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Books in brief

Design Bias

In the communications business, nobody hangs on your every word. If you’re lucky, people remember one thing. The facts are not enough.

Any presentation is an opportunity to simply plant a seed. Whether you’re talking to an audience of millions, a room full of franchisees or your future employer, you better decide what you want them to remember—or be ignored.

Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, presented at a recent Webstock workshop in Wellington. Reynolds is a vocal advocate of clear, simple presentations, and equally vocal about bad PowerPoint. His book is an essential primer if you want an edge on your competition. His bias is design, which is possibly the book’s weakness. Unfortunately, most of the people let loose on PowerPoint haven’t got any taste (hint: if it’s important, pay a designer—it’ll pay off).

I bought the books Reynolds recommended, and you should too.

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School by John Medina (Pear Press, 2008): Learn the basic rules of how the human mind works. Comes with a companion DVD that is little short of genius. Essential for communicators.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (Random House, 2007) Buy@Fishpond: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.” Some ideas are just more compelling than others. Are yours?

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam (Penguin, 2008): Learning to simplify ideas and think visually is critical to quickly selling your ideas. I found this book a little wordy—given its premise—but worth reading.

If you have the chance to attend a Presentation Zen workshop—jump at it.

—David MacGregor

Anecdotal heroes

At last, a local academic studying innovation! Sadly, Imagine: What Wedgwood, Da Vinci, Mozart, Eiffel, Disney (And Many Others) Can Teach Us About Innovation by Ian Hunter is less informative than it could be, but let’s emphasise the positive. It’s well-written, has hundreds of fact-filled, instructive anecdotes about heroes such as Mozart, Da Vinci, Wedgwood, Otis and Disney. It provides easy answers to the ‘what, why and how’ of innovation. It has breakout quotes and handy diagrams. It’s cheap at $40. And the author is resident here at Auckland University.

What’s wrong then? Well, like so many business books that search for meaning in anecdotes, Hunter’s lessons from the great innovators are subjective, not empirical. So while it’s interesting to read the stories, Hunter’s ‘seven pillars of innovation’ could easily be five or 15. A silly example: since 98 percent of the innovators profiled are men, maybe one of the pillars should be that you a need a penis to be innovative. And actually, they all had two legs and wore silly hats, so there you go, there’s two more.

I’d love to see someone treat innovation like Jim Collins did with Built to Last and Good to Great, where he created a control group that finds not what’s similar between successful companies, but what’s different.

Maybe the author has another book on the way. This is a good start. Keep ’em coming, doc.

—Vincent Heeringa

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Overheard

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  Next time you're in Barcelona make sure you stay at the famous Hotel Palace where Antipodes is stocked in the mini-bars and served in the restaurant.  …
• tony on Multi-purpose car park design pushes the sustainability envelope :
  You mean pushing the BS envelope.how can a carparking building be sustainable. Doesnt matter how many wind turbines you put on it......cars arent sustainable in their current guise. It like ...  …
• ash on Wellingtonian's boggy blog design piece gets anti-attention:
  cool idea..but is it a smooth wipe too!?  …
• Tamara Pitman on Misery, Inc.:
  Really never thought that she was a New Zealander, her artwork is sooooooo unquie. Really one of my inspirations now :D  …
• Noel mRoberts on The people's court opens for business:
  At last a N.Z. building design that is original,creative and exciting. So different from the standard rectangular concrete and marble structures that have become the N.Z.standard over many years. Well ...  …
• Bel on Camera never lies:
  Oh my. Very excited about this! Saw the doco at the festival a few years back and it was both funny and moving - can't imagine how kick-ass it will ...  …

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