Reviews by Mark

Your brain is up there with, er oxygen and it is amazing how little most of us know about its capabilities and limitations and how to make the most of this most vital of assets. The core analogy, namely seeing the brain as a stage, works well. I would have awarded 5 stars but found that at just short of 10hrs the message could have been delivered more succinctly.

Great book to follow the excellent blog. Essential management reading because none of us are as smart as we think we tend to think we are.
@upfinder

Brilliant story. Sorry, did I just say story? The truth it turns out is more surreal than most stories.

This book differs from the early post sub-prime crash accounts in that it chronicles the build-up and collapse from the perspectives of the handful of maverick investors that not only predicted the crash but realised that they could bizarrely bet against the market with the odds stacked on their side. It also perhaps benefits from being researched a few years after the event.

Ever heard of Mike Burry or Steve Eisman? No, nor had I, but we should know them. Michael Lewis shows his colours from Liar’s Poker so this cannot be seen as entirely impartial narrative but the testimony is utterly damming.

It provides excellent insight into how we prefer the blissful ignorance of the current economic momentum to rational facts. For the next 10 years or more we will be living our lives and managing our businesses in the fallout from financial greed, corporate mis-management, corruption, ingenuity and our own innate optimism. Enron again, but this time on steroids. Some of this will leave even the most hardened sceptic incredulous at the stupidity of it all. Why is it only in hindsight that giving a $700k mortgage to a $14kpa strawberry picker seems so stupid? So, be warned, as David McRaney has shown us, ‘You are not so smart’.

So now that we’ve survived the mother of all crashes I guess we can all get on with our lives again! A few trillion here and there in national debt for having rescued the system that brought us to our knees is surely nothing to worry about.

@upfinder

Reminding us all, with buckets of passion and character, that the traditional customer service basics and personal touches that were initially lost as we moved to the new economy are even more critical to success today due to the way in which positive and negative feedback can spread so quickly using social media. Most repeated phrase, Pull don't Push. Perfect sense. @upfinder

Humble and persuasive, the author highlights through his own struggles how he came to apply a lean manufacturing mindset to software development. What is particularly fascinating to me is how well this translates to all business startups not just to product development. Excellent stuff. @upfinder

Good narration of a well laid out book containing sensible advice and genuinely free or no cost ways of growing your business online. That is to say free of third party costs. Jim makes it perfectly clear that these are not get rich quick ideas and rightly so. The models he describes are clearly founded selling information but the ideas are equally transferable and applicable to other sectors. @upfinder

Listening to this on the move didn't work very well for me. This content may be better than it came across in audio format or if at a desk and able to make notes/mindmap. I found the narrative and the narration too lifeless and not a patch on the Project Management text in this series.

This may go down well with some but for this Brit the narration and music made the cheesy words unpalatable. 'You are your life's work' is not entirely lost on me and there may be other pearls of wisdom but all was lost in a sea of hogwash.

I'm afraid that I bailed out after three hours of hearing the blindingly obvious. I wish I'd trusted my gut feeling as per Simon Sinek and stopped within the first hour. I kept waiting for a new insight or fresh approach but left wanting. Maybe as a book this works better because you can skim through and pick out the key headlines and the odd insight but this was a random walk through treacle.

Straight away you can tell this is not being read so much as owned. I just wish Simon had opened with how his life changed and led onto his excellent 'golden circle' principle rather than leaving this until the end. The good examples are repeatedly referred to and whilst this helps ram home the message, my interest started waning halfway through. Nonetheless this is an interesting marketing angle and like all good simple ideas is one that is only obvious when you have been told. Its interesting that because of his good delivery, I think this is a book that probably works much better as an audible.