Aaron U. Bolin, Ph.D.

Unfolding the Napkin: The Hands-on Method for Soliving Complex Problems with Simple Pictures by Dan Roam (list price: $20.00; 2009 Penguin Group). Dan Roam is really cool; I really enjoyed this book. Yes, the pictures are kind of corny. Yes, the examples are kind of cartoonish. Yes, the exercises seem like they are from kindergarten. But somehow Roam has taken corny, cartoonish, kindergarten tasks and turned them into something really useful. I read this book and enjoyed it, but I didn't get the full value of the content until I went back and worked the exercises. Though I don't remember what SQVID stands for or any of the other organizing schemes that Roam uses, I really did learn something from his very original presentation of simple visual thinking tools. In the process of working through the exercises in the book, I distilled the complexities of my work into four intuitive pictographs. My boss at the time hated these pictographs for some reason, but the value of the pictog

Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear by Frank Luntz (list price: $24.95; 2007 Hyperion). In Words That Work , Luntz provides a glimpse into the world of the professional wordsmith. Without question, he brings sufficient credibility to write on this topic authoritatively. His experience crafting and re-crafting messages for the wealthy and powerful is well known --- he's considered among the best in the business. And that is what really irritates me. Luntz describes the scientific process of manipulating the message for maximum effect. In essence, he's bragging about manipulating you and manipulating me. There is something really troubling about the idea that the content of a message is ultimately less important than the packaging. My minor irritation disappeared rather quickly though, because I realized that the information and techniques he described were absolutely critical knowledge. If only to avoid being the dupe of the next advertise

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows (list price: $19.95; 2008 Sustainability Institute). Donella Meadows is a genius. Rather, she was a genius; she passed away before this little gem of a book was published. I didn't know her or her work personally, so it is probably more conservative to only comment on this one little book --- which I thought was brilliant. Meadows delivers exactly what she promised: a primer on systems thinking. She digs deep enough and provides wide enough coverage to provide a strong grounding in the topic with a style that should be understandable for most readers. Where it is important, Meadows provides an adequate treatment of the nuts and bolts in a non-technical and enjoyable to read narration. Although hardcore systems modelers and programmers might find this primer simplistic, I found the simple explanations, integrated delivery, and concise package beautiful. I've read through some of the highly technical volumes about systems

Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results by Thomas Davenport, Jeanne Harris, and Robert Morrison (list price: $29.95; 2010 Harvard Business School Publishing). Analytics at Work  is billed as a how to guide for managers to "effectively deploy analytics in their day-to-day" operations (from the inside cover). Though I enjoyed the book, I don't believe that a reasonable person could say that it lives up to the promise. Instead, Davenport and his co-authors provide a very general framework that lacks the advertised day-to-day details required for deployment. I found the book to be interesting and quite useful from a "oh, I hadn't thought of that..." perspective. However, I'm not sure that there is much original material here beyond the general framework -- most of which was presented in an earlier work by the same authors. Though I wouldn't recommend this book for serious analytic how-to, it would be a good read for someone seeking a gen

slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte (list price: $34.99; O'Reilly Media, Inc.) slide:ology is designed as a reasonably comprehensive how-to guide on creating compelling visual material for presentations, promotional materials, and stories. The book is an easy read and visually very appealing. With a list price of $34.99, I found the book to be a very affordable introduction to the world of the graphic designer. I bought the book at a time when I was struggling to depict a very technically complex manpower planning system in a way that was intuitively understandable. As I worked through the illustrated 260 page volume, I found myself nodding my head throughout. That is, Duarte's expertise shines through as she provides a very good basic structure for presentation design. This book was useful to me in my work; I incorporated some of her recommendations into the presentation that I was building. From a critical perspective, I can&