Rob Grady » Book

Quote From Getting to Plan B

Rob — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:59:07 +0000

Here is a quote from Getting to Plan B, “The research on new product success and failure indicates that it takes fifty-eight new product ideas to deliver a single successful new product.” I’m reading this book from by John Mullins and Randy Komisar and find it interesting so far. The fundamental premise of the book is that businesses do not succeed with their original business model but rather an iteration of the original. This parallels the recent trends/fads in lean business/product/software.

Great Quote from British Economist Paul Ormerod

Rob — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 02:25:40 +0000

Here is a great quote from British economist Paul Ormerod’s book Why Most Things Fail, “The tendency to overemphasize successes and to rationalize them ex post is chronically endemic amongst business historians and management consultants. The latter group are particularly prone to the temptation of claiming to have found the unique formula of business success. Books proliferate, and occasionally sell in very large numbers, which claim to have found the rule, or small set of rules, which will guarentee business success. But business is far too complicated, far too difficult an activity to distil into a few simple commands, be it the ’set price equal to marginal cost’ of economic theory, or some of the more exotic exhortations of the business gurus. It is failure rather than success which is the distinguishing feature of corporate life.” Awesome.

Dan Roam’s book ‘The Back of the Napkin’

Rob — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 09:32:06 +0000

I’ve been reading Dan Roam’s book The Back of the Napkin and it’s been a great read. While I picked it up based on the recommendation of a former colleague it not only does a great job providing a framework for identifying problem components but provides a framework for ‘visual thinking’.
It’s a good and relatively quick read that you can can probably finish over a weekend or couple plane trips. I can see its application for consulting and marketing firms looking to grow their teams capabilities but as with any process and methodology implementation, adoption and standardization is always the challenge.

Books

Interaction Design Books

Rob — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 08:29:14 +0000

Great list of interaction design books from Luke Wroblewski. I have most of them on my shelf and need to set aside some time to finish reading a few of them