This book is written in the form of the novel through asking question by mentor and answering them by mentee. It is short read but it took me a while to chew the concepts of profit making. Normaly I like to read business books as novels but in this instance it was dificult.
So this is my assessment of the book The Art of Profitability by Adrian Slywotzky according to my 8 criteria:
1. Related to practice - 3 stars
2. It prevails important - 3 stars
3. I agree with the read - 4 stars
4. not difficult to read (as for non English native) - 4 stars
5. Too long (more than 500 pages) - short and concise (150-200 pages) - 4 stars
6. Boring - every sentence is interesting - 3 stars
7. Learning opportunity - 4 stars
8. Dry and uninspired style of writing - Smooth style with humouristic and fun parts - 3 stars
Total 3.5 stars
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Here are some highlights and excerpts from the book that I find worth remembering...
Book title The Medici Effect, comes from a remarkable burst of creativity in fifteenth-century Italy. Thanks to Medici family and a few others like it, sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, financiers, painters, and architects converged upon the city of Florence. There they found each other, learned from one another, and broke down barriers between disciplines and cultures. Together they forged a new world based on new ideas--what became known as the Renaissance. The main idea is that Medici family formed an Intersection of people and ideas which then develop new kind of ideas, innovation and new avenues of development in science, art, businesses and life.
When you connect two separate fields, you also set off an exponential increase of unique concept combinations, a veritable explosion of combinations of ideas. For example if you take rock music there is about 2,400 variations (this is number of combinations when you multiply 4 basic rock instruments with cca 12 different structures and about 50different vocals) to develop new music. Similary, if you multiply 30 classical instruments with about 40 different structures and only 2 different vocals) you get again 2,400 variationas. However, if you combine rock music and classic music you get more than 6 million variations.
In summary, intersectional innovations share the following characteristics:
➣ They are surprising and fascinating.
➣ They take leaps in new directions.
➣ They open up entirely new fields.
➣ They provide a space for a person, team, or company to call its own.
➣ They generate followers, which means the creators can become leaders.
➣ They provide a source of directional innovation for years or decades to come.
➣ They can affect the world in unprecedented ways.
So this is my assessment of the book The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson according to my 8 criteria:
The book has Smooth style and its easy to read. These strategies are not unknown but sometimes you need to hear it few times before you put it to practice. At the end Jim Rohn asks four questions:
▪ Why should you try all this?
▪ Why not?
▪ Why not you?
▪ Why not now?
This kind of wrapped it up...
Short but very comprehensive textbook about strategy consulting. It will be interesting to reed this book (or Element as author calls it) for anyone in consulting business or anyone who consider consulting as a profession.
So this is my assessment of the book Strategy Consulting by Jeroen Kraaijenbrink according to my 8 criteria:
1. Related to practice - 3 stars - author says that the approach described is somewhat idealistic.
No one wakes up thinking, “I am going to make bad decisions today.” Yet we all make them.
The book Think twice by Michael Mauboussin explores how counterintuitive decision making process is and gives us set of suggestions of how to avoid common mistakes during the process of making decisions.
So this is my assessment of the book Think twice by Michael Mauboussin according to my 8 criteria: