Ged Carroll

Category: oprah time | 書評 | 서평 : 文芸批評

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.

  • Cosa Nostra and other things

    I finished a book by Cosa Nostra – A history of the Sicilian mafia written by John Dickie. Dickie’s work demystified the glamour and media perpetuated stereotypes of the mafia. They were never men of honour. In a surprising degree of personal honesty unusual in these type of books, Dickie is forthcoming about the elements that he doesn’t know or understand about the Cosa Nostra. Usually loose ends are glossed over or used to take the material in another direction – a la many conspiracy theorists.

    Dickie’s account leaves the alone the American cousins of the Sicilian mafia unless they impinge on the Italian story. The mafia story weaves a complex pattern around modern Italian history. More book reviews here.

    I also got to see Clerks II and The Departed. I love Clerks and I really liked what Kevin Smith did with the follow-on film, neatly answering the question how do you top a film that captures the existentialist navel gazing of generation x slackers?

    I won’t spoil the plot, but if you haven’t seen it you can look forward to some classic Jay moments, a boom box to die for, drama worthy of Days of Our Lives and inter-species erotica.

    The Departed is an American interpretation of Hong Kong classic thriller Infernal Affairs. Leonardo DeCaprio plays an undercover police man coming apart at the edges and Matt Damon is the mole inside the police department.

    The film is a good movie in its own right, but lacks of the polish of the performances in the original.

  • The Change Function by Pip Coburn

    Thinking about The Change Function as a book reminded me as an agency person, it is not enough only be a good, but to understand something about your clients. Are they a winner or a flamer?If they are a flamer, you want your cash up front and start contingency planning for how you replace them with another piece of business.

    If they are a winner, then you can be more flexible and possibly take a bath if they are going to be a flagship brand on your client list.

    What is the compelling reason to purchase their product or service.

    Rule one: Clients are generally too close to their products, consumers will work out how they become relevant to their own lives or not

    Rule two: The greatest lie after ‘I love you’ and ‘I can guarantee you coverage in the Financial Times’ is ‘Our product is unique’. If the problem can be solved another way, it means that the product is not unique because the customer has a substitute choice. Believe: flickr was not unique, it was an innovative way at looking at the same problem. The iPod was not unique, Compaq made the first hard drive-based MP3 player back in the late 90s and the Mac wasn’t unique because it got the queues from Doug Engelbart and Xerox PARC.

    The Change Function by Pip Coburn makes an interesting read as it shows by example why some technologies take off, while others flame out.

    What’s the crisis the product or services solves? People will generally only adopt the new, new thing if there is a compelling reason for them.

    Is the crisis one for real-world people, or just for rich people (who fly business class three days in every week and think that having a social life is messaging fellow college alumni on their Blackberry once every six weeks)?

    How high is the total perceived pain of adoption?

    Is your client user-centred: do they use language that shows they look at things from the users point of view?

    Do they have an iterative development cycle? (Do they roll out improvements on a regular basis, based on user feedback and their technological roadmap rather than blockbuster updates.)

    Pip Coburn elegantly codifies common sense; its the stuff you know instinctively, like the smartphone that you only use voice and texting on and yet still listen to music on your iPod, or the latest cool web 2.0 service that you registered for but then never seem to go back to. More book reviews can be found here.

  • Unstuck

    Quick reviews of Unstuck and 11 1/2 Ideas that work.

    I had been meaning to get around to reading this book for a good while. Unstuck is a trouble-shooting guide for situations when you can’t think your way out of a problem or are suffering from inertia. The book was based on a set of flash cards developed by the authors as part of an MBA module that they taught at Harvard.It is quite easy to imagine it as a big decision tree or one of them Dungeons and Dragons books that the geekiest kids at school used to read all the time as you are guided from problem recognition and diagnosis through to resolving the problem in a creative manner.

    The best thing of all, unlike technical support helplines and customer service functions you are not kept on hold for an hour because they are swamped with other callers. Definitely one to keep in the desk drawer.

    11 1/2 Weird Ideas That Work was a book that I read on the way back from Dresden. It is a thinkpiece for managers on how they can further develop innovation within an organisation that is not too corporate in its culture by bringing in disruptive influences and processes – a sort of ‘grain of sand’ in your shoe effect. Sutton is very particular about laying out the parameters of what kind of organisation his techniques will or won’t work for. He cites extensively examples from organisations like design and user experience company IDEO through to small business units in large corporates like phone-tapping technology company Hewlett-Packard.

    Whilst the book makes for interesting reading, applying its ideas successfully may be much harder to do .

  • Everything bad is good for you(sort of)

    I had wanted to read Steven Johnson’s Everything bad is good for you: how popular culture is making us smarter since he gave a talk in association with Demos last year.

    I finally got the chance to read the book on a three-day business trip to Dresden in eastern Germany.

    The proposition of the book is that more complex layered story lines in modern television series such as 24 and many computer games give the people who consume them a different set of skills to the material that appeared in the past.

    Forcing them to deal and understand complex social relationships and hit the ground running without having to see simple plot flags.Even shows like Big Brother and The Real World are supposed to stretch their EQ as they try to make sense of the goings on in the house These new skills also extended to new devices including computer games and internet communications technologies including email and messaging.

    Everything bad is good for you sounds like a grown up version of the excuses that I used to give my parents as a child to unsuccessfully get more TV time. More book reviews here.

    Now I believe in email because it allows users to maintain a larger loose network of contacts that researchers have found to have a number of advantages (and I am a PR tart, so it makes sense for me to try and extend my influence far and wide.)

    However this piece in Popbitch was interesting:

    In sickness and in email

    Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson got married in the South of France last month.

    They read their vows to each other off their Blackberries.

    Who said romance was dead?

    I can just see it now, The bride was wearing an ivory wedding dress with an external bodice and skull detailing to accent her glamous body art and the groom wore Levis and a 1974 Led Zepplin US tour t-shirt.

    Both the bride and groom sported matching BlackBerry Pearl devices.

    A BlackBerry is so essential that you need to take it to your wedding? Please! What about electronic ettiquette?

  • Blue Ocean Strategy by Kim and Mauborgne


    Blue Ocean Strategy is an easy to read book that I managed to zip through in next to no time at all. Kim and Mauborgne have written a book that is accessible and easy-to-read, cover-to-cover or dip in and out of for reference or inspiration.The book’s premise is that most business strategy books are about conflict and competition and this is wasteful. Instead it provides a framework for strategists to Think Different and differentiate their businesses instead.

    The blue ocean of the title is the space that the business puts between itself and competitors, in contrast to the red ocean from business conflict. A classic example of a red ocean would be the Chinese approach to business. In China you will see competing restaurants right next to each other. The idea is that one might move in. It becomes successful, which encourages others to compete next to them since it is a known successful formula in that area. The neighbourhood of restaurants does bring in diners, but margins are small due to the level of competition. 

    A classic example would be to think about the PC manufacturers. A classic red ocean environment where IBM left due to competitive pressures, HP and Compaq merged to unsuccessfully in a failed effort to leverage the economic benefits of their combined scale and Apple and Dell are the only two long-term profitable success stories through innovation.

    The problem is now that Dell’s process smarts have become the norm and both Apple and HP have used their operational efficiency techniques to improve their own businesses with leaner supply chains and total product customisation.

    I wholeheartedly recommend Blue Ocean Strategy. However the type-a personalities in charge of many organisations that most need to read it, will never touch the book or hear its message and as the bard said there-in lies the rub. More book reviews here.