Only slightly bent

The next completed book on the subject of visual presentations on my to-read list was The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam. The subject is quite accurate; this is a book that tells you how to use visual aids to solve problems and does a pretty good job at it, too.

The book starts by quite appropriately debunking some of the myths that keep people from drawing; i.e. the familiar “But I can’t draw” and “I’m not a visual person” excuses. After those possible initial in-your-head restrictions, it’s off to work creating pictures. The book, as far as books come, is a very hands-on book, encouraging you to draw (by hand! not with a computer) the numerous examples.

Beyond the introductory chapter, the book is divided into three parts; Discovering Ideas, Developing Ideas and Selling Ideas. Along the way, several frameworks are developed to help categorize and remember what kind of visualizations are out there, what are the questions they need to answer and so forth. One of the most useful ones is the SQVID which helps decide whether a picture should be simple or elaborate (S), qualitative or quantitative (Q), explaining vision or execution (V), focus on individuals or comparisons (I) and whether it depicts change (D for delta) or as-is/status quo. SQVID combined with a list of different kind of visualizations provided, one can easily choose the most appropriate type of picture for most situations.

I found the Back of the Napkin to be a highly interesting and useful read. The frameworks it offered will most certainly come in handy in the future. One of the most interesting insights was at the end of the book; it is often forgotten was that a picture does not need to be so simple as to not require any explanation:

This brings us to the last problem in this book, namely, Is a problem-solving picture “bad” if it requires an explanation? After all, doesn’t the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” tell us that good pictures always stand on their own?
 
The answer is no. All good pictures do not need to be self-explanatory, but they do need to be explainable. It’s a rare problem-solving picture of any sort that can carry a clear message, convey powerful meaning, and inspire deep thoughts without at least a caption. [..] the point isn’t to replace all the words; the point is to use a picture to replace those words that are more effectively conveyed, understood, and remembered visually.

All in all, highly recommended for most problem solvers. Btw, the book also has a website at http://www.thebackofthenapkin.com/ along with some convenient downloadable “cheat sheets” for the presented frameworks.

Bob Sutton has become one of my favorite management book authors. This particular book – Weird Ideas That Work – How to Build a Creative Company – deals, as the subject suggests, with some more practical advice on how to build a creative and innovative workplace. It’s a relatively straightforward book in the sense that the bulk of the book consists of 11½ ideas in 12 chapters that many, especially the more conservative managers, may find weird.

How weird? Well, Sutton tells you, for example, to:

• Hire people who make you uncomfortable, even those you dislike
• Encourage people to ignore and defy superiors and peers
• Find some happy people and get them to fight
• Avoid, distract and bore customers, critics and anyone who just wants to talk about money
• Don’t try to learn anything from people who seem to have solved the problems you face

Just how weird they are depends on your point of view. In any case, unless you’ve studied innovation processes more, at least some are likely to come off as somewhat strange and counter-intuitive. However, as also stated in the title, the ideas work; there is extensive literature and research to support these ideas. While much of the actual research can be found via the references, Sutton does give plenty of examples where possible and appropriate.

One important thing to keep in mind when reading – and especially when implementing – the advice in this book is that it’s meant as helpful stuff for creative or innovative companies. You do not – I repeat DO NOT – want to implement these things in a place that needs rigid adherence to a standard process or extreme repeatability. What’s also worth bearing in mind is that while the result is likely a more innovative company, it will not be the kind of place all people enjoy working in. It will also mean, with high likelihood, that you fail more. While that may sound bad, it’s only natural because a high success rate means you’re probably not very innovative. I quote a quote of James March from the book:

Unfortunately, the gains for imagination are not free. The protections for imagination are indiscriminate. They shield bad ideas as well as good ones – and there are many more of the former than the latter. Most fantasies lead us astray, and most of the consequences of imagination for individuals and individual organizations are disastrous. Most deviants end up on the scrap pile of failed mutations, not heroes of organizational transformation.

How about the downsides of the book itself? Well, having read quite a bit on innovation, many case studies easily get repetitive. I for one am getting tired of hearing the same examples over and over again; for example, whenever the best innovative companies are discussed, there is IDEO. There’s also 3M and the stories of microreplication and Post-It notes. Other ubiquitous companies are Apple, IBM and Intel. Don’t get me wrong; they’re all great companies that make for inspiring examples, but enough is enough.

Overall Weird Ideas That Work is a wonderful book that’s a quick and interesting read. What I particularly liked is that it’s comparatively down-to-earth in the sense that there is plenty of actually implementable advice in the book, not just some kind of ethereal ideas. While an analytical person might hope for some more proof that these ideas actually do work, with enough background information you realize that they in fact are highly likely to work. But again with the caveat that you should only try these if you want to increase innovation in your company or unit and are also prepared to deal with the negative consequences. But as they say, “no pain, no gain”.

As a summary I can highly recommend this book to at least 95% of the companies who claim to be innovative (and these days, who doesn’t?) – but fall far short of a actually being truly innovative.

Even though I know core competencies shift, I was somewhat surprised to find myself reading this book with precisely that in mind: developing a core competence. It has indeed come to the point when giving presentations is actually an important part of what I do, so I figured the least I could do is become the best possible presenter. Though I’ve had some training on the topic, this book - slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte – was to be one more stepping stone on that road.

An easy way to say what slide:ology is would be to say that it covers everything you need to know about creating presentations. But that’d be a cop-out, even though it does include a wealth of material that very few presenters have ever thought but should think about. There’s seriously a lot of stuff in the book; from choosing color palettes to designing slide layouts to displaying data to the placement of various elements, all wrapped with an array of design hints and case studies. Even dissecting the life and mood of different fonts is covered, so there’s certainly a feeling that everything you need is there.

But then there are also problems. One issue comes from the author; it’s clearly a book by a designer. This is not a bad thing as such, of course, but it means some elements in the book are more likely to be just personal preferences or styles of the author. It also means a near-complete lack of technical advice on how exactly to accomplish the stated ideas. Other problems come in the form of resources; following every advice in the book will require a team of people working on your presentation full-time. Al Gore may be able to afford that, but most other people in the day-to-day business life cannot. As a result, it can be hard to not feel discouraged when you consider the real-life resource and time constraints you have to live with.

Having said that, slide:ology most certainly earned a spot in my reference library and is a book I’m sure to return to when creating presentations. The book reads well, there’s a plethora of useful information and rules of thumb and some nice examples. And make no mistake, 99% of the people, myself included, would benefit from implementing even a fraction of the advice in slide:ology in their presentations.

The positive impacts of diversity have been discussed in many areas such as innovation management – I’ve also touched the topic more than once. However, most evidence for this has been anecdotal or based on experience. The Difference: how the power of diversity creates better groups, firms, schools, and societies by Scott E. Page takes on a different approach – the diversity it talks about is cognitive diversity and the book ultimately offers proof based on models and mathematics that diversity indeed trumps ability.

As it’s one thing to say diversity is good and quite another to prove it, it’s a strong statement but The Difference also makes a strong case for it. If and when someone you know doubts that (cognitive) diversity brings benefits, this is the kind of book you can hit them on the head with it and win any such conversation. Of course there are some caveats, boundary conditions which must apply for diversity to produce benefits.

The models and covering them with plenty of examples take up most of the book. Many of the example cases are very simple – at times I felt they were too simple, but they did manage to drive the point home, so they served their purpose adequately. Nevertheless, they did take some time to think through so I will spare you from the proof-part.

There are many lessons to learn from the book and it provides numerous smaller but still significant insights. The most important practical conclusions, however, can in my opinion be condensed into the following:

• Make sure the problem at hand is one that benefits from diversity; in particular difficult problems or prediction. Tasks truly focusing on individual effort – like selling merchandise – will obviously not benefit from a diverse group.
• Broaden your horizon – but not too much. That is to say you shouldn’t throw diverse people at the problem indiscriminately; a poet will likely not be much help in figuring out a new drug candidate.
• Remember what diversity matters – cognitive diversity. Most of the time when people talk of diversity, they mean ethnic diversity. However, merely ethnically diverse people may not be cognitively diverse.
• Don’t forget intelligence or ability (however one defines those), just don’t focus on them solely. Don’t try to find the most capable person (this might in fact even be detrimental) but also understand that people with very limited abilities will not contribute much even if they bring diversity.
• Manage the diversity. Why? Page puts this well:
  

  .. even in those cases where diversity should produce benefits, it will do so only if managed well. Lots of strange things can happen in a diverse group that would not be likely to happen among homogeneous people – including physical and verbal violence.

• Don’t expect too much – it’s clearly noted that while diversity has indisputable benefits. However, the benefits are not huge. Don’t expect diversity to magically solve all your problems, but you can expect it to bring an improvement.
• Believe. It turns out that belief in that diversity brings benefits may be a necessary precondition for it actually bringing those benefits.

Of course this list leaves out a lot of fascinating details on topics like ketchup. You’ll get to those if you read the book. The one major complaint I have of the book is that it gleefully (admittedly, also explicitly and knowingly) glosses over how one deals with many of the problems stemming from diversity. Sure, covering this comprehensively is impossible – because we don’t have all the answers. Still, it would’ve been nice to see some more pointers to that topic.

All in all, The Difference is not a book I would recommend without qualification. It can feel tedious at times, and at times you might be left wondering whether the models really end up proving useful. In the end they (mostly) do, but even an analytical mind such as myself may find the last chapters relating real-world empirical evidence and practical guidance the most fascinating. All in all a very good book, but I certainly don’t need to read this type of a book again. But then again, I was convinced of the benefits of diversity already before – if you are not or are still looking for proof, reading The Difference will be very useful.

Next up on the review list is Blue Ocean Strategy: How to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant by W. Chan Kim & Reneé Mauborgne. I say review list because Blue Ocean Strategy is a bit of an exception in that I’ve already successfully used some of the concepts at work last summer. I just finished re-reading the book so it’s time to take another look at it.

Now, Blue Ocean Strategy is very popular book with over a million copies sold. The subtitle contains a lofty promise as is often the case with strategy books, presumably so they’d sell more. “Making the competition irrelevant” always sounds good. But despite the numerous copies sold and, one would assume, attempts at creating a “Blue Ocean” as the authors call markets with no competition, we still see quite a bit of competition in the world in most or all industries. So what gives? Is the promise overstated and is the book just another useless strategy book out of which comes no practical value?

Yes and no. Of course it doesn’t magically make your competition irrelevant just like that. But Blue Ocean Strategy is also far from impractical or useless. So what is a Blue Ocean anyway? It’s an area of uncontested market space, where there are no competitors (yet). Traditionally companies strive at surviving in so-called Red Oceans, the hotly contested traditional markets with clearly defined boundaries and competition. The Blue Ocean Strategy is about a systematic approach to creating Blue Oceans.

One could be forgiven to think that there are no more Blue Oceans left in the world, that the hyper-competition has exhausted all possibilities of new “virgin” markets. But that would be a mistake. All you need to do is to think back only, say, 30 or 40 years, and you will find that many industries we now take for granted simply didn’t exist. One of the biggest in the world, one of the few trillion-dollar industries today, was nowhere to be seen 30 years ago – mobile communications. Or biotechnology, nanotechnology, discount retail, snowboards, home videos… the list is surprisingly long. And then think forward 15, 20 or 30 years – wouldn’t it be simply unrealistic to assume no new industries pop up? There are Blue Oceans, but the question is how to get there.

So how does the book help in this task? By providing a number of useful tools, processes and frameworks, the book actually does help in accomplishing that. One of the key tools is the strategy canvas – a visualization of a companies strategy mapped as a graph of key principal factors. We’ve used the strategy canvas at work and it’s a quite nice visualization tool. There is also a plethora of other frameworks and tools in the book, including some with very poor names – or what comes to your mind from a “PMS Map”? (it’s actually a pioneer-migrator-settler map, luckily one of the less useful tools in the book)

Like many good books, one of the best offering in the book is the wealth of case studies and real-life examples. It’s interesting to note that household names such as CNN and JCDecaux were once seen as radical companies, in effect implementing the Blue Ocean strategy very successfully. There are also many valuable points that may seem counter-intuitive; for one, customer desegmentation is often called for when looking for Blue Oceans, going against the current trend of increasing customer segmentation and targeting. And, despite the pompous subtitle, the authors at the end do acknowledge that companies need to be good at both Blue Ocean and Red Ocean strategies – furthermore, there are no permanently excellent industries or even permanently excellent companies. To stay at the top, the company would need to constantly be re-inventing itself, but very few or no companies actually manage to do that. That alone ought to be a sobering lesson.

Blue Ocean Strategy is certainly a very good book and I definitely plan on continuing to use the tools I’ve learned from it. Of course it’s not perfect; for one, it’s missing some important innovation process information (making “How breakthroughs happen” a good companion read). The book also attributes perhaps too much weight on the new strategies in the lowering of NYC’s crime (you’ll recall the Tipping Point providing an alternative, or at least complementary, explanation). Still, the shortcomings are relatively minor – the book is excellent. Read it. But then again, merely reading it will do nothing for your company. If you don’t do the significant footwork involved, expect to get nowhere.

A while back, our ex-neighbor gave us an interesting book called “100 Social Innovations from Finland“, which catalogs some of the social innovations that Finland has made. At first it sounds like a pretty self-righteous book but it’s actually quite interesting – at least after you realize and accept the fact that many topics covered are not, in fact, originally from Finland and many are not innovations at all. In short, it’s a good read though probably not for the reasons the authors envisioned.

Each of the 108 topics gets two pages, written by numerous semi-well-known Finns. The topics are incredibly wide-ranging. Some of them actually deal with genuine innovations from Finland – like Linux, SMS and Xylitol. Xylitol for one is very good stuff in terms of dental health so one would hope it gained wider global acceptance as a sweetener. Some, on the other hand, more describe the society than any innovation therein – topics like Sámi people, NGO proliferation, ice fishing, ice swimming and bilingualism would go into this category.

Some topics are just weird, like “Eroticism in everyday life”. Qué? In Finland? Luckily there are some everyday topics that are rather honestly seen as having a significant cultural impact, like Salmiakki Koskenkorva (from all foreigners’ point of view, interestingly flavored vodka), mämmi and HK Blue Sausage (both food products that, by many accounts, should not be classified as such) as well as Liquorice.

Then there are some topics that must have required some quite creative thinking in order to put a positive spin on them. For example, it is presented in unquestionably positive light that the amount of psychiatric hospital beds was reduced by 51% in just ten years along with increases in outpatient care. I don’t know about you, but I think there are far, far too many patients in outpatient “care” than is good for the country.

Given the messy nature and wide variety of the topics, what is the book good for? Well it’s an interesting collection of stuff about Finland – I myself found it informative, amusing, appalling and interesting. For foreigners the book provides a nice window into the Finnish society, or at least the official truth of it, as a lot of the basic features making up the fabric of the society are discussed. I’m sure it also includes some new tidbits of information for most Finns as well. On the other hand, it does contain some pretty self-righteous material, some of which is funny and some much less so. While you need to take it with a grain or two of salt, it’s worth flipping through.