In summary, I really enjoyed the fact that the author looked at existing pre-conceptions (the warning label on cigarettes to prevent people from smoking) and, through scientific research, looked at what really happened in the brain vs. what people tell. Quite a few widely accepted ideas have to be re-considered based on the results presented in Buyology… and it should every everyone in Marketing to think twice about a new campaign.

The books description on amazon.com states following:

How much do we know about why we buy? What truly influences our decisions in todays message-cluttered world? An eye-grabbing advertisement, a catchy slogan, an infectious jingle? Or do our buying decisions take place below the surface, so deep within our subconscious minds, we’re barely aware of them? In BUYOLOGY, Lindstrom presents the astonishing findings from his groundbreaking, three-year, seven-million-dollar neuromarketing study, a cutting-edge experiment that peered inside the brains of 2,000 volunteers from all around the world as they encountered various ads, logos, commercials, brands, and products. His startling results shatter much of what we have long believed about what seduces our interest and drives us to buy.

In my day job in Product Management, I work very closely with the marketing teams and I am always very interested in better understanding what people go through with their buying decision, in addition to the fact that the product they are considering is great and answers a specific need they have… but what happens when there are so many different offers that fulfill the same need? How important is the brand? What makes the difference, especially when it comes to commoditized products?

Working on products dedicated for the graphics industries, I am well aware of the visual information overload that is characterizing our modern society… From memory, a NY-based research firm recently estimated that we are, on average, exposed to over 5,000 unique messages every day (anyone remember the exact source of the quote btw?). This book looks at various questions and de-facto assumptions. Some points that are analyzed are:

• how the scary health warnings on cigarettes packages are actually having the opposite effect on smokers
• why sex doesn’t sell
• the importance of other senses (smell, touch and sound), except when over-done (Nokia ring-tone anyone?)
• How strong brands stimulate similar areas in the brain as religions

This book is really a great tour in the mind of consumers and is well worth a read by everyone who works on products or services and who is in a competitive space (yes, I know, this doesn’t leave many of you excluded). Highly recommended.

While this book does not cover specifically software piracy, it contains a lot of insightful information about the challenges traditional companies face and how they should embrace piracy vs. fighting it, including great insights in different ways of thinking.

The books description on amazon.com states following:

Music journalist Mason, a former pirate radio and club DJ in London, explores how open source culture is changing the distribution and control of information and harnessing the old system of punk capitalism to new market conditions governing society. According to Mason, this movement’s creators operate according to piratical tactics and are changing the very nature of our economy. He charts the rise of the ideas and social experiments behind these latter-day pirates, citing the work of academics, historians and innovators across a multitude of fields. He also explores contributions by visionaries like Andy Warhol, 50 Cent and Dr. Yuref Hamied, who was called a pirate and a thief after producing anti-HIV drugs for Third World countries that cost as little as $1 a day to produce. Pirates, Mason states, sail uncharted waters where traditional rules don’t apply. As a result, they offer great ways to service the public’s best interests. According to Mason, how people, corporations and governments react to these changes is one of the most important economic and cultural questions of the 21st century. Well-written, entertaining and highly original, Mason offers a fascinating view of the revolutionary forces shaping the world as we know it. (Jan. 08) – Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Overall, this is a very interesting book to read and brings many new points of views and perspectives to the problem. The biggest (obvious) conclusion is that fight might not the best answer when it comes to piracy, much more embrace, which makes sense for the examples in the book. But at the same time, Matt Mason clearly gives examples where taking legal actions make sense.

Looking at the table of content, this book covers many different subjects, from pharmaceuticals to music, and from radio stations to tags and graffitis. Yes, many of these areas have re-shaped how we do and understand things, and many of them are about to. The example of the 3D printers is certainly an excellent one and will have huge implications in the future. And showing how industries have grown from underground activities was very interesting (think about music trends such as disco or the hip-hop). The part I was missing most was related to a look at the current IP laws in major countries and thoughts on how this could be updated / reformed. And if you don’t have time to read the full book, focus on the last chapter (outro titled “The Pirate’s Dilemma: Changng the Game Theory”) next time you are in a library or a book store.

If you want more information on the subject, I can only recommend the related blog: thepiratesdilemma.com

Building on the amazing success of open-source in the software development world, this book looks at business models that apply similar strategies as a competitive advantage compared to other players in their respective industries. With many insightful examples and sometimes ideas going at the opposite of the traditional corporate thinking, this book is worth a read!

The books description on amazon.com states following:

The word “wiki” means “quick” in Hawaiian, and here author and think tank CEO Tapscott (The Naked Corporation), along with research director Williams, paint in vibrant colors the quickly changing world of Internet togetherness, also known as mass or global collaboration, and what those changes mean for business and technology. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written, compiled, edited and re-edited by “ordinary people” is the most ubiquitous example, and its history makes remarkable reading. But also considered are lesser-known success stories of global collaboration that star Procter & Gamble, BMW, Lego and a host of software and niche companies. Problems arise when the authors indulge an outsized sense of scope-”this may be the birth of a new era, perhaps even a golden one, on par with the Italian renaissance, or the rise of Athenian democracy”-while acknowledging only reluctantly the caveats of weighty sources like Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Methods for exploiting the power of collaborative production are outlined throughout, an alluring compendium of ways to throw open previously guarded intellectual property and to invite in previously unavailable ideas that hide within the populace at large. This clear and meticulously researched primer gives business leaders big leg up on mass collaboration possibilities; as such, it makes a fine next-step companion piece to James Surowiecki’s 2004 bestseller The Wisdom of Crowds.

When looking for specific information, I find myself regularly starting on Wikipedia, an only encyclopedia entirely build by volunteers all around the internet in a highly collaborative way. When I look for a specific information, I got there first, even before I start searching on Google. Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, also known as LAMP, have become one of the most widely used web server solution (this blog runs WordPress on a LAMP configuration) and are completely free, developed in an open and collaborative way by thousands of volunteers around the Interweb. There must be something behind the model used to develop these great solutions that can be applied to the business world. That’s the topic of the book “Wikinomics”.

Through numerous examples, ranging from a mining company, to motorcycle manufacturers and even Lego, this book looks at what has made these businesses so successful. Recognizing that even the largest enterprises don’t have enough resources internally to out-think very innovative start-ups or individuals, being able to harness the power of the commons has proven to be a deciding business advantage for these companies. By being open and inviting people outside the traditional walls of the company to participate in the future of products and services, these companies have been able to deliver more and faster than ever before and have proven to be strong competitors to businesses with strong market leadership. Throughout this book, D. Tapscott and A. Williams detail the main principle of wikinomics: Being open, Peering, Sharing and Acting globally. Covering concepts such as Ideagoras, Prosumers and platforms for participations, this book is well worth the read.

At first, it might sound unrelated, but both comics and presentations share some common ideas and there are quite a few things that can be learned from the story-telling of this sometimes considered “lesser” art-form.

Technorati Tags: book, presentation, review

The first great thing is that this is a comic book about comics, having Scott McCloud use the medium to explain it… almost like having a slide show to learn how to create presentations. Throughout this book, you discover the various elements that constitute “sequential art”, to quote the simplest definition of comics. Going through the vocabulary, the gutter, time, using color and the six steps (idea, form, idiom, structure, craft and surface), this book is very insightful to better understand the structure and “science” of comics from around the world, why and how they work, and simply go beyond looking at them as a series of drawings in little boxes.

But now back to the reason why I picked-up this book in the first place: How does this apply to presentations? Assuming that you don’t believe in slides that are including extensive bullet-point text with a 12pt Times New Roman font, and that you don’t over-use transitions, you certainly noticed the similitude between comics and presentations. Both use images, text and color to transmit a message, both are based on a sequence of frames (e.g. the slides) and both progress through time. OK, comics usually are bound to hand-drawn (some artists such as Jean-Louis Boccar or Pascal Sibertin sometimes use Corel Painter on their computer) while presentations rely a lot more on photos, but that’s simply because most of the time, public speakers aren’t the best at drawing. Therefore learning from comics to apply to the repertoire of tools for the presentation “story-telling” know-how does make sense.

I won’t go in further detail in this blog posting about the book in itself. If you are serious about presentations, if you are interested in becoming a comic author, or if you simply want to better understand the mechanics used behind the scene when reading your favorite Hergé created adventure, then this is work a read.

There is so much that could be said about the content of that DVD and why we all need to take action today, that I could write multiple blog entries about this… I am going to simply recommend you go to the Inconvenient Truth web site and find out more for yourself. Instead of looking at the message, I wanted to share my thoughts from a content delivery perspective.

Technorati Tags: dvd, presentation, review

And what a delivery! Years of politics combined with the passion of the subject and in-depth preparation make the way Al Gore presents an amazing experience. This is really an impressive way to make the point. So once you watched the DVD once and started taking action, go through it a second time and think about how to improve your presentation skills (if you have to do presentations from time to time that is). Here are some of my notes from the delivery of the message.

First and foremost, know your subject and the data behind your content inside out. You have to believe in what you say, you have to be passionate about what you say. Throughout the delivery, Al Gore relies on very strong data to support the the information presented, to provide proof for the message delivered. In addition to that, if you can relate to information that the audience already knows and add information that they don’t know (but have a trusted source), it amplifies the message and credibility of the delivery.

Second, get the pace and intonation of your voice right. Years of training in the political arena have enabled Al Gore to know know how to speak in public, how to stop just at the right moment and how to do all that with no visible notes and no reading. In his book “In the Line of Fire”, Jerry Weissman introduces the concept of Roman Columns. The former Vice-President of the USA knows his columns amazingly well, using the visuals on the screen.

Visual communication – if it had to be proven, you don’t need a lot of text to communicate and transmit a message. Slides and other media are there to support your message and speech, not to be the sole source of information with your voice in the background. In addition to using a presentation software with charts, photos and almost not text as a great support (did you notice that there are no bullet-points and very little “title, sub-title, content” sections), Al Gore uses a vast diversity of media: animations, video, comic strips, charts and even a small crane! And when it comes to using charts, they are being built-up in front of the eyes of the viewer. To summarize, the slide support the presentation, not the other way around.

One more thing about the slides: When the message is about something as serious as global warming, it is critical to not only show the bad side, but you also need to show the good things that are happening, the things the audience can do…. give hope and not only a good excuse for suicide! And please, look at how the transition and text effects are used. It’s not because you have he capability of flying text or crazy transitions between your slide that you need to use the animation in your presentation!

Almost never looks at the projected screen… OK, the stage that Al Gore used is rather unique and you won’t always have special smaller screens that show the same information so that you can show and point at information without having to turn his back on the audience. But you should normally be able to have the laptop in front of you, facing the audience, while the projector shows the same information in your back.

The usage of humor as well as the tone of the voice and the speed and timing of the message delivery where perfect during this presentation, briefly pausing in the middle of a sentence, give the time to the audience to understand and digest the message delivered. Humor doesn’t require telling jokes. One example is the little animation about the frog and the boiling water (I won’t say more, go and get the DVD!) Throughout the presentation, Al Gore engages his audience, gives them time to think about the message and build expectations on what is coming next… when he shows a timeline, he makes it appear slowly and progressively, leaving enough time for the audience to build an expectation of the trend. To summarize: Project yourself and the audience into the future and give them time to reflect / think about the information delivered.

Non-verbal communication is also a very important aspect of presentations. The dress-code that was chosen by the Vice President, a suite but no tie with the upper button of the shirt open, gives and informal, yet serious look, providing him the trust and brings him closer to his audience, yet doesn’t build a barrier with the public. In addition, Al Gore engages his audience, he is open, certain, confident, calm yet passionate. He also connects with the audience, shares past experience, even if painful, so that the public is able to better understand his motives and is able to better relate to what he is telling.

There is so much more I could write about: Get the DVD today, watch it at least twice… the first time for the message and the second time for the delivery. And if you want to look at other great presentations, the MacWorld 2007 Keynote from Steve Jobs is available as a podcast from iTunes.

37signals is a company that is best known for their online project management service called Basecamp, which turns project management on its head according to the developers. Their main approach has been to focus on things that really matter to the majority of the users, leaving the rest outside their applications.

The “Getting Real” eBook provides an in-depth view into their approach to Web Service / Software development. Taking the less is more assumption, this book guides you through the various aspects for the development of a solution, from the starting point (including budget and resourcing issues), setting priorities, features selections and processes to get things done.

While I won’t reveal the content of this eBook, I wanted to highlight a few things. A whole chapter is focusing around the Interface Design and how this is the starting point of every development. If you cannot clearly define and drive the user interaction with the product / service you develop, potential customers will have a strong incentive to go and look for something else. Also, make sure you always work with real content and not only dummy text. Using Lorem Ipsum will not enable you to discover the real-life experience a user of the final product will have once it goes live.

The other section that I want to highlight here is the one about Promotion. Many concepts are about how to get the word about your product out. They cover the concepts of teasers and trailers for products, how to build on a blog and beta programs, upsell to more powerful versions of the products.

While focusing around the development and promotion of a web service, this eBook provides many great ideas that can be applied to software and hardware development, as well as any other product that has an interaction with users. In many ways, it makes me think of books such as Norman’s “Invisible Computer”, Cooper’s “Inmates are running the asylum” or Kim’s and Mauborgne’s “Blue Ocean Strategy“. All these have a common theme of focusing what matters to the user, minimizing everything else (especially what is costly and doesn’t provide big returns) and keeping it simple.

Noteworthy, the purchase experience applies the concepts the eBook preaches. It’s very easy to get your copy and it comes in a printable PDF format. To prevent broad distribution of the PDF, the name of the person who purchased it is written on every page of the document.

I can only recommend you get a copy of this eBook and read through it twice. A first time to see the big picture, and a second time to actually think about how each element described in this book applies to you and your business. A must read for product managers and user experience designers out there.

Why do many companies compare their products with what the competition is doing and fight a features war while needing to be very careful on costs? Why not look at what the customer needs and wants to focus on that instead? In a step-by-step approach, “Blue Ocean Strategy” provides a way of defining a strategy that will make the competition irrelevant and minimize costs at the same time. A well-worth read!

The book description on amazon.com states following:

Kim and Mauborgne’s blue ocean metaphor elegantly summarizes their vision of the kind of expanding, competitor-free markets that innovative companies can navigate. Unlike “red oceans,” which are well explored and crowded with competitors, “blue oceans” represent untapped market space and the opportunity for highly profitable growth. The only reason more big companies don’t set sail for them, they suggest, is that the dominant focus of strategy work over the past twenty-five years has been on competition-based red ocean strategies-i.e., finding new ways to cut costs and grow revenue by taking away market share from the competition. With this groundbreaking book, Kim and Mauborgne-both professors at France’s INSEAD, the second largest business school in the world-aim to repair that bias. Using dozens of examples-from Southwest Airlines and the Cirque du Soleil to Curves and Starbucks-they present the tools and frameworks they’ve developed specifically for the task of analyzing blue oceans. They urge companies to value innovation that focuses on utility, price, and cost positions, to create and capture new demand and to focus on the big picture, not the numbers. And while their heavyweight analytical tools may be of real use only to serious strategy planners, their overall vision will inspire entrepreneurs of all stripes, and most of their ideas are presented in a direct, jargon-free manner. Theirs is not the typical business management book’s vague call to action; it is a precise, actionable plan for changing the way companies do business with one resounding piece of advice: swim for open waters.

“Blue Oceans Strategy” not only offers very valuable insights about a different way of looking at strategy (compared to the traditional beat the competition view) but also provides the tools and framework to make it work. Through the use of many examples throughout the book, ranging from a circus, to a police department and the car industry, this book helps formulating a strategy for a company or a product that focuses first and foremost around what the end-user / customer really wants and needs, minimizing or removing everything else. To use the terminology of this book, it’s about value innovation, as the goal is to make the make the competition irrelevant by making a leap in value for buyers (and your company as a side effect). Throughout the book, Mr. Kim and Mauborgne provide a framework and the analytical tools to pursue differentiation and low cost simultaneously.

The book details six principles of blue ocean strategies:

• Reconstruct market boundaries
• Focus on the big picture, not the numbers
• Reach beyond existing demand
• Get the strategic sequence right
• Overcome key organizational hurdles
• Build execution into strategy

As those who know me are aware, I am a strong believer that technology should be the tool and not the goal. The Blue Ocean strategy described in this book fits perfectly with my focus on customers first. It provides a very nice strategic correspondent to the “Inmates are running the asylum” book that I blogged previously, which is more targeted at the technology-focused people: FOCUS on the end-user! I am not going into further details here, and highly recommend that you get your own copy of this book and read it through. Well worth the time.

One of the top High-Tech companies of this new millenium, Apple brought the Mac and the iPod, as well as the Newton and the Lisa. This book provides interesting summarizes of the good, the bad and the ugly related to the management and strategy behind the company and the products.

The book description on amazon.com states following:

Shows you how to use the success secrets of Steve Jobs to create a stylistic and technological revolution in any company The computer industry has seen significant losses over the past few years, but one company has emerged with unprecedented profitability. The Apple Way examines how the company combines innovative, integrated product development, exceptional customer support, a high-performance corporate culture, sleek packaging, and cutting-edge marketing to keep the business ahead of the curve and on top of the game. This insightful book divulges how the company’s steps–and missteps–have led to its continuing evolution, and what lessons you can learn from Apple.

The last 30 years of Apple’s history have been made of many successes (from the Apple II and the Macintosh to the iPod) as well as numerous failures (I actually still have a Newton somewhere). Reading through this book, it is a miracle that this company is still around.

This book, divided in twelve different chapters which can be quickly and individually read, provides a lot of data and facts about the very interesting history of the company. While not opening up all the “secrets” to Apple’s business model, it provides a very convincing interpretation and analysis of the facts, the disasters and the triumphs. This include consistency, follow-through, vision as well as making the product and the customer king. It also includes many interesting comments and quotes, such as this one:

“We don’t underestimate people….Rather than making a far inferior product for a hundred dollars less, we gave the people the product that they want and that will serve them for years, even though it’s a little pricier. People are smart; they figure these things out.” –Steve Jobs

Overall, an interesting read. For those who are really short on time, go to the end of each chapter and read the 10 to 15 different lessons (one page per chapter). The rest is really the whole argument and background for that teaching.

Happy reading!

While reading the Presentation Zen Blog there was a reference to the Creative Business Presentation book. After reading it through, I really like the step-by-step approach of this, with many ideas and comments that are worth putting in practice.

The book description on amazon.com states following:

This title provides ideas and templates suitable for use in presentations. The first half of the volume concentrates on the necessary skills for a successful presentation such as adequate preparation, correct body language and keeping calm under pressure. The second half of the volume offers verbal, visual and aural ideas for presentations that are designed to make your audience wake up, sit up and take notice.

Overall, I really liked the approach of providing a step-by-step approach, with many tips and tricks, to presentations. Dividing the different aspects from slides, the styles of presenters and how to prepare provides with multiple check-lists that are valuable depending on how trained you are with presentations. I would highly recommend reading this book for people who do not feel comfortable or are not doing presentations on a regular basis. For the professional presenters out there, it still provides a few interesting insights and bring different ideas to the table that can be worth trying out or incorporate in your next keynote, to make them even better.

During a discussion with a friend, I recommend he reads The Invisible Computer (perhaps the subject of another blog entry)… in exchange, he told me that I should read “The inmates are running the asylum” without providing me any form of additional information. The title sounded very intriguing and the content was worth reading through.

The book description on amazon.com states following:

Imagine, at a terrifyingly aggressive rate, everything you regularly use is being equipped with computer technology. Think about your phone, cameras, cars-everything-being automated and programmed by people who in their rush to accept the many benefits of the silicon chip, have abdicated their responsibility to make these products easy to use. “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum” argues that the business executives who make the decisions to develop these products are not the ones in control of the technology used to create them. Insightful and entertaining, “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum” uses the author’s experiences in corporate America to illustrate how talented people continuously design bad software-based products and why we need technology to work the way average people think. Somewhere out there is a happy medium that makes these types of products both user and bottom-line friendly; this book discusses why we need to quickly find that medium.

I’ve been working for software companies for a few years, used computers for a lot longer than that, and am computer literate to say the least. Finding my way with computers and networks is certainly something I can do with a certain ease. In Alan Cooper’s terminology, I am an apologist, i.e. someone who not only is happy with the complexity of modern computers, but is, at least in a certain form, looking for it. The other type of user are the survivors, i.e. those who make what they can with the technology they have to use every day. It’s the distinction between those who want to use a computer and those who have to use a computer redefined.

After an overview of “what do you get when you cross a computer with…” that introduces the book, Alan Cooper goes into detail about the different types of users on both sides (company and customer) and looking into who actually owns what the end user will get as a product. While I won’t go into everything covered in this book (I don’t want to write it again and if I tell everything here, why would you buy your own copy), the in-depth description of the persona concept makes a lot of sense. A persona is a representation of a typical end-user in all the possible details. This persona becomes the single focal point of all development to make sure everything that gets implemented in the product will be to this invented end-user benefit. If it doesn’t make sense for the persona, it doesn’t get into the product.

This book also goes into numerous details about Interaction Design, covering the importance of designing for pleasure, for power and for people. Alan Cooper also goes in details about who actually should own the design… as you might have guessed by now, it is not the developers

A few more comments about customer driven products that are worth mentioning here. If a customer asks for a feature, it seems to make sense to implement it. But at one point, implementing features and answering specific requests for customers get into the way of actually releasing a product that will focus on the needs of the persona, the true target user. The focus shifts from developing software to be more and more a consultancy working on special projects. At what point do you draw the line between a “customer requests driven” solution and a solution that is driven by the customer needs. In other words, a customer can only ask for features that he can feel the pain for, but if you don’t investigate it further, you will not be able to actually solve the pain. It’s about getting to the roots of the problem and solving them, not choosing the best color for the lipstick.

Overall, this is a very interesting book, with a lot of insightful information. As always, you cannot take everything as is, but the majority of it can bring valuable enhancements to the product development process. A must read for product managers so that the “we need this feature for that customer by that date” gets banned from their vocabulary… oh yes, that’s right, I am a product manager