"Plan B" by David Kord Murray

Plan B: How to Hatch a Second Plan That's Always Better Than Your First by David Kord Murray may have taken a long time between purchase and reading for me, but was a solid business book.

I previously read and reviewed his Borrowing Brilliance and Plan B was an interesting follow up that lays out Murray's 11 "Principles of Adaptive Management." The principles themselves can be found in a book synopsis by Harvey Schachter for the Toronto newspaper Global and Mail and the ones that struck me as most interesting are the following...

Principle of Problems - The idea behind this was that an owner or employee should figure out what problem their business trying to solve. This very much reminded me of the book How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen, James Allworth and Karen Dillon with the idea expressed there (which I noted in a review of the book) being to consider what job a product or service fills. On the same topic of writing by Christensen, Murray refers to him the end of Plan B to  in a chapter on evolving plans and strategic evolution vs tactical alternations.

Principle of Solutions - This as described by Murray was about the the importance of tactics, especially as they align with strategy. Concept from the book is that too often tactics are overlooked in importance, and it's an examination of tactics that can reveal what will work in an endeavor... with the example given of finding the tactics that would be used to successfully return to Earth the Apollo 13 crew after an equipment failure.

Principle of Force - This was one of those situations where an idea from someone made me think of a similar concept I've seen elsewhere previously. Specifically, what I took from Murray in this chapter was the notion of being expert at the most niche thing possible. I may have seen other writers expound on this as well, but the person I recall who covered it was Tim Ferriss is his book The 4-Hour Workweek (which I reviewed here).

Principle of paper plans - Concept simplified was that the important thing isn't the plan itself, but the thinking through of the business idea that's required to actually write the plan.

Principle of Multiple Futures - This somewhat ties into the idea of paper plans and them not being the end-all, be-all, but the idea I took from Murray in this section was the best way to make predictions is to make a lot of them and best way to plan for outcomes is to consider a lot of them. Basically, things won't often turn out exactly like we expect so multiple outcomes should be considered along with potential reactions to them.

Book Review - "What the Dog Saw" by Malcolm Gladwell

Finished reading "What the Dog Saw" from Malcolm Gladwell and found it to be a really interesting read.





Gladwell is a solid writer (whose website can be found here) and I've enjoyed reading his prior books "Outliers", "Blink" and "The Tipping Point". "Outliers" was my favorite of these and it's hard to compare his new effort as "What the Dog Saw" isn't about one overarching idea, but rather a collection of Gladwell stories from The New Yorker.

Probably the best way to review the book as a whole is to note the chapters that stood out as most interesting and get into why exactly that was.



Section One - Minor Geniuses

The Ketchup Conundrum - Addressed the question of why ketchup differs from mustard in it's number of varieties. Had the very interesting mention of amplitude as a measure of food ranking... with the concept being how well various flavors work together. Gladwell writes during this portion of how this amplitude measure is often the difference between the most popular consumer brands of a product and generic store brands... for that same product and featuring many of the same ingredients and flavors.

Blowing Up - About Nassim Nicholas Talib and the idea of not knowing what the stock market will do so betting on big deviations from the norm. Talib two years after this Gladwell story wrote about this idea in his bestseller "The Black Swan"... which I found to be an interesting, but also pretty weighty read. Gladwell's story here is interesting in that it really gets at the idea that you can't predict the future. Really, perhaps the only prediction that can be done is the obvious... like for example if housing prices are rapidly increasing and people are buying them based on income they don't have, problems will follow and prices will drop.

What the Dog Saw - The title chapter of the book and written about the "Dog Whisperer", Cesar Millan. Featured Gladwell's writing about the fascinating concept of Laban Movement Analysis... basically high level non-verbal communication (and the concept of phrasing as a combination of posture and gesture).



Section Two - Theories Around Experience Or Events

Open Secrets - About Enron accounting and how it wasn't lies, just information people didn't look for or want to believe. The model the company followed was predicated on normal, but the company was brought down by not normal conditions. In many ways, this chapter reminds me of the Taleb story.

Connecting the Dots - About military intelligence and stands out as interesting given how this chapter relates to the intelligence failure around the attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner (from Time Magazine).

Blowup - About the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and how it really was due to an acceptable risk not having an acceptable outcome. Reminds me of my blog post about terrorism in Detroit in that the world isn't a perfect place and bad things can happen.




Section Three - Predictions About People

Late Bloomers - Was a fascinating chapter about how you have boy wonder types and then those who work and flounder around prior to success. Gladwell quotes the economist David Galenson who says "late bloomers goals are imprecise, so their procedure is tentative and incremental" (and experimental). Another idea put forth by Gladwell is that late bloomers simply often aren't that great to start, they have to improve to get there... which reminds me of the David Kord Murray book "Borrowing Brilliance" (that I reviewed and summarized here).


All in all, really an interesting book with some chapters that may appeal more than others, but that's where the practice of skimming through the less interesting stuff comes into play...

Authors Are Nice People Too

A habit I've acquired as a result of writing this blog is to e-mail authors I like to express said admiration for their writing.

I suppose there's part of me thinking how great it would be if people were to then ask me to "work with them on a hot new book/movie script/epic tome," but really... I just think it's cool to express appreciation for something you like.

I found interesting from doing this that of the nine authors I've reached out to, eight responded with e-mails or notes. The intent wasn't to demand (or even request) anything back, but I do think it exceptionally good of people to take the time to write something.

So... very cool move on the part of the authors below:

- Alain de Botton
- Dave Bidini
- David Kord Murray
- Eric Weiner
- Jeff Jarvis
- John Gardner (since passed away)
- John Grogan
- John Wooden

Book Review - "Borrowing Brilliance" by David Kord Murray

Just finished reading "Borrowing Brillance" by David Kord Murray... which I heard about when it was reviewed here in BusinessWeek.





The overarching theme behind Murray's book is business ideas and where they come from... with that spot often not being one of "out of the blue" originality. That said, I found the guy himself as being almost as interesting as where the ideas come from.


The Guy

Murray seems quite the interesting fellow given his personal and business highs and lows described in the book. He first worked as a NASA engineer and then became an entrepreneur who was poised to sell his Lake Tahoe based financial company for $50 million, and would up with close to nothing. Through a combination of his past experience, lots of reading and a good contact made, Murray eventually found himself consulting with Intuit on the Turbo Tax direct mail program. This then led to a full time Innovation Exec role at Intuit, and then another entrepreneurial venture and now him writing this book and living back in Lake Tahoe.

Solid stuff and his story seems to be an interesting example of how speed bumps can come and you may not know where you'll wind up, but you just try to keep moving forward.


The Business Ideas

As stated previously, the book works with the concepts of ideas... and how to generate, repurpose and repackage them. Following up on this idea of pattern recognition and meaning making, Murray writes of how as a business society we're now out of the information age and onto the conceptual or innovation age.

The structure of the book is broken into 6 steps:

1. Defining - Define the problem and figure out the right one to work on. The idea here is on of scope and how small problems can both fit within and when solved, sometimes create other ones. Murray cited Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page as good people to think of when considering problem definition. The idea behind Google began when they were Stanford PhD students, each working on a separate data mining problem. This led to thinking about organizing information, which led to search. Now that the lower level problem of search has been worked (and of course, continues to be), Google has moved back to the high level problem they talk about of organizing the world's information.

Related to this idea, I also think of the information architect field and how it focuses on the presentation of data, facts and ideas... interesting stuff.

2. Borrowing - Take ideas from places near and far. This is tied to the third step, but focuses on looking for the answers to your problems from yes, your competitors, but also other fields of work entirely. Murray writes heavily about Hollywood and how the construction of movies into acts with emotional triggers and levels was something he thought about in relation to the Turbo Tax offering while at Intuit.

This is in many ways the concept of critical observation... just with a wide net.

3. Combining - Throw the ideas together and try lots of different iterations. Related to borrowing, Murray writes about Star Wars and how George Lucas spend years working on it until he had the perfect combination of science fiction and mythology (with the light saber as an example). Also discussed by Murray in relation to these borrowed combinations were Google utilizing page ranks, Disneyland being built to scale like a movie set and Facebook as a metaphor of a college yearbook.

Interesting concept... causes me to think about Social Networking and web publishing as done through various sources such as Facebook, blogs, Digg and Ning among others.

4. Incubating - allow the combinations to come together.
This step centers on the concept of the subconscious mind being the best source of creative ideas. Murray describes historical intellects like Einstein and Newton as being in touch with their subconscious, but also provides his thoughts (in the three bullets below) on how people can train themselves to get more in touch with their subconscious.

- Input: Think about what problems you want to solve.
- Incubation: Work on clearing the mind... whether it be throw daily walks, meditation or simply doing creative work immediately after a good night of sleep.
- Output: Be willing to let ideas in, but not be held captive by them. Sort of a duality concept of listening to ideas and emotional responses, but at the same time having doubts about them so as to not get led astray by something that is not a true belief.


I liked this concept as it made me think of how creativity doesn't always come, but when it does, you want to run with and get the most out of it. Most simple example of this would be people who jot down thoughts that come to them so that they're not lost in the ether...

5. Judging - Identify strengths and weaknesses... the throwing out of the bad parts of any idea and expanding of the best.

6. Enhancing - Eliminate the weak and enhance the strong. This sounds a lot like point five, but Murray describes it as in many ways being like a recycling of points one through five. Just continually cycle the process.


The conclusion of Murray's book contains his view of "the creative life"... and how one can view these steps as being part of a creative process around more than just business.

Solid stuff (with more details on Murray's book website) and it reminds me of some of the great John Gardner's writing that I linked to in this blog post.

BusinessWeek Best Places to Launch a Career / PCs vs Macs / Books

Excellent content from the Sept 14 BusinessWeek on the "Best Places to Launch a Career".




The annual special report gets into a lot of interesting concepts that companies can offer new hires... especially in the area of opportunities for growth and employee value to the corporation.

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Two other categories of writing that I found interesting in recent Business issues... and which I'll link to here for lack of them being truly compelling enough for their own post:

PC vs Mac & Windows 7 vs a slide rule: In it's Sept 7 issue, BusinessWeek technology columnist Stephen Wildstrom wrote "Snow Leopard: An Upgrade in Camouflage" about new the Mac operating system from Apple.

In the vein of "equal coverage to both sides"... from the Sept 14 issue, Peter Burrows wrote "Will Windows 7 Reboot PC Sales?" and Wildstrom penned "Windows 7: Upgrading Can Be Hard to Do". Releasing Oct 22, Win 7 replaces the much reviled Windows Vista and it will be interesting to see both how Microsoft prices it and how good it is.

Books of Interest: Two mentions of interesting books in the last few issues of BW. "Acting the Part of a Leader" is excerpted from "The Essential Bennis" by... Warren Bennis.

Probably of more interest to me is "Borrowing Brillance" by David Kord Murray... and reviewed here. The idea behind Murray's book is that great business ideas frequently come from cherry picking other ideas and simply adapting them.