I’ve read more than a few books about systems thinking and business processes, including All That Matters About Quality I Learned in Joe’s Garage, a few on the Toyota Production System, and several on kaizen and lean manufacturing.
It’s another in Tim’s series of business books that are written around stories: business realities woven into narrative. It’s definitely his best yet.
Systems thinking is not natural for most people. In today’s complex business processes, inputs and outputs are widely separated in space and time … often by continents and months, if not years. So inefficiency and worse, ineffectiveness are hard to spot and harder to fix.
(Inefficiency, of course, is doing the right thing in the wrong way, and ineffectiveness is doing the wrong thing, period. You want to improve the first, but you need to ensure you’re locked on to the second.)
Since systems aren’t things and can’t easily be visualized, it helps when SWAT makes the system come alive. Embedding the information in an engaging story is something that makes the teaching transparent and the learning effortless. Plus, the book is brief and to the point: perfect for busy people.
I learned from SWAT while enjoying SWAT: I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to improve business (and other) processes while focusing on the outcome.
I’ve owned and been reading from a Kindle for a couple of weeks now. A number of people have been asking when I’ll post some thoughts on it … so here goes.
What I didn’t like
I won’t be curling up with it
I stare at a screen 10-12 hours a day, sometimes more. That might be the 3.5″ screen of my iPhone, the 23″ plus 13″ screens of my laptop and external monitor, or the 42″ screen of my TV (this one is a little rare lately!).
Surprise, surprise … in my downtime (which means: recreational reading) I don’t want to stare at a screen.
It’s just not as good a reading experience as a book
The Kindle is definitely a gadget … and it doesn’t feel like a book. And, it doesn’t read like a book.
I’m a fast reader, and I find I need to turn the pages so often that it gets annoying. A page on Kindle at a decent but not tiny resolution is not very many words, meaning that I’m flipping more than once a minute. Each time there’s a little hesitation/interruption in my reading process, my state, my flow. Each time, it’s annoying.
I don’t like the positioning of the buttons
The buttons are oddly placed. If you want to hold it widescreen, you can’t reach the Next Page button without effort (a couple of times a second, remember). The big buttons on the left and the right are BOTH for Next Page … whereas intuitively the left side might be Last Page and the right page might be Next Page. The small button above the next page is Prev Page on the left and Home on the right … another inconsistency.
And don’t get me started the on the “5-way button” that is masquerading as a mouse.
The keyboard hates humans
Writing notes on the Kindle – page notes, footnotes etc. – is a masochistic exercise. The keyboard is easily the worst I’ve ever used. Painful! Slow! Annoying!
I just want to touch it NOW
Sorry, world. iPhone has spoiled me rotten and now when I can’t use touch on a small screen it gets extremely annoying. Several times I found myself touching the screen trying to do something quickly and easily … only to find that the device was, after all, dumb and unresponsive.
Books not on Kindle
Having a Kindle makes you want to buy books on Kindle … or at least acquire them. And when you have the capability of getting books INSTANTLY on Kindle, you want to. So when books are not available in Kindle format … even books by people who should be clueful enough like Seth Godin … it gets annoying. Having to get it shipped and having to wait a half a week for the physical object suddenly seems intolerable.
In addition, there are hundreds of thousands of books that are in the public domain which sellers of e-readers who don’t make their money selling books make it easy for you to access. Not Kindle. It’s hard to get free books from, say, Google or Project Gutenberg on your Kindle. You need to download third-party software, install it, find books, and then transfer them over to your Kindle via USB.
What I did like
Immediacy
Obviously, getting a hot new book right away (read, in a couple of minutes) is a wonderful, excellent, exciting feature. This is perhaps the best feature of the Kindle.
Small, thin, and portable
The Kindle – I got the smaller, 6″ version – is so thin and light you won’t know you’re carrying it around. It’s easy to just slip in a bag and run. I could even fit it in my jeans’ back pocket (but I don’t recommend sitting down!)
Business/trade books
While I didn’t like the Kindle for relaxation and recreational reading, I found it just fine for books that I’m reading for information: business books, books about technology, etc. etc. I would typically dive into a book for 5-15 minutes, and then get back to whatever I was doing.
For this kind of reading – Twitter-style, you might say – I think the Kindle works fine.
Battery life
As long as you turn it completely off – important caveat: sleeping is not off – the battery lasts a loooong time. This is great … you don’t have to take the charger along on a week-long trip. Just throw the Kindle in the bag and go.
. . .
. . .
Overall, I think I’ll stick primarily to paper books for now when I want to read for fun. For business/trade books, I’ll probably switch just due to convenience, price, and availability.
Interestingly, I recently played with a Nook in a Barnes & Noble and actually liked it better. David Pogue savaged the Nook in the NY Times, but I liked the feel better, felt there were a few more words on the screen, and really liked the touchscreen feature. It’s not perfect, but I think they may have a winner in the 2.0 version.
After a few more months of using the Kindle, I’ll probably update these thoughts.
For every 100 books we sell in physical, we sell 48 Kindle books,” said Cinthia Portugal, a spokeswoman for Amazon.com. “This is up from 35 books for every 100 in May. Our customers tell us they read more with Kindle because they never have to worry about running out of books.”
Wow. This is great – you can’t invent stuff this good.
Sony has had a digital reader product for some time now: Reader Digital Book. Lately Amazon refreshed its Kindle, and is of course getting much more virtual ink.
So here’s a small piece of Sony’s marketing campaign that I stumbled across during a routine Google search:
Complaints are too easy – I like to blog raves as well as rants.
I’ve just received excellent, above-and-beyond, unexpected great services from two class organizations: Blurb, and the Nielsen Norman Group.
Blurb recently printed the book I did for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. A number of books arrived with scratches. I emailed them, they asked for a photo, I emailed a photo back, and they immediately shipped out new copies.
Nielsen Norman Group publishes usability studies, among other things. I ordered a downloadable product from them, not realizing it was only part of a study and not terribly useful on its own. Upon getting and reading through the study – and realizing that it was not what I needed – I emailed customer service. They immediately refunded my money, and asked me to delete the PDF from my computer, which I did.
Simple, fast, helpful.
In both cases: wow and thanks. You exceeded my expectations.
My parents recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. So my sisters and I held a celebration at the Four Seasons in Vancouver … and we also created a book showcasing my parents’ lives and our life as a family.
I used Blurb to create the book. It was great, but as with all projects like this, the hard work was in selecting, digitizing, and cleaning up the photos. My wife Teresa and I probably put in over 50 hours of work into the book, but the results are spectacular.
Sophomoric. I read a lot of Alan Dean Foster as a teen, enjoying it though realizing this was not anything approaching great literature.
The two most unfortunate things about Alan Dean Foster novels:
1) Gratuitous use of vocabulary
Didn’t an English teacher ever tell him to stop pulling out a thesaurus? Has he never read Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, or Strunk & White? Does he still think he’s 13 and impressing people with big words?
2) Poor editing
Has he had such boffo box office that he’s now immune to expert copy editing? Numerous head-scratching cases of oddly counterposed sentences jump out of the text. Example on page 8: ” … the elongated beach resort was one of the least crowded on the continent. It well suited the multitudes that thronged to its shores …” Huh? Is it uncrowded, or is it thronged? The beach can hardly be both.
In both these characteristics, Foster’s writing is definitely in the “baffle them with bullshit” category.
In spite of all good intentions, it sat on at table in my office for two months. I’ve just now started to crack it open and check it out. I have to say, I like it.
I’m currently reading Chris Hunter’s Eight Lives Down, an autobiography of his time in Iraq with the British army as an explosives technician, defusing bombs and IEDs.
He starts off every chapter with a quote, and I really appreciated this one:
We tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
– Gaius Petronius (AD 66)
Having gone through my fair share of re-orgs in the past decade, that 2000-year old quote rings very true.
What I’ve done till now is just post titles and authors to this blog. I noticed and checked out Shelfari years and years ago, but never really got the hang of it, and never really posted any books to it.
However, I just tried it a few days ago, and it’s incredibly easy … so I’m going to try entering my books there. They’ll still display here via the Shelfari widget.
One thing that I might miss is that occasionally I would add a mini review to a book. I know you can do it on Shelfari too, but I’m not sure how to expose that on this site.
I just finished my recent semester and can get into some serious reading. Here’s what’s been on my bookshelf lately:
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond Great book, really excellent … exploring the various factors in how societies fail. Talked about Anasazi, Norse in Greenland, Easter Island, Rwanda, and many other cultures/societies.
Bias, by Bernard Goldberg Interesting book on the bias in what and how established media cover the “news.”
East of Desolation, by Jack Higgins Fluffy but enjoyable.
The Borman Testament, by Jack Higgins Ditto.
The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmon Overrated – bigtime. I am seriously not impressed with books that mix science fiction and fantasy …
More details later … but we’ve got to run into town to the library, mall, and grocery store as it’s snowing outside and we’re a little worried we won’t be able to drive soon.
Yesterday I bought 27 books from Amazon – mostly from the marketplace. Why not? The book are almost new, and they’re easily half off or less.Today I got a notice that a book I bought via the marketplace was previously sold.No biggie – I just went back to Amazon, chose the next available seller for the book, and bought it again.Here’s the deal: when Amazon sends out that kind of email, they should include a link to re-purchase. That would probably increase their sales from people whose purchases are no longer available.And would make an already very usable store even more so.
John Varley’s Mammoth:Great read with a nice twist at the end.Blindsight by Peter Watts:Dark – both literally and figuratively. Impressive work, though.Menace in Europe, by Claire Berlinski:Good read, but a pretty pessimistic view of Europe’s direction. Berlinski should know, though: she’s a grand-daughter of Jewish escapees from Hitler’s Germany and lives in Europe today.Platinum Pohl, by (of course) Frederick Pohl:Collected best short stories of Frederick Pohl … and Pohl’s best is very, very good.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
I'm a software exec who cares about UX and UI, scours web & social media, lives in Canada, plays hockey, uses a Mac (mostly). Oh, and I blog and speak at conferences.
I’ve owned and been reading from a Kindle for a couple of weeks now. A number of people have been asking when I’ll post some thoughts on it … so here goes.
Complaints are too easy – I like to blog raves as well as rants.
No biggie – I just went back to Amazon, chose the next available seller for the book, and bought it again.Here’s the deal: when Amazon sends out that kind of email, they should include a link to re-purchase. That would probably increase their sales from people whose purchases are no longer available.And would make an already very usable store even more so.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
