Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Uncertainty makes us free!

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Posted 08 May 2012 — by Charles Martineau
Category Books, Risks

I am cur­rently read­ing the great book Against the Gods by Peter Bern­stein and we learn a lot about John May­nard Keynes and its view on risk. Like Karl Pop­per, Keynes believes that we have a very lim­ited knowl­edge. So much that there is no sci­en­tific basis on which to form any cal­cu­la­ble prob­a­bil­ity. In the words of Bern­stein “Keynes’s words bring great new: we are not pris­on­ers of an inevitable future. Uncer­tainty makes us free.”

Couldn’t agree more! Imag­ine if life was cer­tain… how bor­ing would that be!

Authority in Social Science Research

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Posted 03 Sep 2011 — by Charles Martineau
Category Books, Research

Few weeks ago I arrived in Van­cou­ver to start my PhD and I was able to find some time to start read­ing a book I wanted to read for a while … “Con­jec­tures and Refu­ta­tions” by Karl R. Pop­per. I won’t go into the details of the book but sim­ply intro­duce one key point raised in C&R.

Some of you might know that Pop­per was a crit­i­cal ratio­nal­ism philoso­pher. In other words, the best way for us to increase our knowl­edge is through self-criticism or from crit­i­cism of oth­ers regard­ing our research find­ings and the­o­ries. We musty try to fal­sify the­o­ries (if fal­si­fi­able). The bot­tom line is that no one holds the def­i­nite truth.

Early in the book, Pop­per ampli­fies the idea that we seem to beg for author­ity in our quest for the truth, which can come from politi­cians, philoso­phers, etc – by any­one basi­cally! We seem to beg for authority.

This reminded me of one of my for­mer prof at the mas­ters level that once told me that if you wish to pub­lish a paper that dis­prove one par­tic­u­lar the­ory that I must avoid some jour­nals for pub­li­ca­tion if one of the edi­tors is con­sid­ered as an author­ity on the sub­ject – in other words that edi­tor is a proud sup­porter of the the­ory that my results might dis­prove. (No won­der there is so many papers that likes to prove a cer­tain hypoth­e­sis and many researchers are afraid to take the risks to try to dis­prove a theory)

Now what is this… author­ity in social sci­ence? How can there be such thing as author­ity in social sci­ence?  What is the dif­fer­ence between a dic­ta­tor who says that he or she holds the truth on how social life should be orga­nized and admin­is­tered and some­one who claims to be an author­ity in a par­tic­u­lar field of social sci­ence? Don’t con­fuse author­ity and some­one who has a lot of knowl­edge on a par­tic­u­lar field of study. By author­ity I mean, some­one who delib­er­ately want to pro­tect its views / find­ings (on a par­tic­u­lar author­ity or hypoth­e­sis) from criticism.

This same prof also said that what­ever we do in social is often “abstract”. So again, how can there be some­one claim­ing author­ity in the abstract world? Truth is above human authority…

“What we should do, I sug­gest is to give up the idea of ulti­mate sources of knowl­edge, and admit that all knowl­edge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prej­u­dices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it be beyond our reach. We may admit that our grop­ing is often inspired, but we must be on our guard against the belief, how­ever deeply felt, that our inspi­ra­tion car­ries any author­ity, divine or oth­er­wise. If we thus admit that there is no author­ity beyond the reach of crit­i­cism to be fond within the whole province of our knowl­edge, how­ever far it may have pen­e­trated into the unknown, then we can retain, with­out dan­ger, the idea that truth is beyond human author­ity. And we must retain it. For with­out this idea there can be no objec­tive stan­dards of inquiry; no crit­i­cism of our con­jec­tures; no grop­ing for the unknown; no quest for knowl­edge.” (p.39 of Con­jec­tures and Refu­ta­tions; Karl Pop­per; 2010 reprinted edi­tion of Routledge)

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What matters for an effective presentation? Know your audience

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Posted 06 Jun 2011 — by Charles Martineau
Category Books, Presentations, Research

Per­son­ally, what I think is the most impor­tant thing when it comes to pre­sen­ta­tion is to know who your audi­ence is. You will not have a suc­cess­ful pre­sen­ta­tion if you can’t bond effec­tively with your lis­ten­ers and it all starts by know­ing who will attend your presentation.

Res­onate – a book by Nancy Duarte

Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte Design (the firm behind Al Gore’s pre­sen­ta­tion “An Incon­ve­nient Truth”) recently released a new book titled “Res­onate”. It is a sim­ple book but how effec­tive at teach­ing you the basics (and more) at mak­ing sure that your mes­sage in your pre­sen­ta­tion res­onates with the audi­ence. The author argues that in order to “res­onate” with your audi­ence you must fol­low sim­ple rules. One of these rules is: “If a pre­sen­ter knows the audience’s res­o­nant fre­quency and tunes to that, the audi­ence will move.

Duarte says that before a pre­sen­ta­tion, you must know who your audi­ence is by seg­ment­ing them in groups. In other words, seg­ment them by answer­ing this ques­tion: “Who are they?” You may seg­ment them by lifestyle, knowl­edge, moti­va­tion and desire, val­ues, influ­ence, and respect. That is what I exactly did few weeks ago…

Pre­sent­ing your research to aca­d­e­mics – what’s their background?

I had to present my Mas­ters Degree research to my depart­ment, not for defend­ing my the­sis, but to demon­strate that my research has a good chance to pub­lish in the upcom­ing year. My research is titled “Do Polit­i­cal Insti­tu­tions Affect the Choice of the US Cross-Listing Venue?” Now, since I did my research in the inter­na­tional busi­ness depart­ment and not finance (despite my work being more a finance dis­ci­pline type of research) I was pre­sent­ing to a group of aca­d­e­mics with var­i­ous back­grounds such as eco­nom­ics, finance, polit­i­cal sci­ence, strat­egy, etc. So like usual, I did some very basic and quick research on the back­ground of the indi­vid­u­als assist­ing my pre­sen­ta­tion. I asked my research direc­tor who will attend the pre­sen­ta­tion and researched them on the web. I quickly real­ized that many comes from dif­fer­ent back­ground and con­se­quently I would face some dif­fi­cul­ties at mak­ing my research “res­onate” with them if I don’t take this into account.

When I started my pre­sen­ta­tion, one of the first thing I did is to read the title of my work and say right away that I expect many to be 100% clue­less of what my title or research is all about. The sec­ond thing I did was not to dive directly in the work/research itself but to take time and define three things:

(1) What is “Cross-Listing”?

(2) What is a “Cross-Listing Venue”?

(3) What do I mean by “Polit­i­cal Institutions”

Again, my title of my work is “Do Polit­i­cal Insti­tu­tions Affect the Choice of the US Cross-Listing Venue?” (to be avail­able soon on SSRN and my website)

I made sure that every­one under­stood these three set of terms and the research ques­tion. I also tried my best to relate each terms with var­i­ous research fields. This was really appre­ci­ated by my audi­ence. We were all on the same page from the begin­ning. Then it was easy for me to carry them on through my research. If I had dive in my research from the start, it would have been a major failure…quite early in the presentation!

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Documentaries by the historian Niall Ferguson: amazingly good!

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Posted 04 Jun 2011 — by Charles Martineau
Category Books, Documentary
I would like to write a short post on three doc­u­men­taries by my favorite his­to­rian Niall Fer­gu­son from Har­vardUni­ver­sity. Fer­gu­son is not like any other his­to­rian. First of all, he is really enter­tain­ing and does not believe at study­ing the past to pre­dict the future. With PBS & Chan­nel 4; Niall Fer­gu­son has released 3 doc­u­men­taries, each con­tain­ing 6 parts (47min each). Below are the titles of each doc­u­men­tary and part 1 for all three doc­u­men­tary (free online via PBS or Youtube) with a descrip­tion pulled for the books:
(1) War of the Worlds — part 1
Why, if life was improv­ing so rapidly for so many peo­ple at the dawn of the 20th cen­tury, were the next hun­dred years full of bru­tal con­flict? Fer­gu­son (Colos­sus) has a rel­a­tively sim­ple answer: eth­nic unrest is prone to break out dur­ing peri­ods of eco­nomic volatility—booms as well as busts. When they take place in or near areas of impe­r­ial decline or tran­si­tion, the unrest is more likely to esca­late into full-scale con­flict. This com­pelling the­ory is applic­a­ble to the Armen­ian geno­cide in Turkey, the slaugh­ter of the Tut­sis in Rwanda or the “eth­nic cleans­ing” per­pe­trated against Bosni­ans, but the over­whelm­ing major­ity of Ferguson’s analy­sis is devoted to the two world wars and the fate of the Jews in Ger­many and east­ern Europe. His richly informed analy­sis over­turns many basic assump­tions. For exam­ple, he argues that England’s appease­ment of Hitler in 1938 didn’t lead to WWII, but was a mis­in­formed response to a war that had started as early as 1935. But with Ferguson’s claims about “the descent of the West” and the smaller wars in the lat­ter half of the cen­tury tucked away into a com­par­a­tively brief epi­logue, his thought­ful study falls short of its epic promise.
(2) Ascent of Money — part 1

Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, read­ies, the where­withal: Call it what you like, it mat­ters. To Chris­tians, love of it is the root of all evil. To gen­er­als, it’s the sinews of war. To rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies, it’s the chains of labor. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Fer­gu­son shows that finance is in fact the foun­da­tion of human progress. What’s more, he reveals finan­cial his­tory as the essen­tial back­story behind all history. Through Ferguson’s expert lens famil­iar his­tor­i­cal land­marks appear in a new and sharper finan­cial focus. Sud­denly, the civ­i­liza­tion of the Renais­sance looks very dif­fer­ent: a boom in the mar­ket for art and archi­tec­ture made pos­si­ble when Ital­ian bankers adopted Ara­bic math­e­mat­ics. The rise of the Dutch repub­lic is rein­ter­preted as the tri­umph of the world’s first mod­ern bond mar­ket over insol­vent Hab­s­burg abso­lutism. And the ori­gins of the French Rev­o­lu­tion are traced back to a stock mar­ket bub­ble caused by a con­victed Scot mur­derer. With the clar­ity and verve for which he is known, Fer­gu­son elu­ci­dates key finan­cial insti­tu­tions and con­cepts by show­ing where they came from. What is money? What do banks do? What’s the dif­fer­ence between a stock and a bond? Why buy insur­ance or real estate? And what exactly does a hedge fund do? This is his­tory for the present. Fer­gu­son trav­els to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free mar­ket can’t pro­vide ade­quate pro­tec­tion against cat­a­stro­phe. He delves into the ori­gins of the sub­prime mort­gage crisis.Perhaps most impor­tant, The Ascent of Money doc­u­ments how a new finan­cial rev­o­lu­tion is pro­pelling the world’s biggest coun­tries, India and China, from poverty to wealth in the space of a sin­gle generation–an eco­nomic trans­for­ma­tion unprece­dented in human history.Yet the cen­tral les­son of the finan­cial his­tory is that sooner or later every bub­ble bursts–sooner or later the bear­ish sell­ers out­num­ber the bull­ish buy­ers, sooner or later greed flips into fear. And that’s why, whether you’re scrap­ing by or rolling in it, there’s never been a bet­ter time to under­stand the ascent of money.

(3) Civ­i­liza­tion: Is the West His­tory? - part 1

f in the year 1411 you had been able to cir­cum­nav­i­gate the globe, you would have been most impressed by the daz­zling civil­i­sa­tions of the Orient. By con­trast, Eng­land would have struck you as a mis­er­able back­wa­ter rav­aged by plague, bad san­i­ta­tion and inces­sant war. The other quar­rel­some king­doms of West­ern Europe — Aragon, Castile, France, Por­tu­gal and Scot­land — would have seemed lit­tle better. The idea that the West would come to dom­i­nate the rest for most of the next half mil­len­nium would have struck you as wildly fan­ci­ful. And yet it happened. What was it about the civil­i­sa­tion of West­ern Europe that allowed it to trump the out­wardly supe­rior empires of the Orient? In Civ­i­liza­tion: The West and the Rest, Niall Fer­gu­son argues that the West devel­oped six “killer appli­ca­tions” that the rest lacked: com­pe­ti­tion, sci­ence, democ­racy, med­i­cine, con­sumerism and the work ethic, and takes read­ers on an extra­or­di­nary jour­ney around the globe with a defin­ing nar­ra­tive of mod­ern world history.

I found myself watch­ing over and over these doc­u­men­taries (par­tic­u­larly Ascent of Money). If you love his doc­u­men­taries, you will love his books, and his aca­d­e­mic papers (no joke). The amount of knowl­edge you can gain by watch­ing these doc­u­men­taries is massive.
Warn­ing: Once you start look­ing at part 1 of any documentary…you can’t stop!
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Administrative Behavior — Herbert Simon

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Posted 28 May 2011 — by Charles Martineau
Category Books
This is a quick post for me to say to every­one who has a form of intel­lec­tual curios­ity to read the great book by the Nobel price win­ner Her­bert Simon Admin­is­tra­tive Behav­ior. It is a book on how orga­ni­za­tions can be under­stood in terms of decision-making processes. It was pub­lished in 1947 when Her­bert Simon was 31 and is was a “con­tin­uum” / follow-up or enhance­ment of his PhD the­sis. The authors cen­tral point is that decision-making is the heart of admin­is­tra­tion. Since humans are not ratio­nal, but bonded ratio­nal as argued by the author, orga­ni­za­tions should be design in order to make decision-making processes for select­ing the means more “effi­cient” to achieve the ends (goals of the organization).
It is a com­plex book but the intellectual-depth of the book is so fascinating!
One theme of research that inter­ests me is the mix between chaos the­ory and orga­ni­za­tions — yet, I have still not found a paper or work that relates Simon’s work and chaos the­ory. I will keep searching.
UPDATE:
Simon on chaos the­ory can be found here
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What can business managers learn from sports trades?

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Posted 12 Mar 2011 — by Charles Martineau
Category Books, Management

So, what can busi­ness man­age­ment learn from sports trades? The slight­est move of per­sonal can be dis­as­trous. Unless your firm faces a major recon­struc­tion (due to bank­ruptcy, finan­cial dis­tress, etc), a move­ment of per­sonal such as fir­ing some­one that is appre­ci­ated in the com­pany, clos­ing more or less prof­itable depart­ments or mov­ing some­one from one posi­tion to another with­out their con­sent can launch a spi­ral of unpre­dictable neg­a­tive con­se­quences in the envi­ron­ment of the firm. When a man­ager decides to make a move­ment of per­sonal, the manager’s deci­sion must be based on strong grounds. In other words, there must be a very legit­i­mate rea­son for per­sonal move­ment (e.g. a staff that don’t work, dis­rupt oth­ers, per­son is neg­a­tive, not per­form­ing to the stan­dards, etc.) If a man­ager moves some­one around such for the sake of mak­ing changes, the con­se­quences to the firm can be devastating.

Why sports trade can be disastrous?

As we know, trades in sports cre­ate a lot of excite­ment and when we expect a team to make move and don’t, fans tend to com­plain a lot. Fans must under­stand that trades (or in the case of man­agers, per­sonal move­ment) must be based on strong legit­i­mate rea­sons. I am cur­rently read­ing the great book “The Game” by Ken Dry­den – famous goal­tender for the Mon­treal Cana­di­ens in the 1970s. Dry­den wrote a book on the game of hockey but more pre­cisely the last year spent with the hockey club. There is one part of the book on trades. Trades and per­sonal move­ment in firms are sim­i­lar. Dry­den talks about a trade con­cern­ing a very good hockey player but at the end of his prime Pete Mahovlich:

“On the road, Pete was our social direc­tor, ambas­sador, and guide, his role to make sure that every­one was happy, and he always did his best. When­ever we were look­ing for some­thing to do, we always looked for him—“Hey Pete, what’re ya doin’ tonight?”—then fol­lowed along. If he said he was tired, which he rarely did, and was going to bed early, we would react as if he was let­ting us down, spoil­ing our fun. But we knew that he didn’t like to say no, and could never say it for long, so we kept ask­ing until we knew with a laugh he’d relent. But it was a life-style that couldn’t last. Com­pet­ing with him­self, always need­ing to be fun­nier and more out­ra­geous to seem as funny and out­ra­geous as he had been the day before, he finally burned out. His

skat­ing grew labored, he com­plained to Bow­man (coach) that he needed more ice time to “get [him­self] going.” Instead he got less. The worse things got, the more he tried to right them with one dra­matic play, usu­ally an end-to-end rush that would leave his line­mates Lafleur and Shutt as spec­ta­tors. When it didn’t work, when he’d be stopped at cen­ter or lose the puck at an opponent’s blue­line, it became more and more annoy­ing. Then one morn­ing, after sit­ting two seats away from him for more than six years, I found that he was gone. That night, he showed up at the Forum in a Pen­guins sweater. While he had talked of being traded off and on for some time, it seemed it would never hap­pen. When it finally did, when he left, the dress­ing room changed. Every­thing we had come to expect of him—the hats, the jack­ets, the laughs, the out­ra­geous stories—we couldn’t count on any more. Even the few things we told our­selves we wouldn’t miss, we did. Each had become some­thing we could depend on, some­thing we could fit in with and orga­nize around, some­thing that was part of him, that had become part of us. For while same­ness can be dead­en­ing, it is also com­fort­ing. Like George Burns’s awful songs or Johnny Carson’s double-takes, when you like some­one there is  some­thing quite nice in know­ing what’s com­ing next, in know­ing that noth­ing has changed; that when laces are cut, when petro­leum jelly is smeared on the ear­piece of a phone… In a life that changes with the score, this is our con­ti­nu­ity, our secu­rity. When (Pete) Mahovlich was traded, the room felt lousy for a while.” – Ken Dryden

Cana­di­ens kept on win­ning that year but man­agers must under­stand that a change just for change can kill the vibe between play­ers; hence per­for­mance might take a hit. Fans must under­stand that we don’t see what goes on in the locker room. Some gen­eral man­agers don’t want to make a trade just to trade to please the fans. They know that despite the fact that a player should be traded, they won’t just to make sure that the good vibe still reigns in the club. They don’t want to take the risk of the unpre­dictable con­se­quences of killing the vibe.

Busi­ness man­agers, this is just a small les­son for you. Make sure you know your staff well before any changes.

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Book talk: The Naked Presenter by Garr Reynolds – let’s hope for better presentations in this world!

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Posted 27 Feb 2011 — by Charles Martineau
Category Books, Education

(Full dis­claimer: Garr Reynolds, the author of the book “The Naked Pre­sen­ter”, was my pro­fes­sor when I stud­ied at

Kan­sai Gaidai Uni­ver­sity in 2007. I was blown away by how good this teacher was at teach­ing, shar­ing his knowl­edge, but more impor­tantly to make us hun­gry for curios­ity. Thus, some may say that I am not objec­tive when I rec­om­mend this book but I can’t see how any­one would dis­like this book either.)

Who’s Garr Reynolds?

Garr Reynolds is one of today’s top experts to con­sult when it comes to mak­ing pre­sen­ta­tions either as a researcher, busi­ness per­son, etc. We all had to go through a crappy expe­ri­ence at lis­ten­ing some­one speak­ing in front of an audi­ence using Pow­er­Point where the speaker reads the slides which are full of text (which no one reads) and where we don’t feel engage what­so­ever. Garr was a for­mer Man­ager of World­wide User Group Rela­tions at Apple Com­puter in Sil­i­con Val­ley. With Apple, Garr worked with user groups (brand com­mu­ni­ties) in the U.S. and Japan and deliv­ered pre­sen­ta­tions, soft­ware demos, and keynote addresses to the firm’s most loyal cus­tomers. It is then that he found is love to present but also how to present well! He noticed that in the busi­ness world, the qual­ity of pre­sen­ta­tions was just sim­ply quite pathetic!

Garr’s love for pre­sen­ta­tion led him to cre­ate a web­site called Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen (PZ). At PZ, Garr teaches his insights and tips on how to deliver pre­sen­ta­tions with a touch of Zen and Japan­ese cul­ture. Garr saw in the study of Zen many lessons that we should apply to the world of pre­sen­ta­tions. His web­site became the most pop­u­lar web­site on pre­sen­ta­tion and decided to write a book called Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen. This book became a best seller and one of the top busi­ness books of Ama­zon in 2008. His first book was an all-around book on how to deliver good pre­sen­ta­tions and go beyond Pow­er­Point with a touch of Zen.

His sec­ond book, Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen Design, which was released in 2009 focused specif­i­cally on how to cre­ate bet­ter designed pre­sen­ta­tions. He shares his lessons on design­ing effec­tive pre­sen­ta­tions that con­tain text, graphs, color, images, and video.

His lat­est book which was just released is called The Naked Pre­sen­ter. That is the book I will briefly write about and seri­ously recommend.

The Naked Pre­sen­ter: Deliv­er­ing Pow­er­ful Pre­sen­ta­tions With or With­out Slides – A must for any­one who speaks in front of an audience

Garr’s lat­est book aims at teach­ing pre­sen­ters how to com­mu­ni­cate the essence of your mes­sage by strip­ping away all that is unnec­es­sary (i.e. point­less slides, text, etc.) and embrac­ing the ideas of sim­plic­ity, clar­ity, hon­esty, integrity and most impor­tantly PASSION through your “naked­ness” or “nat­u­ral­ness”. This book teaches the core of pre­sen­ta­tions – ten (plus one extra) deliv­ery prin­ci­ples that begin with the let­ter P. They are: Prepa­ra­tion, Punch, Pres­ence, Pro­jec­tion, Pas­sion, Prox­im­ity, Play, Pace, Par­tic­i­pa­tion, and Power.

Why Naked?

Taken from the con­cept of Japan­ese pub­lic bath called Onsen (温泉  in Japan­ese) where every­one who is in the bath is naked, Garr makes a link on how Japan­ese bath can make you more pre­pared to make bet­ter pre­sen­ta­tion of your core mes­sage. As in pub­lic bath, pre­sen­ters should be naked: remov­ing the unnec­es­sary and expose what is most impor­tant. The ten Ps teaches you how to be naked.

Quick insights on some of the ten Ps – prepa­ra­tion, punch, and Pas­sion.

Prepa­ra­tion: At school, I see stu­dents prepar­ing their pre­sen­ta­tions the night before the pre­sen­ta­tion day…what the hell? No won­der there is so many crappy pre­sen­ta­tions out there. It takes time to pre­pare a good pre­sen­ta­tion. Hence, the first P takes a big part of the book. It teaches how to find time to pre­pare you pre­sen­ta­tion, the neces­sity to under­stand your audi­ence prior your pre­sen­ta­tion and the power of story (sto­ries is what makes pre­sen­ta­tion sticks in people’s mind). Good prepa­ra­tion gives you the chance to remove the unnec­es­sary of your core message.

Punch: To make your core mes­sage stand out it needs to PUNCH in the state of people’s mind. For instance, does your core mes­sage chal­lenges con­ven­tional assump­tions? Is it in any­way per­sonal? You will find that when you core mes­sage as a PUNCH fea­ture, build­ing a story around your core mes­sage becomes eas­ier, hence it makes you more open to the audi­ence and eas­ier to grab people’s attention.

Pas­sion: One way to show your true naked­ness is by show­ing your emo­tions through pas­sion! When you are pas­sion­ate by your work, project, prod­uct, and etc there is no way that you shouldn’t demon­strate that pas­sion to your audi­ence. By doing so, you’re engag­ing your audi­ence in your pre­sen­ta­tion (as long as you make them feel why they should also be pas­sion­ate). Grow­ing as a kid, it was easy to go in front of the class and just be joy­ful and pas­sion­ate but for some sad rea­son, grown-up pre­sen­ta­tions are always too seri­ous. We demand seri­ous pre­sen­ta­tions — but why? This kills the vibe for cre­ativ­ity and engage­ment. The book teaches you how to express your pas­sion through professionalism.

Pre­sen­ta­tions is all about hav­ing conversations

Hav­ing Garr as a teacher, read­ing is blog and his two pre­vi­ous book reli­giously, and always pay­ing atten­tion to all the great pre­sen­ta­tions that you find on the web, is lat­est book made me real­ized some­thing that I never really noticed or taken seri­ously. When you present, you are sim­ply hav­ing a dis­cus­sion or con­ver­sa­tion. For some rea­son, my mind always clas­si­fied pre­sen­ta­tions and con­ver­sa­tions in two sep­a­rate groups. But this is not the case! Once you real­ize inside your mind that you are sim­ply hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with your audi­ence, it is much eas­ier to express your true self and be authen­tic because you remove the bar­ri­ers to for­mal­ity. As said by the author:

“Just like a good con­ver­sa­tion­al­ist, a pre­sen­ter with good pres­ence will con­nect with you on some level and demon­strate with sin­cer­ity that, at least for the moment, he or she does not wish to be any­where else than right there hav­ing a dia­logue with you.”

Fol­low the Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen movement

I highly sug­gest every­one to fol­low Garr’s blog Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen. This will make you a much bet­ter pre­sen­ter on a weekly basis. You will be hooked on the web­site and you will turn your­self to Garr’s three books. By doing so, we will live in a much bet­ter world where there will be bet­ter pre­sen­ta­tions because there is no such thing as bor­ing knowl­edge, only bor­ing presentations.

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Book Talk: Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch Joel

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Posted 16 Jan 2011 — by Charles Martineau
Category Books

Since I read a lot of books, I decided that it would be great if I do a blog post for each book that I read. I won’t review the book per se but try to extract the true “essence” of the book and how it may be applied to you in your every­day life. I will call these blog posts “book talk” (I may have to come up with a more orig­i­nal title).

The book

Six Pix­els of Sep­a­ra­tion by Mitch Joel of Twist Image is a book that focuses on new social media such as Face­book, Blogs, Google (Alerts), Linkedin, etc. and how it affects our lives – either for small busi­nesses, cor­po­ra­tions, and indi­vid­u­als. These new social media, wanted it or not, make us all con­nected and more impor­tantly enhance our com­mu­ni­ca­tions with the peo­ple we know, don’t know, or the type of peo­ple we thought never existed. Hence, new tools for busi­nesses and indi­vid­u­als to bet­ter tar­get their audi­ence (cus­tomers, fanat­ics, peo­ple who share the same inter­est, etc.) At first, I was a bit reluc­tant at read­ing this book because, for some rea­son, I had the impres­sion that this book was tar­geted for big cor­po­ra­tions and teach them how to suc­cess­fully lever­age these tools. I was, quite thank­fully, dead wrong!

Why was I wrong?

This book was writ­ten for every­one who use social media and not only for cor­po­ra­tions who wish to develop a more per­sonal rela­tion­ship with its cus­tomers. For instance, the authors teaches us how can some­one who has a pas­sion for com­puter design cases show his or her pas­sion and how can he or she actu­ally lever­age her pas­sion into poten­tial money (some­time small money but nonethe­less inter­est­ing)? Use SQUIDOO! This is a book that helps you unleashes you per­sonal ambi­tions to many through the use of var­i­ous social media. Mitch Joel takes a stance at not push­ing the reader to use all the tools but use the ones that fits you best and how to pro­fes­sion­ally and care­fully exploit them. The last part is the most impor­tant: How to EXPLOIT them (e.g. how impor­tant it is to answer back on com­ments on your blog, how to fol­low oth­ers what they say about you or your brand on the web). I thought I knew all about Twit­ter, Face­book, Google Reader, etc but after read­ing this book: hell no I didn’t!

Exploit your niche

The best mes­sage from this book is how some­one can share its pas­sion through a “global mar­ket” niche via social media if you are either a designer, musi­cian, a small busi­ness, and the lists goes on. Mitch Joel states the case of Garr Reynolds of Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen (my actual pro­fes­sor when I stud­ied at Kan­sai Gaidai) and how he found a way to share its pas­sion for good pre­sen­ta­tions but also his desire on chang­ing how busi­nesses view pre­sen­ta­tions, the need to under­stand why ter­ri­ble pre­sen­ta­tions are costly, to know how to cor­rectly use pre­sen­ta­tion tools such as pow­er­point, why design is impor­tant, etc. Garr exploited is love for good pre­sen­ta­tions through a social media (blog) and his blog pop­u­lar­ity launched new career oppor­tu­ni­ties through writ­ing books, work­shops, and con­fer­ences. All thanks to social media. As Mitch often points out in the book: any­one who needs to get the mes­sage out (as long as it is focus) can use the power of social media for its own and social benefits.

Stu­dents: social media is for you too!

A point that is more or less lever­age in the book is how stu­dents like me, who are about to grad­u­ate, can use social media to hope­fully land a good job. I am in this sit­u­a­tion. Yes we all know about linkedin, but is it enough? We have to under­stand that social media such as Blogs or Linkedin (or even Squidoo) can help us, stu­dents, to go beyond the CV or resume. I real­ized through my basic web­site that I can sell myself so much more than through a CV. These days with aca­d­e­mic infla­tion and every­one want­ing to put as much stuff on CVs to look good, finds them­selves all in the same boat…how can we dif­fer­en­ti­ate our­selves? Social media can help us and I see blogs as one of the best tools out there to go beyond the CV. Take my case: I post all the books that influ­enced me, all the good doc­u­men­taries that I find on the web, I write crit­ics, and I am not afraid to show (to my future employ­ers or cus­tomers) who is Charles Mar­tineau. Let’s face it, blogs helps stu­dents to go at an inter­view and say: “You really want to know (almost) every­thing about me: go on my web­site – you can have a bet­ter pic­ture of me in your hir­ing process”. This, my friends, is priceless.

Con­clu­sion

Get the book! It is a fast read book with price­less details on tools that are now sur­round­ing our lives. Ignore this book at your own peril. Stu­dents out there: this book will change the way you pro­mote your­self for future career oppor­tu­ni­ties. Let’s face it: look at my web­site, do you think it says more about me than a CV?

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About reading…

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Posted 27 Dec 2010 — by Charles Martineau
Category Books, Education

Just find time to read!

I just read an “old” blog post (Nov.2010) by Mitch Joel — the man being Twist Image (a mar­ket­ing con­sult­ing firm located in Mon­treal) and author of Six Pix­els of Sep­a­ra­tion on how read­ing books is such a valu­able asset to the human mind and cre­ativ­ity. When he (and you may include me) talk about read­ing we don’t mean news­pa­pers or mag­a­zines. Yes they are impor­tant assets to under­stand to some “degree” what goes on all around the world but you must read books that goes deep in long thoughts. It takes more time but how more valu­able! I use to read the Econ­o­mist mag­a­zine inside out (a great mag­a­zine) but read­ing bits of every­thing with­out going in depth left me on my appetite. I quickly real­ize that I should spend more time read­ing books that go deep in thoughts and argu­ments. Some fic­tion books are also great too to develop a deeper under­stand­ing of many sub­jects such as Ayn Rand — Atlas Shrugged on economics.

In its blog post, Mitch Joel describes how much he likes read­ing and how much he feels that he never reads enough despite the fact that he reads all the time. Well I feel the same. Species like me and Mitch Joel who reads all the time have a thirst of knowl­edge that is inde­scrib­able. We feel that no mat­ter how much knowl­edge­able we can get we always remain igno­rant. What mat­ters is not what we have read but what we haven’t yet read! This thought might suck for you but seri­ously is what keeps us going. We will die in this state of mind but that’s alright. Those who read a lot increases the chances to be suc­cess­ful in life.

The role of pro­fes­sors on influ­enc­ing kids on reading…

When I was a kid I hated to read books until my Eng­lish pro­fes­sor in grade 10 made me read a fic­tion book involv­ing some mafia wars and all sud­denly I real­ize that read­ing can be quite enter­tain­ing. From that time I just start­ing to read a lit­tle then over the years the num­ber of books I read increased expo­nen­tially (well almost!).

I met a young high school pro­fes­sor not long ago and told me a lit­tle trick on how to get kids hook on read­ing. He says to stu­dents that “any­thing can be read”. For instance, there is a kid in his class who loves hockey but hates read­ing. So the pro­fes­sor asked the stu­dent who was is favorite hockey player and he answered Wayne Gret­zky. The pro­fes­sor went to the library and got him the biog­ra­phy of Wayne Gret­zky and lent it to the kid. Guess what? The stu­dent read the book with pas­sion and then started to read other books on hockey. Now, some might argue hockey books may not be what is con­sid­ered the deep­est intel­lec­tual and cre­ative read­ing but it is a start! That is what is impor­tant. [side note: for those who thinks read­ing books on hockey do not have some “intel­lec­tual” assets..you should read Ken Dry­den — The Game]

The rea­son why I have a sec­tion books / aca­d­e­mic papers is to increase the inter­est of my friends and oth­ers on read­ing! I can promise you some­thing, once you read any book in my list you’ll want to read more and more…Or sim­ply go to the library and walk around and just look at books! I can promise you that a book will grab you interest.

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Great Quote by Karl Popper on Education

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Posted 08 Dec 2010 — by Charles Martineau
Category Books

While read­ing Unended Quest: An Intel­lec­tual Auto­bi­og­ra­phy by Karl R. Pop­per, I found a superb quote on Popper’s dream of future education.

If I thought of a future, I dreamt of one day found­ing a school in which young peo­ple could learn with­out bore­dom, and would be stim­u­lated to pose prob­lems and dis­cuss them; a school in which no unwanted answers to unasked ques­tions would have to be lis­tened to; in which one did not study for the sake of pass­ing examinations.

Pop­per had this in mind in the 1920s. Still in 2010, almost 2011, schools are excel­lent at destroy­ing cre­ativ­ity. Pop­per would be really mad at stan­dard­ize exams like SAT, GMAT, LSAT, and all that crap

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