I just finished reading a new O’Reilly book by Gabe Zichermann & Christopher Cunningham (site here) entitled Gamification by Design and I strongly encourage you – yes you – to read it. Just in case you thought that gamification has anything to do gaming, let me assure you: that it doesn’t. Some of the easiest examples of gamifaction are frequent flyer miles, badges on...
I’ve just finished a book by PSFK consulting called Future of Retail. (I strongly encourage you to follow them on Twitter; @psfk. Inspiring material.) The book is a nice tour through all of the technologies/behaviors/trends that’re impacting retail. Instead of reviewing each trend I thought it would be better to list the examples they sited and let you extrapolate (word of the day!)...
I provided some background on Mr. Smiley in my earlier post and now wanted to talk about his book, Your Kid’s too Soft. This book was written, based on Mr. Smiley’s 34 years of teaching experience and talks about the changes in youth he’s seen. Now before you go thinking that this is yet another case of someone complaining about the youth “these daysâ€, it’s important to remember...
I just finished a excellent book called Fixed: Global Fixed-gear Bike Culture. The writing is style is essentially stream of conscious but the insight is appreciated. The book covers the history of fixed-gear bikes. A fixed gear bike (also called a fixie) is a bike with no brakes and no gears. A single chain ring and you can only go “as fast as you can go”. Pedal backwards and the...
As a youth I was somewhat less than engaged in academia. Specifically high school. Actually, to say that I was “less than engaged” would be like saying nuclear bombs make a loud sound when they explode. My motto was ‘D’ is a passing grade and I worked to insure that I barely got by. As hard as one can, given the goal is to simply not fail. I had many excellent instructors...
I finally finished Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose by Tony Hsieh which is a book about Zappos. I read most of it and then stopped short of finishing by about 60 pages and then let it sit there for one month. Not smart. From what I remember of the beginning of the book, Tony believes in WOW-ing the customer and he repeats this mantra throughout the book. This is...