I think that David Shipley and Will Schwalbe may have been looking over my shoulder the past 14 years, because every mistake I’ve ever made using electronic communication (and its solution) is cataloged in Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home. Email has become a bigger and bigger part of our lives over the years, but nobody ever gets a course on how to do it properly. That’s exactly what this book is: the “how to email” class you never took.
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I have been assimilated.

Lots and lots of people have recommended David Allen’s productivity bible, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity to me over the years, but I kept thinking, “I’m already pretty productive, I don’t need that.” I couldn’t have been more wrong. Over the past several months, Allen’s techniques have made a noticeable impact on my day to day life that I didn’t think was possible. Instead of doing a traditional review of his material, I thought I’d walk through what I’ve done with it over the past few months that has changed the way I approach my job.
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I’ve often written in this space that it’s a good practice to study successful people in other fields. Even if what they do is completely unrelated to your own career, you can still find a nugget or two to bring to your own life. Who better to study for an engineer, than the creator of the ultimate in nerd subculture?

Empire Building: The Remarkable, Real-Life Story of Star Wars is a really good biography of George Lucas by Garry Jenkins. It starts with his simple but some times rebellious childhood in Northern California and the revised edition ends during production of the unfortunate Jar Jar Binks career vehicle known as Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace. In between, though, there are lots of interesting tid bits:
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On its face, Every Business is a Growth Business: How Your Company Can Prosper Year After Year, by Ram Charan and Noel M. Tichy looks like a market analysis book. In a broader sense, though, it is about taking something and trying to look at it a different way. In doing so, you find more creative uses for what you already have or realize there is something else you might go about building instead that’s a lot better. Such things aren’t exclusively directed at the marketers of the world, but can help everybody. (more…)

Whenever someone starts to talk about networking, the computer geek in me assumes they mean something having to do with TCP/IP. To most people, though, that means tracking and growing the relationships you have with different people. For most of my professional career, I’ve equated this practice with going to bars in groups of people you hardly know that only talk to you long enough until they can figure out way to exploit your skills to do their bidding. Obviously, I’ve had a bad attitude about it and much to my detriment.

What changed my way of thinking was reading David Teten and Scott Allen’s excellent book The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors And Closing Deals Online. Since then, I’ve broadened my network far beyond what I had before and did so from the comfort of my desk (and one trip to a Chipotle in Austin, TX). While I’m not exactly ready to leave HP over this epiphany, I’m involved in a lot of things I wasn’t before that have opened side opportunities that weren’t possible with my previous mindset. (more…)

Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date should be required reading for anybody even remotely involved in the computer industry. Robert X. Cringely covers the birth of what he calls the 4th largest industry in the world (after cars, energy production, and illegal drugs) from its infancy in the world of semi-conductors until just before the explosion of the Internet. This book is the basis for the mid 1990s PBS multi-hour documentary “Triumph of the Nerds” (not to be confused with the TNT original movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley” which dramatizes a subset of the same material) which is pretty epic in its own right (although, according to Amazon reviews the DVD version has been shortened considerably compared to what originally aired). (more…)

I am generally not a very political person and I did not start reading this book for political reasons. As such, I start this review in an unusual fashion.

In 2004 as Jessica Simpson was getting ready to marry Nick Lachey, she came out with a book entitled “Jessica Simpson I Do: Achieving Your Dream Wedding“. In fairness, I never read this book. I did, however, see her interviewed on a few different talk shows when she was promoting it so I got the gist of what her advice was:

1. Get yourself a million dollars
2. Spend it on a really nice wedding

While that may have worked for her, it wasn’t advice that was terribly practical for the general public.

I know, you’re asking yourself, “What could this possibly have to do with Barack Obama?” (more…)

If you mix up a little dash of sociology, a pinch of marketing, and a few tablespoons of analytical thinking and you get:

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
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There are only two books I’ve read more than twice. Michael Crichton’s Sphere (awesome science fiction that’s much better than the movie with a miscast Sharon Stone playing an unattractive scientist who is self conscious about her inability to attract men) and The Dilbert Principle. Nobody in the past 15 years has accurately captured office existence, and nerd sub-culture in particular, than Scott Adams. Dilbert personifies all that it means to be an engineer with everything to his clothing, love of problem solving, and lack of social skills. In 1996, Adams expanded on an article he wrote for the Wall Street Journal into a book:

The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle’s-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions
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You have to understand a little bit about marketing in order to function well with the MBA’s in your life that come up with ideas for products. It’s a necessary evil of engineering. That’s not to say that you have to go out and buy MBAs for Dummies or something similar, though. Instead, there are lots of more interesting materials out there.

OK, I admit a bias on this one. As someone who makes their living creating web sites, I may bring a prejudice to the topic of using the Internet in a variety of ways. Still, it’s not like the Internet doesn’t touch everyone’s lives, though. It just happens to touch mine not only as a user of its content, but as one of the millions of creators of it as well.

With that, I bring you a (perhaps the) defining marketing book of the Internet Age:

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More
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