Review: Trust Me, I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday
Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator
This book is not your classic marketing tome filled with case studies. And it’s definitely not a tell-all featuring Tucker Max, Dov Charney, and Robert Greene drunkenly grinding on a beach somewhere.
No. This is a book for thinkers. For those who have spent time working and navigating the information terrain. For those who found that it is easy to de-tether from reality and drift. For those who see that there’s great potential in the web but find it falling far short of that mark, instead dying on a vine, desperately reaching for dwindling CPC/CPM dollars.
Trust Me, I’m Lying is a critique of the top .01% of blogs (that hallowed tier of Mashable, Gawker, Jezebel, Business Insider, etc) and the control they exert over your reality.
And if there’s one person in the world who can explain that in depth, it’s Ryan Holiday.
Because Ryan has wielded the flow of electronic information as a weapon. He’s both made kings and taken down targets. It’s no surprise that he is methodical and exacting in his explanation of how knowledge don’t matter in a world where only pageviews do. How every headline is evil. How truth is immaterial. He even goes far as to describe the evolution of text media, and how we’ve been down this yellow journalism road before.
His honesty is refreshing, his vision scary. Exactly the kind of book worth reading.
Review: Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez
Kill Decision is startlingly real. And equally plausible.
Suited masters of perception playing games with reality while skipping scotch in Crystal City. D.C.’s incestuous relationship between big defense business and… everyone else. Nameless, compartmentalized operators fighting through the night in cesspools loosely labeled as countries. Drones raining from the skies.
For those familiar with the constellation of clandestine units, private military contractors, and information warriors that comprise much of America’s counter-terrorism capacity, this book will feel very, very real.
(If you’re not up to speed, I heartily recommend Marc Ambinder’s The Command as a quick/cheap/quality introduction to that world.)
But Kill Decision takes that reality a step forward. In a way that perhaps cements Suarez’s position as the best near-future fiction author of the post-9/11 era. He folds in equal parts science, warfare, and informed futurism to take today’s sleek drones to their logical conclusion. The results will gnaw on your brain like a swarm of gnats, for weeks after you read the book.
This is possible, of course, due in large part to his foundation in John Robb’s work (something Suarez graciously mentions in his acknowledgements). Readers of Brave New War and Global Guerrillas will find themselves nodding along.
Kill Decision is that real, yet, like Suarez’s Freedom and Daemon, it’s also a lot of fun. Great action sequences that just scream MAKE A MOVIE. Compelling characters. Quality narrative. It’s all in here.
Grab it today if you want to see tomorrow.
Cool Books Friends Are Releasing
- Ales Kot is releasing “Wild. Children”. I’ve seen him iterate the graphic novel from black and white to full blown color. It’s awesome. He’s taken the frustrations of a generation and concentrated them into the point of a pen. And I’m not the only one to think so:
- Ron Domingue has a graphic novel on the iPad out. It’s called Hotel Whiskey Tango. It’s set in Vietnam and takes advantage of the video/audio stuff iBooks enables. Anyway, he’s a phenomenal artist. You can check out the book on the iTunes store here and here’s a Kickstarter for the a print companion.
- Ryan Holiday has a book coming out. It’s called Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator
. I have a review copy in my hand (it comes out on the 19’th). It’s awesome, but more on that in a bit.
- Daniel Suarez’s Kill Decision
is equally awesome in a different way. I read it last week and it is still blowing me away. Again, more on that in a few days.
Review – Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers
Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers
Consider a business model to be an engine. One that generates opportunity – wealth for investors, freedom for entrepreneurs, jobs for employees, value for customers.
Like all machines, this can be broken down into its component parts and recombined to achieve different ends. Speed off the line. Social good. Enterprise software.
That’s what this book is about. Understanding what processes make up your (prospective) business, then bundling them together in a way that is most efficient.
In that sense, it’s a lot of Biz 101 packaged in a visually interesting way. (Parts do feel like someone got enamored with the aesthetics. For example, a wall of text cut into the shape of a circle is just goofy.)
It’s also where the business canvas concept originated. (This went on to be a big part of the Lean Startup community.) Here is what it looks like:
At the most basic level, you fill in the blanks with how you’re going to build out your company. It’s a structured hypothesis. Sit down, think it through in these terms, then blow it up on the wall with everyone’s help.
I kind of wish the book ended here. But it goes on.
There’s a spattering of business model patterns, which is old hat if you’ve paid attention for the last decade. (Also, their conceptualization of an open business model is oddly closed.)
Then there’s a section on how to think like a designer. Maybe I haven’t spent enough time with big companies, but this isn’t exactly revolutionary stuff. Brainstorm, draw, solve problems, hypothesize stories/scenarios/products, test. (This section is not in order. You bounce around in a most jarring way.)
They define strategy as “environmental scanning.” That’s smart. Then they gets lost in the weeds trying to shoehorn a lot into the canvas. There’s some pretty ridiculous looking canvas’s near the end of the book.
And that’s kind of the core problem with everything the book discusses after the introduction of the Canvas. There’s a ton of stuff covered, but tethering it to the canvas feels forced. There’s no holistic framework here despite their (well intentioned) effort to treat the canvas like one.
The canvas is a useful tool and I’m glad to have it. Just planning on not getting super carried away with it.
Review – The Ultralight Startup: Launching a Business Without Clout or Capital
The Ultralight Startup: Launching a Business Without Clout or Capital
Baptiste is the cofounder/CEO of OnSwipe.
To be honest, I loath OnSwipe.
If you’re not familiar with it, the product turns normal websites into piles of ‘tablet friendly’ ugly. Worse, it operates like a precision suck missile, targeting people with iPads (which was designed to show the web as normal, not the mobile garbage).
I’m not alone in my disgust. Winer says it is “another example of the web breaking up.”
So yeah, I didn’t love the product or what I imagined to be its cackling, hooded creator. But, to be fair, Baptiste has built a company with a lot of traction, and, as it turns out, his book is actually pretty good.
That said, there is little to no original material in this book. Rather, it is a good compilation of best practices. Perhaps the best way to describe it, is that The Ultralight Startup provides the 100 ft view to the 20,000 ft view presented in The Lean Startup and The Four Steps to Epiphany.
So you’ll get a lot of bullet points of, basically, how to take a business from zero to something. Basically checklists of content marketing, raising funding hiring, finding cofounders, ideating, building, hiring freelancers, a brief legal section. Baptiste could have gone deeper on each subheading, but I get he wanted to present an overview, and in that, he succeeded.
It’s quick. (I read the book in an hour or so.) And though I wouldn’t try stick to his roadmap, it does present a starting point, which is useful in its way.