Best Practices in Management – Page 5 – Public Intelligence Blog

2014/02/162014/02/17

Review: Absolute Value – What Really Influences Customers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information

4 Star, Best Practices in Management, Information Society

Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen

Formula book, somewhat shallow, misses major opportunity, February 16, 2014

This book was a gift. The subtitle (What Really Influences Customers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information) overcame my reluctance and I gave it it a quick read, which is all it deserves. This is a formula book, and as one reviewer notes, would have been just fine as an article. The “innovation” in the book is the discovery that brand and prior experience are less relevant today to purchasing decisions that are now heavily influenced by up to date social commentary and readily available peer reviews.

At one level I find the book interesting as a quick once over of the obvious. At another level I am quite disappointed. There is nothing in this book about true cost economics or open source. If you want to be pretentious and talk about Absolute Value, it would help if you actually had a clue that Absolute Value includes virtual water, virtual fuel, virtual child labor, and virtual tax avoidance, among other things.

I appreciate the discussion of how false reviews and paid reviewers are losing ground to better systems for policing such abuses, and I am interested when they discuss the failure of most market research, which focuses on past experience and conventional concepts.

The importance of corporate monitoring of social media for all mentions of all of their products is presented in a useful manner. I particularly like the examples in relation to rapid recognition of flaws from specific production lines — this is about feedback loops.

The book ends weakly with a few examples of sites such as Goodguide, Decide.com, and BrightScope.

Best wishes to all,
Robert David STEELE Vivas
INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability

2014/01/232014/01/23

Review: 24 Carat BOLD – Claim Your Position as the Top Expert in Your Field

4 Star, Best Practices in Management

Mindy Gibbins-Klein

4.0 out of 5 stars Concise, Clear, Logical, Missing the Magic Sauce, January 23, 2014

I read this book and have ordered a book recommended by this author, Ron Brown's How to Build Your Reputation.

Having published nine books myself, I am a little jaded when someone says “write a book and be recognized.” However, I do like this book. It has a clear message, it is concise, it is very well written, and on balance I think it provides anyone interested in becoming “known” with a very fine starting point.

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2013/12/262013/12/26

Review: Dawn of the Akshic Age – New Consciousness, Quantum Resonance, and the Future of the World

4 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Cosmos & Destiny, Culture, Research, Environment (Solutions), Information Society, Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design

Ervin Laszlo and Kingsley L. Dennis et al.

4.0 out of 5 stars Superb Appetizer Book — a Potpourri of Genius — Not the Main Plate, December 26, 2013

Buy and read this book for a marvelous panoramic view of the latest thinking circling around the end of the top-down scarcity model that concentrates wealth, and the emergence — sooner than most might expect — of the distributed bottom-up local to global harmonization.

This is a hybrid book — the first two thirds are written by the co-authors (Laszlo and Dennis), while the last third is a collection of eleven very short essays, each generally provocative and each providing me with at least one insight, web site, or book that I was not aware of. The book ends with recommended readings in the following categories that are a also a summary of what the book strives to cover at a very high level:

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2013/10/252013/10/25

Review (DVD): Frank Lloyd Wright

6 Star Top 10%, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Environment (Solutions), Leadership, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Philosophy

Frank Lloyd Wright by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

5.0 out of 5 stars 6 Star — Utterly Brilliant Man, Mind, and Treatment, October 24, 2013

WARNING: This DVD has two parts, and if you are inattentive, you can get to the end of Part I (the 1920's and Frank Lloyd Wright's low point) and forget that there is a Part II (the rest of his life, with his greatest accomplishments during his 70's).

PBS has really out-done itself with this production. The detail, the mosaic of interviews and the integration of glorious music and spectacular photography make this one of the best DVDs I have ever enjoyed.

This is not just a DVD about a man; it is a DVD about a philosophy of life, about the integration of humanity, nature, work, and artifact – from a single house that is a spiritual temple to heaven on earth, and across the board re-invention of how man relates to everything.

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2013/10/062013/10/07

Review: Say It With Presentations

4 Star, Best Practices in Management, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Intelligence (Public)

Gene Zelazny

4.0 out of 5 stars Fundamentals Most Ignore A Bit Too Generic, October 6, 2013

I was lent this book by a colleague. Here is some context for my appreciation of the book:

01 The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (C/JCS) once BANNED all powerpoint presentations, for two reasons. First, because they had become “death by powerpoint” monstrocities in which intellectually limited people tried to substitute technology for thinking and color for precision of thought; and second, because more often than not, something would go wrong with the computer and the briefing officer would be found to be empty-headed. Too often (and I include myself) powerpoint presentations have been an aid for the BRIEFER, rather than a visual map for the DECISION-MAKER.

02 Presentations as most understand them are didactic tools (I talk you listen) instead of socractic tools (I spark, you engage, we create new understanding). Yes, one good visual can equal 10,000 words, but every visual past one radically loses value in a downward spiral. Less is more.

Presentations are not charts — they are different, a point the author addresses by publishing a separate book, The Say It With Charts Complete Toolkit, Cd-Rom.

Presentations are also not visualizations, an area where Edward Tufts is a leading light, a mind whose two books below I highly recommend:

Envisioning Information
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Presentations are a tool for thinking and a tool for inspiring human engagement, on this point I have been guided by Howard Rheingold and his books and web blogging, see for instance, Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology from the 1980's and the more recent Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter? (Kindle Single).

Put as simply as I can, a presentation is a tool for thinking — one third of the value is in the thinking and doodling and exploration of alternative paths leading to the presentation; one third of the value is in the final product that can inspire others on its own and as a tool, and the last third of the value, almost never achieved, is in the reaction, engagement, inspiration, and collective intelligence that the presentation might elicit.

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2013/07/032013/07/03

Worth a Look: Books by Folk-Hero Farmer Joel Salatin

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Culture, Research, Economics, Environment (Solutions), Health, Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Philosophy, Survival & Sustainment, True Cost & Toxicity, Worth A Look

Drawing upon 40 years' experience as an ecological farmer and marketer, Joel Salatin explains with humor and passion why Americans do not have the freedom to choose the food they purchase and eat. From child labor regulations to food inspection, bureaucrats provide themselves sole discretion over what food is available in the local marketplace. Their system favors industrial, global corporate food systems and discourages community-based food commerce, resulting in homogenized selection, mediocre quality, and exposure to non-organic farming practices. Salatin's expert insight explains why local food is expensive and difficult to find and will illuminate for the reader a deeper understanding of the industrial food complex.

From farmer Joel Salatin's point of view, life in the 21^st century just ain't normal. In FOLKS, THIS AIN'T NORMAL, he discusses how far removed we are from the simple, sustainable joy that comes from living close to the land and the people we love. Salatin has many thoughts on what normal is and shares practical and philosophical ideas for changing our lives in small ways that have big impact. Salatin, hailed by the New York Times as “Virginia's most multifaceted agrarian since Thomas Jefferson [and] the high priest of the pasture” and profiled in the Academy Award nominated documentary Food, Inc. and the bestselling book The Omnivore's Dilemma, understands what food should be: Wholesome, seasonal, raised naturally, procured locally, prepared lovingly, and eaten with a profound reverence for the circle of life. And his message doesn't stop there. From child-rearing, to creating quality family time, to respecting the environment, Salatin writes with a wicked sense of humor and true storyteller's knack for the revealing anecdote.

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2013/04/202013/04/20

Review: Ending the Male Leadership Myth – How Women Can Save Us from Destroying Ourselves

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Intelligence (Public), Leadership, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Fernando Pargas

STUNNINGLY Intelligent, Timely, A Study in Ethics, Business, & Governance, April 20, 2013

I received this book as a gift because I have been telling people for over a decade that the 21st Century is going to be the Century of women, whose compassion, intuition, and smaller egos make them so much superior to men in an age that will be vastly more complex and nuanced than the Industrial Era with its willful ignorance of the true cost of everything including the true cost of colonialism, unilateral militarism, and predatory capitalism.

First, for context, a few of the books that have caused me to appreciate this one and recommend it without reservation, the bottom line being that muscle (and blind heavy metal militaries) are out, brains and heart and “non-zero” are in.

Philosophy and the Social Problem: The Annotated Edition
THE DAWN OF THE AGE OF AQUARIUS
Improper behavior
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future
Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of Women's Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

First off, the author's background is relevant: business professor and corporate time with Time-Warner. This is a serious guy that has done hard time in both the academic and corporate media worlds–he is inteimately familiar with the pretensions and limitations of men, and with the cavalier manner in which we have treated women. I like to point out to people that it used to be legal to abuse women and people of color, and to deprive both groups of voice and vote. This is also an author with a very broad international perspective, who teaches for the United Nations and understands the challenges and the requirements for stabilization & reconstruction.

I am quite taken with the author's discussion of “tribalism” and how modern tribalism combined with media manipulation make us all both stupid and dangerous. As one who has studied the origin of the state (including matriarchs as the first leaders, because lines of inheritance from women were absolutely known) and also the preconditions of revolution (concentration of wealth and huge disparities of income being number one), I see the author's introduction as long overdue common sense. I have been charting what I call “information pathologies,” my reflections on this are easy to find online, they boil down generally to men being able to get away with insanely criminal corruption because of secrecy and the willingness of men to assume that they are entitled to deprive others for their own advantage.

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