If you are in the business of designing products, have I got a book for you: It’s called Manufacturing Processes for Design Professionals ($60 on Amazon). This may sound expensive until you see it: it’s a monster of a book at 500+ pages and with 1200 color illustrations and weighs several pounds.

A huge range of materials and manufacturing processes are covered in detail, richly communicated with great on-the-shop-floor photos taken by the author himself, Rob Thompson, who is an industrial designer. There are sections on familiar categories like metals…

And plastics…

…and less familiar ones like caning: 

This is really a breathtaking effort in its scope and detail. Highly recommended. 

I just finished reading Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, and if you are in the business of having to present ideas to others and get them acted on (and if you read this blog you probably are), then you need to read this book.

Authors/brothers Chip and Dan Heath have put together one of the most succinct and valuable resources for helping communicate ideas effectively and inspiring others to action. They have a simple mnemonic to help remember the vital elements (and they admit it’s a bit corny): SUCCESs:

• Simple: Strip away all the cruft and get at the core idea. Easy to say, hard to do. What often gets in the way here is what they call “The Curse of Knowledge” - knowledge that is in the head of the person trying to communicate the idea. This tends to make people add to much detail, but also leave out the basic underlying message which for them is a given (but is non-obvious to someone unfamiliar with the idea).
• Unexpected: Shake people out of their expected conventions of thinking. This doesn’t have to be earth shattering, but crafting of the message in such a way that the problem you are trying to solve becomes more stark is important.
• Concrete: Engage the emotional as well as the rational when communicating by making the problem tangible: use props, scenarios, prototypes, familiar examples. Make it personal.
• Credible: Through appropriate use of details you bring credibility to an idea so that it can stand on its own and be repeatable to others. The ideas should punctuate the broader idea, but your story can’t just be a collection of details. Outside experts can provide credibility and details, or the details may come from personal experience.
• Emotional: Understand how people’s emotions induce or inhibit them from action, whether it be because of self-interest or altruism
• Stories: Stories have an amazing power to inspire and galvanize people into action, more than seems rationally possible. Including stories as part of your message makes it more engaging, lively, and ultimately more impactful. Keep the stories short, like parables (the Good Samaritan parable for example), as these are easily memorized durable and portable nuggets that can be passed from person to person. People are very good at abstracting principles out of stories, so they are an efficient communication tool.
  

I have to admit I was skeptical going into this book as I’m not usually a fan of business/pop-psychology writing that strings together a bunch of anecdotes as it often misses an analytical framework that helps you abstract it to your particular situation. But the Heaths do a good job of providing that framework, and the many, many anecdotes that they have serve that. Not all the chapters are as good as the others - the ones on credibility and emotion are not quite as strong - but you come out at the end of it with a sense that you have really learned how to communicate complex ideas more effectively.

Made to Stick website

Made to Stick on Amazon 

From Lee Iacocca’s new book, “Where Have All the Leaders Gone?”

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the cours.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

I’ll go a step further. You can’t call yourself a patriot if you’re not outraged.

And that’s just the first page.

Not what you’d expect from a former car company executive! The last quarter of the book gets a bit maudlin, but the first three quarters is a sprawling, plain-spoken assessment of the state of America, from Iacocca’s point of view. He takes on government (and voter apathy), the car industry (why are the US companies so behind on hybrids?), business ethics, healthcare, education, and immigration. It’s a quick read, I ran through it in a 4 hour flight, but gets you thinking.

 
I was delighted to find out recently that an article I wrote is cited in Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. Specifically, on page 107:

The trend watchers at Frog Design [sic], a consultancy, see this as nothing less than an epochal shift:

“We are leaving the Information Age and entering the Recommendation Age. Today information is ridiculously easy to get; you practically trip over it on the street. Information gathering is no longer the issue - making smart decisions based on the information is now the trick… Recommendations serve as shortcuts through the thicket of information, just as my wine shop owner shortcuts me to obscure French wines to enjoy with pasta.”

This quote has been used in a number of articles writing about the book overall, so it’s obviously one that people  respond well to. For example, the Independent Newspaper in England pulls it out along with a dozen or so other quotes in an article entitled “The Power of Collective Intelligence” on July 6, 2006. (Sorry, no url for it, a colleague happened across it in Nexis, and thanks to the hopeless search function on the Independent’s website I can’t find it…)

OK, so I can live with not being mentioned by name and just being referred to as one of several “frog trend watchers”. But I thought, “Well surely my article must be mentioned in the footnotes or the bibliography?” Sadly, no. Despite this being a verbatim quote from a published article, no footnote is given. And no bibliography is provided either. I was shocked, actually, that there were only 3 pages of endnotes in a book of 250+ pages, especially given how long Anderson has been ruminating on this Long Tail idea, and doing so in public.

Hey, Chris, would it kill you (who’s near the head end of things) to throw a few scraps to those of us who are very much at the tail end?

Oh well, can’t complain too much as I did get my first citation in a well-known book… 

I’ve posted a review over at CPH127 of Giles Slade’s recent book Made to Break. Unfortunately I felt the book missed an opportunity to critique the real drivers today of rapid product obsolescence. Check it out, and take some time to see the interesting stuff on CPH127.