It must be a lot of pressure to live up to the billing of “James Bond of design research” and the “Indiana Jones of technology for the developing world.” I mean, what do you wear? A tux with a dusty brimmed hat? Action adventure movie references aside, Chipchase takes us on a rollicking global adventure in his new book, Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Create Extraordinary Products for Tomorrow’s Customers, which hit the bookshelves in April.

Design research, Chipchase explains in his first chapter, “Crossing State (of Mind) Lines,” concerns itself with identifying the unmet needs of customers. And if you can spot those, then you can be ahead of the curve in terms of innovation.

Often, when people cross a threshold from one state into its alternative, or when they avoid crossing that boundary by taking an action to steer themselves away form the borderline, it’s a matter of maintaining standards of acceptability and appropriateness. For designers to understand what lies within the boundaries of acceptable use and what lies outside those boundarieas, they need to understand the contexts in which things will be used, and the range of likely conditions that will change that context in some way.

In the same way that a testing laboratory can help us understand the boundary between normal and extreme (and probably out-of-warranty) use of a product, design research helps us understand the boundaries of normal behaviors.

But where to look? Chipchase’s answer: in plain sight. Look for patterns of use, for every day objects that can be improved on. You needn’t create something new out of whole cloth; instead, you can identify how an existing object might be ripe for an evolution. People use ‘things’ to identify themselves by, Chipchase explains in “The Social Lives of Everyday Objects,” and are eager for not only new items but for meaningful items.

It may seem arbitrary to take a simple everyday item and suddenly imbue it with powerful symbolism, but in our modern culture of branding and conspicuous consumption, just about every product on our shelves can be construed as some metaphor for personal identity. We use the word superficial pejoratively to describe people who are overly concerned with such symbols, yet we’re all concerned with them to some degree, because we all use objects–from over ones like jewelry and cars to subtle ones like the reading materials we stop in our bathrooms–as tools to communicate aspects of ourselves.

Stay ahead of that curve, and you tap into what’s ‘next.’ And if you want to narrow the focus even further concentrate on the objects people carry. Literally. There are very few items which are indispensable to people. Chipchase says in “You Are What You Carry.” Most of us carry a wallet, phone, and keys, Chipchase explains, so think about how those three items are redundant. Could the next invention be one that allows our phones to work as keys to our houses and as a method of payment? It’s already happening! What else is indispensable to us, beyond what we carry in our hands? Our cars? Zipcar. Our groceries? Peapod. Now the challenge is to figure out how to refine those solutions even further and make them more accessible.

Because accessibility matters. All of those innovations above are all well and good, and may improve the lives of most users, but Chipchase also asks us to wonder who high design leaves behind. For people who are illiterate, for example, design that does not rely on text is desperately important. And, Chipchase reminds us, we are all illiterate at some point in our lives.

Illiteracy is, arguably, fundamental to the human condition, in that every single person lacks at least some amount of knowledge that other people possess, and every deficit of knowledge comes with the cost of being unable to perform certain tasks without assistance. Nobody is expected to know everything. Everyone is illiterate in some regard.

Which restroom do you use when the signs on the door are in a foreign language? How do you learn how to use your new cell phone’s technology if you can’t read? These are questions Chipchase compels us to ask, however, he recognizes in “The Great Tradeoff” that it’s a compromise. You can’t make “everything” for every person, to riff off a popular phrase. People will adapt and users become adept at figuring out other ways of making objects work for them, and maybe some people will be left behind. “The idea of an “optimally” designed product has its allure, but optimal for whom and for what purpose? … And given that there’s more than one notion of optimality, how do you reconcile the differences? And who gets to decide?” The answer isn’t readily available, but Chipchase believes that it is the designer’s responsibility to always aim for “creating meaningful products and services” because “the poor can least afford to purchase poorly designed products and services….”

Chipchase ends his book with an appendix of “The Eight Principles of Design Research” that will help keep his insights on design research front of mind. Ultimately the closer you look at what is hidden in plain sight, the less remains hidden from view.

From all these little things, all these lenses into life, you’ll have the means to a greater appreciation of how the world works. You may use this knowledge to get more out of your vacation, to develop a greater sense of “being there,” which will ultimately remind you what you like and dislike about life back home. You may draw inspiration from the creative ways that people make do with the limited resources that they have. Or you may use these newfound insights to reimagine your business and bring a rich palette of ideas to bear on the challenges you and your customers face.

There’s a certain urgency to the new book by Mitch Joel, Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends On It. Its sentiment has also been expressed by authors such as Gary Vaynerchuk: Business is changing and if you don’t keep up, you’ll be left behind. And that’s putting it nicely.

What Joel is saying is that if we don’t change, our companies will go out of business, and we ourselves will become unemployable. Scary stuff, yes, but the good news is the book has the answers to avoid these problems. Both Joel (and authors like Vaynerchuk) tell us what we already know and see around us, but might not understand the intricacies of: Technology is moving at a very fast rate. For instance, we acquire and learn one device, master one platform, just in time for it to be outdated, and as we scramble to keep up, there are others, millions actually, who are ahead of the curve, and are participating in what they see on the platforms, sites, and devices they have. Some companies are prepared to communicate with people on whatever the cutting edge is, but others aren’t, and the size of each platform or device’s audience depends on how fast tech know-how and innovation move together, and how communication savvy both sides are.

Joel explains:

Whether it’s a corporate head office or a massive retailer, where you put that physical entity has a direct correlation to your success. Here’s a new spin on that theory: With people spending more and more of their time looking, reviewing, and shopping online, the new real estate is whatever screen is in front of the consumer.

How great does a brand have to be to earn a coveted place on the home screen of a consumer’s iPhone? Recent data and research do not speak kindly to how well brands are integrating into these new neighborhoods and communities. In the Digiday news item “Saving Abandoned Brand Mobile Apps” (March 29, 2012), Giselle Abramovich reports that one in four mobile apps are never used again after being downloaded and that 26 percent of apps aren’t used more than once. Do you think it is because are branded apps? Probably not. The likely (and brutally honest) answer is this: Most branded apps suck.

Now think about this on an individual level. Just as companies are challenged to stay relevant, so are our individual skills, experiences, and understanding about how business and people currently work. Think about what these things were to you 5 years ago. Now think about how they’ve changed. That process, according to Joel, will only increase. Resting too much on what we’ve done in the past might make it difficult to adapt to what is expected now. Without adaptability, we might slow processes down, become the weak link in the team, and may not even be hired.

According to Joel, the answer is to get “squiggly,” which is sort of an intuitive, improvisatory sense. He states:

You will have to adapt to a world where your career can (and should) get squiggly. You wind up seeing, reading, and listening to a lot of content (both online and in traditional publications) that speaks to the coming years and what businesses should expect in terms of disruptions, predictions, new channels, and shinier and brighter objects. It’s almost easier to say that everything we have known about business continues to change and that the only constant in our lives will be change. Fine. Dandy. Now what? The true adaptation for you (and your business) will not be about how smart you are with your marketing or whether or not you’re doing clever things in spaces like Twitter or Facebook. True adaptation will come from how well you can get over what I call “the lazy” and move to a place where squiggly becomes your friend.

This book is an important reminder to look at the world, business, and ourselves in ways we might not be. Keeping up with changes is challenging, but with books like this, it becomes much easier.

If I were to ask my husband to make a “to-do” list of the things he wants to get done over the weekend, the list would top out at around 20 items. On it would be anything from cleaning out the garage and going to the bank…to moving our garden to the east side of the yard and building a new set of stairs. Over the 16 years we’ve been married, I’ve been a witness to his inability to whittle that list down to something manageable many times, and the inevitable result that he gets none of those 20 things done because he is overwhelmed and distracted. He wants to get it all done, and is unsatisfied by anything less. I doubt my husband’s method is rare. In fact, it’s likely pretty common. We all buy into the myth that we must be uber-productive and any inability to multi-task is a glitch in our character.

But trying to do too much is a hard habit to break. Thank goodness we (and my husband) have The One Thing by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan. Not only will the authors help you establish a practice of whittling down that menacing “to-do” list to increase productivity, but he will also help you understand yourself better, making it easier to find and stick to your personal ONE Thing.

Keller and Papasan open the book with a Russian proverb: “If You Chase Two Rabbits You Will Not Catch Either One.” And that is a fitting synopsis of the book’s premise. But really, the book is populated with similar easy-to-remember catch-phrases that you can carry with you as you apply the ONE Thing process. Another is to “go small.”

“Going small” is ignoring all the things you could do and doing what you should do. It’s recognizing that not all things matter equally and finding the things that matter most. It’s a tighter way to connect what you do with what you want. It’s realizing that extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus.

Pretty antithetical to the message we usually receive about productivity, isn’t it? But the authors back up their theory with a little physics. The chapter titled, “The Domino Effect,” describes how the momentum of one small domino can not only knock over many dominoes, but also knock much larger dominoes. Why does this work? “Because extraordinary success is sequential, not simultaneous.” Not only can small accomplishments add up to big results, a series of small results can actually add up to much more progress than if you were doing two tasks at once. “Every time we try to do two or more things at once, we’re simply dividing up our focus and dumbing down all of the outcomes in the process.”

I think nearly all of us have a friend or colleague whom we regard as being admirably focused. We long to be as disciplined, and we treat that person with a sort of reverence. The One Thing offers us relief from this envy: discipline and willpower are over-rated. “When you do the right thing, it can liberate you from having to monitor everything.” Concentrate on establishing a habit, rather than trying to change your character.

Returning to my husband’s inclination to overload his to-do list, even if he buys the argument that multi-tasking is bun, and he needs to concentrate on that first domino, how does he deduce what his ONE Thing is? The second half of The One Thing focuses on solving that conundrum, and it’s this section of the book that is truly revelatory. The authors start by encouraging us to ask one “focusing” question:

What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

Parse out that question, and you’ll begin to see that the ONE Thing process is, well, two-fold. First, you must determine your “big picture” ONE Thing. Then, you will ask yourself: “What’s my ONE Thing right now?” The answer to that question becomes your first domino. Is this a bit of a cheat? Doesn’t the premise of the book become “The Two Things?” No, the authors explain: “Your big ONE Thing is your purpose and your small ONE Thing is the priority you take action on to achieve it.”

The third section of the book steps you through the process of finding that ONE Thing you dream of, that thing that sometimes seems too big to achieve. The formula the authors present consists of Productivity, Priority, and Purpose. The section concludes with a chapter on how to implement the ONE Thing process in every area of your life. And the authors’ enthusiasm is contagious:

So be prepared to live a new life! And remember that the secret to extraordinary results is to ask a very big and specific question that leads you to one very small and tightly focused answer.

To help you practice the ONE Thing approach, in addition to providing winners with a copy of the book, The One Thing, we will also send you a door hanger that will remind you and your coworkers/family that you are working the ONE Thing philosophy, as well as a mousepad/notepad on which you can practice the process.

Sign up today to win the gift of greater productivity! Then visit us in the forums to discuss what you’ve learned and how you’ve applied the concepts to your own work.

“What do people think of you? What do they say when you leave the room?” Maybe you don’t think you have a brand. Hopefully you don’t think that. As Dorie Clark demonstrates in her new book, Reinventing You, taking control of your professional future hinges on your acceptance and understanding of your current brand, and your ability to take control of where that brand is going.

OK—we can call it a reputation, if that makes you feel better. As Clark points out early on, we simply can’t afford to disregard the impact that our personal brand has on our success.

The idea that you can just keep your head down and work without any regard to office politics, for instance, has been thoroughly discredited.

Some might perceive a keen interest in one’s own reputation as tacky, but so what? If ‘too cool to care’ is your M.O., you might be risking your professional future. Even further, a lack of concern for your public image is a red flag to your manager—future or current—and if you’re a freelancer, it’s a warning to your potential clients. Companies and managers want to work with people on whom they can rely to be not only effective on the job, but also friendly and conscientious. If you’re not actively engaging your bosses (i.e. maintaining your brand), you’re risking being forgotten, or worse.

Reinventing You is a step-by-step manual for actively steering your career. The beginning is an assessment. Clark provides strategies for discovering the reality of your current brand, so that you can get an idea of what needs to change. This includes asking friends and colleagues to participate in focus groups, as well as using data from past performance reviews from employers. Especially if you’ve never done an assessment of your brand, you will learn a lot. One important thing to remember is that others’ perception of you is effectively reality. Whether you agree with the results of your assessment or not, it’s important that you take them seriously and use those results as your starting point.

After you have some idea how you look to the public, you’re ready to take aim on your destination and try your hand at living your future. Clark advises trying the work you’re interested in. It might not be easy to land your new dream job right off the bat, but you can get started on your new path by volunteering or shadowing in your target field. As Clark says:

To avoid costly mistakes—and wasting your energy—you can take a short-term test-drive.

This experience is often unpaid, but the most important part has already been stated: experience. It’s out there if you want it.

Throughout the rest of the book, Clark walks us through essentials like key skill development, finding a mentor, and one of my favorite topics, leveraging your points of difference. As a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ myself, I love bringing the crucial ‘outsider perspective’ to a project. In the current market, your diverse background is much more likely to be a benefit than a drawback. Clark demonstrates the benefits of transferable skills and your unique identity, and the importance of analyzing your skills through the lens of the current marketplace. Skills you’ve had and valued for a decade might no longer be valued, while other skills you perhaps have taken for granted might be more highly-valued than you thought. Don’t miss the value you bring to the job.

Your reinvention won’t be as simple as point A to point B. In fact, it’s almost certainly going to be hard work, and it doesn’t stop once you land that new job. Wherever you are going, Reinventing You will help you map your path and arrive to a newly-defined you with the skills and image to make your new career a success. The book even contains a self-assessment, re-cap questions at the end of each chapter, and group discussion questions at the back of the book. Start by reminding yourself that your future is too important to be left up to chance; then open Reinventing You and get started.

For your weekend perusal, here is another installment of Friday Links

➻ Calvin Ried’s coverage of the BISG’s MIP (The Book Industry Study Group’s Making Information Pay Conference) 2013: A New World of Big Data, Complexity and Collaboration for Publishers Weekly yesterday was a treasure of interesting insights:

BISG executive director Len Vlahos gave an overview of “The Digital Consumer” using data from its “Consumer Attitudes Towards E-book Reading Survey,” in particular looking at the behavior of “Power Buyers” or consumers who buy at least one e-book a week. They represent about 17% of all e-book buyers, they are likely to be a women aged 55-64, and are “grown not born,” he said, noting that they buy physical books and e-book interchangeably and have grown into being “power” e-book buyers over time. Vlahos also noted that while 80% of Power Buyers shop at Amazon, 40% shop at B&N and 30% buy or use libraries/OverDrive to find the e-books they buy. And while dedicated e-readers continue to dominate, their dominance is slipping (and the use of iPads for reading is growing) and Power Buyers generally own tablets and e-readers (though they prefer dedicated e-readers for reading).

That is just one bit of the fascinating data provided in the Ried’s coverage. But what does it all mean for those that write, publish, and sell books? What, if anything, does that data do to the way we move forward as an industry? If anything, it shows that we must continue to work together:

Ken Michaels, president of Hachette Book Group and chairman of BISG, closed the conference with a presentation on change and adaptation, noting that “the world is changing more rapidly than we realize.” In particular he noted that the former linear supply chain in publishing—the familiar publisher to distributer to retailer paradigm—has been replaced by a crazy and complex constellation of financial interests and sevices surrounding one central figure—the reader. He also used this new paradigm to promote industry collaboration, like BookStats.

“We see complexity as an opportunity,” Michaels said, “not because we can figure it out in isolation, but because we can participate togther in organizations like AAP, BISG, IDPF and others, without which we couldn’t educate ourselves about the best practices in this new world.”

And speaking of collaboration, this time internal, the BBC went inside HarperCollins in London to see how their covers come to life in a cool little video, Cover to Cover: How are book jackets designed?

➻ Taking a look inside another literary institution, Julie V. Iovine of the Wall Street Journal writes that The Library’s Future Is Not an Open Book. It’s a great overview of a paradigm shift taking place in libraries throughout the country and shows that libraries continue to be some of the most dynamic, forward thinking institutions in the country. The piece deserves a full read, but this excerpt should begin to give you the gist of the article:

Branch libraries have long served as community hubs offering book clubs and after-school story times. But central libraries, dedicated to the care and maintenance of weighty collections within ornately crafted and lofty spaces, are having to recast themselves. Thanks to the shift of emphasis to online resources over hard copies, the prevalence of mobile technologies and changing approaches to studying and learning, libraries have a different social purpose. “I used to be greeted by a sea of faces with questions like how to spell ‘Albuquerque,’” said Amy E. Ryan, a career librarian since the 1970s and now president of the Boston Public Library. “That’s all over. It’s now about providing an experience.”

That experience still includes books, but more importantly for our true education and the health of our civic life, it includes the serendipity of discovery, of the unexpected, of the other and the unfamiliar—something I think is less prevalent as algorithms dictate who and what we see and read in our lives online.

I also believe that if the world were a perfect place, libraries would become the central, not-for-profit wireless providers in their communities. There are a number of models that could be explored, and the for-profit businesses we have providing this public service now are 1: dead last in most customer satisfaction polls, and 2: lagging behind much of the developed world in providing hi-speed service and capacity. The best ideas they seem to be able to come up with is to charge their most loyal customers more and to tier their services, which explains the public’s low esteem of them.

➻ As always, while the Amazon continues to be depleted, Amazon the company just keeps growing. In the news this week, Joanna Stern wrote about Amazon Introducing Amazon Coins—Virtual Currency for Buying Apps and Games, Greg Bensinger reports that Amazon Is Developing Smartphone With 3-D Screen, the Guardian‘s Ian Griffiths and Simon Bowers have Fresh questions for Amazon over pittance it pays in tax, and Dave Jamieson tells us about Amazon Warehouse Workers Suing Over Security Checkpoint Waits, all while Amazon employees strike in Germany. From Melville House’s Kelly Burdick on that last point:

An Amazon spokesperson said the strikes will not affect shipments in Germany.

That said, the action is significant—it’s the first meaningful labor action against Amazon anywhere in the world and an ironic mark against Amazon, a high-tech company suffering from the “distinctly old world malaise of industrial action,” as the FT puts it.the action is significant — it’s the first meaningful labor action against Amazon anywhere in the world and an ironic mark against Amazon, a high-tech company suffering from the “distinctly old world malaise of industrial action,” as the FT puts it.

I would suggest that, if Amazon doesn’t want to deal with the “old world malaise of industrial action,” they should probably not rely on old world industrial labor conditions.

➻ Over at Salon, Ted Heller says Goodnight, sweet print, asking “Are words on paper gone forever?” At the same time Fast Company‘s Addy Dugdale tells us that Qantas Urges Passengers To Ditch Their Kindles For A Paperback Book

A collaboration between Hachette and Droga5 is attempting to get Qantas’s passengers to turn their tablets and e-readers off, and turn instead to paperbacks.

Stories For Every Journey is a collection of bespoke books aimed at the airline’s frequent flyers. Each of the 10 volumes has been written to allow travelers to devour it, front to back, within the flight time–longer flights allow the passenger to devour a meal, throw back a few glasses of wine, and settle down for some sleep, with enough time left to finish the book.

In the Christian Science Monitor, Donna Bryson explores A ‘novel’ idea for spreading literature in Africa: The cellphone. And taking a look at a fascinating new book from Simon & Schuster, Claire Kelley wrote yesterday that Jaron Lanier offers to save the book business, but even his own publisher doesn’t listen:

In her review of his new book Who Owns the Future?, Janet Maslin adds another descriptor, calling Lanier a “mega-wizard in futurist circles. ” But she could have also called him a “book publishing strategist.” In the final chapter of his book, Lanier lays out his thoughts on the future of books and offers a money-making scheme to save the book business:

It amazes me that traditional book publishers don’t understand the emotional value of paper… To survive, the book business has to define a product for the upper horn, for the rich… there should be hyper limited editions of books like this one, hand copied by monks onto handmade paper, using organic fair-trade inks, and sold only in VIP rooms at parties where almost no one can get in. Listen up, publisher, you are with these very words publishing the advice that could win you a fortune, but you are choosing to ignore a way to get through these tough times.

Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Who Owns the Future? was apparently unwilling to take the leap. Seemingly resigned to the inability of publishers to heed his warnings, Lanier offers possible outcomes once the book industry has been completely overhauled by Silicon Valley.

Man… with the physical book disappearing, maybe it’s a good thing so many of us practice Tsundoku.

➻All of these links make my head hurt after a while, which brings me back to the ideas of Simple: Conquering the Crisis of Complexity.

➻ You may too old for summer camp, but if you’d like to take two weeks away from home this summer to build new relationships and “a new online thing,” check out the Summer 2013 Seth Godin Internship.

➻ Do you realize that we’re floating in space?

Monster Loyalty: How to Build Customer Loyalty like Lady Gaga
by Jackie Huba

“While known as much for her voice as for her over-the-top wardrobe, few recognize Lady Gaga for her stunning business acumen, which has earned her legions of loyal fans worldwide.”

Brains Favor the Ridiculously In Charge Leader by Henry Cloud, Ph.D

“Leaders must establish some key boundaries in some very key areas if they want to get results. And, thanks to brain research, we now can scientifically get a peek into why the leaders who do establish these kinds of boundaries get the results that they get.”

Mentorship 2.0: How to Find the Mentor You Need by Dorie Clark

“Waiting for a mentor to appear like a deus ex machina is a loser’s game. Some people luck out, but most don’t. This manifesto is about how to make your own luck—how to proactively identify the people you want in your life as mentors, cultivate real relationships, and look beyond the obvious.”

Recharge: 7 Ways to Improve Innovative Thinking by Debra Kaye

“If companies want to innovate the way successful bold newcomers have, they have to unplug from the constraints of, ‘That’s the way we’ve always done it,’ and recharge, starting with the mantra, ‘Let’s just not do that anymore.’”

The Art of Adherence by Lee J. Colan, PhD & Julie Davis-Colan

“Achieving adherence is simple but not necessarily easy. It takes skill and creativity to continually nurture focus, competence, and passion with your team. This is why we call it the art of adherence.”

An Action Plan for Making Good Customer Service a Reality by Kirk Kazanjian

“Any company can market and promote that they are experts at cuddling customers, but very few ever get the formula for execution right. [...] They like to talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk.”

Two conversations I had last week got me thinking about networking.

➻ The first was during a brainstorming meeting with Jon, our general manager, about our annual author conference. The meeting ended with a discussion on the value of mentoring, and the predominance of books that advocate for the practice.

➻ The second was over a drink with a friend who was joking about the state of her golf game. When I commented that I had no desire to learn the sport, she explained that she works in an industry in which golf is still an elemental aspect of networking. She challenged herself with learning the game in large part to not miss out on opportunities to build relationships.

I hadn’t really come to any conclusions beyond this one: networking can be difficult. Showing up at local events to shakes hands and pass business cards isn’t for everyone. Nor is putting a little white ball into a hole. Asking for help, confiding your struggles, taking advice: none of these things come particularly naturally for business people who often strive to appear efficient, in control and decisive. But maybe these are all just requirements of networking that are gradually becoming archaic.

Pamela Ryckman, author of Stiletto Network: Inside the Women’s Power Circles That Are Changing The Face of Business, would agree that it’s time for women to look a little differently at networking.

I’ll admit I didn’t know what to make of this book initially. Reading through the publisher copy, I was perplexed by the celebration of networking groups of women with names like the “Power Bitches”; “Brazen Hussies”; and the “S.L.U.T.S.” (Successful Ladies Under Tremendous Stress). It’s not that I’m humorless about language exactly. It’s more that I’m skeptical of the efficacy of a minority group reappropriating derogatory language in order to re-empower that word and, as a result, that group. Is it attention getting? Sure. Is it a way for a group of women to be defiant in the face of continued discrimination? Possibly. But, to me, it can also be confrontational and limiting. And because this is my personal preference, I wasn’t sure I could enthusiastically recommend this book.

That was before researching the author, Pamela Ryckman. She herself describes the book this way:

Stiletto Network is a story of female friendship—disguised as a business story, a tale of women banding together to improve lives and companies and communities, to achieve their destinies and change the world.

This ‘elevator pitch’ is warm, positive, and powerful–just like the author herself. Spend some time with Pamela Ryckman by watching the video below, and I think you’ll find yourself excited in a whole new way about networking.

Delving into the book, you’ll find the material within just as inviting and optimistic. In Stiletto Network, Ryckman recognizes a new power trend in business: women banding together to bust through those barriers that continue to impede an individual woman’s progress. She offers examples of real-life women who have found networks and mentors to help them get further faster.

While Shauna Mei [founder of AHAlife, a women-centric shopping site] seems remarkable, she is not an outlier. Increasingly, behind aspiring women entrepreneurs stand older female mentors and investors. Many of these elders made it the old way–the hard way, the way with lots of battles–but they’re now secure in their positions. Now that there’s room for more women at the top, they don’t fear being displaced by the younger, newer model. They can breathe. And after forty years of women in the workforce, isn’t it easier, not to mention more fun, when ‘you or me’ becomes ‘you and me’?

Despite the book advocating gender comradeship, Ryckman makes it clear that gender isn’t really the most important thing. “Gender alone won’t qualify any woman for membership in the club. For Stiletto Networks to be relevant and desirable, they must be rooted in shared experience and true sympathy–which means they must have some form of exclusivity.” Exclusivity is a difficult word to use in relation to minorities, and more precisely, for women. Exclusivity can act similarly to discrimination. It brings to mind “cliques” and “hierarchy” and being the last kid picked for gym class. Ryckman defends the requirement of exclusivity by clarifying that extreme inclusiveness can just cause these individual circles to get watered down and less effective. Ryckman also stresses that these networks should not become “mentoring programs” because they easily become imbalanced with young women outnumbering the experienced. Stiletto networks, she says, work best when peer-to-peer.

So is the answer to the oppression of women in business the exclusion of men? No, Ryckman says.

For occasional bonding trips, segregation might make sense. But on a day-to-day basis, men and women need to mix and…prepare to play on coed teams. It’s happening, as more boys are raised by mothers who work (yet are still involved and loving), as men strive to create opportunities for their daughters, as husbands slowly increase their share of duties at home, and as boys and girls collaborate in school. Men and women are starting, just now, to meet in the middle.

And if it takes women circling together to make their presence in business undeniable, then the added benefit, Ryckman rejoices, is that these women will enjoy the journey, and maybe even the battle, all the more because they are doing it together.

When we talk about breakthrough simplicity, we mean an interaction that cuts through the clutter. This is a standard that should be applied to everything a company puts out into the world, from the product to the ads down to the smallest piece of correspondence: It should do its job quickly, clearly, simply. People just don’t have the time or the interest to wade through corporate rhetoric and jargon to figure out what you’re trying to tell them. Through clarity of thought and presentation, it’s possible for a business to rise above the cacophony of today’s marketplace.

This quote from the new book, Simple: Conquering the Crisis of Complexity by Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn, is about as explanatory as it gets. Be it cleverness, verbosity, poor design, or perhaps even a company’s own confusion with what its focus and purpose are, there’s a lot of complexity in how some companies appear to the world. And it doesn’t end there. Taking a step beyond the doors of many organizations and you’ll possibly find many other layers of miscommunication, misunderstanding, and missed opportunity. Siegel and Etzkorn have spent decades helping business leaders and their companies edit out the unimportant stuff and communicate clearly – both in word and design – and the results were profound.

This book tells those stories: where the companies came from, what the change process was like, and what the results were. The irony is that the process in not necessarily easy. As the authors found, opinions, egos, and conversation often get in the way of simplicity. After all, the more communication, the better the understanding, right? According to the authors and their findings: Not at all. Through a process of empathizing, distilling, and clarifying, the authors explain how organizations can satisfy their leader’s feelings and opinions and help their customers better understand and connect with them in more productive ways.

Here’s another statement from the book to give you an idea of what’s within:

Ideally, everything a company puts out there – from its products and services to its website to every letter or invoice sent to customers – should reflect its commitment to considering the customer’s point of view. We’re all looking for that in our interactions with organizations and companies – the sense that someone there is aware of us as human beings. This can be expressed in the most minor exchanges and in mundane forms of communication. From clear instruction manuals to statements and invoices that are easy to read and understand, there are many ways to signal to customers that you’re a company that understands and respects them.

It’s a fascinating read, clearly written and full of interesting stories and logic. It’s as much about communication and design as it is about customer service and marketing. It’s a book every business leader should read and adapt. In fact, any member of a team can implement ideas from the book into their respective role, improve their own process, and stand out within their team.

➻ Scientific American had a post I missed last month about The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens. And it seems that despite the recent surge in e-book sales, our brains still prefer the physicality of the page.

In the U.S., e-books currently make up between 15 and 20 percent of all trade book sales.

Even so, evidence from laboratory experiments, polls and consumer reports indicates that modern screens and e-readers fail to adequately recreate certain tactile experiences of reading on paper that many people miss and, more importantly, prevent people from navigating long texts in an intuitive and satisfying way. In turn, such navigational difficulties may subtly inhibit reading comprehension. Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people’s attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.

“There is physicality in reading,” says developmental psychologist and cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University, “maybe even more than we want to think about as we lurch into digital reading—as we move forward perhaps with too little reflection. I would like to preserve the absolute best of older forms, but know when to use the new.”

And if you’re worries about getting your book wet in the bathtub, here is an 8-year-old’s invention for keeping books dry in the bath.

➻ Of course, Nicholas Carr would concur the reading on digital devices does not encourage the same level of comprehension, and The Shallows: cartoon edition can show you why in 3 minutes and 45 seconds.

Of course, I’m sure Carr would still prefer you read the actual book.

➻ But we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the internet as the cause of all our ills and think an internet-free existence is the solution to our problems. As Paul Miller shows in a review of his year spent offline, I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet, it isn’t what the internet is doing to us, but what we are doing on the internet and what we are doing ourselves that makes all the difference:

I’d read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I’d begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the internet was “doing to me,” so I could fight back. But the internet isn’t an individual pursuit, it’s something we do with each other. The internet is where people are. [...]

When I return to the internet, I might not use it well. I might waste time, or get distracted, or click on all the wrong links. I won’t have as much time to read or introspect or write the great American sci-fi novel.

But at least I’ll be connected.

And there is certainly something to be said for that.

➻ Getting back to books, Alexander Nazaryan has some thoughts in the New Republic about When Celebrities Take Over Publishing Companies …

Every age gets the publishing industry it deserves, whether it’s Babylonian scribes etching the Epic of Gilgamesh into stone tablets, medieval scribes toiling away at illuminated manuscripts or Maxwell Perkins laboring over the sentences of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Which is why, I suppose, today we have imprints from the comedienne Chelsea Handler, the rapper 50 Cent (Handler’s erstwhile beau, but I wouldn’t read too much into it), the chef Anthony Bourdain, and actors Viggo Mortensen and Johnny Depp, not to mention mystery writer Dennis Lehane and former Men’s Health editor David Zinczenko.

All these are small imprints, usually folded into publishing conglomerates and producing only a few books each year—and always announcing the celebrity affiliation with unabashed pride of the sort that must make the wise old men of the publishing world, the two or three still left, cringe. All were founded in recent years, as the publishing industry has searched ever more desperately for a solution to its chronic, worsening woes. They suggest, to me at least, that the business of discovering, editing, publishing, and promoting a book has become little more than that—a business, on par with hawking energy drinks or endorsing restaurant chains. Yes, publishing has always been about making money. The rise of the celebrity imprint indicates that it is now about little more than that.

I don’t know that I agree with that, or that there’s a huge difference between books written by celebrities and imprints presented by them (other than celebrity imprints show that said celebrities are interested in sharing voices other than their own which seems commendable), but if there is an undeniable truth in the article it is this:

The most depressing aspect of this whole celebrity imprint business: not what it says about publishing, but what it says about ourselves. In their own crass, slick ways, these imprints are indicative of the cult of personality that grips our culture, the facile worship of figures who somehow escape the critical examination we reserve for other aspects of our lives.

That said, I would want to read the “long-lost novel by Woody Guthrie, House of Earth, with an introduction by the historian Douglas Brinkley” whether it was published by Johnny Depp or not. And if these celebrities can get more people reading, then like Oprah Winfrey, I say more power to them. And from a marketing standpoint, I find it far more annoying (as Sally and I have been discussing for years) how publishers present books by women authors, which is why I love Coverflip: Maureen Johnson Calls For An End To Gendered Book Covers With An Amazing Challenge so much.

➻ And we’ll leave you with this…

The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli, Harper, 384 pages, $25.99, Hardcover, May 2013, ISBN 9780062219688

Have you ever toiled over a project so much that even when it showed no signs of succeeding, you couldn’t let go? If so, you were a victim of effort justification. Have you ever asked a group of current customers what they thought of your product, then felt good that most liked it while only a few had complaints? If so, you might have insured those positive results with unconscious self-selection bias. Author Rolf Dobelli blames both instances of muddled thinking on our irrationality. His international bestselling The Art of Thinking Clearly presents behavioral economics, psychology, neuroscience research, and concise and relatable anecdotes to explain where we go wrong in our thought processes and how to think our way out of trouble.

According to Dobelli, we generally complicate our lives with doing, believing, and thinking in ways that seem to offer some kind of solution to our current wants and needs, but, over time, become a quicksand of contradictions. When we brush these contradictions to the side, we become increasingly irrational. He explains:

When we encounter contrasts, we react like birds to a gunshot. We jump up and get moving. Our weak spot: We don’t notice small, gradual changes. A magician can make your watch vanish because, when he presses on one part of your body, you don’t notice the lighter touch on your wrist as he relieves you of your Rolex. Similarly, we fail to notice how our money disappears. It constantly loses its value, but we do not notice because inflation happens over time. If it were imposed on us in the form of a brutal tax (and basically that’s what it is), we would be outraged.

No one wants to lose money, but we do. No one would do something “so stupid,” but we do. No one would think they jump to conclusions, but we do. The solution is working toward a clearer understanding of how our brains work, and the truth within a given situation. Dobelli’s book is a fascinating guide.

The short chapters (2-3 pages) are like brain puzzles that can actually change you. The stories will shock you as you recognize the foolish decisions you’ve made, but the stories will also inspire you to chuckle about the human condition. The big takeaway is that we all get too hung up about doing the right thing, making smart decisions, and becoming successful; reading The Art of Thinking Clearly will help you realize that a big part of every challenge is how complicated we ourselves make things. Dobelli guides us to simplify:

Forget trying to amass all the data. Do your best to get by with the bare facts. It will help you make better decisions. Superfluous knowledge is worthless, whether you know it or not. The historian Daniel J. Boorstin put it right: “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge.” And next time you are confronted by a rival, consider killing him—not with kindness but with reams of data and analysis.