Excisions And Omissions from ‘Thinking Out Loud’

There are some differences between the printed edition and this online version of my blog. While it may be possible that not many copies of the volume will be printed, I wanted to note those differences here.

My initial impulse for creating the print-on-demand edition was to produce an archival volume of my complete blog. Therefore, I originally included every blog post in the manuscript. However, typesetting everything resulted in a far greater page count than I had anticipated. So I needed to edit my existing content down to a page count that I was more comfortable with.

One complicating factor in deciding which material to excise is that my own perception of the ‘job to be done’ for my blog has evolved over the years. So I had to make decisions about a variety of different classes and categories of blog posts. I decided that the essence of what I most usefully wanted to record in the volume was my own thinking. So firstly I could dispense with all of my published posts where that was not the core focus.

Many of my early posts from 2004 and 2005 were merely web links with short accompanying descriptions, and that text was often only cut and pasted from the linked source page. This was before Evernote had evolved to its current form. One of my primary uses for my blog during that time was as a searchable online archive. There was no value in including that class of posts when editing the volume. I did decide to retain a very small number of such minor posts from 2004 that convey some sense of what finding my feet in my early days of blogging was like.

In retrospect it seems surprisingly prescient or somewhat telling that my second and third posts were concerned with initial attempts at uploading content into the Blogger CMS using my 2004-era featurephone. Wholly without prior consideration on my part, those first brief posts turned out to be the seeds of one of the stronger emergent themes of the collection. So while it may have taken time to find my voice, some of my themes were there right from the start.

Then in 2008, while I was blogging my way through my Masters, I began to cross-post some pertinent tweets onto this blog in a Thought for the Day series. I have retained those tweets within the printed volume but, rather than typeset them as complete posts, I gathered them together in the first appendix.

Also during 2008 I ran a complementary series of posts called Quote of the Day highlighting some interesting or inspiring quotations that I had come across during my MA research. As none of those posts included my own commentary I omitted all of them.

I posted the majority of my MA original research on Blogging in the Irish Graphic Design Sector onto this blog as well. I omitted the substantial amount of my quantitative research, which is mostly voluminous check-lists of Irish design companies’ social media activities during 2009. All of that research material still remains available online and would have seemed incongruous and redundant within the printed edition.

There were some interesting (and popular) posts which I omitted solely due to their lack of any of my own commentary, such as the evergreen Colin Powell’s Rules of Leadership. For any number of reasons, not least copyright violation, I did not want to republish any directly reblogged content.

Another small number of posts were so dependant on embedded video that they made little sense within the context of a book.

Finally I had to make some judgement calls. I omitted certain posts that concerned friends and family. While there would be no reason to retroactively whitewash those posts out of the online blog (they are still available here) they just did not contribute enough to the overall arc of my blog to warrant their inclusion.

All of those excisions gave me a more focused manuscript without losing sight of my original intent of producing a representative printed archive of my writing on this blog.

My Book ‘Thinking Out Loud’

So I decided to make a book version of this blog. I made it for myself. It is called Thinking Out Loud and it looks like this. 

Given that so much of my writing on this blog is essentially Digital-First Advocacy, it is worth addressing the question of why I have invested time and effort into reconfiguring my blog writing into a paper-based artifact? There are a set of related answers to that question.

The first reason is the sense of agency achieved by creating an alternative second home for my writing that exists apart from the Blogger platform. My current belief is that Google’s Blogger product is unlikely to be depreciated within the next few years, as was the case with Google Reader which they closed down in July of this year. That said, since I do not host my own blog on my own server, I have to be very respectful of the fact that every single word I have published on this platform since 2004 is always only ever available at the whims of Google. So there is a lot be said for being able to read this material in a separate context not beholden to Google or to anyone else. While a printed edition hardly counts as a viable back-up, there is something (non-logically) reassuring about having my complete blog in one discrete container in my shelf.

While doing some work-related research into ebook publishing at the end of last year I became intrigued with the idea of this blog existing as an ebook. After that initial idea took hold, a cloud of unanswered questions occurred to me. What different characteristics might my blog exhibit when reconfigured within a book format? (Even as the person most familiar with this blog, I still find it challenging to comprehensively conceive of its remit, scope, and what I can only think of as its overall shape.) Would a hard copy make that shape more comprehensible and apparent to me? Would my writing read any differently when presented on paper as opposed to on screen? Was there any overarching narrative themes to my writing over the years? And would those themes become more apparent when presented in a traditional oldest-to-newest chronology? (Blogger presents posts in a reversed chronology, with the latest posts first and older material progressively further downstream.)

What started out as a seemingly uncomplicated idea – producing a hard copy archive of what I had written on this blog – took on a life of its own and my little side-project hobby gradually expanded its scope.

The ‘minimal viable product’ approach would have been just to re-purpose this blog as an electronic book for my Kindle. After considering the amount of work involved in producing an ebook, it seemed to be only a short distance from doing that to creating a physical on-demand printed version. In retrospect, I was very very wrong about that.

To make the book, I had to take on the roles of sub-editor, designer, typesetter, and proof-reader. As a result of taking that one-man-band approach, completing this book needed precisely zero meetings, emails, phone calls , or other mechanisms of coordination. Obviously then, any and all errors of comprehension, argument, logic, reasoning, referencing, attribution, spelling and typography are solely my own responsibility.

Firstly, I needed to correct the assorted typos and grammatical errors that I uncovered. As I originally intended the print-on-demand edition to be an accurate archive of the online version, I made all of those corrections within the Blogger CMS. I did not want to fork the content and end up with an alternative improved version on my own bookshelf and the less polished version representing me online.

For various reasons, above and beyond the fact of an unreasonable page count, I ultimately decided that I needed to edit out all of the posts which did not logically or usefully translate across to a printed edition. However, I left in as much material as possible. So this is definitely not an edited-highlights version of my blog. It still includes plenty of examples of my early writing that personally I find somewhat challenging to re-read.

Admittedly, most of the free time I would normally have spent writing new blog posts this year has been absorbed with all those inter-related tasks involved in putting together a book. That is my explanation for the paucity of all-new posts that I have published so far this year. So there was a definite opportunity cost in pursuing this project. Arguably, producing this book may not have been the optimal use of my spare cycles. But, in counterpoint to that, I wanted to create a tangible realisation of my existing writing. I thought that having the book would being me some joy and a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.

My initial reaction to having the physical object since yesterday is that – even though I might be tending towards being ‘Mr. Digital’ these days – I have to admit that holding a printed copy of your own book in your hands is very satisfying.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I made this book for myself. Now having my own hard copy sitting on my bookshelf realises my original intention. That said, I have published this book using Lulu.com which means it is also available to order print-on-demand for anyone else who is interested in having their own copy. Print and delivery took just under two weeks for my copy.

You can purchase copies of Thinking Out Loud here.

Everything included in the print on-demand version will always remain available online here. This blog will still be the canonical version, due to it being both pointable-at and deep-linkable-to. The print on-demand version is a snapshot in time.

Nine Recommended Books on Branding

I have curated this short list of recommended books on brands, brand design and other related branding issues for a lecture on corporate identity and branding that I am giving at the School of Art, Design and Printing in the Dublin Institute of Technology. I am sharing it here as it may be of broader interest.

Talking to His Tribe

Marketing Analysis (4 of 6)

I never listened to an audio book before I downloaded the two Patrick Lencioni books onto my iPod, as I needed the first one in a hurry for module one of the MA programme. Since then I have now taken to checking out the audio book section in iTunes, which I had never bothered with before. I was pretty interested to discover that Seth Godin’s new book ‘Tribes’ is on sale there for 95 cents. Yes that is 95 cents, and it is a complete unabridged book, clocking in at more than three hours.

Seth Godin is my favourite writer on marketing. As evidenced by the fact that his daily blog is the highest volume contributor to the Thought-Of-The-Day posts that I have been interspersing throughout my online Learning Log blog. He primarily writes about marketing, but regularly crosses over into leadership, customer relations, and entrepreneurship; the whole enchilada basically. Most of his books are best sellers, ‘Purple Cow’ and ‘All Marketers Are Liars’ are two of his most successful titles. His daily blog is not only a must-read, but one of the few I have kept in my RSS-reader since my great MA Clear-Out Of 2008.

His interesting new business model/marketing strategy is to continue to sell a €20 hardback edition of his new books for those readers who want an archival edition, or one to give as a gift. But if all you want are his ideas (and, like all good business authors, he wants his ideas to spread) then you can purchase his book for less than a euro. From a marketing perspective I find this fascinating. It rewards the early birds, the Godinites who follow his blog and make it to iTunes within the 95-cent window (I am assuming that ultra-low price-point is not fixed). It also gets his book quickly into the hands of the people most predisposed to talk about it and to spread his reputation by word-of-mouth. Finally, by using dynamic pricing, he is assured of hitting the top five audio book list in iTunes, at least initially. Which raises his profile across target markets who may not be familiar with him.

Now I have not listened to ‘Tribes’ yet (all that required MA reading to get through don’t you know) so I cannot yet vouch for the quality of this new book But for less than the cost of most chocolate bars, it cannot hurt for me to take a punt on this one.

Internalising My Inner Game

A response to finishing Miles Downey’s book ‘Effective Coaching’.

This is a book I can see myself returning to again. It falls into a class of books that deliver their value accumulatively. With some books you get all you are every really going to learn on your first reading Other, more useful, books deliver most of their benefit from a staged engagement. You need to read them, put their recommendations and suggestions into practice as best as you can, make mistakes and learn from those errors, then become competent while still not becoming proficient. Eventually you plateau and realise that you will benefit from revisiting the book for a refresher. Second time around certain ideas that seemed opaque initially now slot logically into place and other ideas, that seemed so enlightening the first time around, now seem merely so obvious as to be almost prosaic. Which is a measure of how far your thinking has moved on.

David Allen’s book ‘Getting Things Done’ falls into this category for me, giving some more every time I dip back into it. Likewise with ‘Effective Coaching’, there is a lot to be learned from this book, even if formal coaching is not something I think I shall ever do a huge amount of. Lots of Downey’s suggestions and ideas are useful and worth grappling with. His more advanced material I perceive as only coming into operation after you have successfully internalized the first tranche. Although I do not do much fully-formal coaching within my Design Director role, I am aware of the daily opportunities for informal coaching that benefit everyone. This book provides a great mental toolkit for thinking about optimising those encounters.

Downey writes authoritatively about self-awareness. Expounding on the topic far more than I expected given this volume’s subject material — which just shows what I knew. Obviously, such awareness is a prerequisite trait for becoming an effective coach. But more than that, as is so apparent from other readings and discussions on this MA programme, it is a compelling personal competitive advantage for achieving your goals. Without wanting to get all introspective, spending time getting your head around your own head seems to be time well spent. As a great poet once wrote ‘Know Thyself...’

POSTSCRIPT
As a parting shot (or parting backhand) I cannot let it go unsaid that this book claims the second-highest count of tennis metaphors of any book that I have ever read except for David Foster-Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest’.

POST-POSTSCRIPT
I realize that the majority of my postscripts are actually technically footnotes, but the unending-scroll format of the blog paradigm is not footnote-friendly. So the cranky Sub-Editor facet of my persona is going to have to live with that. Although who knows, when I get around to the required hard-copy edition of this learning log, I may manage to re-typeset all of these postscripts into proper numbered footnotes.

False Consciousness And The Self-Managed Team

Reading some of Bratton’s Work and Organisational Behaviour last night dragged me twenty years back into a major deja-vu of Cultural Studies class in NCAD. It has been that long since I read any reference to Marxist critical theory. Back in NCAD, I always remember believing that the Marxist cultural theorists essentially lost their own argument once they had to introduce the notion of ‘false consciousness’ into the debate. It seemed to me to be their way of both having their cake and eating it. (To summarise briefly, if you felt like a truly oppressed member of society with the weight of capitalism crushing your soul, then you were truly conscious. If not, and you believed yourself to be a happy, well-adjusted member of society, then you had been successfully infected with false-consciousness. As a rhetorical construct this no doubt helped Marxist Theorists always win a lot more arguments down the pub — at least from their perspective.

What brought all of that to mind was the Marxist criticism of Self-Managing Teams outlined on page 314. The thesis discussed was that such teams allow management to still control workers (in perhaps a more covert manner) through an ‘illusion of self-control’. That reads like the same old circular logic to me. One of the other key issues I have with that Marxist approach is that it is ‘in cause’: the choices available to the worker’s must always be limited by management’s schemes. To me this always gives Management (in the broadest and most general sense) a lot more credit than they actually deserve.

In Training

I am currently reading ‘Bit Literacy’ by Mark Hurst. I imagine that I am going to generate a substantial volume of digital files and data over the next twelve months as I engage in the Masters programme. This book is a good refresher on effective life-hacks for managing your digital deluge.

I may also need to re-read David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’ as well, as my GTD habits have gotten more than a little lax. Every spare minute is going to count, and I am going to need to have laser-focus on my objectives and to neutralise as many of my distractions as I can.

‘Good To Great’ in Spain

1–12 September 2008
I brought four of the books from my Masters programme reading list on holidays to Spain. Which was wildly optimistic behaviour: what with two young kids to manage. In week two of holidays I managed to work out a system of bringing Laoise, my six-month daughter, for a walk mid-morning, stopping at a coffee shop once she fell asleep, and reading 'Good To Great' until she woke up. It is a fascinating read, I can see why it is a perennial best-seller in so many of the business book charts. I have always read more of the Seth Godin, Tom Peters, Marty Neumeier et al, style of business books (strong on the Big Picture, less so on details and the follow-through) so Jim Collin’s über-methodical approach, and the exhaustive research-based apparatus that supports it, is fascinating. Again as my own preference in business reading inevitably gravitates towards advice aimed at the small, nimble rule-breaking start-up or the sole trader, consultant, digital nomad class, it is interesting to be reading outside of that, seeing how the large publicly-traded organisations operate (The Spanish cappuccinos were not bad either.)

POSTSCRIPT
Guess I can skip the chapter on the US Federal Mortgage association ‘Fannie Mae’, as they have totally lost their ‘Good To Great’ mojo and are now being bailed-out by the US Federal Government.