Here Be Monsters|blog

BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS

Don't know about you but I love books. I was once told, as long as you can read you'll always be able to learn. I liked that. And I was able to read a lot over Christmas.

Two books I didn't get to read though, but are now on order are

The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. I  knew nothing about this book until I read a post here.

And Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die,  written by Stanford Business School professor Chip Heath with his brother Dan. I lifed this from the review I was reading (and now can't remember where it came from - sorry. ) Basically, it's a studying into why some messages stick and others don't, e.g. "we only use 10% of our brain," "alligators in the sewer," "people get drugged and have their organs harvested. Even though these myths aren't true, they persist. And according to Chip it's because they're all;

Simple
Unexpected
Concrete
Credible
Emotional
Stories

Anyone beaten me to them and want to do a book swap?

I heart work

There's a great post over at Noisy Decent Graphics that talks about the love of being a designer. You don't have to be a designer to appreciate and recognise what he's saying, just someone who is passionate about what you do.

So if you don't recognise yourself in this, shouldn't you be looking for another job?

After all, if you find a job you truly love, you'll never have to work again.

Defining HBM

We're constantly thinking about how to be different, not different for difference's sake, you understand, but different for better's sake.  If nothing else it forces us to challenge our presumptions and highlight when we're being complacent. Okay, it keeps us from arguing over who's going to win, I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. It was while reading The Wisdom of Crowds that it occurred to me that this, was as good a description of how we're trying to work  as any we've seen or heard.

There are four key qualities that make a crowd smart. It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralised, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd's answer. It needs a way of summarising people's opinions into one collective verdict. And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information, and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks.

And then I was reminded of Collective Intelligence by Pierre Levy, which refers to a situation where nobody knows everything, everyone knows something, and what any given member knows is accessible to any other member upon request on an ad hoc basis.  And through that collaboration you grow and develop And that rang true too.

Obviously they can both co-exist, but what is the best working structure, briefing process etc  that would maximise the potential from both?  I've no idea where I'm going with this, I just wanted to get it out there in the hope that I might get some clarity. No doubt I'll come back to it and expand upon it. In the meantime feel free to chip in with any suggestions.