Yesterday was a beautifully sunny day, and I sat on the balcony of my friends Jesper and Mia’s apartment, reading The Adventures of Johnny Bunko by Daniel Pink. What a great read.

Written, or rather drawn in manga, Japanese-style print cartoons (very much like the Kita Koga series in the back of my favourite magazine Monocle), Pink conveys six career/life lessons. It is short and sweet, and the book is fun and enlightening.

While I do not agree fully with all of the points made in the book, I think that they make for a very good perspective. Here is a short bite of what I took note of:
Lesson number one that Johnny Bunko is taught is that there is no plan. I could not agree more. I have a strong preference for not planning (so I keep telling myself), both concerning small things (not packing in due time for vacation), but also in the grander scheme of life (not knowing where I want to end up). “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” (John Lennon).

What I also feel important about not planning too much for life, is that it is difficult to actually know what will be useful for you later in life. How can you possibly? And we need not go further than to our own house-philosopher here in Denmark, Søren Kierkegaard: “Life is understood backwards, but must be lived forwards (Livet forstås baglæns - men må leves forlæns).”

Building on that, Johnny learns that you can make choices for basically two reasons — instrumental and fundamental. Doing something for instrumental reasons is to do something for another desired and expected outcome, whereas doing something for fundamental reasons is to do it because you are inherently interested in it and not necessarily know what it will lead to.

There are many more goodies to go for in the book. Regardless of how you feel with what you are currently up to (doing your dream job — or — thinking seriously about doing something else) this is a fun and insightful read.

One or two of you may have heard “Fly or die” fly out of my mouth. I stole it — along with the headline — from Paul Arden, the author of these two books:

   

I read them a couple of years ago after which they ended up as shelf material in my apartment. On a lucky strike, I rediscovered them after a friend of mine returned them after having lent them for a while. I picked them up and read them again. And they are even better the second time around.

They are both easy and quick reads with Paul Arden’s input for how you can approach life. When reading, you may find that many of his ideas are self-evident, but give me, him, and yourself a break. Many of us need a push once in a while, and these books do it, so it’s fun to read. (Paul is a former advertising executive, so he has flair for good copy writing.)

Let me bring up just a few great passages, which are not only well-written, but also touches on important topics. Firstly, about our tendency to neglect to assume responsibility when things go wrong:

If you are involved in something that goes wrong, never blame others. Blame no one but yourself. If you have touched something, accept total responsibility for that piece of work. If you accept responsibility, you are in a position to do something about it. There are no excuses.

Secondly, about sharing ideas and how we tend to “sit on” ideas and knowledge instead of sharing. Remember, sharing is caring :-):

Do not covet your ideas. Give away everything you know, and more will come back to you. If you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. This forces you to look, to be aware, to replenish.

And lastly, about problem solving leadership and taking chances:

If you can’t solve a problem, it’s because you’re playing by the rules.

(…)

But you must show no fear. It must be what you think, not what the client may think or your boss will think. This is your job. Don’t refer back to those in authority, they will play for safety. You’re on your own. Fly or die.

[All bolds in quotes my formatting]

If you have to choose the one over the other, I think the first one (It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be) is by far the best. But I’d pick up both any day.

Paul Arden has also written a new book (new and new — end of last year) — God explained in a taxi ride. Has any of you read it? If so, let me know if it is worth picking up.

As I have mentioned before, I’m currently writing my Master’s thesis — which I hope I’ll get the time to tell you about. The thing is, when I work on it all day, I really don’t feel like spending my evenings trying to write a post for my blog. At the latest, I’ll write up the ideas of the thesis when it’s done and over with. :-)

Anyway, because I’m writing my thesis I am re-reading a book I bought in the NYU book store in the fall of 2004 when I lived in New York City. The book is called The Elements of Style (by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White) and is about usage and style of well-written English. It is my absolute favourite book on the topic, it is short and it is to the point.

However, the point I want to make in this post is actually far from the subject matter of the book. But in the introduction to the book is an important point:

If you don’t know how to pronounce a word, say it out loud!

This sentence, one that William Strunk repeated over and over in his classes, is a metaphor or something bigger. Please don’t hide what you can’t do, because if you do, you’ll never learn.

I’m reading a great book right now — Difficult Conversations it’s called (I’ll give you a review when I’m done with it) — which is about how you handle the tough, emotionally charged conversations that you inevitably face in life.

That type of conversations are probably not on the top of your wish list, but when they are there, you need to deal with them properly, and you need to make sure that you address both the feelings of you and the party with whom you’re speaking. We should not forget either, that it is these types of conversations that also shape a great deal of our character.

At this time, I wanted to share a section from the beginning of the book, and then I’ll get back to reviewing it in a later post, once I’ve finished reading it.

There Is No Such Thing as a Diplomatic Hand Grenade

Desperate for a way out of the dilemma, we wonder if it is possible to be so tactful, so overwhelmingly pleasant that everything ends up fine.

Tact is good, but it’s not the answer to difficult conversations. Tact won’t make conversations with your father more intimate or take away your client’s anger over the increased bill. Nor is there a simple diplomatic way to fire your friend, to let your mother-in-law know that she drives you crazy, or to confront your colleagues’ hurtful prejudices.

Delivering a difficult message is like throwing a hand grenade. Coated with sugar, thrown hard or soft, a hand grenade is still going to do damage. Try as you may, there’s no way to throw a hand grenade with tact or to outrun the consequences. And keeping it to yourself is no better. Choosing not deliver a difficult message is like hanging on to a hand grenade once you’ve pulled the pin.

If you want to get ideas, don’t kill them:

“An idea is delicate,” said Charles Brower, the head of an advertising agency. “It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.”

Then, aside not killing ideas, how do you get (more of) them? I thought that I’d share with you some of the thoughts I had during my latest read, Jack Foster’s How to Get Ideas. Jack is a former creative director in the advertising industry (in which he has worked for 35 years), and the people in that business are among some of the most creative on the planet.
Don’t you know these people who seem to be able to come up with ideas one after another—they could put them onto an assembly line if they wanted to. How on earth do they do it? Jack has a very good story:

When I was a kid I hung around with a guy named Johnny-Boy Boyd. JB was a klutz. Accidents just seemed to happen to him; if one didn’t run into him, he ran into it. Nowadays psychologists would say that subconsciously JB made accidents happen, that it was his way of getting attention. Back then we just called him “accident prone” and let it go at that. As an adult I hung around with people who were “idea prone.” Ideas just seemed to happen to them the way accidents happened to JB.

So how do we get ideas to “happen to us”? I think one of the most important things is putting your mind, both your conscious and sub-conscious, to it. If you think you can’t (or don’t want to) get new ideas, then you won’t get them.

After that, I think the most important thing is to feed your mind with raw material. The reason for this is that “an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.” (James Webb Young). So, if an idea is a combination of something you know, then you better know a lot.

What’s frustrating, however, is you don’t know what you need know. Again, looking at the very idea-prone people you know, notice how they know crazy details about crazy stuff. They suck information out of everything, because what if they need it?

One way of going about this is to do new and different things all the time. Read new books, different books, do different things, meet new people—and—ask a lot of questions; obvious questions, stupid questions, questions that have already been asked, questions that have never been asked. In this way, you’ll position yourself better to get new ideas, I’m sure… or that’s what Jack Foster says in his book anyway, and I think he is on to something.

Another thing that I think he is on to, is the paradox of creativity within limits. Sometimes, posing limitations on your creative process can help idea generation. He offers a story from his teaching, where he tells his students over-night to produce a poster for a Swiss Army knife. The next day, students complain that it was so difficult—and some were not able to do it at all. In another class, he gives the students the same task, however, they need to come up with 10 proposals for the poster—not for the next day, but for after the lunch break. The result was dramatically different, and the students were much better at producing ideas.

It is a paradox. In The Courage to Create, Rollo May calls it a “phenomenon.” But he explains “that creativity itself requires limits, for the creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.”

This post is already too long, so let me just finish with yet another quotation from the book:

Man can live without air for a few minutes, without water for about two weeks, without food for about two months—and without a new thought for year on end.
–Kent Ruth

Let it better not be us that do not get a new thought for years on end :-).

The book is extremely well written has countless anecdotes, which you will want to read if you like well-placed stories that illustrate important points (about the process of getting ideas).
Read more:

• Jack Foster: How to Get Ideas
• James Webb Young: A Technique for Producing Ideas (a classic, which Foster references numerous times)
• Wikipedia on Ideas

(All quotes in this post are from Jack Foster’s book, if you had not figured it out already :-) ).

I try to buy as many books about presentation technique as possible given certain (and other) constraints such as money and time — and given that the book at hand looks sufficiently interesting, of course.

So, when I heard of Cliff Atkinson’s book Beyond Bullet Points, I quickly put it on my Amazon wish list, because I hate bullet points on slides — they are misused, abused and what is even worse. Finally, this September, I got around to buying it. Here is my take:

The message of the book is essential: Stop using overcrowded slides, stop being bound by the standard bullet point template and start to think. I like that. And Cliff has a very good tool kit to use, if it is difficult for you to move from bullet point slides to “simple” slides with practically no text in them.

He introduces a running Hollywood metaphor and compares the making of a presentation to the making of a movie. It is a good and useful comparison — and his introduction of two techniques, namely the story template (equivalent to filmmakers’ manuscript) and story board comes directly out of this comparison. The story template tool is the single largest takeaway from the book — and you can download it for free (Word template) here.

On the negative side, the book is extremely repetitive and in some passages very basic. And, it, especially the repetition, becomes boring at times – very boring. And for savvy presenters (and savvy Keynote/PowerPoint users), it may not be a revolutionary read, in fact it may be the contrary.

Finally, let me just share a quote from the book, which is very true, but may be obvious, but nevertheless, sometimes, someone has to state the obvious. And Cliff does it well:

You use PowerPoint well when people don’t even notice you use PowerPoint at all. The last thing you want is for someone to compliment you on your slides — that would mean that the medium called attention to itself instead of your ideas. The most important outcome of the presentation is that the audience understands the meaning you intend to communicate. When you finish the presentation, you want the audience to talk about your special ideas, not your special effects.

You can also visit Cliff’s website and his blog.

All in all, the book is good, if you have difficulty in producing text-light slides, and seem to be stuck with bullet points. If that’s the case, buy it.

Also read:

• Go Own the Room: Sincerity
• Great Presenters
• Those Who Practice Improve
• Visual Display Workshop

Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence, The Pursuit of Wow!) runs an extremely read-worthy blog. Some days ago, a post drew my attention to an article Tom had written in Liberation Management called The Pursuit of Luck. He puts forward 50 rules that you can follow, if you want to get more lucky. Here are some of my favourites:

1. At-bats. More times at the plate, more hits.
6. Visit odd places. Want to “see” speed? Visit CNN.
17. Constantly reorganize. Mix, match, try different combinations to shake things up.
34. Spread confusion in your wake. Keep people off balance, don’t let the ruts get deeper than they already are.
40. Vary your pattern. Eat a different breakfast cereal. Take a different route to work.
45. Get out of your office. Tell me, honestly, the last time something inspiring or clever happened at that big table in your office?!

Boy is he right! You can read the entire article here.

Howard Gardner in his book Changing Minds:

To change minds effectively, leaders make particular use of two tools: the stories that they tell and the lives that they lead.

Beautiful! I haven’t read Changing Minds yet (I just browsed through it), but I am reading Multiple Intelligences, which is basically a collection of articles on the subject that made Howard Gardner famous.

From the book Karaoke Capitalism (by the authors of Funky Business:

- In 1998, CBS, Fox and ABC paid $12.8 billion to broadcast National Football League (NFL) games until 2005. The very same year the Minnesota Vikings franchise was sold for $250 million. In fact, the three networks could have bought all 30 NFL teams and had free broadcast rights forever. They didn’t.

Unless there is more to this story than this, it a big Oops. Read more fun quotes at Stefan’s Karaoke Capitalism post.

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. In summary, it is an easily read book, well-suited for relaxation, but it doesn’t make your mind wander off or challenge some inherent beliefs you might have.

The book rides on the historical faction wave, which most people are introduced to by Dan Brown’s bestseller novels. The Rule of Four evolves around a book called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which means Poliphilo’s Struggle for Love in a Dream. It was printed and written in the fifteenth century—mainly in Latinate Italian, including phrases and words in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew—not to mention extra-ordinarily many self-invented words. Many scholars believe that the book is full of riddles, and it is in this web of riddles that Caldwell and Thomason build their story. Other than the fact that the Hypnerotomachia is a real book, there is no assurance that the rest of The Rule of Four is factual, rather the opposite.

The main characters in the book are Paul, Charlie, Gil, and Tom (the main character)—four Princeton undergraduates in their ultimate year working on their respective theses. Tom is the son of a famous scholar who mainly researched the Hypnerotomachia, the book Paul is writing his thesis on. The dynamics between the two solving the riddles in then spiced with the killing of a school-mate, Tom’s ups and downs with his girl friend, and how Charlie and Gil are as friends. It is a page turner, but nothing ground breaking.

What I think is above the book’s own standard (although nothing like F. Scott Fitzgerald or his peers), is the description of the books characters—Tom, who hates doctors, because they lost his father after a car accident, describes his friend Charlie, who studies medicine: “He’s the strongman of the local ambulance squad, the go-to guy for tough cases, and he’ll find a twenty-fifth hour in any day to give people he’s never met a fighting chance to beat what he calls the Thief.” (p. 27 in the 2005 Arrow Books print) It has almost a chapter like that on each of the main characters, where the person is painted nicely, but with few really golden phrases.

All in all, if you have read The Da Vinci Code (which I haven’t), I am told that this is a book you will love. If you’re more into heavy or beautiful novels—or both (which I am) this will not meet your standards, in my opinion. However, I found it very relaxing, requiring almost no note-taking.

Read more about:

• The Rule of Four at Amazon.co.uk
• Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
• The Rule of Four

I read Freakonomics some time before summer, and it was a thrill. Since then, I have been following the authors’ blog. One of Levitt’s latest post, “Please buy gas!” illustrates the spirit of the book and of Levitt’s research, and if you like it, you should buy the book.