Recent Books I've been reading Jan - May 2008

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely Harper Collins March 2008. I have Shiona McDougall of Harper Collins to thank for this book which she gave me when I was running training for the marketing team there. Predictably Irrational is the work of a behavioural economist  Dan Ariely. Marketing still works within the paradigm that consumers behave rationally. Ariely gently shows that this isn't true. This is an introductory text - very easy to follow and a ripping read. You probably ought to know that people's product experience is massively affected by packaging and even the design of the glass or plate you sample it from.  What I really appreciated about the book is the way Ariely demonstrates the principles using small scale surveys in the college where he teaches. Human behaviour isn't rocket science - you don't need to subject your customers to 2 hour depth interviews, or scan their brain patterns to get insights about them. And just using small scale quantitative studies he is able to show there is a gap between people's behaviour and what they think they were doing. I think my favourite was the couple of chapters about how to reduce dishonesty, showing a measurable increase in honesty among the sample who read the 10 commandments first!

Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowicki Abacus 2004
Beautifully written - this is a great introduction to the idea of markets and collective thinking which surpasses the powers of the individuals within that market or crowd. There's a lot packed into this book and I would say it is required reading so probably will have to add it to classics before too long. Starting with Francis Galton's experiment in 1906 Suowicki shows how market thinking has grown in influence. And the principles behind it. set up properly crowds can indeed make great decisions. Conventionally western culture fears crowds and considers that groups of people are more likely to behave irrationally and destructively. Wisdom of crowds shows some very different possibilities. The internet research agency Brainjuicer has based a couple of its products on this book. Mark Earls the Herd Meister must have got a lot of the examples listed here. One of the most intriguing and undeveloped parts of the book is the attack on small group decision making. Small groups make even wose decisions than individuals according to Surowicki. Because of hierarchy and the desire to please. Which rather raises the question about how so much of our decision making is made by task forces of people. Thoroughly recommended.

Wikonomics by Don Tapscott and Athony Williams Atlantic 2006
Hmm well the topic - the power of human collaboration as evidenced by wikipaedia and web 2.0 couldn't be more relevant. But this book and I developed a thorough going dislike for one another. It took me a real effort to get back into it and finish it. The problem is that the book is masively overwritten and the turgid prose and sheer repetition of the core ideas ground me down. Not that there isn't good material in it and lots of case studies but it just took too damm long. Use with care as reference - dive don't graze.

The User is always right by Steve Mulder and Viv Yaar New Riders 2007
This is the most useful book about research I have read in some time. It is an introduction to personas a way of typologising consumers which has come out of website design. The fundamental difference between a persona and other consumer summaries is that a persona is a 1 page precis of the uses goals and behaviours. Demographics and attitudes aren't high on the agenda. This is critical when understanding how to make websites and online campaigns work better clearly. But the ramifications of persona thinking are much bigger than that and will I am sure spread right across the research world. This is a good accessible introduction. It covers the development of personas using quantitative as well as qualitative research - the lucidity of all of this is surprising - not all research books are as clear or practical. And the later chapters go into a number of ways of applying personas particularly in terms of the construction of user scenarios. I designed a set of personas for Microsoft UK back in 2003 for all their audiences. Its just that we didn't call them personas then! And I still found the book interesting and helpful - I now use it as part of the distance learning training I run for international students about Internet Research. Highly recommended.

Hillman Curtis on making short films for the Web by Hillman Curtis New Riders 2005
This was a lucky encounter. Once a year I go to Adobe Live and tend to buy a number of books which I never see anywhere else in the vain hope that the best selling titles for designer and web developers will be useful to me. This is one of those. Hillman Curtis used to work for Adobe - then he became a Flash Designer then he taught himself to become a flim maker. The cover shows him in his working gear - in theory able to take all his kit on a bicycle to the shoot. This is a very readable blend of his first half dozen projects - how he did it - how he usually made some pretty basic errors and how he retrieved the situation. There's a lot of practical advice and some really interesting commentary from his knowledge of great film making and film makers. It will definitely help you get beyond the point and shoot type of film making which now characterises youtube. And you can visit the man's site to see the finished films yourself.

Herd by Mark Earls - review and interview with the author in In their own words worth a look.

I've lost my Over the Edge section somewhow so until I put it back here's the last less business specific titles I have read and reviewed

Chronicles by Bob Dylan Simon and Schuster 2004 Here's a personal account by one of those who could fairly claim to have had a had in creating the 1960s. And who famously did his best to shake off every label that got put on him. One of the main weapons in defending one's own persona from cultural icondom is reclusivity. Which is why Bob's version was so eagerly awaited. Well you won't land this fish easily. Its called Chronicles but they're not in sequence. And at the start there's an illuminating contrast between Dylan's candour talking to a folkie to get a gig in one of the Greenwich clubs and his mendacity when talking to a journalist about how he arrived in New York in a boxcar - cunning or cynical - you decide. And is this account remotely truthful of how it really felt then to be on the cusp of cultural change but not knowing how and when it would happen. And what he covers are the formative times - not the madness of rushing from festival to festival surfing the 1960s. Later on the book covers Oh Mercy the album he recorded with Daniel Lanois in New Orleans. There's almost a suggestion that the albums from 2 decades in between were attempts to cover his tracks. Whether its reliable its certainly revealing about his heroes and also the craft which goes into being a creative. He claims to have studied the 1930s so he had a seam to mine when the songs came. True or not it shows you that there's more to writing songs than 3 chords and the truth. You have to line your stomach first.

How to read a novel by John Sutherland Profile Books 2006 Here's an English Professor and a chair of the Booker Prize telling you how to read a book. And it wasn't quite what I expected. Sutherland has a penchant for setting puzzles so he's happy to write an endorsement of his own book on the flycover as well as including a quote urging suspicion of endorsements. What is useful about this book is the postmodern suspicion of a text so a lot of the ground is about publishers, titles, publication dates which are all clues in how to make sense of a work. We eventually get to the critics - there's an interesting section about a British novel slated by an American critic who patently doesn't understand the rules of squash - which Sutherland argues is fairly critical to making sense of the novel. It lifts the corner on those tedious internecine squabbles between different countries, critics and novelists. If you want a far less illustrious comparison think of the block voting evident in the Eurovision Song Contest. How much of the sound and fury leading up to the Booker shortlist is basically the same thing. In the end (no surprises) Sutherland leaves it up to you. But gives some interesting takes on how you might inform your judgement. There are no right answers. Providing some contemporary definition of good style would of course make the book date very quickly. But Sutherlands refusal to commit seems also very contemporary! Is this book useful for criticism for other areas? Undoubtedly but its a good thought starter.

To see every bird on earth by Dan Koeppel Penguin 2005 I was working on a pitch for the RSPB hence the need to understand what motivates a birder. This book is written from an American perspective. The author's father an obsesseive birder managed to get past the 8,000 mark. The book is very readable, hilarious at times. The arcane rules of birding are struggling to cope with the ability of even amateurs to fly to the farthest parts of the globe and use the latest technology to get the birds to reveal themselves - there is hot debate about it is legitimate to identify a bird purely by sound. Or whether it is legitimate to play back bird sounds to tempt birds into the open as they search for rivals. There is also a glimpse of the state of zoology because if if birds are being differentiated by bird song then the number of species is technically increasing up from less than 8,000 20 years ago to over 11,000 today and still climbing. And anyone working in a market where the collector mentality is important will find this account illuminating - the collector can't collect anything - but only what is acceptable by other collectors as belonging to the collection.