Elephants Books

William Ardill presents in truly scarey detail the problems faced in a vey uncivil civil war with 3 different factions. One feels the longing to help people, the fears for native friends especially fellow workers and believers. He describes trying to mend bodies and one can only guess the time it will take to mend emotions and the country itself. The most fearsome part, howver, is the reality that it is happening elsewhere now and can easily happen in further African countries. WHEN ELEPHANTS FIGHT everybody gets trampled but Dr. Bill worked hard with his co-workers to share the love of Christ equally to all whenever possible.

This is a FUN Cookbook with receipes from Sammy Davis, Zaa Zaa, Roger Moore, Sean Connery, et. at.

Whether lyricizing for Andrew Lloyd Webber's latest musical or giving words to John Barry's musica as Shirley Bassey belts out the latest James Bond theme, Don Black, a shy kid from a working class London Jewish neighborhood, has lived a magical showbiz life as a lyricist whose songs the whole world sings and enjoys. The book is both a personal story and an examination of exactly what the craft of lyric writing is--when it's good and when it's not--and how Black has added to the artform. From London to Hollywood and back again, his story is one of humility and, it seems, genuine niceness in a realm where sometimes venality and harshness rule the day. A subtitle might be "why GOOD things happen to GOOD people once in a while" and the author, a music writer who knows Black well, really gets inside this talented man's skin. Whether you are an aspiring lyricist or songwriter yourself or just a fan of the music of the past 40 years of popular songs and musicals, you'll find this a satisfying read.

Fun book for dance and elephant lovers. The elephants were really trained to dance in a real circus.

The critics were predicting IBM's demise when he took the rains, apparently after much prodding. He took the bold step of listening to customers and cutting the price of their cash cow, the 360, to raise cash. He also decided that the business model (proprietary) that had worked for IBM in the 50s-70s just wasn't going to work, and he made a big bet on middleware and services.

What's important to his management philosophy? First, he considers big to be good: IBM doesn't have to scrounge for resources to do something. He also loves to win and wants to hear the same from his people.

That said, the book reads a bit like he's trying to sell us IBM: the brand. I also find myself asking what it means to save IBM if he has to lose almost 200K employees (they were hired back eventually) and change the culture. How much can you change something and keep it the same?

Never forget that Gerstner was one of the big dog tobacco executives before he came to IBM.

One of the tobacco executives who took an oath and swore before Congress that he did not believe that tobacco was addictive. Tobacco was known to be addictive since at least 1932 according to the tobacco companies' own records.

Before you believe anything that Gerstner wrote or (more likely) had ghostwritten for him, always keep that in mind.

When I started the book, I have no idea about the history of IBM. I am not an IT person, so I have heard IBM but that is basically it.
I learned a lot from the book about IBM, what they did wrong and how he changed it.
But besides everything he revised the company culture and organizational structure. I think that is the hardest thing a CEO can achieve. His vision, his attention to details but still seeing the big picture amazed me. No wonder they picked him as the great saver of the IBM legend.
The book is long and sometimes repeats itself, without going into details.
The part I enjoyed the most was his e-mails. How encouraging was he after 9/11, he mentioned employee names and all the things they did both to help and also to get their business going. He sent e-mails to his 300.000 employees. His tone and the things he mentions, his clarity was amazing. He is an excellent leader. IBM is very lucky to have such a good CEO.

Having spent twenty-three years in management before I became an entrepreneur, I recognize that moving from one side of the desk to the other side may be the longest journey a professional person ever makes. When we shift into a leadership spot, not only do we find that our prior perceptions might have been totally inaccurate, we have to address personal and professional challenges we would have never imagined.

I applaud this book as one man's record of what life at the top is really like. He won me over immediately when he decided to wear a blue shirt because everyone else was wearing white. Thoreau would have applauded his individualism.

With my current profession dedicated to improving individual and corporate communication, I agree with Gerstner's assertion that "No institutional transformation takes place, I believe, without a multi-year commitment by the CEO to put himself or herself constantly in front of employees and speak in plain, simple, compelling language that drives conviction and action throughout the organization."

Another striking bit of Gerstner wisdom: "Success in a company comes foremost from success with the customer, nothing else."

He's right on target again when he observes that "lack of focus is the most common cause of corporate mediocrity."

Yet Gerstner goes beyond mere platitudes: "Execution--getting the task done, making it happen--is the most unappreciated skill of an effective business leader."

Possibly two of Gerstner's words capsule his approach to awakening IBM to its possibilities: "constructive impatience."

In my judgment, Louis Gerstner should rank alongside Jack Welch as a take-no-prisoners leader. Read this book, and you will agree that he was the right man at the right time for IBM.The Complete Communicator: Change Your Communication-change Your Life!

Throughout this book Gerstner discusses the changes IBM made and how he helped turned the company around. I have no doubt that he was a large part of the dynamic shift at IBM to again make it the successful, global company that it is today, but I felt that I went through the book without completely understanding what those changes were. There was a lot of discussion of how IBM was operated and managed when Gerstner took control of the company in 1993 as it was falling apart before the public's eyes, and there was a lot of explanation of how IBM was successful and reborn when he stepped down from the CEO position in 2002. But there was little substance in between. I am not sure if that is because the day-to-day steps taken throughout the mid and late 1990s are too mundane for the average business reader, of if the details were just left out. Gerstner does share some insight into leadership skills and his management style, but IBM as is left in the shadows. All in all, this is not a bad book, but be aware that the reader is left wondering exactly how IBM regained its dominant position in the marketplace.

Jeffrey Moussaieff's book offered a nice range of examples on various emotions. I enjoyed reading it, but I thought that some of the examples were questionable and displayed too much of an anthropomorphic view of animals.

I strongly believe that animals do have emotions. It wouldn't even be conceivable to me that they would just live without any emotions. Jeffrey goes a long way in proving that they do, using a variety of examples. However, I'm not sure about who the reader for this book is. Is it the people who already know that animals have emotions and love them so much that they wanted to read and learn more about it? Or is it the person who doesn't have a clue about it, nor cares to know? I would say the former.

He has great points and I enjoyed reading it. Some great stories and eye opening facts.

I would highly recommend it.

I wanted a book with evidence of animal emotions, not some guy trying to make me feel guilty for not being a vegan. I already believe that animals have emotions, but I almost wanted to argue against it just because this book was so horrible. Find a book without so much bias, this author is a little crazy. Comparing hunting to rape? Come on now, that's stupid enough to be HIGHLY offensive. Masson is severely disconnected from reality, someone needs to go through the bibliography, pick out the relevant stuff and write a book with some value.

What a wonderful book! Although I am an admitted 'animal person' I think everyone would (and should) enjoy reading this book for a perspective on life on our planet.

My interest in this book is in learning more about animal cognition, behavior, training, etc.

It was a good read. I finished it in just a few days. The stories were varied and colorful. Clearly the author did a lot of research in creating the book.

It is pretty well balanced in the sense you don't have to be an extreme animal rights person to appreciate it.

The only reason I couldn't give 5 starts is that it lacked a bottom line. There were all these wonderful stories about what animals did, but I went away wondering what conclusions to draw. Or at least end the book with some philosophical questions that keep me thinking?

The scientific community has long denied that non-human animals have any emotions; many pet owners and other sorts of caretakers would beg to differ. This statement forms the basis for Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's and Susan McCarthy's When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals. From this, Masson and McCarthy set out to prove to the reader that non-human animals do, indeed, feel emotions, particularly in ways humans can understand or relate to, even if the feelings may not be exactly the same (which the authors do admit would be incredibly difficult, probably impossible, to ever find out). Based on their emotions, highlighting joy and suffering, the authors employ what seems to be the basis of Peter Singer's utilitarian argument - animals can be happy or miserable - to argue for Tom Regan's concept of animal rights - that they should have them, and we should respect them.

The premise of the books is appealing and the title is effective and intriguing - many people would like some acknowledgment that their pets are happy or sad when appropriate, and not merely `displaying behavior.' However, for the reader that hopes for a bit more out of this topic, it may be better to look elsewhere.

Masson and McCarthy rely heavily on anecdotes from scientific reports and field observations. They criticize heavily those who say that anecdotes are useless examples of anthropomorphism, or the projecting of human traits onto non-human animals. Masson and McCarthy claim that anthropomorphism is not as big of a problem as the scientific community has made it out to be; rather, it shows a connection with the animals we are studying and is likely to be more accurate that simply stating that an animal is only displaying a certain kind of behavior.

Most of the book is anecdote after anecdote, organized into chapters by groupings of emotions, such as "Grief, Sadness, and the Bones of Elephants," and "Compassion, Rescue, and the Altruism Debate." Most of these stories are asides in longer research articles, or stories from animal owners, trainers, zookeepers, and the like. The authors make a persuasive argument in favor of taking seriously these anecdotes, but that is soon lost once it becomes clear that the entire book is nothing but `interesting stories,' about a paragraph each. Interspersed with these anecdotes is criticism after criticism of the scientific community and of humanity at large, claiming as a whole that scientists, terrified of being accused of anthropomorphism or simply cold-hearted, deny at every turn any possibility that any animal could feel anything, going all the way back to Rene Descartes. Descartes set the standard for the Western attitude toward non-human animals, claiming that they were mere machines, programmed to have responses resembling emotions but that really, they felt no pain or joy. If any of the descriptions of modern-day experiments that the authors provided are even remotely accurate, then Descartes has left too-lasting of an impact.

However, the scientific community is unlikely to be quite the straw man that Masson and McCarthy have set it up to be. While the authors use a few famous scientists' works in a positive way, such as Jane Goodall and Roger Fouts, most of the references to science are about how cold, unfeeling, and in denial the scientific community is, making grand statements about how all of science is determined to blot out animal emotions in an effort to keep humans up at the top. Indeed, the second chapter, devoted to the scientific community, is entitled "Unfeeling Brutes."

Masson and McCarthy make little use of scientific observations or experiments specifically designed to study animal emotion (though the book was written twelve years ago, and perhaps there was not as much out there). They also make little use of solid arguments or stylish prose, opting instead for a stilted read of unsupported but passionate arguments in favor of animal rights based on the idea of animals' emotions. Unfortunately, any sort of clear argument is left until the ten-page conclusion, in which Masson quickly summarizes the past thirty years of mainstream animal activism, quoting Jeremy Bentham, Peter Singer, and Tom Regan, as well as the famous story of Androcles and the lion who refused to attack him.

The ultimate moral of the book, delivered quickly at the end, is in the vein of Tom Regan - animals have rights, too, because they can feel joy and pain, and all human-caused suffering must end. A noble cause, an excellent premise into an interesting topic, poorly delivered.

Truly. I am absolutely terrified of them. The mere sight of an elephant in a photograph or on TV starts my flight reflexes going. I often have nightmares about them. So I am still surprised, eight years after reading The White Bone, that I love this book as much as I do.

The prose is gorgeous. The characters are original and engrossing. The story is beautifully constructed and compelling. Mud's world and life are brought beautifully to life. This book has stayed in my head for nearly a decade, even in spite of my reluctance to think about elephants. I still sometimes think of snakes as "flow-sticks."

The White Bone is among the best animal fiction I've ever read, and that is really saying something, as I try to read every book with animal characters that I can locate. The disturbing and affecting ending will remain in your mind. I think the death of Tall Time will always stick in my head, as vivid as if I witnessed it myself.

This book is a beautiful and sad tribute to the importance of conservation efforts and will appeal to any person who makes the protection of wildlife a priority in his or her life. The itself will be with you for many years.

I came read others' reviews because I couldn't believe how much I was dreading each page of this book when I'd expected to love it. Those who liked it, seem to have liked it from the first page and those who didn't like it, responded to it the way I have responded. I'm about a third of the way through the book and think it is time for me to find something to read that touches me. Much as I love elephants and as horrified as I am about their plight, this book is leaving me cold. In the hands of a good author, I'd be putty.

One way of looking at "The White Bone" is to think of as following the conventions of much of the best of epic fantasy. A threatened race, dependant on the hope of a youth born with superior powers, destined to find a sacred artifact that will lead her people from the monsters that prey on them, through turmoil and hardship to a promised land, encountering fascinating creatures along the way. However, "The White Bone" is not fantasy -it's a harrowing, tragic and dramatic story - and it's real. The characters may be made up, and certain plot points (like the sacred object: the fabled White Bone of the title) but the basics are true. The threatened race is the elephant race, the monsters that prey on them are human poachers, the journey the group treks on is through Africa, and the creatures they encounter are mongooses, rhinoceroses, ostritches, etc.

The heroine in the book, and one of the great heroines in all the field of novels, is Mud, a young elephant orphaned at birth. The elephants have their own religion, their own worldview, their own stories handed down through the generations. Through the book we also get briefer glimpses of the worldviews of other species. The worldviews of the enigmatic hindleggers (the elephants's term for humans) is unknown; for, although each group of elephants has a mind-talker who can communicate telepathically with most creatures, thus learning of their perceptions of the world and their thoughts and feelings, to share with the other elephants, the minds of humans are unreadable. The mind-talkers hear from certain other animals they can't communicate with only what is described as a 'faint chiming'; from humans though comes a hideous absolute silence that can be deeply traumatic to encounter. The mind-talker in the main group of elephants is Date Bed, a shy younger elephant who clings to Mud. These two, along with the bull elephant Tall Time, comprise the three central characters of the story.

It's hard to say how much of the elephant culture and worldview depicted in the novel paralells the minds of real elephants, but it's likely alot closer than the traditional scientific view (now thankfully being abandoned in whole or in part by many scientists) of elephants and all non-human creatures as basically automatons driven solely by biological instinct and completely or virtually devoid of thought or emotion. Whatever the case may be, this involving, vividly written, detailed and character-driven epic gives fascinating glimpses at how other lifeforms may view things; and a disturbing look at how humanity does indeed conduct itself amongst its fellow species.

Several women recommended this book to me quite highly - meaning you may enjoy it. I certainly didn't. The story was predictable and repetitive. Elephants suffering the atrocities of man wander around the plains aimlessly searching for each other, their holy grail (a white bone) and/or the promised land. The elephants kept getting killed or dying from exposure to the barren elements. It was written in a "matriarchal feminist style" that would very much have appealed to me in my early twenties but which I'm rather tired of now. It is unlikely this story will appeal to many men. I read through to the end expecting to find some meaningful take away. I didn't. It was just another story of the suffering and despair brought by human cruelty. If you already know this, don't torture yourself with a 327 page reminder of the fact.

A profound and inventive book. Gowdy's choice of speaking to the human condition through the medium of an extended family of elephants is unusual, to say the least, but ultimately rewarding. A challanging but deeply satisfying read. In my opinion, this is Gowdy at her best.

Elephants Can Remember (Hercule Poirot)

As most people know, this was the last Hercule Poirot novel Dame Agatha Christie was to write. (CURTAIN, the last in the series had been written some years before with the intention of the author that it be published after her death). Again, as in FIVE LITTLE PIGS Five Little Pigs (Hercule Poirot), and HALLOWEEN PARTY Hallowe'en Party (Hercule Poirot) Hercule Poirot will have to delve into the distant past in order to solve the mystery. (Miss Marple was also quite capable of doing this as in Sleeping Murder (Miss Marple Mysteries).

This novel satisfies any true Christie fan on several levels. A baffling mystery, the return of old friends like Ariadne Oliver, the mystery writer who was a kind of self-portrait of the author, and Mr. Goby, the mysterious character who seems to have the ability to find out anything about anyone.

Altogether, as with almost ALL of the author's works---a good read for a cold winter's night! (also available as a kindle download: Elephants Can Remember

One note, Charles Osbourne, the self-professed Christie expert (who has even taken a stab at trying to write in her style with little success) posed a question in his essay on this book: "Why should a hand be covered in blood when all it has done is push someone over a cliff?"
He should have read Dame Agatha's novel a little closer---that wasn't all it did.
But don't worry---I won't tell you any more. GET the BOOK!!!

Definitely one of my least favorite Poirot books. As other reviewers have mentioned, the solution to this mystery is quite apparent about halfway through the novel. I sort of wanted to shake Mrs. Oliver and Poirot and ask them how they could be so obtuse and not realize the solution. The quirks our beloved Poirot typically display are all gone here; all that is left is rather dry prose and a mystery that should have been shortened by about sixty pages. Having said all of that, it does make for a quick read that does not require much thinking. If you are looking for a great example of a murder-in-retrospect book by Christie, I would recommend "Five Little Pigs" instead.

REVIEW: Not exactly the best book to start with if you're curious about Christie; and her expertly crafted, wildly plotted crime novels. Still, "ELEPHANTS CAN REMEMBER" does have its charms and its moments of glory. The story concerns the murder/suicide of General Ravenscroft and his wife Margaret on a lonely cliffside at their house in Cornwall some twenty-odd years before the book's opening scene. Famed mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver (Christie's alter-ego) is approached at a literary luncheon by the overbearing presence of a Mrs. Burton-Cox who wants her to find out the truth behind the tragedy as it involves Mrs. Oliver's goddaughter, Celia Ravenscroft, who just so happens to be engaged to Mrs. Burton-Cox's son, Desmond. The reason why she wants the whole affair dug up is puzzling to Mrs. Oliver, and so she pays a visit to her old friend M. Hercule Poirot who (though at first reluctant) decides to help Ariadne uncover the truth about the deaths. The solution to the killings is sound (if trite), yet no where near as intriguing as Christie's other "murder in retrospect" cases. On top of that: the book rambles on too much and is too leisurely paced for a lengthy novel (as a short story it might have had more success). Still it's hard to dismiss "ELEPHANTS" as an all-out failure. It is flawed yet engaging, and the sheer joy of reading along with such wonderful characters as Ariadne and Poirot makes it all worthwhile. Alas, there is an excuse for Dame Agatha's slightly below par performance: after all the woman was eight-two-years-old and in diminishing health when the book was written. HARSH LANGUAGE: none. VIOLENCE: about 8 instances. SEXUAL REFERENCES: none.


THE MORAL COMPASS: Agatha Christie will always be known as a treasure trove of first-class entertainment, and as such (and in comparison with her classic detective novels) "ELEPHANTS CAN REMEMBER" remains a terribly disappointing work. Luckily this was not to be the final Poirot case released before her death in 1976 (the wickedly twisted "CURTAIN" would have that honor). Hoever, if the reader doesn't expect too much from this book then the initial sense of disappointment will be lessened, while the die-hard Christie fan can appreciate the autobiographical asides that she infuses through the character of Mrs. Oliver. It is these little bits of insight into the mind of the author that proves the most amusing thing about "ELEPHANTS". Still, Christie manages to describe a most horrible crime with tact, and the handling of certain "manic" tendencies of the murderer is sympathetic yet not without a sense of Godly righteousness in how to deal with the consequences of such insanity. The use of suicide is also presented as understandable under the circumstances of the story even though it is viewed as wrong in the moral sense. But overrall: the tragedy of General and Molly Ravenscroft is quietly portrayed with taste and dignity, and with no foul language or sexual descriptions. As such the book's content should earn a strong ACCEPTABLE rating.

Whose work are we actually reading at this point? There were major differences in punctuation, word choices, and scene breaks between the original Collins and Dodd Mead editions of this novel. There were further differences between the Dodd Mead editions republished by Random House/Avenel and the Dodd Mead editions republished by Simon & Shuster/Pocket. There are further additions still in the recent Signet, Berkley, and Leventhal and Black editions. For every publishing house putting out her works, there seem to be a new batch of editors altering Agatha Christie's words and the sound of her voice. Here the publishers at Collins, dissatisfied with their own earlier efforts, put still more distance between author and public with a "New Ed" edition. What's the matter with these publishers? Whose voice do they think we want to hear when we sit down to a novel by Agatha Christie? And what will she sound like twenty years from now? It's frightening that her estate has failed to see the importance of guarding her words as she wrote them. Please tell me I'm not the only one here who senses that a crime has been committed.

"Elephants Can Remember" does not read like a typical Hercule Poirot mystery. Agatha Christie's famed detective is drawn into an old case by his friend, the amateur sleuth and mystery writer Ariadne Oliver. The case involves what was apparently the double suicide of a loving husband and wife, and the concern that these past actions might have left a horrible impact upon their children.

The story switches between the findings of Ariadne Oliver and Hercule Poirot as they each go in search of 'elephants' who might remember what happened around the time of the accident, because after all, an elephant never forgets. While there is no definite evidence as to what happened, there are those who have never accepted the double suicide theory because they couldn't answer the question why. But with Poirot and Mrs. Oliver working together, a long-unspoken truth is certain to be uncovered.

"Elephants Can Remember" is classic Agatha Christie, in terms of mystery. It's central mystery has a unique, if perhaps a little predictable, twist, the denouement of which is quite evenly paced and satisfactory. However, this might be one novel where the time period of the plot is more glaring than others. The prose is heavy-handed at times and one does get a little sick of all the mentions of 'elephants'. The characters are borderline two-dimensional and, therefore, the reader does not care about them, even if they are still interested in the mystery at hand.

This book is a humorous look at how to deal with the Big Boss. Unfortunately, the many truths that lie beneath the humor, also make it a bit sad.

Stanley Bing, the Budha, walks the reader through all aspect of the Zen art of elephant handling. It starts with the foundation, exposing truths (e.g. Work is suffering. Desire is the root of suffering. There are no truths! - You get the idea). Then he charts the path to enlightenment.

Like mastery of any skill, it takes time and it is best to start with simple lessons such as how to greet the elephant, feed it, and follow after it with a broom and shovel. The lessons get more complicated with topics like shining its belly with appreciation, obeying and disobeying, helping it make up its mind, convincing it every idea is its own, etc. It culminates with the final lesson and the title of the book, throwing the elephant.

The book is laugh out loud funny at times. The author is extremely clever. At 200+ pages, it probably would have been even more effective if shorter.

If you find you are taking your job or yourself too seriously this book will quickly break you out of that funk.

-- Nick McCormick, Author, Lead Well and Prosper: 15 Successful Strategies for Becoming a Good Manager

Please assist me as I still have not received this book and this is the second time I have placed the order and the money has been debited from my account.

No really, I mean it.

Or anyway, it will be, once you calm yourself, little aphid, and penetrate to the heart of "Throwing the Elephant", Zen Master Stanley Bing's exegesis on the sublime art of applying the infinite wisdom of Siddhartha himself to the sinews, guts, entrails and viscera of the business jungle, and mastering the King of the Beasts himself.

No, silly, not the Lion. The Elephant.

You don't know about the Elephant in the room? Sure you do.

Let's step back a moment: let's meditate. Calm. Relax. Get in touch with the great infinite blackness of stars and even more stars wheeling and dancing and colliding above us and about us, and what the Hell, after a few vodka gimlets down at Dorsia, maybe even *through* us.

Did you know see that star overhead? See how it twinkles? Now imagine: the light from that star has taken thousands, perhaps millions of light-years to travel from Constellation Seti Prime, which means that by the time we see it twinkle, the star itself may very well have exploded. Or subsided into the stellar senesence of a red dwarf. That is to say, that star you're wishing upon may already be long dead.

Kinda puts the McGillicuddy Account in perspective, huh?

I could end this review with that, but I'll proceed a bit further: sit beneath the bodhi tree with Zen Master Bing. He'll teach you about the Elephant. He'll teach you about the Great Nothingness which flows around and through you. He'll teach you, as Sidhartha taught him, that desire is suffering, that there is only the dharma, and at its heart, Duty.

Duty? Why yes: to serve and keep and feed and groom and care for the Elephant. To not annoy it. To console it when it is sad, and galumph about with it (beware the feet!) when it is joyous. To sweep up its poop, and to clean off its poopy hindquarters. To leash it, to ride it, and ultimately, to throw it.

But let's talk, quickly, about the Elephant. All offices have one, perhaps a few. The Elephant has its pen in one of the corners of the executive suite: good digs, maybe even a working fireplace up here on the 37th floor, possibly a wet bar, maybe even an in-house masseuse.

Can you smell the sweet rotten reek of straw and sweat and blood and tears and dung? Yep, the Elephant. It will sally forth, to trumpet and do other bellicose things in the jungle: the lowly creatures in its vicinity (hint: you) will keep their heads down, fall silent, try not to make sudden moves or loud noises.

The Elephant will make you fear for your career, your home, your wife, your small children, your very life. It will make you work over the weekend, or cut short the long-planned trip to Bermuda. It will force you to work long hours and give lots of face time.

Ah, yes: now there is recognition. The Elephant.

So with that, then, this quick little primer---Bing the Bhodissatva practically puts the KO in Koan---will teach you how to abide, control, and ultimately master this fell beast, without being stamped to jelly. And it's a tasty little read, that goes down like cucumber paste. How cool is that?

As the Buddha himself once said, as he sat beneath his bhodi tree: Very.

JSG

I'm a big fan of Bing's column in Fortune, but I was a bit disappointed by this book. He offers his usual ironic insights on upper management -- but I found the entire zen-buddha framework somewhat forced and tiring. If you know a lot about "zen" philosophy, I'm sure you'll be able to appreciate more of the subtleties than I could. However, I mostly found myself reading quickly through the zen quotes and references, eager to get on to the more meaty actual business stories and anecdotes. Maybe it just wasn't the book for me. I look forward to some of Bing's other works, instead.

It must have been fun to write this book. It is much better than Mr Bing's What Would Machiavelli Do? There is more humor than knowledge in this one. Even if you are a Bing fan, I would suggest you borrow it from the library.

Marketing gurus Howard Moskowitz and Alex Gofman believe their method of product testing, called Rule Developing Experimentation (RDE), can lower your costs, shorten turnaround time, and improve your product development, packaging, messaging and competitive analysis. RDE involves defining your problem, then testing a series of alternatives to determine its boundaries. The data you gather may confirm your expectations, but often enough it will contain surprises. Even if your customers can't articulate their needs, their choices and behavior will show you what they want. RDE will also inform you about how to sell to each market segment. The authors illustrate their method with interesting case studies; they also include amusing, if irrelevant, sidebars (one covers the history of the tomato, for example). Their style may be digressive and flawed by the overuse of jargon, and some of the graphs and illustrations can be confusing, yet we recommend this book to experienced marketing managers who are tired of guessing about their strategies and want to base them on reliable data.

This is a good overview. It will give you ideas of how to rationalize a multi-product, multi-segment business to optimize it. A quick read - and keeps you up to date.

Selling Blue Elelphants. How to make great products that people want before they even know they want them.Moskowitz & Gofman. 2007. ISBN 0136136680. This is a very important book. It should finally put a bullet into money wasting focus groups. This is the applicationo of the scientific method to product development with a high tech web tool. Prodcys reange form consumer, hiugh tech, services, teh US President, stocks, competitive analysis - it is a very thorough treatment. The truth is people do not know what they prefer if they have not exerienced it. Previous work in this area promised bland and mediocre. These two marketing scientists have written a definitive work in this area.
From the cover it does show the following

* Discover "how the world works" in your market
* Reveal the hidden rules that define your next breakthrough product
* Create prototypes that answer the right questions, fast
* Get at the truths your customers don't know how to tell you
* Use automated tools to streamline the entire process
* Streamline your research, and get actionable answers in just days
* Extend RDE value throughout the enterprise
* From messaging to corporate communications to investor behavior

It is an important book. But, it is tiresome to read. Each chapter starts out brilliantly and then it drops numbingly into the data. I would have put most of the data in appendices. If you can get through it the results you can bring to your firm that are worth it and save time and money.

I liked this book and learned a lot about a market-research technique that I had hoped might apply to the needs of a small business-to-business company. The book made me enthusiastic about the potential to test product concepts before we spend a lot of money taking final products to market. The approach the authors advocate appears to be able to dramatically reduce risk for companies that are trying to get their offering right. The focus of the book is primarily on consumer-goods companies and their products, though the technique has also be used for B2B offerings.

As I got into the book, I was disappointed that the only practical advice the authors offer is to contact them about using their on-line research tool. Good as their tool may be, it appears not to be well suited for the needs of my small B2B business.

I now feel I've paid about $20 for the authors' elaborate marketing brochure, and I have no way to apply what I learned unless I choose to work with their company. Use of books to promote the authors' business is a consistent trend in the publication of business books. I don't object to it if the book provides real value the reader can apply even without engaging the services of the authors' company. This book fails that basic test, as do many other such books. If the trend toward self-promotion continues without regard for the lasting value a book provides to the reader, I think the entire market segment will lose credibility.

By the way, in contacting the authors' company I learned that the cost of their services comes to about $10,000 per study. That's very reasonable for companies bigger or more mature than mine, but its well beyond what we can afford at our stage of growth.

I'll be selling this book soon on the Amazon.com marketplace. I only wish I had bought it there.

The concept of Rule Developing Experimentation (RDE) should prove intriguing enough for any marketing manager looking to dive into the "blue ocean" of unstructured demand and untapped market space. The varying definitions of that ocean have led to RDE, the subject of this illuminating though somewhat presumptive book by market research mavens Howard Moskowitz and Alex Gofman. The source area of study will be familiar to anyone who has read W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne's Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant and Chris Anderson's The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, both works reflecting authors who feel that any venture into the great unknown requires some discipline. Using experimental psychology and adaptive management as their basis of argument, Moskowitz and Gofman offer seven steps toward successful produce launches:

(1) Identify groups or classes of features that constitute the target product.
(2) Mix and match the elements according to an experimental design to create a set of prototypes.
(3) Show the prototypes to consumers and collect their responses on a rating question.
(4) Analyze results using a regression module.
(5) Uncover the optimal product by finding the best combination that has the highest sum of utilities.
(6) Identify naturally occurring attitudinal segments of the population that show similar patterns of the utilities.
(7) Apply the generated rules to create new products and services.

The template is far easier to grasp in theory than in execution, a point validated by the co-authors who assume companies have a clear understanding of their value-add in the marketplace at a most granular level. The most challenging aspect is identifying the right breakdown of product features and then using the appropriate statistical formulas to recognize the response patterns in order to make tangible enhancements. Quantifying the process is an admirable effort by the co-authors, but it seems to apply easier to hard consumer goods than softer services. However, the more constructive argument relates to the shortcomings of the more nebulous findings to be produced from survey questions or focus group discussions, the traditional means of eliciting such customer-generated data. So much qualitative judgment, in particular, by marketing managers constrained by their own thinking, can hamper such findings as to render them next to useless, especially in an established marketplace.

Moskowitz and Gofman point out how established name-brand companies who can afford to invest in RDE analysis (such as Hewlett-Packard and MasterCard) have yielded dividends from the approach. These companies typify markets that have become so saturated that the marketing leadership is forced to come up with new value propositions. This means testing a broad variety of feature combinations, and some may strike you as counterintuitive. It appears that the more combinations tested, the more actionable the findings, all of which makes this a potentially expensive methodology. The co-authors are particularly effective in showing how such thinking extends to design elements, even packaging, in order to assess a product's resonance on the marketplace. At times, I wish the co-authors would have toned down their use of superfluous jargon and their obvious pitch of ideamap.net as the source of their research software, but there is no doubt from this book that the subject of RDE is endlessly fascinating.