforce Development: "Most workplace learning goes on unbudgeted, unplanned, and uncaptured by the organization.... Up to 70 percent of workplace learning is informal."

Evaluations can be based on how well someone performs...or how smart the person seems. How smart they seem is often the only data at hand. Smart talk becomes confused with good performance.

Teresa Amabile notes, "Only pessimism sounds profound. Optimism sounds superficial." But at the end of the day, something still needs to get done.

A simple principle was applied in firms in which the measurement systems helped--rather than undermined--the ability to turn knowledge into action. Such firms measured things that were core to their culture.and values and intimately tied to their basic business model and strategy, and used these measures to make business processes visible to all employees.

What does affect performance, if it isn't competition? THere is a large body of research showing the power of the self-fulfilling prophecy, also called the Pygmalion effect, on performance. Independently of skill, intelligence, or even past performance, when teachers believe that their students will perform well, they do. Independently of other factors, when leaders believe their subordinates wil perform well, these positive expectations lead to better performance.

Guidelines for action:

Why before how. It's a process, it's not an answer. The successful organizations in the book begin not with specific techniques or practices but rather with some basic principles--a philosophy or set of guidelines about how they will operate.

Knowing comes from doing and teaching others how. In a world of conceptual frameworks, fancy graphics presentations, and, in general, lots of words, there is much too little appreciation for the power, and indeed the necessity, of not just talking and thinking but of doing--and this includes explaining and teaching--as a way of knowing.

Fear fosters knowing/doing gaps, so drive fear out. Christensen: "What companies need is a forgiveness framework, and not a failure framework, to encourage risk taking and empower employees to be thinking leaders rather than passive executives."

Systems Design of Education by

Systems Design of Education by Bela Banathy

UCB Ed/Psych Library LB 2805 B264 1991

Improvement or transformation?

To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding. Geo. Skinner

This is a solid yet entertaining book. Highly influential in shaping school reform. Unfortunately, it's due back at the library and I've read but 67 pages.

The Tree of Knowledge by

The Tree of Knowledge by Mumberto Maturana and Francisco J. Varela

All cognitive experience involves the knower in a personal way, rooted in his biological structure. THere, his experience of certainty is an individual phenomenon blind to the cognitive acts of tohers, in a solitude which, as we shall see, is transcended only in a world created with those others.

Nothing we are going to say will be understood in a really effective way unless the reader feels personally involved and has a direct experience that goes beyond all mere description.

This special situation of knowing how we know is traditionally elusive for our Western cluture. We are keyed to action and not to reflection, so that our personal life is generally blind to itself. It is as though a taboo tells us: "It is forbidden to know about knowing." Actually, not knowing what makes up our world of experience, which is the closest world to us, is a crying shame. There are many things to be ashamed about in the world, but this ignorance is one of the worst.

Now, if the reader has followed seriously what was said in these pages, he will be impelled to look at everything he does --- smelling, seeing, building, preferring, rejecting, conversing -- as a world brought forth in coexistence with other people....

We must walk on the razor's edge, eschewing the extremes of representationalism (objectivism) and solipsism (idealism). Our purpose in this book has been to find a via media: to understand the regularity of the world we are experiencing at every moment, but without any point of reference independent of ourselves that would give certainty to our descriptions and cognitive assumptions. Indded, the whole mechanism of generationg ourselves as describers and observers tells us that our world, as the world which we bring forth in our coexistence with others, will always have precisely that mixture or regularity and mutability, that combination of solidty and shifting sand, so typical of human experience when we look at it up close.

We are continusously immersed in this network of interractions, the results of which depend on history. Effective action leads to effective action: it is the cognitive circle that characterizes our becoming, as an experession of our manner of being autonomous living systems.

We have only the world that we bring forth with others, and only love helps us bring it forth.

We affirm that at the core of all the troubles we face today is our very ignorance of knowing. It is not knwoledge, but the knowledge of knowledge, that compels.

The Tree of Knowledge by

The Tree of Knowledge by Humberto Maturana and Francisco J. Varela

All cognitive experience involves the knower in a personal way, rooted in his biological structure. THere, his experience of certainty is an individual phenomenon blind to the cognitive acts of tohers, in a solitude which, as we shall see, is transcended only in a world created with those others.

Nothing we are going to say will be understood in a really effective way unless the reader feels personally involved and has a direct experience that goes beyond all mere description.

This special situation of knowing how we know is traditionally elusive for our Western cluture. We are keyed to action and not to reflection, so that our personal life is generally blind to itself. It is as though a taboo tells us: "It is forbidden to know about knowing." Actually, not knowing what makes up our world of experience, which is the closest world to us, is a crying shame. There are many things to be ashamed about in the world, but this ignorance is one of the worst.

Now, if the reader has followed seriously what was said in these pages, he will be impelled to look at everything he does --- smelling, seeing, building, preferring, rejecting, conversing -- as a world brought forth in coexistence with other people....

We must walk on the razor's edge, eschewing the extremes of representationalism (objectivism) and solipsism (idealism). Our purpose in this book has been to find a via media: to understand the regularity of the world we are experiencing at every moment, but without any point of reference independent of ourselves that would give certainty to our descriptions and cognitive assumptions. Indded, the whole mechanism of generationg ourselves as describers and observers tells us that our world, as the world which we bring forth in our coexistence with others, will always have precisely that mixture or regularity and mutability, that combination of solidty and shifting sand, so typical of human experience when we look at it up close.

We are continusously immersed in this network of interractions, the results of which depend on history. Effective action leads to effective action: it is the cognitive circle that characterizes our becoming, as an experession of our manner of being autonomous living systems.

We have only the world that we bring forth with others, and only love helps us bring it forth.

We affirm that at the core of all the troubles we face today is our very ignorance of knowing. It is not knwoledge, but the knowledge of knowledge, that compels.

Allison Rossett’s Beyond the Podium

Allison Rossett’s Beyond the Podium

This is a little like reading Don Norman. Yes, we agree, no problem, nothing new here for me. I did learn some things: Ruth Clark’s schema and the ARCS model.

George Leonard's Education and Ecstacy

George Leonard's Education and Ecstacy

I haven't finished this one but I'm going to remove it from the top of the stack. George's message has largely filtered down to me through other sources.

Notes on George Leonard’s Education and Ecstasy

Leonard wrote this book in 1968, yet its stinging criticism of the practice of schools fits today’s situation 33 years later, a demonstration of how hard it is to change something as ingrained as education.

“It is as cruel to bore a child as to beat him.”

Learning eventually involves interaction between learner and environment, and its effectiveness relates to the frequency, quality, variety and intensity of the interaction.

A visitor from another planet might conclude that our schools are hell-bent on creating—in a society that offers leisure and demands creativity—a generation of joyless drudges.

Ways can be worked out to help average students learn whatever is needed of present-day subject matter in a third or less of the present time, pleasurably rather than painfully, with almost certain success. Better yet, the whole superstructure of rational-symbolic knowledge can be rearranged so that these aspects of life’s possibilities can be perceived and learned as unity and diversity within change rather than fragmentation within an illusory permanence.

Ways can be worked out to provide a new apprenticeship for living, appropriate to a technological age of constant change.

Ways can be worked out so that almost every day will be a “teachable day,” so that almost every educator can share with his students the inspired moments of learning now enjoyed by only the most rare and remarkable.

To learn is to change. Education is a process that changes the learner.

Education is, at best, ecstatic.

THE HUMAN POTENTIAL
Neurologists, psychologists, educators, philosophers, and others agree that people now are using less than ten percent of their potential abilities; some put the figure at less than one percent.

Don Norman’s Things That Make

Don Norman’s Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine

Two forms of cognition: experiential and reflective

Reflection is greatly aided by systematic procedures and methods, and these are learned primarily by being taught. Alas, our educational system is more and more trapped in an experiential mode: the brilliant inspired lecturer, the prevalence of prepackaged films and videos to engage the student, the textbooks that follow a predetermined sequence. We strive to keep our students engaged in our schools by entertaining them. This is not the road toward reflection.

The skill of an expert is that of experiential cognition. The experiential mode seduces the participant into confusing action for thought. One can have new experiences in this manner, but not new ideas, new concepts, advances in human understanding: For these, we need the effort of reflection.

Vicarious experiences can be entertaining but they cannot substitute for active participation.

Three ways of learning:
1.Accretion: accumulating facts
2.Tuning: practice (maybe 5000+ hours)
3.Restructuring: the heavy lifting of reflection

“It is remarkable how little scientific knowledge we have about motivation, enjoyment, and satisfaction.”

There’s no reason for study to be solitary.

Cognitive artifacts are representations, internal or external, of sounds, ideas, concepts, and objects that are not the thing itself.

Stories are marvelous means of summarizing experiences, of capturing an event and the surrounding context that seems essential. Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into one compact package, information, knowledge, context, and emotion. Roger Schank points out that our stories not only explain things to others, they explain things to us.

Logic is artificial. It assumes a certainty to the world. Ah, if only the world were like logic, clear and precise, with no sloppiness or indeterminate states. But it isn’t. And in its attempt to abstract the relevant from the irrelevant, logic oversimplifies to the extreme.

Ad for the Wooton patent desk, 1880. “With this desk a man absolutely has no excuse for slovenly habits in the disposal of his numerous papers, and the man of method may here realize that pleasure and comfort which is only to be attained in the verification of the maxim: a place for everything and everything in its place. The operator having arranged and classified his books, papers, etc., seats himself for business at the writing table and realizes at once that he is master of the situation. Every portion of his desk is accessible without change of position and all immediately before the eye. Here he discovers that perfect system and order can be attained; confusion avoided; time saved and vexation spared; dispatch in the transaction of business facilitated and peace of mind promoted in the daily routine of business.” (It didn’t work but the desks go for $35,000 to $250,000 on the antique market.)

People Propose, Science Studies, Technology Conforms

Steven Johnson's Emergence: The

Steven Johnson's Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software is a good read about self-organizing systems. I'm about halfway through. Swarm intelligence -- it works for organizing cities, ant colonies, and perhaps the net.

Histories of intellectual development--the origin and spread of new ideas--usually come in two types of pacakages: either the "great man" theory, where a single genius has a eureka moment in the lab or the lbirary and the world is immediately transformed; or the "paradigm shift" theory, where the occupants of the halls of science awake to find an entirely new floor has been built on top of them, and within a few years, everyone is working out of the new offices. Both theories are inadequate: the great man theory ignores the distributed, communal effort that goes into any important intellectual advance, and the paradign-shift model has a hard time explaining how the new floor actually gets built.

Generations of ants come and go, and yet the colony itself matures, grows more stable, more organized. The mind naturally boggles at this mix of permanence and instability.

The relationship between body cells is indeed very much like that between bees in a hive. The ancestors of your cells were once individual entities, and their evolutionary 'decision' to cooperate, some six hundred million years ago, is almost exactly equivalent ot the same decision, taken perhpas fifty million years ago by the social inserts, to cooperate on the level of the body.

The human body is made up of several hundred different types of cells--muscle, blood, nervous, and so on. At any given time, approximately 75 trillion of these cells are working away in your body. In a very real sense, you are the sum of their actions; there is no you without them. And yet those cells are dying all the time! Thousands probably died in the time it took you to read the last sentence, and by next week, you will be composed of billions of new cells that weren't there to enjoy the reading of that sentence, much less enjoy your first step or your high school prom.

Cities, like any colonies, possess a kind of emergent intelligence: an ability to store and retrieve information, to recognize and respond to patterns in human behavior. We contribute to that emergent intelligence, but it is almost impossible for us to perceive that contribution, because our lives unfold on the wrong scale.

The body learns without consciousness, and so do cities, because learning is not just about being aware of information; it's also about storing information and knowing where to find it.

As the futurist Ray Kurzweil writes, "Jumans are far more skilled at recognizing patterns than in thinking through logical combinations, so we rely on this aptitude for almost all of our mental processes. Indeed, pattern recognition comprises the bulk of our neural circuitry. These faculties make up for the extremely slow speed of human neurons." The human mind is poorly equipped to deal with problems that need to be solve serially--one calculation after another--given that neurons require a "reset time" of about five milliseconds, meaning that neaurons are capable of only two hundred calculations per second. Unlike most computers, the brain is a massively parallel system (whew!), with 100 billion neurons all working away at the same time. ... Kurzweil: "We don't have time...to think too many new thoughts when we are pressed to make a decision. The human brain relies on precomputing its analyses and storing them for future reference. We then use our pattern-recognition capability to recognize a situation as compatible to one we have thought about and then draw upon our previously considered conclusions." Where, one wonders, are the metatags for these precomputed knowledge objects?

This is a book to get you thinking about systems that organize themselves. The Invisible Hand. The Invisible Foot. At times, I lost Johnson's train of thought. The hand needed to be more visible. I think this is because the book is a pastiche of previous articles that didn't stich together seamlessly.

I've perused other books on the Bauhaus since reading this booklet and visited the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin. Now I recognize that the book is not so much a summary as a narrow slice of the whole.

The End of Marketing As

The End of Marketing As We Know It by Sergio Zyman.

Zyman is the former marketing honcho at Coke. So outspoken that he earned the nickname Aya-cola.

I would hate to work for this blowhard. His premise is that traditional marketers are clueless dolts who don't focus on business results or making sales. Zyman, of course, has the answers (even though he orchestrated the New Coke fiasco which he now repositions as a success). Again and again, he states the obvious as if it were news:

You don't make any money until you sell the stuff, and you can't sell the stuff until you've gotten people to want it. And that's what marketing does.

Zyman's pitch is the old line-is-good, staff-is-bad bullshit. I could substitute "training" for "marketing" and get a credible book on training, e.g.,

One of the biggest reasons that training directors often lack the discipline that they need to achieve their desired results is that they do not do a good job of defining what those results should be.

This is getting back to my point that training directors focus too much on tasks and not enough on results.

If you want to be successful, then you must clearly define, in detail, what success looks like. Then you've got ot figure out how to get there.

If you want to establish a clear image in the minds of [trainees], you first need a clear image in your own mind.

Make strategic thinking a way of life. What I mean is that you have to think about everything. You have to look around you. You have to see what is really going on. You have to understand the connections among seemingly different things, and then you have to form an opinion that will serve as the basis for how you are going to act, and what you are going to do.

Constantly test and measure the results of everything you do.

Reward excellence and punish mediocrity.

Have a sense of urgency, and work with passion. Otherwise, what's the use of getting up in the morning?

I bought Zyman's book at Half Price Books for $1. The price was right.