Review: Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve read more than a dozen books on telling stories for business, and I find that they take different tacts to tell their own stories. I find this StoryBrand book is a bit more basic than most I’ve seen recently, but to me the simplicity in its storytelling suggestions is a good thing. Instead of drilling down into story archetypes and theory, this book suggests looking at a handful of aspects of the story. Key takeaway is to put the customer in the role of the hero, and to put the company in the role of the guide – a Yoda to the customer’s Luke Skywalker. I liked that the author referred to dozens of classic movies to give examples of the story structures he’s explaining. This made things clear, although the author promotes the movie “Tommy Boy” as an example so many times you think there must be some other movie with that name that you somehow missed. But no. “Tommy Boy” is obviously the author’s guilty pleasure movie. For those familiar with the storyline comparing men’s movies and women’s movies in “Sleepless in Seattle”, most if not all the movies the author uses are “men’s” movies, with “Tommy Boy” as the poster child. No “An Affair to Remember” here. The author does pitch his classes an excessive number of times. I tend to dislike books-as-ads, especially if the book doesn’t stand by itself providing value. This one, I believe, does provide value. The suggestions offered are simpler than many other corporate storytelling books. The advice is better than some. I can see building stories for my demos at work using the structure described here, and I would expect better outcomes than using story techniques from the pure demo-creation books I’ve read. Nice work.

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Review: Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town by Brian Alexander
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The mentality that lived on money gathered from cash-out home refinancing hits companies. Here, the story is of what appears to be a one-horse town when it comes to industry, that industry being glass and the town being Lancaster, Ohio. There are many such towns, beholden to a single company for the source of many, if not most well paying jobs and for donations that ensure the local economy worked. I’m from one such town. When a company, or in this case a plant, becomes the instrument of a series of investors intent on de-capitalizing for their own profit, the wreckage includes the plant, but also the workers and the community. The book focuses on two related topics. The main thread covers the series of owners of the plant and the steps they take to ultimately make money. There seems to be a lot of planning that never amounts to anything. The second thread is about the drug culture in town. I liked the first topic, it explains how money is made by private equity. The second topic was tangential, and could stand on its own. Depressing in many ways.

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Review: The Reign of the Kingfisher

The Reign of the Kingfisher by T.J. Martinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

After finishing this modern superhero story, I found I appreciated it. While listening to it, though, I found it hit and miss. The hit part was that it was an interesting concept, and the writing was cinematic. There was a lot of miss to go with that though. First, the story takes place in Chicago and burbs, where I live, and I usually enjoy that home town feel in a story. But here, it felt like it could have been any city, and that the author just randomly put references in to neighborhoods or streets that in actuality would have worked as well in St. Paul or Dallas. The localness felt phony. Second, the writing, though feeling like a television show, felt at times like a not-so-great superhero tv show on a minor network. The characters ended scenes with a corker of an overwrought statement, just like before you go to a commercial on a tv show. If it reminded me of, say, a classic comic book, I would have liked that gimmick. But here it reminded me of a bad tv show, so this was no plus for me. Thirdly, the plot just seemed to have too many holes. I find that I tend to be very forgiving on plot holes when reading something avant guard, but this tries so hard to be like a normal fiction city story that I can't suspend belief, and frankly, the plot holes are quite ridiculous. I found myself constantly wondering why people weren't thinking.Perhaps it was the water in the city that could have been Chicago.

But as I mentioned up front, on reflection I enjoyed this more than I would have thought while reading it. The concept was winning, and the take on the missing superhero was interesting. Overall, to use a horrible baseball metaphor, this was a lot like a massive Dave Kingman swing for a home run, occasionally pretty to look at, but often not connecting.

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Review: Gene Smith's Sink: A Wide-Angle View

Gene Smith's Sink: A Wide-Angle View by Sam Stephenson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I took a flyer on this book, based on its curious title. I had never heard of Gene Smith, but found that Smith was a prolific photographer and artist. He lived the stereotypical life of an artist, focused on the creation of art, at times oblivious of all else. The author approaches Smith like a private detective, tracking down acquaintances based on brief mentions in papers or on the audio tape that Smith liked to leave running and recording. You get a great taste of the life of an artist and his entourage in 50s Gotham. And a bonus here is that Smith lived among a number of jazz greats, and recorded them surreptitiously. So in addition to the life of a professional photographer/artist, you get a slice of life of a number of jazz artists. This really does a good job of putting you into the time and place. You can almost smell the reefer and feel oblivious about missing your rent payment.

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Review: The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I picked this book up due to a mention as a book to build leadership qualities by Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. It’s what you’d expect in a feel-good story about the growth of the rowing teams in pre-war University of Washington, culminating in a victory against all odds at the Olympics in Berlin hosted by Hitler. The way author Brown told this story was to focus first on one teammate, through a difficult childhood and into college. While building this hero, the author also introduces other team members, the enigmatic coach, and the unlikely guide, a boat builder from England. You follow the teams through the years, seeing disappointment with poor results, but showing growth in skills and in finally coming together as a team. The author makes rowing races exciting. The sporting action consists of a few races that are very well described. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Edward Hermann. When you get to the final race, the narration has sped up to a frantic pace to match the story. I found this went beyond normal audiobook narration to performance, and it really worked well. I’d say this is one of the best non-fiction audiobooks I’ve heard. This book works well on many levels. As a sports book, the sporting scenes are well described and intense. As a history book, the author covers the story of the rowing team, but also provides plentiful background on the people, on the sport, and on the politics behind the sport. And as a leadership book, it provides a story of a team coming together from mostly humble beginnings to be formed into a cohesive unit. You will understand how the coaches and “guide” influenced the team, the impacts that their actions had, and you will feel the growth of the team as they come together. After such an involving book, the reader wants to know what happened to the individuals of the rowing team after their win. Brown includes an extensive history of the team mates and others through the present day, including even the winning boat. Very nice story.

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Review: The Witch Elm

The Witch Elm by Tana French
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It doesn’t seem that this book was a good choice to be the first Tana French mystery to read. The book does carry a mood throughout, but it’s entirely due to the narrator being unlikeable but in a bad situation. French does a nice job putting you in the shoes of someone with recent brain damage, but that’s really not an enjoyable place to be. There were long stretches of repetitive thoughts while we inhabit narrator Toby’s mind, but again, it’s part the brain damage and part that he’s always been a bit oblivious. This plays big here as it is a mystery from the past. My summary – French is excellent at setting a mood but this story won’t leave you in a good place.

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Review: Unstoppable Confidence: How to Use the Power of NLP to Be More Dynamic and Successful

Unstoppable Confidence: How to Use the Power of NLP to Be More Dynamic and Successful by Kent Sayre
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

So, do you need a book to tell you how to repeat affirmations? Probably not, but if you do, this is one of them. Having read a number of books on the concept of influence recently, I wasn’t surprised to see what is discussed here are really a number of basic influence techniques, but where the influencer is also the influencee. Kinda interesting, but also very obvious. This has some new-age overtones that made this sound more spiritual than scientific.

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Review: Big Money Thinks Small: Biases, Blind Spots, and Smarter Investing

Big Money Thinks Small: Biases, Blind Spots, and Smarter Investing by Joel Tillinghast
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

About 2/3 of the way through listening to this audiobook, I thought about what I had learned. The author talks about evaluating companies and their stocks, generally using a great deal of research and spreadsheet work. As you listen to the “case studies” of the companies that he has evaluated and how he architected the evaluations, you are left with the feeling that it takes a special person to do this, one that is single-mindedly dedicated to tracing down the numbers behind the numbers, the forecasts that the company uses but don’t repeat to analysts, and information from sometimes obscure sources. While I originally assumed this was a how-to book, it is far from it. It was more a “here’s why you leave this to professionals” book that is pretending to be a how-to book. I also noticed, about 2/3 of the way through the book, that this would be a perfect book to explain why active fund management could be beneficial compared to index funds in raising return or lowering risk. And then, the author flips a switch and calls this out in the remainder of the book. As a defense of active fund investing, this does a good job. The author writes in a friendly way, and you understand that through his focus he’s able to tell stories about stocks and companies based on evaluation of numbers that are enlightening. What he doesn’t do is give you the belief that you can do these evaluations yourself without a lot of experience. Well written.

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Review: Libra

Libra by Don DeLillo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the audiobook, this story based on the Kennedy assassination had a dreamlike quality. Part of the reason for that is DeLillo’s writing. He is talking about some of the most consequential actions in a person’s life, even in recent history, and he will sometimes stop to describe the way a person is smoking a cigarette, as if it might be a tip-off to why a person acted a certain way. You expect that when you get into conspiracy theories, and this story is really that at its base – the story leading to the action. We follow Lee Harvey Oswald, and all his aliases, from childhood through defection to Russia and return, and we follow him as he’s groomed to be a patsy. While Oswald is the central character in the book, we also spend time in the eyes of his wife and mother, Jack Ruby, and in the CIA mastermind who plots the assassination attempt, including Cubans and mafia figures. I found the storyline with Oswald and the CIA operative to get quite confusing over time, as the author I believe intended, such that the story gets changed and you can’t tell how it happened. Was there a doublecross? DeLillo ends with Oswald’s mother’s lament, which felt quite Shakesperian in tone to close out the story. DeLillo says in an afterward that this was a novel, not non-fiction, and intended to get people to think. But it’s a novelization of a conspiracy theory, interesting and well written, so I can see myself remembering this more than any official version of the story as time goes on. Fact becomes fiction becomes fact, though modified in the process. Hopefully this story is one that readers will be willing to remember over time.

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Review: When You Are Engulfed in Flames

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found myself laughing quite a lot while listening to this audiobook. I also found myself saying “gross” a lot, too. Sedaris has a tendency to slip into what I’d consider adult-level gross-out humor, usually dragging out the story when he knows the listener will be most squeamish. Think “lancing boils” here. He seems to tell more stories about his rebel, drug-using, younger years here than in his other books I’ve listened to, and they tend to the quite humorous. I found this one of his better collections of stories.

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Review: Your Complete Guide to a Successful & Secure Retirement

Your Complete Guide to a Successful & Secure Retirement by Larry Swedroe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This felt like two different investment books. The first was closer to what I look for than the last. The book begins with some suggestions of the issues faced by retirees, such as worrying about spouses and sequence of returns risk. The author then provides some advice on thinking through these issues and determining your own path. This was a pretty common start. Where the book shines was the next few chapters, focused on asset allocation research and personal investment policies. The author provides some specific fund examples to plan around, and some specific advice that I hadn’t run across before based on the author’s research – in effect advice to step back from the efficient frontier to trade off a little return for some measure of risk reduction. The bulk of the rest of the book were a series of chapters on topics of interest in retirement, including the normal topics of Medicare, Social Security, and annuities, but also including lesser covered topics like women’s unique retirement issues, elder financial abuse, and preparing your heirs. I found these chapters to be hit and miss, some bits very familiar and some bits providing a new take on topics. Very good, even for someone who reads a lot of these kinds of books.

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Review: The Lincoln Highway Across Illinois

The Lincoln Highway Across Illinois by David A. Belden
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another in the series of historic snapshots books with sepia-tone photo covers. This one focuses on the Lincoln Highway through Illinois. The book generally follows the original generation of the road, passing through the Southern suburbs of Chicago, meandering Northwest to the Western suburbs, then heading along a number of state highways toward the Mississippi, where it rejoins US 30. I'm very familiar with the drive on US 30 in Illinois where it isn't called the Lincoln Highway, so this was a learning experience - I've mistakenly assumed I was driving on the Lincoln Highway for decades. But I'm also familiar with the actual route. I enjoyed the pictures and some of the description, but I found two issues. First, the descriptions were very repetitive. There were three or four places where the authors added descriptions of motor courts to go along with vintage photos of motor courts and tourist camps. The thing is that the description is almost identical. Same with some other descriptions - it seems like an editor was not involved. The second issue was the prevalence of photos from the South suburbs. The rest of the route seemed hit or miss in terms of the quantity of photos. I assume this is because the authors focused on sources local to them, and made few trips to remote locations to gather info. Nevertheless, an interesting set of photos for people interested in the history of the road and its businesses. My favorite parts were the photos and stories about the unpaved, rutted, muddy roads that made up the early highway. Some of those photos were from about 100 years ago, really not that long ago.

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Review: The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance

The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance by Nessa Carey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I like to talk about the march of technology, and the way I see it in software is that basic functions are understood and then packaged together into higher level functions, which are subsequently bundled together to create even higher level functions. In science, it seems the opposite is true – things keep getting broken down into their building blocks, which get more granular and interact in stranger ways. From this book I think of epigenetics as breaking down the concept that DNA is THE instruction for an organism into DNA being one of the pathways to determine what an organism is and how it functions. I really liked how the author time and again found analogous stories to describe the science, making it broadly understandable. She made the effort to explain, sometimes multiple ways, that you don’t always find in these kinds of popular science books. I’d say this is a bit deeper than an average pop science book, but better explained. I’m looking forward to reading more by this author.

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Review: Shadows in Flight

Shadows in Flight by Orson Scott Card
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Having completed the Ender series and following by reading this to complete the Ender’s Shadow series, I was initially led to believe the stories were connecting. Ends up that was originally in the cards for this one, but the author changed the story. In the audiobook of this short novel, author Card himself appears at the end to explain why this, in fact, isn’t the advertised final book in the series. I have grown to enjoy his audiobook discussions of his books, and this few minutes was no exception, giving a peak behind the scenes of building and maintaining a reader-cherished story world.

This one wasn’t up to the quality of the earlier Ender books. Another name might be “Geniuses and Babysitter in Space”. In Card’s other Enderverse books you spent a lot of time in the heads of the characters so as you learned how they thought and could predict their actions, but here it just didn’t seem like that was the focus. The ending was abrupt and conveniently tied up many loose ends – too many. It was like one of those pulp westerns written a century ago where when the author hit his word count, the cowboy up and rides off into the sunset. I do hope there is another in the series that finishes re-connecting the best of the Ender and Bean storylines.


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Review: We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

200 plus years of lawyers and jurists interpreting, perverting, and writing the laws of the corporation, determining just how closely a corporation could be cast as a human, or a citizen. The author tells these legal case stories with relish, mixing the historic record with profiles of major players in this realm, from descriptions of Daniel Webster’s piercing black eyes to Samuel Alito’s brashness. Not dry, quite interesting.

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Review: The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically

The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically by Peter Singer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Say you are Mr. Spock, and you take it as a personal goal to optimize the good in the world. You’d first define what good is. After some thought, you might come up with the good that you want to focus on is eliminating medical issues in the world to reduce human pain and suffering. Then you would emotionlessly put forward your efforts and wealth to making that happen. Only after you totally solve the problems of health would you consider turning your attention to something farther up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This path follows logic and optimization based on an assumption of what “good” is. What loses with Singer’s system? Tribalism and higher human callings like the arts. What really doesn’t feel right here is the thought that if everyone followed this prescription, the world would be very grey, leaving more of humanity alive but having less to live for. This was a very thought-provoking book to read, and I’m glad I did. Although I don’t agree in total with the author, I can easily understand those that do agree and I commend those donors on putting effort and reflection into their plans. I guess the rest of us will fund the local jazz radio station.

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Review: She Rides Shotgun: A Novel

She Rides Shotgun: A Novel by Jordan Harper
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This feels like the author has taken a good story, in this case a father teaching his child to survive bullies, and amped up a few variables. In this case, the bullies aren’t just going to beat anyone up, they kill entire families. And instead of a typical teen or young adult child, we have a pre-teen that plays with a teddy bear. That’s pretty much it. I found this read like it could be turned into a movie very simply. The plot is simple, the scenery is well described and the scenes could be filmed in California. I’d read more by this author.

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