amglett.com

Every so often a book comes along that speaks to me, sometimes it tells me something new, sometimes it tells me something I thought I knew well in a different and insightful way. This book was a mixture of both. Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions by Guy Kawasaki is a remarkably useful blueprint for building a brand with that magic touch, but it’s not the original McCoy. I’ve heard of Guy Kawasaki being called the 21st century Dale Carnegie, and they would be spot on in that assessment. Dale’s consistent best seller How to Win Friends and Influence People gives you similar ideologies to work from, only his doesn’t give you the roadmap to modern media that Kawasaki does. As a result, I would recommend that you put Enchantment in your library in addition to How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Here’s why. Interpersonal skills are something you have to practice, sometimes fail at, and continually hone, like a chisel or a chef’s knife. Guy Kawasaki’s book although strong in implementation on the media promotional side and business strategy, lacks some of the interpersonal interactions and subtlety’s that Dale Carnegie’s age old wisdom tells of. There is something to be said of non-technology based relationship building, and both books do place an emphasis on this, Carnegie’s is just stronger in that particular area.

Don’t sell Guy short though, he’s got a character and whit that drew me through the book in less than a day and a half. And his insights into how to bring interpersonal skills into the 21st century make it a must have for any good business or individual to have. If you replace the “product” “company” and “brand” with “personal promotion” “skill-set emphasis” and “personal identity” you get a plan that should get employers to come to you, rather than you having to search for them. Do what you do best, and eventually someone will pay you for it. That’s why it’s called enchantment.

Typically we see a large number of companies exploiting resources. Some are trying to make ends meet in a difficult economy, and I understand their doing their best. Supply chains can be a nightmare, and social media just makes every day one more chance to be attacked by the people buying your products. However, what if I told you that you could control the perception of your consumers merely by being better than they expect you to be? What if you created experiences that people wanted to come back to, that you wanted to experience more than once, merely because you enabled them to have an experience that was pleasant?

Pete Blackshaw’s book Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000: Running a Business in Today’s Consumer-Driven World you get a picture of just how dog-eat-dog it’s really gotten. You can’t just lazy eye the consumer into submission, they will leave. Either you impress them with your response, which as a result proves them wrong, or they leave and they take their social posse with them.

We’re talking about customer service. How working with the consumer, talking to them genuinely, and trying to bring a brand message that isn’t a bunch of media hype. You want a genuine interchange of ideas that helps you to build a better product, a better product experience, and a better overall service rapport with the consumer. It’s essentially about building relationships. Being personal with the consumer is becoming about as important as the product itself. It seems that Honesty, Integrity, and the logistics to engage and create trust is the new thing in corporate business. How each company maintains that relationship or repairs it, may determine whether they remain viable or go bankrupt.

Breakthrough By: Paul Kurnit & Steve Lance happened to be a pleasant surprise. I expected it to have remarkable similarities to The 10 Faces of Innovation By Ideo co-founder Tom Kelley, it surprised me with a vast array of specific knowledge that I didn’t expect from such a book.

Breakthrough, takes you through the general process of finding out how well you are fostering innovation, how your hindering it, and how to build an environment that will create innovation and keep it moving. Who do you need on your innovative team? What things should be weary of? How much will it cost? All things you need to take into account. I was even surprised by the fact that they suggested that you bring legal into the team. Obviously, they wanted to ensure that you didn’t create something someone else did, or that you didn’t mishandle it when you got closer to implementation.

I’ve read a lot of books on the subject of innovation and how to foster it. Those who may have been following before might not be surprised by the fact that I classify entrepreneurial ventures in the same area as innovation builders. Innovation has to remain in the design of the product, the people working with the product, and those willing to run with the product. Delegation, project benchmarks, technology needs, budgeting, appropriate management of assets, people, time, and incentives all help build that new idea; the innovative breakthrough.

Overall, I found it entertaining. At times, they did cite some of the same examples that Ideo’s Tom Kelley did, but you would expect that. Paul and Steve did however, manage to weave a significantly different tapestry than Tom Kelley did, and that benefitted me greatly. As a matter of fact, if you are trying to figure out how to foster innovation in your company and how to bring design thinking into research groups, you might want to read both books.

I’ll start off by saying, I am not a communist. Frankly, I believe a government should work for the people, by the people, and right now many of the worlds governments aren’t working so well. Hence why I decided to read up on the whole history and background of what makes Carl Marx (the destitute social philosopher and economist) so influential today. He’s been dead for ages, but his Communist Manifesto has changed the overall landscape of how Democracy works, what people perceive they should receive from government, etc. It essentially created this overbearing sense of entitlement that people seem to have today.

The book itself is a cross between the Communist Manifesto, a political history of Economic Philosophy, and a Comic Book. I guess you could call it political satire, in a way. You get a general history of how society went from feudal castes, to education based castes. It also describes how most communists tend to be atheists (however, what it did fail to mention in the book was how the original model for communism could have been found easily in a monastery ages before Marx came up with it. On a grander scale, Marx merely proposed how to implement it in a post Industrial Revolution society).

One misnomer about communism that I had to learn quit quickly was the fact that you actually do have some method of tracking how much someone has done within the system. You work more, you get more, in proportion to the amount of labor you do of course. The major difference was the fact that the means of production was owned by the people, not some rich person who tells you how much he wants to pay you for your work. After having read the book, I came to the conclusion that you couldn’t have a pure Communist Society that would work, and you couldn’t have a pure Market Economy that would work. Which as a result, is why you see a lot of governments today becoming a hybrid of the various forms of economic systems currently in existence.

Ruis’ Marx For Beginners proved to be an entertaining read, and it did help me to understand the Star Trek Universe a bit better. As a result, it helped me model some of my characters personas better. Most effected by this knowledge was a restauranteur character that I decided to write. I also understand now, why we’ve never seen a pure Communist Society. We always get stuck in the proletariat and never make it to the actual communism part. I just hope that they can find a better way to motivate people to do their best than to feed the unnecessary greed that is so prevalent today. It’s why people have credit card debt, their eyes are deeper than their pockets.

When I set out to read the “holy” documents of other religions, I wanted to set aside some misconceptions. The books themselves helped me do that, but I also learned just how similar the religions are in their makeup and their construction. At the heart of even the Quran (or as it’s spelled Koran on the copy I purchased) it happens to be a compiled history and social law of a people group. In reality it’s very similar in function to The Bible, The Tao, The Sayings of the Buddha, etc. Their all open to interpretation, they all create a set of social guidelines for people. As a result, they all promote some semblance of order amongst humanity.

I realize that many people are expecting my usual review, comparing it with other doctrines, saying if it collides with the Bible amongst other things. To some degree they all collide with each other in both good and bad ways. The misconceptions built by the general populace are tearing doctrines and our own history into sound bites. These sound bites then lose meaning because they have been removed from the appropriate context. Muslims, Atheists, and countless others, breaking the Bible into chunks and using it against them without appropriate study. Meanwhile my fellow Christians do the same of the Muslims, and groups they want to equally paint as evil.

After reading the Koran, I have figured out that many of these Conservative interpretations are taken as fact when in reality they are fictional distortions of  reality. In reality these interpretations are only as they wish them to be, as biased and twisted as their hearts have become. They aren’t searching and probing for the true intent. At the heart of the Koran, just like The Bible, or any other religious document is a desire for peace, for justice, for righteousness, and equality.

Do I seek to villainize these doctrines? Not in the least. I hope that my explorations into the various doctrines of the world religions will make you dig deeper. To help you find the heart of these peoples and their rich histories. Find it in your heart, even if you disagree with them, to love them. To help you see why these people’s deserve more than the stiff black versus white justice of an angry populace. I don’t want any people group to be hated without reason. Everyone deserves to have their life and their wishes respected.

As a side-note: No, the Muslim holy book does not say Kill All Infidels (There is a very real lack of anything that remotely resembles such a phrase in the Koran). Christians who want to say it says this, are obviously not reading it, or haven’t read it in the appropriate contextual backdrop. It mentions The People of The Book. It also mentions that these People of The Book are running down a path that isn’t right, and they are ignoring or harming the warners being sent to them. I do not personally know if it is referring to The Bible, The Jewish Bible/Torah (which from what I’ve been told actually doesn’t read identically to The Old Testament), or The Koran itself, but it does beg you to wonder. Is it warning us against this faith without reason that seems to be pervading our world like a plague? There may be something severely wrong with today’s society, our closed mindedness, that is counter to God and his intent for building an interdependent system of species and climates.

If you want to know more about what I read, please by all means look up The Koran With Forward by R.A. Nicholson and Translated to English by E.H. Palmer. I would recommend reading the introduction/forward, because it does describe that this book was held in the minds of listeners and then recorded. It also describes why the book seems to be out of order (it is in order of who they managed to collect the stories or chapters in). Overall I found it to be a fascinating read, and an eye opener in a time where we are judging the loving believers on the actions of the militant few.

The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: Consists of the thirteen Nag Hammadi Codices, the Berlin Knostic Codex 8502, Codex Tchacos, and other Coptic Manuscripts. Reading them will expose you to the various incarnations of thought during early Christianity. Over 700 pages of translated and partial accounts and many non-traditional accounts of Jesus’ life are contained in these doctrines. They partially corroborate much of what was later decided to be placed into the canon Bible in the early 19th century. Other things these books mentioned seemed to be the core basis as to why people thought the earth was flat or the center of the universe prior to establishing the central core of what is now accepted as The Holy Bible.

Those who cannot distance themselves from reading, or cannot read something for educational value, namely fundamentalist Christians, should avoid this book. It contains many things that would confuse and or alarm anyone in that particular grouping of Christians. It does however, help you separate some of the confusion about christianity, because it expresses in more than simple terms, and sometimes disorienting terms the way the universe supposedly works. It also splits the Gnostic codices into three distinct views. These are Thomas Christianity, The Sethian School of Gnostic Thought, and The Valentinian School of Gnostic Thought (ironically this is the most similar to modern Christianity).

Overall, I felt the books were very insightful, but on the whole the Sethian books were the most confusing to understand.

In light of my other understandings of more contemporary christian thought, all of them seemed to be toying with a somewhat cross-bred monotheistic interpretation of multi-theism. Overall, this explains the headaches in relation to reading them. Certainly a tough collection of doctrines to read for those who don’t have a somewhat masochistic desire to use and comprehend contradictory knowledge in many forms.

However, the implications to my beliefs and understandings were minimal. In some places it solidified ideas, in others it merely challenged things I had already been challenging myself. I am only as resilient as the spirit that guides me. I plan to be strong and break through stereotypes by seeking truth, and that means trusting few words from the mouths of scholars on these and trusting my own Christian faith to guide my interpretation.

Probably the oldest recorded religious documents we have are the books from Asian descent. They harken back to before the bible is supposed to have been written. Clouded in mystery or clouded in ignorance I don’t plan to guess. There is however one thing I will admit, and that is the fact that these books are much less threatening after they have been read than most Christian pastors seem to imply in their fire and brimstone services. In many ways, they are actually very compatible with other systems. It’s no wonder that the highest cross breeding of religions happens in the Asian cultures.

Tao Te Ching, by the near mythical Lao Tzu is a series of wisdom filled riddles, that imply that the world is guided by a central force that everything comes from and will return. Ironically, one could equate that this particular doctrine doesn’t conflict with Abrahamic doctrines much at all; excluding the fact that it says both good and bad are present in all people (Which may be debatable if this actually conflicts or not).

Dhammapada (Words of The Buddha): This one is a bit more conflictive, especially in it’s belief of reincarnation, but it proves to be a very insightful read. Despite it’s general overtones, 80% of the sayings inside of it do not conflict with Abrahamic traditions at all. Reading it with a thought of what you yourself were raised within, it makes you ponder the meanings of some of them in deeper thought.

Overall, I would suggest that anyone who questions the overall Evil that most dogmatic groups chirp should read these. I went into reading them expecting a much different understanding than I actually got from them. They proved to be worth the read and the exploration. They were far more simple and less complex than I expected them to be, but still challenged my mind to think through some of the paradoxes and logic presented within.

As I continue to ponder these, do not be surprised if I write further on these books in my further explorations into world philosophies.