Ever since I picked up Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, I’ve always been a fan of his books.  I’ve read Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw, so when I saw that he had a new book, it was an easy decision for me to add it to my list.

Once again, Gladwell tackles some of our assumptions about how the world should logically work.  In the typical “David and Goliath” story, the titular tale of this book, a tiny underdog goes against overwhelming odds – and somehow perseveres and manages to conquer.  What an unexpected result!

However, is David’s win over Goliath really such a surprise?  Gladwell argues that it is not!  Indeed, in the ancient world, stone-slingers (David) were typically used as the natural military counter to slow, heavy infantry (Goliath).  Why would anyone be surprised by David’s win?

Indeed, as Gladwell goes on to show through a plethora of other examples, many times the individual that we regard as the underdog turns out to have at least one, sometimes several crucial advantages.  Gladwell emphasizes the idea of “near misses” versus “remote misses”.  For example, when talking about a bombing, a near miss might leave an individual wounded.  But when an individual experiences a remote miss, they are not only unharmed by the bomb – but also, since the bomb missed the first time, that individual starts feeling invincible, and is more likely to take on additional risk in the future!

It is this idea of near misses, Gladwell argues, that leads to underdogs often rising up far higher than anyone might predict.  And although the concept sometimes seems extreme, he fills the book with plenty of examples to back it up.

While there aren’t a ton of lessons to take away for improving your personal life or approach towards problems, the book is, as are all of Gladwell’s books, a thoroughly interesting and engaging read.

Time to read: about 3 hours.

Going back to fiction again!  I’m continuing in my quest to read all of Agatha Christie’s consistently amazing mystery books.

Normally, a mystery book doesn’t reveal the killer right away.  If so, he’s well hidden, and often the last person to be suspected.  We almost certainly don’t get a chapter from his narrative, telling us his full name and what he’s up to.

But there’s a reason why Agatha Christie’s books are anything but normal…
In only the second or third chapter of “The ABC Murders,” we get a short little blurb from a man by the name of Alexander Bonaparte Cust, detailing how he’s considering a new method for selecting a victim.  By gods, we’ve got our murderer!  No need for a detective after all!

But of course, for Christie, nothing’s as simple as it seems at first, and as she leads our mustachioed hero Poirot deeper into this mystery.  As Poirot himself mentions, this is one of his first cases where there’s a murdering spree, and not just a single murder in a cozy group of clear suspects.  How does he hunt down a killer, when it could be anyone in the country?

But of course, it turns out that there are suspects, and we also get a nice glimpse into the operating methods of the police as they investigate, both with and without Poirot’s help.

And once again, at the end, I couldn’t guess the killer.  Damn.  One of these days, I’ll manage it, Christie!

Time to read: 3 hours.  Typical for fiction.

The authors of this book might be recognizable – they’re the same two guys who wrote Freakonomics, followed by the sequel, Superfreakonomics.  They are great at showing how a lot of behavior that, on its face seems irrational, is actually totally logical and can be explained.  They also show how sometimes, making a decision that seems crazy might be the best possible option to do.

Now, in their third book, Think Like a Freak, Levitt and Dubner claim to be able to teach all of us rubes how to think in the same way as them; how to take a situation and turn it on its head, looking at an unusual approach as a solution that might work better than the old “tried and true” method.

So, how do they fare?

In terms of getting all of us to think like Freaks, I have to admit that I’m not super impressed.  A lot of the actual lessons in this book are more “try things and see what happens,” and “don’t be afraid to try something new, even if your boss doesn’t immediately agree.”  Good lessons, sure, but nothing groundbreaking.

But despite the lack of a full, coherent message, the book is very good at doing what Levitt and Dubner do best – providing tons of real-life detailed examples of how people have used strange solutions to solve complex problems.  They discuss:

• Zappos, the shoe company that gets thousands of applications for each $11/hour position;
• A “one-and-done” mailing that provides a huge boost in charity donations;
• A ban on cobras – that resulted in a lot more cobras;
• Why kids are bad audiences for magicians;

I would like to preface this little review by saying that, despite the title of this book, I am not a C student.  I am, in fact, an A student (at least on a good day), and so I wasn’t sure how useful some of the advice in this book would be.  However, I firmly believed that it was a good idea to know what strategies these C students were using to get ahead of me – so I can crush them at that as well!

Just kidding.  Mostly.

As for the advice of the book itself, a lot of it is rather common sense (although perhaps that’s just my “A student” mentality speaking, and many “C students” don’t realize this stuff).  Common advice in the book includes taking over jobs that no one else wants, going for the challenging risk when others hang back, not being afraid to throw yourself into new experiences, and making sure to learn some new skill at every job.

Bliwas takes a lighter hand with attacking A students, but he does state that many of them, thanks to the connections of success or money, don’t bother with many of these tidbits of advice.  However, many of these suggestions sounded familiar.  Why is that…

…oh yes, because they’re also in every other management and career advice book I’ve read.

For a student who didn’t score the highest grades and is struggling to find a way to connect or succeed in a job, the tips and suggestions given in “The C Student’s Guide to Success” are good.  But don’t let that student believe that they’ve found some hidden secret, some inside track.

Everyone out there is going for these same moves – and that includes many A students.  Sure, some of them believe that connections and grades will get them all the way, but most A students tend to be overachievers – and that comes to their devotion to a job as well as their devotion to studying classroom material.  Those A students were willing to take on the workload of extra credit in their classes, and they’re just as willing to take on the workload of a challenging project or long hours in a career.  Even here, I suspect that many C students will find themselves outflanked.

Overall, Bliwas wrote a decent book.  My two big complaints, in the end, are as such:

1. Bliwas has several “rags to riches” success stories of various friends and business contacts.  These are good stories, and reflect a wide range of viewpoints – but the author always has to use the person’s full name every time they’re referenced!  For some reason, this strikes me as shoddy writing (by 100 pages in, we should remember someone named “Art Frigo”!).  It gets annoying and distracts from the message of the book.

2. As you can see above, the cover of this book features the title, “The C Student’s Guide to Success,” in very big, easy to read letters.  While this is great for advertising the book, it does make me feel a bit uncomfortable about carrying the book around.  “Look at me, I have bad grades!” it shouts out to passerby.

Time to read: 10 hours.  This was a “bedside read” that I struggled to get through, mainly due to the author’s habit of consistently referencing the same individuals over and over, always by their full names, giving me deja vu and making me think I’d already read that section.

Is it strange that I really like reading books about sales, even though I’m not in a sales position?  As a graduate student, the most “sales” I have to do is selling my PI on some idea as the best approach, while secretly biting at my fingernails and hoping I’m not overlooking some obvious blunder.  I’m definitely not out cold-calling clients or making commissions.

But even so, I think some of the case studies in Philip Broughton’s narrative, “Art of the Sale”, are applicable to just about everyone who interacts with another person.

A lot of the lessons of this book are very similar to those that I’ve read in other sales books (again, this is a favorite area of mine).  It’s important to not be bothered by rejection, to always be optimistic, to truly have a passion for what you’re selling, to have a powerful intrinsic drive to be the best.  I’ve heard these tips before.

Yet even though most of the advice of “Art of the Sale” is fairly common, the way that these lessons are presented makes the book a very appealing read.  Instead of simply telling us these rules, Broughton takes us around the globe, showing us how master salesmen in different cultures and locations succeed.

And most interestingly, it’s not always the same path to success.

In fact, most of the salesmen profiled in Broughton’s book have found their own unique way to sell, to succeed.  But even though they vary their methods a lot, they all still find success, and Broughton concludes that, depending on the company and market, wildly different methods of sales can all work.

For example, for a company that sells huge pieces of power machinery to just a few clients, culturing client relationships is super important.  But for another company that sells thousands of products on low margin, relying on volume, pure speed and volume is all that matters.  And both of these approaches are correct – for their target market.

In conclusion, the most important lesson of this book for salesmen is not to adapt a strict set of rules or beliefs – but to understand how to best interact with your customers.  An interesting perspective.

Time to read: probably around 8 hours.  I read most of this book in small chunks before bed.

To start this review, let me say that Pitch Perfect is probably the best book on public speaking, bar none, that I’ve found.  This book has so much good advice, I’m actually considering buying a copy to keep it around permanently.

Let’s face it – everyone hates public speaking.  Some people are better at it than others, and I like to believe that I, personally, am not the worst at it.  But still, whenever I have to get up and talk (even if it’s just in a small meeting), I get nervous.  And presenting a more detailed topic, to a large audience?  I cringe at the thought!

In Pitch Perfect, McGowan starts by acknowledging this, and he first drills down on the idea of practice, practice, practice!  He explains how everyone goes through three stages: dread, acceptance, and enjoyment.  He emphasizes that it takes lots of time/practice to get to the enjoyment stage, but that it’s possible!

He also brings up practice to show that all those people who are “natural” speakers are nothing of the sort – they have practiced!  This was a huge realization to me personally.  I always thought that some people could just stand up and talk, and their words would come out perfectly.  Oh, how I envied them!  But the dirty truth is that these people have to practice, just like everyone else – and if they don’t, it shows in their next talk.

After these broader statements, McGowan buckles down and emphasizes everything that can go wrong, everything that makes a speech fail.  He touches on body language, overused words, the most common (and, coincidentally, the worst) ways to start a speech, and how to fix each of these points!  He shows how even experienced presenters shoot themselves in the foot, and how to avoid those same mistakes.

Finally, McGowan talks about some of the more specialized speeches – how to give a toast, how to speak at a corporate event versus a social event, and how to handle other parts of communication.  In the end, I finished the book feeling strengthened, but not overwhelmed.

In fact, only a day or two after finishing the book, I had to give a speech, and I put some of McGowan’s suggestions into effect.  And I was astounded to see positive effects right away!  I would wholly recommend this book to everyone, and in fact have already done so to several colleagues.

Time to read: about 6 hours.  I really focused on going slower with this book to absorb everything.

There’s a reason why Agatha Christie is one of the best-selling mystery writers of all time.

Every time I pick up one of her books, I expect something quaint, slow, and old-fashioned, something that won’t ever manage to hold my attention in this modern era, where I can see a serial killer go on a rampage and eventually be captured in under an hour on television.  Next to that level of action, how can I ever care about the dull little murder in some small English village?

Every time I pick up one of Agatha Christie’s books, this is what I expect.

And every time, I’m amazed by how deftly she weaves together a plot that keeps me guessing up until the last few pages.

In this book, we follow a group of wealthy urbanites as they take a retreat out to a chateau on the side of a lake, where they grew up.  The primary source of tension in this retreat is due to the fact that not only has wealthy Nevile Strange decided to bring his second wife along – but he’s also invited his first wife there as well!  It’s a recipe that’s guaranteed to cause tension, and there’s plenty – even before a murder knocks off the matron of the house, and everyone becomes a suspect.

Our detective, Superintendent Battle, goes about investigating in his usual mild British manner, but the more he digs in, the stranger things become.  In the end, I was certain I knew who the murderer was, as did everyone else – and then twist!

Of course, I won’t reveal that twist here.  If you want to know, well, click the book above to get to Amazon, and read it for yourself!

Time to read: 2 hours.  I can do a Christie book a day.

It looks like I’m going to be switching back and forth, from fiction to non-fiction books and back again, as I work through this 52 book challenge.

I picked up this book, “Three Signs of a Miserable Job” by Patrick Lencioni, expecting to get to hear tales of jobs where employees are miserable, perhaps learning about how even those “perfect” jobs like actor or rock star don’t end up leading to happiness.

I did learn about why those “perfect” jobs aren’t so perfect – but it was presented in a totally unexpected way.

This book tells a story in the form of a parable, following a displaced and unhappily retired CEO by the name of Brian.  Brian believes that proper management, rather than just focusing on profits and the bottom line, is what leads to happy employees and a happy company.  As we follow his adventures, from buying a stake in a pizza restaurant to trying to turn around larger companies, we get to see his three core beliefs about management at work.

Those beliefs are founded on the idea that all employees seek three things in order to make their careers feel rewarding and enjoyable:

1. Metrics – most employees have no way of truly telling how well they’re performing at their job.  For a hotel clerk who checks in guests, there’s no tracking of numbers – and for someone in the middle of an organization, like an office receptionist, there’s no real numbers to consider at all for evaluating performance.  A good boss or manager needs to find a way to provide real data so employees can track their unbiased performance.

2. Relevance – employees need to know how their work actually benefits someone.  If you file away papers in an office all day, what does that actually do to help the rest of the outside world?  A good manager needs to make sure employees understand who their job benefits – even if that person is the manager himself.

3. Recognition – employees want to have a manager who knows them as more than just a cog in a machine.  Here, we risk straying into some touchy-feely stuff, and there probably are some employees who don’t want their manager to really be a friend.  But Lencioni emphasizes that some level of connection, knowing some facts about employees, whether it be that they live with their parents, just had a baby, or are coming down with a cold, is useful in helping those employees feel like they are truly valued.

Of course, in the parable in the book, application of these techniques works out amazingly for our case studies.  Whether this truly translates into the real world is less certain, but the book definitely resonates with me, and its lessons seem useful and applicable.

Now, I just wish I had some employees to manage…

Time to read: About 2 hours.  As a narrative, this went quite fast.

Author’s note: Yes, this is a trilogy of three books; however, if I hope to space out this 52-book challenge over anything close to 52 weeks, it’s going to take some creativity to not advance too quickly.

I can’t recall the last series of books that had me throwing my hands up in the air this many times in frustration… while still wanting to read the next book!  Talk about frustration.  Annoyed, bothered, but with no choice but to continue in hopes of finding answers.

The plot is difficult to even summarize without giving away spoilers, but here’s my best shot:

About thirty years ago, an area of the United States (designated “Area X”) was consumed by an event that barricaded it off from the rest of the world, with only a single doorway, or point of access inside.  Strange things are happening inside, and it has fallen to the government division known as the Southern Reach to figure out what is happening.  The Southern Reach attempts to accomplish this by sending in expeditions, each group trained and conditioned for the best odds of success.

Despite all of this, the agency hasn’t been making much progress.

Although there’s a common core of characters that persist through the whole series, each book takes a different approach, focusing on different characters and a different area.  The downside to this, of course, is that some characters are much more interesting than others.  I was much more interested in what is actually happening inside Area X, as documented in books 1 and 3, than I cared about the dysfunction of the Southern Reach chronicled in book 2.

In addition, my biggest frustration with this series is that, much like in a horror movie, Vandermeer has the ability to paint very descriptive scenes, using beautiful language, without actually telling the audience much about what we want to know.  We learn in great detail about the scenes of nature and the birds and plants that are spotted, but the strange and unnatural buildings that are encountered, and the creatures within, barely get more than a couple very broad strokes of the literary brush.

Instead, as a reader, I found myself wading through pages of flowery and beautiful descriptions in order to find the tiny little nugget of story.  There are many beguiling, interesting threads opened up, but many of them remain frustratingly loose, not tied down or answered.

In the end, I’m still left with far more questions than answers, feeling as if I missed another book’s worth of explanation somewhere, and I need to find that before it all makes sense.

Time to read: Approximately 2.5 hours for the first book and 3.5 hours for the next two; call it 10 hours for the complete series.