Welcome! I guess the first question that you have is why oprah time? Well in my last year of college I used to sit in the house that I shared with my landlord and write my essays whilst watching cable TV.
There I would be sipping tea, writing away and referencing from text books spread around me on the couch and coffee table. One of the programmes on the in the background was Oprah Winfrey. A lot of the show was just background noise. But I was fascinated by Oprah’s book club.
She’d give her take on a book, maybe interview the author. And then it would be blasted up the New York Times bestsellers list. This list appears weekly in the New York Times Book Review. Oprah’s book club was later emulated by other talk show hosts, notably the UK’s Richard Madeley and Judy Finegan.
On the high end you had Melvyn Bragg‘s South Bank Show when they profiled an author of the moment.
When I came to writing my own review of books that I’d read, I was was brought back to that time working on a sofa. Apple laptop in hand. It made sense to go with Oprah time.
You might also notice a link called bookshelf. This is a list of non-fiction books that I have kept. And the reasons why I have kept them.
If you’ve gone through my reviews and think that you’d like to send me a book to review. Feel free to contact me. Click this link, prove that you’re human and you will have my email address.
Why would I care about a book like Type Matters? Back at the beginning of the PC era; Apple sought to differentiate itself through its understanding of design. Steve Jobs had the Macintosh team apply the knowledge he’d gained dropping into a college course on typography. Fonts and kerning became important.
Jobs also drove his team to distraction. The original Macintosh operating system had a 2D graphics library called QuickDraw that was a core part of the system. It could create primitive objects such as lines, rectangles, polygons and arcs. Jobs berated his developers. They didn’t have an oval or a rounded rectangle in its capabilities. He took them outside looked around the real world and pointed these shapes out to them.
Decades later, we care about the principles of UX; but don’t pay quite the same attention to typography. Books are often designed to be to be read on screen and then a paper version is printed from the same layout. Often the sole consideration that will be given to typography will be by the digital designer who will be wondering what web font will be used. Spacing and kerning won’t have that much attention paid to it. Instead we accept ‘good enough’ in the way that the word appears on the web or in an app.
Which is where I think Type Matters comes in. Jim Williams brings decades of experience of graphic design to the book. The book is a thin Moleskine sized volume that provides a good guide to fonts and their use. It’s a book that is easy to read cover-to-cover, or dip in and out of as you feel like it.
It combines good design practice with a history lesson on the elements and consideration of putting words on a page: whether its made of velum, paper or pixels. Williams’ writing is accessible for the non-designer. It provides a better understanding about readability and legibility considerations. More design related posts here.
Before reading The Bhutto Dynasty I knew very little about Pakistan. The story of the Bhutto family is a story of fierce ambition with bursts of hubris. But it is also the tale of the moghul empire of pre-Raj India, British rule and post-colonial Pakistan.
The Bhutto Dynasty
The Bhuttos have been at the centre of Pakistan government. It is an interesting parallel to the Nehru-Gandhi family in India.
The author Owen Bennett-Jones has had access to the family and its wider circle of friends in writing this book. Combining that with a long time covering Pakistani current affairs for the BBC and you end up with an informative book.
The Bhutto family power base comes from being land owners and being able to rely on a block of local voters. The feudal nature of their power base was important before, during and after British rule. These votes were often achieved through means, rather like the British rotten boroughs.
A second aspect of their success was their ability to change and adapt. Bennett-Jones talks about how they adapted and thrived using the British legal system. They also shifted their allegiances to match where Pakistan was going. Being recognised for their support to the British Empire to supporting Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Or from founding a political party that engaged with China, to becoming a centre right party.
I would have liked to know more about the Pakistani effort to develop nuclear weapons. As an outsider, this was the biggest event since independence for Pakistan.
It was fascinating how different members of the Bhutto family consistently under-estimated rivals. This was usually because they had a blind spot for clerics, the uneducated and of lower social standing.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto grossly underestimated his own choice for chief of army staff. General Zia went on to depose Bhutto and bring in ten years of military government.
He compromised on laws sought by muslim clerics and was surprised when they were back demanding more, instead of appreciating what he’d given them. His daughter Benazir Bhutto underestimated the risk of her religious opponents and was assassinated by suicide bombers prepared by the Taliban.
I found The Bhutto Dynasty as a good introduction to South Asian history; rather than just a family biography. There are a number of aspects that I would like to understand more about. In particular, the rise of extreme political Islam, the India – Pakistan conflict, Pakistan’s relationship with China and the Pakistani nuclear programme. More book reviews here.
Consumerology taps into Phil Graves experience as a consultant on consumer behaviour.
In the book, he draws on experience in retail marketing and classic marketing case studies such as New Coke. These examples show the numerous ways in which marketing fails to understand consumers.
Much of the tried and true testing methods used make consumer marketing decisions have their own built in biases and affect the results that marketers use to base major decisions on.
AFECT criteria
In Consumerology, Graves recommends a set of criteria to assess any research project against. The more that the research project aligns with these principles, the less likely it is to be adversely affected by consumer or marketer bias.
A – Analysis of behavioural data. Does the research look at consumer behaviour or not? If it doesn’t look at some aspect of consumer behaviour, it isn’t valuable.
F – Where the consumers in the right frame of mind? Where they observed whilst in a retail experience, making a purchase?
E – Environment. What is the context of the content. Research that isn’t observational / behavioural in nature should at least be done where retail decisions happen. Environment is bound together with frame of mind.
C – Covert study. Being aware of being observed affects behaviour. Think about the use of close circuit TV and fisheye mirrors to try and prevent casual shoplifting.
T – Timeframe. Did the timeframe of the study match the timeframe that consumers would typically use themselves?
Persuasive Technology was published in 2003. It is still the bible for captology ( from Computers as Persuasive Techologies). Back when I was working inhouse at Yahoo!; copies of the book could be found on the desks of some product managers and designers. It has since gained a certain amount of notoriety. Questions are asked around the addictive behaviour of social network and gaming app users. Some consumers even find it hard to stop swiping dating apps.
Fogg realised that computers offered new challenges and opportunities. Persuasive Technology was written almost 20 years ago. How well does it now hold up?
Relevant content
Right from the start when Fogg starts going into the advantages of persuasive technology you can see the evergreen nature of the content.
Some of the content is quite prescient with a section on surveillance technology creating persuasion through observation. The comments on simulation are equally applicable to modern VR environments, which has been proven in the treatment of PTSD amongst combat veterans. The application ‘In My Steps’ (page 76) designed to facilitate empathy among doctors for cancer patients echoes through the patient centric work that pharma companies are currently funding.
Chapter 5 on computers as persuasive social actors is playbook for the way modern apps from freemium games to Tinder work effectively. If you don’t read anything else read this chapter.
Tired?
A cursory skim of the book would yield examples that are Windows Vista-era screenshots of crude applications. You have to remember that the book was written before mainstream social networks or the New York Times paywall. Back then, it was right at the end of the banner ad golden age in online advertising; surviving on ads was still considered an option for news media.
Whilst the context has changed around the web and the way that we use it; the examples are still illustrative. They’re worthwhile sticking with when reading though the book.
Misinformation
The modern issue of misinformation gets a relatively small mention. Fogg realised the impact that misinformation could have on future computer credibility. He felt that as computers lost their ‘aura, their mystique, their presumed credibility’. He thought that computing ubiquity would make computing credibility more complex due to purpose and form-factor.
He also worried about bad actors; though this largely seems due to hacker Adrian Lamo hacked the Yahoo! News content management system from his browser and was able to alter the quotes in stories. At the time subtly altering mainstream news stories was seen as the greatest risk
…Peter Sommer, an expert in computer crime at the London School of Economics, says that carefully changing information posted to a major web site could be far more serious.
“If it is done in a subtle way then this could spread misinformation,” Sommer told New Scientist. “It’s unfortunate that Yahoo! is the largest and most important portal in the world.”
Yahoo! is one of the most popular destinations on the internet. In June 2001 the site had more than 200 million visitors. Yahoo! takes news feeds from a wide range of news agencies and web sites.
Lamo says he was disturbed to have had access to the system during recent terrorist attacks on America, when internet news sites were in great demand.
“At that point I had more potential readership than the Washington Post,” Lamo told Security Focus. “It could have caused a lot of people who were interested in the day’s events a lot of unwarranted grief if false and misleading information had been put up.”
In some ways Fogg’s vision came true. The Macedonian fake news publishing during the 2016 US election wasn’t driven by bad actors; but ad revenue hungry teens. The effect was the same as Lamo’s Yahoo! News hack a decade and a half earlier.
Ethics
The thinking in Persuasive Technology was weaponised in various products and services. Yet, the book, was ethically driven by design. Fogg had a good understanding of how his work could be used by bad actors. He devoted a whole chapter to the ethics of captology and pointed out times when an act would be unethical throughout the book. Fogg starts off with ethics in the preface on page XXVI right before the acknowledgements section.
Chapter 9 goes into the various ethical pitfalls that may await the designer and the user. It’s interesting that many of the case studies focus on getting personal information out of children. Protecting children online has consistently been an issue since the start of the commercial web.
It is also interesting in this chapter that he emphasises the role of education in protecting future users from the unscrupulous.
Conclusion
Yes rereading Persuasive Technology was like taking a time machine back to the post dot com bust web. But the lessons to be learned are still the same. We might have more stylish web design and responsive pages; but we still have the same problems. Whether you work in digital transformation, user experience or content strategy, this book deserves a place on your bookshelf
Michael Lewis’ The Fifth Risk is marketed as a Trump presidency book.
The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis mass paperback cover.
The Donald
The Fifth Risk starts off by telling the story of Chris Christie. How he helped the future Trump administration organise a government in waiting. Christie and the team are let go. Trump was worried about spending money.
Given the revelations about Donald Trump’s finances in the New York Times; I can understand his desire to control cash flow. This goes some way to explaining the problems filling senior government places.
A second thing comes out in the first part of the book; Trump’s instinct to value personal loyalty. Which is fine; but doesn’t scale that well. That meant that people were often unsuitable for the jobs that they were given.
A final trait that came through was a massive root-and-branch concern against climate change.
So Lewis doesn’t say that much about the Trump administration that we didn’t already know. But that is only 30 percent of the book.
What the government does
The remaining 70 percent of the book tells the stories of different departments of the US government. The vital, complex roles that they play. He peels back the complex relationships between the federal government and the states. That interface builds in a lot of waste and inefficiency – to meet state political goals.
Lewis gets experts to explain how welfare payments work and why they’re needed. Or how departments like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Energy benefit the country.
Lewis also covers what motivated some of the government service. TL;DR – from the new deal to the Kennedy administration young Americans felt that they could make a real difference. They felt inspired in a way that probably only clergy or military service personnel feel now.
Finally, touches on risks. The fifth risk that the Department of Energy expert talked about was programme management. This is where the name of the book comes from. How is programme management a risk?
If a department is managed by someone who doesn’t understand the area involved.
Realpolitik – NASA was for years a victim of pork barrel politics and the o-ring failure that happened on the Challenger disaster was a function of it
If an administration takes a short terms, or small government world view.
In praise of Keynesian economics
The examples in the book tear away at the popular narrative around big government. Of inefficiencies and long queues of rapacious welfare queens.
It shows all the things that the government does for the collective good. Things that the market wouldn’t be able to address. It also shows the hucksters involved in the markets. In particular calling out Accuweather’s founders Barry and Joel Myers. That Lewis hasn’t been sued by Myers adds to the veracity of his claims.
This is essentially a criticism of the economic orthodoxy that has governed both of America’s political parties for the past 40 years, since the Carter administration. In this respect, the educated reader would appreciate that it fires a shot across the bow of all parties. From Sanders and Biden to Trump.
Style
I was introduced to Michael Lewis as a writer, when I read Liar’s Poker in college. It is a deeply personal book, full of humour and self examination. In it, he provides the ley reader an insight into the financial services system. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to have much impact as the financial recessions following the dot com boom and the housing crisis proved.
He then wrote a slew of books that owe a good deal to the new journalism style of Tom Wolfe. His writing covered sports, financial crises and politics. Some of the books were very of their time, such as The Future Just Happened, Boomerang and Panic!. Others like Liars Poker, are ageless. A couple of his books were made into films of the same name: Moneyball and The Big Short.
The Fifth Risk still feels like the classic Michael Lewis new journalism style. But it also feels like it has an eye on a documentary adaptation. In this respect he reminds me a lot of Ben Mezrich in term of his cinematic approach to writing.
