Rick Harris

• Rated 5 stars

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This book is for people who like to think. Deeply. About big ideas affecting the human condition. Recipe hunters and quick-fix seekers, look elsewhere. Kate Cowie has written a book about what she calls “the human development journey.” The phrase is apt. Humans have the capacity to develop throughout the course of their lives, not just in the early years. Cowie cites research from neuroscience, biology, and the social sciences to show that development is in fact an open-ended “journey”. When one phase is reached, another phase opens up to challenge the individual to continue to learn and grow.

Cowie integrates a number of developmental frameworks to show how humans progress simultaneously along several dimensions: intellectual, social, moral, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. For the individual these dimensions act as guideposts: Where am I now? Where can I develop next? For those of us who live our lives helping others navigate these developmental challenges, there are suggestions for how to intervene both as a teacher and coach. Parents take heed: your children don’t leave the nest quite as rapidly as you may have. Cowie points out that parents are increasingly playing an important role not just in child development, but in adult development.

To keep the book from being simply a catalogue of the great and the good developmental thinkers (Most readers will have already read Jung, Piaget, Kegan, etc.), Cowie weaves her theme of development around the Arthuriad. (Now that’s something I hadn’t heard of. If your knowledge of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table has been shaped by the musical Camelot, there is much to be learned here about the legends themselves.) Cowie’s title, Finding Merlin, suggests that if we can find our own Merlin, we will advance in our development much more quickly and completely than if we don’t have the magician at our side. Some of Merlin’s powers are clearly the stuff of legend and not likely to be found in 21st century organizations. But as a sage and a seer, Merlin emerges as the ideal mentor prototype…someone who knows when to ask, when to prod, when to remain silent.

I wish Cowie would have written more about the coaching role that today’s Merlins play. There is much debate about whether coaching is a pure process of helping young Arthurs get their heads screwed on straight, or if there is a role for instruction, didacticism, and even downright emotional confrontation. Perhaps that will be the subject of her next book. Suggested title: Being Merlin.
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Rick Harris wrote this review Monday, February 4, 2013. ( reply | permalink )

1 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 4 stars

“I keep coming across books about introversion, all with the same message: the culture makes introverted people feel inferior to outgoing people. I thought three things in this book make a positive contribution to the discussion:

First, from a historical perspective, American Culture (and perhaps Western Culture) has gone through a transformation over the past 150 years. In the 19th century good character was essential. You didn’t need to see good character to know a person had it. In fact, many people demonstrated character by the accumulation of quiet deeds. By the end of the 20th century, however, personality has come to be valued over character…and a certain type of personality. People who speak with confidence, have a steely stare and iron-clad handshake—the extraverts. It’s not that character is unimportant; it’s just that personality trumps character nowadays.

Second, the author argues that a mix of introverts and extraverts is preferable in social and business settings. While the culture of personality values the outgoing, it is the inward looking who can get undervalued. According to the author, introverts comprise more than a third of the population.

A different book, The Introvert Advantage, by Marti Olsen Laney, is written as a pep talk for introverts. Quiet is focused on the leader: make sure you don’t miss the contributions introverts can make to your team. I see the books as complementary.

Third, there is an extended discussion about how parents and teachers can support introverted children and stop trying to “fix” them. This section includes some interesting case examples.

The journalistic writing is reminiscent of Malcolm Gladwell and Joshua Foer. It’s fast paced and full of colorful anecdotes—Tony Robbins seminars, or a visit to an evangelical church campus. The chapters read as if they could be free-standing articles. If you’re a stickler for research discipline, it might bother you the number of times she uses the phrase “research has shown”. And if you’re a stickler for spelling, you spell extravert with an “a” not an “o”. But hey, sometimes we introverts get bogged down in the damnedest things.
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Rick Harris wrote this review Friday, February 10, 2012. ( reply | view 1 replies | permalink )

• Rated 0 stars

“Frank Moss, former head of MIT's Media Lab, starts this book with an engrossing story about how a team of students won a contest sponsored by DARPA using the internet (DARPA's brainchild) to crowd-source the answer. The point of this story is to illustrate just how fast information can be mobilized. The team entered the contest over a weekend, and the winner was announced before the team's sponsor had a chance to brief Moss that they had entered it.

Moss was bemused that he hadn't known about the contest, but as I read through this book I found myself responding in a similar fashion. Who knew such innovation was going on on the banks of the Charles? Who knew how fast things were moving from lab to lifestyle?

Actually I think there are two main messages in this book. The first is that there is a lot of cool stuff happening at the Media Lab. Artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming less artificial. People, for instance, are starting to bond with their robots. Artificial limbs used to be a poor substitute for the real thing. Suddenly they've become performance-enhancers. And what about that clothing that has built in sensors to monitor your vital signs or help you stay on your diet?

The Media Lab is still a mecca for geeks entertaining geeks, but increasingly practical applications are working their way into our every day lives.

The second message in this book is that it's time to stop thinking that technology is victimizing us and to start thinking creatively about how each of us can take more active ownership of the tools that technology is giving us. There are some powerful tools coming into mainstream use. This book suggests intriguing ways that we can take charge of those tools so that they enhance our lives.”

Rick Harris wrote this review Monday, August 8, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

1 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 0 stars

“Joshua Foer is a very good writer. How else to explain that he kept my interest in a topic that incorporated the ancient Greeks, quirky Europeans, and a year long quest to be able to remember things better than anybody else in America--anybody else, that is, who cared to compete in the US Memory Championship.

The Greeks? They're the ones who used repetition and imagery (remember the "wine-dark" seas in Ulysses?). His quirky Europeans have perfected memory techniques that enable them to remember the sequence of cards in a shuffled deck. One also has to marvel at the amount they drank...surely that can't be good for the memory. And how did Foer do in the US Memory Championship? Well, I gave away the beginning, but I won't spoil the ending. Foer's style is a mix of historical perspective on memory, character sketches of these quirky Europeans, and personal examples of his own quest to get better at remembering things.

There was one thing that he didn't address, and it's the thing that keeps me from wanting to use memory techniques on real-world things like the names of people that I forget as soon as I meet them. I don't want some memory technique helping me remember Jessica Hook's name because I can associate her with my grandmother (named Jessie) who did crochet (with a hook). I want to remember Jessica because she made her own impression on me as a person.

Also, Foer mentions the following point, but doesn't dwell on it: getting good a memorizing a deck of cards or a random list of numbers only helps you get better at remember the order of cards or the order of numbers. In fact if you only concentrate on numbers, you don't get any better at cards at all. The dirty little secret is that this type of memorizing doesn't improve one's memory. It's a parlor trick. It might make you the hit of a dinner party, but it won't make you any smarter.

However, for people who desperately need help remembering names, you'll get a good primer on the process from reading this book...and you'll also come away with a warm feeling for Joshua Foer and his merry band of quirky Europeans.”

Rick Harris wrote this review Friday, April 15, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 0 stars

“I read this book to help me understand the kind of strategic upheaval that the advertising industry is going through. I came away thinking that the insights here apply to much more than advertising. Using advertising as a backdrop, the author chronicles the way that the digital age is shifting power away from producers and into the hands of consumers. For other examples, think publishing. Or retailing. Or Tunisia.

Agencies who are used to controlling the message on behalf of their clients find themselves trying to engage customers in ways that put the customer in control. ("Upload your pictures of yourself drinking our vodka!") The book is full of case examples of how this can work. But Iezzi is also quick to point out that moving to a digital environment produces a great deal of soul searching and second-guessing. A creative campaign that leverages multiple media platforms might sound cool, but if it gets customers talking about the "wrong" things, the client is likely to put the account up for review.

Be sure to read the Appendices...interview transcripts with two leaders in the industry, Lee Clow and Jeff Goodby, who talk about how their agencies have been affected.”

Rick Harris wrote this review Sunday, February 6, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 0 stars

“Good insights for strategic planners. The world may not be predictable, but it sure helps to know what's going on.”

Rick Harris wrote this review Saturday, February 5, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 0 stars

“An interesting first-person account by the person who invented the flash mob...addresses the question: can the internet be used to manipulate the actions of others in a wide array of situations from buying indie music to influencing voters.”

Rick Harris wrote this review Saturday, February 5, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 0 stars

“Terrific insights into the ways that internet access and social media are changing cornerstones of our culture (like personal privacy and private property). There's also the not so subtle implication that the people who would read this book (the over-40s) have a lot to learn about the ones who will not read this book...the ones who simply and innocently use new media and in the process are redefining what it means to be a human being.”

Rick Harris wrote this review Saturday, February 5, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 0 stars

“I liked this book for its content...no Malcolm Gladwell-type stories here. Instead there are discussions of 7 types of virtual teams, 7 success factors, etc. Hey, it's written by academics. I particularly liked the elements of trust: competence, integrity, concern for the well-being of others.”

Rick Harris wrote this review Saturday, February 5, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 0 stars

“Great insights into how social media is changing everything. Lots of eye opening stats too. See the 5-minute version on YouTube: Social Media Revolution.”

Rick Harris wrote this review Saturday, February 5, 2011. ( reply | permalink )