Categories
Links
Archives
Other Blogs
|
Thor Projects LLC - Welcome : Blog - Robert Bogue [MVP]
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
It's hard to think of something that's more practical than duct tape. Whether you're a fan of the TV show MythBusters or you've got your own stories about what you've been able to do with duct tape, you know it's pretty amazing stuff. Duct Tape Marketing promises to help you put together marketing with a limited budget – as other books like Guerilla Marketing do. I stumbled across the book from a friend of mine having forwarded a seminar – that I couldn't attend but I decided to invest in the book anyway.
The book clarifies some difficult concepts. Having watched the corporate search and workflow markets grow up over the past several years, I'm intimately aware of how difficult it is to build a market. Building a market takes time, patience, education, and luck. Duct Tape marketing makes it clear that it's easier to differentiate your offerings in a competitive market than it is to create a market. This truth applies to every marketing situation whether it's SharePoint or Comedy. I know that the biggest challenge I have in helping people understand the power of the Shepherd's Guide is that I've got a model they've never seen before – licensing content for use on their network. Creating that little sub-market inside of the SharePoint space has proved to be more challenging (and rewarding) than I could have imagined.
There are some pretty classical messages in the book like finding your unique market proposition (what makes you uniquely valuable), finding your ideal client (creating a picture of the perfect client so you can always keep them in mind as you're seeking clients), and an elevator pitch (a 30 second verbal commercial you give to folks when they ask you what you do.) – just to name a few. If you're looking for some fundamentals of marketing you'll find that the coverage is there.
In addition to the classic content, you'll find some fairly progressive thinking in Duct Tape Marketing too. There is practical advice on how to create content and pointers to some services that can help you in your content creation journey. Fundamentally John Jantsch believes that the key to success is the creation of content. This shouldn't be too surprising from a book author, however, the conversation is very pragmatic. I loved his coverage of objections – "No one reads blogs" with the honest truth – search engines love blogs and if you've searched for any topic on the Internet it's likely you've seen blogs in the results.
In the end, Duct Tape Marketing is a nice balance between theory, approach, and practice. If you're looking to step up your marketing game, it's worth a read.
Categories:
Book Review, Professional
|
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Most of the time when I read a book that I have problems with – or that I don't like most of it – I simply don't write a review of it. I generally think that there's little value in telling people what not to buy – it's a habit I picked up from my days of writing magazine reviews, however, the book The Information Diet is a bit different – because there's some things that I agree with strongly and a few things that I vehemently disagree with.
I'm going to let you in on a secret that many of my closest friends know. I'm quirky. Yep. I admit it. I do things that make little sense from the surface. One of my quirks is that I almost never turn on a TV at a hotel while I'm traveling. If I'm in the breakfast room I won't go over and turn it off – I'm not rude. However, I don't turn the TV on in my room. This has led to some interesting conversations about how great the TV or the channel selection is where I have to respond with "Um, yea. Sure." The heart of this quirk is the heart of The Information Diet book. That is, you should be choosy about your information diet just like you should be with your physical diet.
The precept is that we're consuming highly processed information that has embedded biases that we won't be able to detect. Advertising sections with editorial content in a magazine is a really good example. Those Amish heaters which are purportedly Amish-made is another good example. The heat source isn't Amish made… of course that makes sense if you spend time tearing apart the idea that they're electrically driven heat sources – but who thinks that much about a space heater? (By the way, the Amish heater is my example, not the authors)
A key message is that you don't have to consume information, any more than you have to consume a slice of pie placed in front of you. However, how many of us have the will power to resist a delicious slice of grandma's apple pie that's placed in front of us? We're leading our elephant down the wrong path – and the rider is simply not strong enough to steer him back in place – for long. (See Switch and The Happiness Hypothesis) So it's true that you don't have to consume information but it's also true that you're wise to influence the information that you put in front of you. Unfortunately, the forces of commercialism are driving news outlets to seek to entertain and affirm us – because those are the things that keep us coming back. It's sort of like the high fructose corn sugar and other sweeteners silently added to our foods to make them more appealing to us.
Before I talk about what bothers me about the book, I need to talk about another really important distinction that's touched on lightly in the book. We tend to wire ourselves in one of two basic operating modes. Mode 1 is constantly connected, constantly distracted, and constantly confused as to what we're doing. (I might be editorializing a bit.) In other words, we're always looking for the next email popup, the next tweet, the next IM. We spend all day chasing one shiny object then the next. There are some jobs where these skills are absolutely essential. If you're monitoring a chemical plant – I want you trying to take in every piece of information. So to be clear this isn't a bad way of operating. It's the way that our ancestors used to operate. They were constantly vigilant about the threat of a lion. However, they dealt with substantially less interruptions.
Mode 2 is completely focused. This is the cone of silence – although I actually find that having a cone of music is instantly more helpful. This is Flow. This is focused concentration leading to the ability to move a single thing forward. Peopleware talked about how it might take 15 minutes for a developer to regain the productivity they had after an interruption. (This is consistent w/ Csikszentmihalyi's research.) Today we're overwhelmed with interruptions. It's not just email or twitter but a desk phone and a mobile phone. Text messages and knocks at the door.
The biggest issue I have with the book is that it advocates a 5 minute working, 1 minute break approach for helping folks deal with distractions. The concept is you have to focus for five minutes and then you can take a break and getup and stretch for a minute. Um. Wait. If it takes 15 minutes to get into flow … you'll never get there. So the approach to the day that is recommended is awful from a productivity standpoint. The author admits that he extended these windows once he got discipline about staying focused. I appreciate the need to program yourself to be focused – to block out distractions – however, in this case I believe the medicine is worse than the disease.
I need a final word of criticism for the book before I encourage you to buy it. The author has some serious biases relative to his political background and spends an inordinate amount of time talking about political situations and information in that context. This was just annoying to me. This is coupled with the real undertone that the author was attempting to lose weight immediately before or during the writing of the book. As a result some of the analogies and ties are a bit too much for me. (Even as I'm trying to lose a few extra pounds myself.)
Still, understanding how the information you consume leads you to think differently, and how those thoughts can be a serious issue over time is an important thing. (We've all met the closed minded person.) If you're interested in learning more about how your information forms you – you should read The Information Diet.
Categories:
Book Review, Professional
|
Friday, March 23, 2012
Working on the new DVDs (Psychology of SharePoint Adoption and Engagement, Nine Keys to SharePoint Success) and the SharePoint Tutor (SharePoint Shepherd's Guide Corporate Edition) I've gotten quite curious about how demand is created and how some products sell well while others don't. I've gotten a healthy appreciation for the value of marketing – if a consumer doesn't know you exist they can't buy you. However, I knew that something else was missing. The book Demand describes a set of keys that Adrian Slywotzky believes create products that will have great demand – from NetFlix to Amazon.com and beyond.
Slywotzky believes there are six things all demand creators do:
- Make it Magnetic – Create an emotional connection to the product or service. Create a product that has some special, unique value.
- Fix the Hassle Map – Life is filled with hassles. The more hassles that your product solves and the fewer that it creates the lower the friction between people and buying your product. The less friction the more purchasing.
- Build a Complete Backstory –It's not enough to have a product that's not supported by the right back end systems. Consider the iPod. What's the real value? The ability to manage and acquire music – and that's the job of iTunes and the iTunes store. You can't build one part of the solution without the other.
- Find the Triggers – Triggers are what gets people to take action. They're notoriously difficult to create. In consulting I say that I have no true competitors except inaction. I seriously don't view any other SharePoint consultants as a real competitor. I really only compete with the client deciding not to do the project or to do it internally.
- Build a Steep Trajectory – This is how the product improves over time. The greater the rate of improvement the greater the trajectory.
- De-Average – Realize that everyone is unique and has their own needs, desires, and hassle maps. This is customization ala The One to One Future.
The book is sprinkled with helpful, and reassuring, nuggets. For instance, Demand speaks of how great demand creators imitate (copy) in places that aren't strategic. For instance, NetFlix copying amazon's web design. It's a simple example on how something that was being done right could be copied and adapted to minimize investments in an area.
Incidentally, the book also speaks of the relentless testing that goes into refining other aspects. For instance, NetFlix's obsession with creating a mailer that worked. So on the one hand it speaks of copying the non-critical items to business and absolutely creating the right solutions where it is critical to business. This in turn reminds me of Tom Peters' (et all) book In Search of Excellence where there are numerous stories of how organizations obsessed about things that were non-obvious – for instance clean washrooms.
In some sense the obsession, or preoccupation if you prefer, with details that on the surface shouldn't matter is a part of the genius of the book – and the demand creators. There are many things that are true but also counter intuitive. For instance, go to your favorite ecommerce site and start the checkout process – you'll be more or less prevented from shopping the catalog and getting more items in your cart. Why? Because it turns out that if you have the opportunity to keep putting things in your cart you're less likely to checkout. Truly good demand creators – the book asserts – will do the research to determine where things are counter intuitive and capitalize on those places to dramatically improve their demand.
If you're struggling to sell a product, or trying to figure out why your service isn't selling like it should – or if you're even considering starting a business and are concerned with whether or not people will want to buy what you have to sell – Demand is a great book.
Categories:
Book Review, Professional
|
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Sometimes you stumble over a book in a way that makes you believe that there's some outside force – God or the higher power or whatever – and you decide you need to read it. Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company That Changed the World is one of those for me. On my way out to SPTechCon last week I sat next to a lady who I noticed had a leadership paper she was working on. She wasn't reading a book on leadership, she was editing a paper on leadership. I can't remember this every happening in all of my years of traveling. Through our conversations I learned that she was a minister's wife in Iowa attending a seminary in Chicago. When we discussed leadership she said that the book Heroic Leadership had really influenced her thoughts on leadership – particularly that she realized that everyone leads. A book that can create a feeling of leadership inside a person is a book worth reading – so I downloaded it and started reading.
While Who Moved My Cheese? is an easy read, Heroic Leadership is a bit more deep. Chris Lowney was a Jesuit Seminarian who left to work for JP Morgan and the book is his reflections on the Jesuit company – the Society of Jesus. His perspective is historical, providing references through time of how the Jesuits had shown leadership. However, that's not a good place to start – the good place to start is "who are the Jesuits in the first place?" I had a vague idea but didn't realize that they were an outgrowth of the catholic church. Certainly they trace their roots back to 1540, so they're a 450 year old company although company had a slightly different meaning. As Lowney is fond of pointing out in the book, the company wasn't much like any company that we'd recognize today.
Fundamentally Lowney believes that the Jesuit leadership is based on four key values:
- Self-Awareness – Leadership comes from leading oneself which in turn comes from self awareness.
- Ingenuity – Being willing to live outside the box in order to reach ones goals. Said differently, they're always looking for something better than the status quo.
- Love – Concern for others and their condition both physically and spiritually.
- Heroism – Facing adversity with courage and self-sacrifice
The focus on self is relatively unique. Many leadership books focus on how to work with other people. Some books like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People speak about principle driven leadership, however, most books are more concerned with the techniques of leadership than the principles. Strangely the Jesuits do have their own form of "how to" book. It's The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit company. However, as the title suggests, it's not a book about with "how to" for other people, it's a "how to" book for yourself. It's a guide to the process of discovering yourself and your values. It's an inside-out approach to leadership.
While Lowney never directly uses the words Servant Leadership, the thought kept resonating with me as the list of accomplishments of the Jesuits – and their approach to the accomplishments were read. Servant Leadership puts the leader below the folks they are leading – supporting them in their growth. This is certainly consistent with the values of the Jesuits. In China they became involved with the creation of the Chinese calendar bureau and by supporting the creation of accurate calendars they were helping to lead the Chinese people in acceptance of their Christian ideas. They created the finest schools in Europe for their time (and for free) in order to help others become more educated (and provide a basis for potential members.) Their attitude was one of leadership through support and doing.
A key component that Lowney discusses several times throughout the book is the contemplative or reflective nature of the Jesuits. The spiritual exercises anchored them into a routine where they reflected on their condition and themselves. This was a sort of continual fine-tuning which allowed them to both shape their world view and refine their understanding of themselves and their weaknesses. Very few people have a thoughtful, intentional time to reevaluate their world and themselves personally.
One curious bit is the question of who is a leader? As I mentioned above my seat-mate heard that everyone leads through this book – and that's true whether they do it well or poorly may be up for debate but the fact that they are leading isn't. We lead when we help a friend through a personal problem – we lead them through the problem. We lead when we discourage or stop bad behaviors of our peers. We lead in lots of ways.
The Jesuits, in Lowney's opinion, were generally good at knowing which things were changeable. That is they knew that some things, like the way they dressed, were not a reflection on their core beliefs and were instead cultural norms. They differentiated between their religious faith and principles from those things that which are simply norms. This clarity between what must remain the same because they are unalterable expressions of their value system and which things were just the way things have been done before – and therefore are of little consequence if they change is very powerful. I was reflecting on the way that I add value to my clients and how the ability to pinpoint key problems is essential. Knowing which things can be changed and which cannot allows everyone to keep productive.
I was also struck by the innovation in the Jesuits finding solutions that no one had figured out before. Lowney describes this as living outside the box and certainly I'd love to figure out how to get everyone to redraw the boundaries of the boxes. For me I see people artificially draw small borders for their boxes. Not knowing what is and isn't movable causes them to unnecessarily confine themselves to a place where fewer things are possible. From my perspective, the Jesuits throughout history were able to define their boxes – their limits – with enviable accuracy. They knew how far they could go and no further. This sort of reminds me of farmers. Most folks who've never been on a farm think of the experience as quaint or backwards – or both. However, I find ingenuity on the farm. I find new uses for existing materials and solutions built upon the foundation of what was at hand. Farmers knew what the materials around them would – and would not do – and used everything at their disposal to fix the windmill, create a tool, or find a solution to a problem.
The final point I want to make about Heroic Leadership is the word magis. That word (concept) means something more or something greater. The quest to continue the journey to find that better that is yet to come. It's the core drive that caused the Jesuits to span across the globe to chart the uncharted and to do what had not been done. It's that single word that fueled the drive. So my question for you is, do you have that drive for magis?
Categories:
Book Review, Professional
|
Monday, March 05, 2012
On the spectrum of easy to access compared to academic reading, Who Moved My Cheese? is a clearly on the end of easy to access. The book centers on a story with two mice (Sniff and Scurry) and two "littlepeople" (Hem and Haw). The story is a fable designed to teach how different approaches to change are healthier than others. Perhaps the greatest value in the book is that because it's so easy to read it can be given to every employee as a reading assignment. It's less than 100 pages so in a few hours most people will have it read.
Change happens. There are times when I'd swear that our world is spinning faster and faster – even though I know this can't be true. Despite our intellectual awareness that change is a part of life today still some resist. Some members of your organization will steadfastly deny that your market is changing, your competitors are changing. Once the change becomes impossible to ignore some bemoan the change. No one told me. It's not my fault that the world changed. I shouldn't be held accountable.
If you're trying to get the entire organization to realize how change isn't the problem. If you're trying to get them to see how their attitudes and behaviors are the problem, then you may find that Who Moved My Cheese? is the right change for you.
Categories:
Book Review, Professional
|
Monday, March 05, 2012
Lately I've been getting a distinct message that I need to just do. I just had to get some things out there for the market to test. No small part of that message is from Seth Godin's Poke the Box. Godin makes a compelling argument that we sometimes fail to start because we fear to fail. We don't want to put that first, tentative foot into the water for fear that the market might not like it. There are the cliché references to Thomas Edison and the light bulb and the same reminder that most folks don't know how many time Edison failed to create the light bulb – they only know that he did. His success virtually erased his failures.
However, beyond the same prompting for action that you might find elsewhere, there's an awareness of pressures that cause initiative. Having been a consultant almost my entire professional career the idea of a project based organization creating the drive for the next thing is familiar. It's downright eerie when you consider the name of my organization is Thor Projects.
Perhaps another insight is a restatement of Scott McCloud's argument in Understanding Comics. That is: Life isn't what's drawn in the frames, it's what's in between the frames that counts. It's the space that's left up to you – and you alone – to fill in the blanks.
As a final thought, there's a discussion about the delicate balance between initiating – getting started – and the need to get finished. In my head I went back to a large snow when I was a child. I can remember designing a snow fort. Or rather I can remember a series of iterations for gathering and piling up snow to create a snow fort. What I realized even then was that I spent so much time changing my approach for gathering snow that I never really finished trying one. I kept changing my approach until I had gathered all the snow. It's this story that reminds me that sometimes it doesn't help to keep changing and doing new things.
Poke the Box is an easy read and worth it if you're trying to help motivate yourself to get started.
Categories:
Book Review, Professional
|
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Steven Covey's book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is a classic. I probably read it 20 years ago when I was first entering the workforce and the book was the latest rage. I can probably count on one hand the number of books I've read more than once on one hand – actually I can't recall any other book that I've read more than once. However, when Amazon.com featured the book for $0.99 on Kindle I thought it was time for a reread.
The 7 Habits, for a quick reminder are:
- Be Proactive
- Begin with the End in Mind
- Put First Things First
- Think Win-Win
- Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood
- Synergize
- Sharpen the Saw
These correspond to three "levels" – Independence, Interdependence, and Self-Renewal.
The Seven Habits is different than other books in the sense that it focuses on principles rather than techniques. While the connection is never made to Dale Garnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People the difference between the approaches is striking. Where one is teaching you the psychology of how people work – something I deeply enjoy as evidenced by my DVD – the Seven Habits talks about how to develop an inner strength of character. I believe both are needed as I've found people who are very character rich who still struggle with how to work with people, how to communicate their concern for others on a daily basis. One of the premises is that principle centered growth leads to more happiness than techniques for connecting with other humans. This is consistent with The Time Paradox and The Happiness Hypothesis. Both of these books speak of the way that character and purpose are more rewarding than the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure.
Much of reading the book was like watching an old home movie of me. Somehow I remember being there but I was seeing things from a new perspective, from a new lens. I was stirred by different words. I caught the difference between principles – natural laws and values – beliefs. I pride myself in having friends with different beliefs. While I personally have a deep faith in God, I have friends who have no such belief. I can have great conversations with them exploring because I know that my perspective on the situation isn't the only one.
Having been a consultant for most of the last 20 years of my professional career, I consider the information in The Seven Habits foundational for every good consultant. As Covey admits in the book his struggles to always live the seven habits, I too must say that I'm not always on track with the seven habits. I can, however, say that in many cases I know when I get off track with them. It generally means I get a healthy dose of retraining as to why they're important in the first place.
Even if you've read the book before, it's worth reading again.
Categories:
Professional, Book Review
|
Sunday, February 05, 2012
You would think that with the great value I saw in John Kotter's Leading Change book I would have jumped to read The Heart of Change – but I didn't. Part of that may be the fact that I've had a pretty deep reading list for a while. Part of it may have been that I felt like I had extracted the most valuable piece from Kotter's work – the process. No matter what the reason, more time spent with the change model was well worth it.
More than any other of the books that I read lately, I found myself taking notes about The Heart of Change. I was writing in the virtual margins on my Acer Iconia A500 Tablet with the Kindle software. I kept reading and writing notes and parallels.
I wrote in one spot the classic (if not potentially insensitive) question: How do you eat an elephant? The answer is simple and surprising. One bite at a time. In another place I wrote "You can't boil the ocean." These clichés may be overused but they represent a fundamental awareness that Kotter and his co-author Dan Cohen grok.
Distilling the key message of the book into just this would be an over simplification, but core to the book is the idea that first people SEE the need to change, then they FEEL the need to change, and then, with luck, they CHANGE. This SEE-FEEL-CHANGE model is important. If I put this into the language of The Happiness Hypothesis and Switch it's about the elephant, the rider, and the path. The rider must become aware of the change that's needed (urgently), but it's the elephant, the emotional powerhouse of the arrangement, that must FEEL the need to change. With a bit of luck in shaping the path (removing barriers) change can occur.
It seems that the natural resistance to change – which is less about resistance and more about confusion – can be overcome by feelings. The elephant will start to move when he senses that standing still isn't working.
|
Another interesting thought that swept across me while reading The Heart of Change was the idea of a fish ladder. If you don't know what these are, they are specifically designed parts of a waterway that are designed to allow fish to traverse dams, locks, and other manmade structures that have disrupted their normal migration. What's remarkable about these fish ladders is that they aren't so much a set of distinct areas but rather a connected system. As the water flows across them they make each individual step – which are distinct in structure – seem like a part of a system. So there's a bit of overlap – or connectedness – between the steps. The Heart of Change speaks to this exact thing – that the steps aren't so distinct as they are a natural system where the lines blur and the next step starts before the previous one ends.
Sidebar: the whole idea of a fish on a ladder is funny if you think about it. How do the fish hold on to the rungs?
I was also struck by a story about how pictures were removed from the lobby of one organization – not because changing the décor is the solution to changing a company – rather – I was struck by how sometimes simple, stupid, unseen things are the sacred cows of the organization. They're the thing, process, or procedure with the unwritten "do not touch" rule. My note on the story was "find the sacred cows and slay them – with theatrical style." Why would I write such a thing? It's simple. There are far too many sacred cows, it's time to thin the herd. Make sure the sacred cows that remain are meaningful. |
Image from Flicker - USFWS Pacific |
A quote from the book is "You can't plan what you don't understand." The context is that it's difficult to plan for radical changes because you don't understand what a radical change will look like. However, it occurred to me that this extends beyond. The great project managers I've worked with always seek to understand. They want to know how things work – even if they don't understand the details, a foundational understanding makes them better at planning the project. It also occurred to me that far too often organizations try to move forward through a transformation without an understanding of what the other side looks like.
Even after all the books I've read on change, on thinking, or motivating, I still found new ways of connecting to this content. If you're trying to figure out how to do change, pick up The Heart of change
Categories:
Book Review, Professional
|
Saturday, January 28, 2012
When a friend of mine told me about this book I was sort of concerned. I thought that somehow learning more about Social Engineering was sort of like reading a book on how to make a bomb. Sure I know some people need to know how to make a bomb, but does everyone need access to this kind of information? However, as I was reading it I realized that the information in the book wasn't "new" per-se. It was the same sorts of things that consultants do every day – perhaps without the lock picking part.
If you've read my reviews you know that I love psychology. I love the observation of human behaviors and the thinking about what makes people tick. So much of what I ran into including neuro linguistic programming (NLP) was already information I had been exposed to. However, there were other places where I was reexposed to things that I had not remembered. Dr. Ekman's work on FACS (Facial Action Coding System) was something I was exposed to before but hadn't really spent much time thinking about.
While I don't think that reading this book will make you a good social engineer, I do think that if you're interested in psychology, particularly how people are manipulated you'll find this book very informative. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that everyone who's a full time consultant should read it – not because I think that consultants should use these techniques to get their next consulting engagement – but rather because the sheer number of people a typical consultant interacts with will ultimately cause them to run across someone who is trying to use the techniques on them.
Perhaps the best part – from my point of view – was that the book was easy to read and interesting. Having made a relatively sharp right turn into some heavy academic books this was the book that I kept coming back to for "filler time." It was the one I wanted to read when I had a few minutes. So whether you're looking for a job as a tester who will test an organization's vulnerability to social engineering tactics, or you just want to learn more about the tactics that Social Engineers use, this book is a good read.
Categories:
Book Review, Professional
|
Thursday, January 19, 2012
When I was reading Switch I was introduced to the metaphor of the elephant, the rider, and the path for thinking about how to motivate people (including ourselves) but the book referenced The Happiness Hypothesis as the origin of this model. Despite the good coverage of the model in Switch, I wanted to get more details about how the model was formed and some of the concepts that surrounded it.
The Happiness Hypothesis doesn't disappoint. It reaches across religions and great thinkers, it quotes psychologists, philosophers, and research. It's an ultimate tour of peoples thoughts. I deeply respect Jonathan Haidt's considerable effort to seek balanced views. I remember a blog post by Malcolm Gladwell where he was discussing Freakonomics. In his book Tipping Point, Gladwell points to "broken windows" as a theory for why crime fell. Freakonomics proposes that it's the reduction in unwanted children because of Roe v. Wade (abortion rights). He mentions that he dismisses other ideas in his writing. I'm not saying this is wrong – in fact, The Happiness Hypothesis acknowledges that this is normal human behavior. The fact that Haidt fought so hard to provide a balanced text is important.
There's one direct quote that I can't pass up because it's so perfect:
"The metaphor I use when I lecture on Freud is to think of the mind as a horse and buggy (a Victorian chariot) in which the driver (the ego) struggles frantically to control a hungry, lustful, and disobedient horse (the id) while the driver's father (the superego) sits in the back seat lecturing the driver on what he is doing wrong."
I just love that word picture.
There is some good coverage of Buddhist philosophies about detachment and their evolution as well as their usefulness. Ultimately, walking through the consumption and the externalization of a person's identity into the things that surround them and how this isn't good – even though it's less risky now than in the past because we're relatively speaking more secure in our possessions than any other time in history. Haidt explorers the positive effects of meditation and highlights the benefits of cognitive therapy.
I particularly liked the closing which ties things together by talking about "vital engagement" – which is flow plus meaning.
If you're interested in a "once around the block" for the religions and great thinkers of the world as to what makes people happy, you should reach for The Happiness Hypothesis.
Categories:
Book Review, Professional
|
Next >>
|
|