Book Review Jam – quick hit book reviews given by members of the forum. Each reviewer touches on high points, key “aha” moments, applicability to games.

Reviewer: Simon Amarasingham
Title: The E Myth Revisited
Central idea is to work “on” your organization not “in” your organization,
i.e. rather than becoming critical to the day to day operations of your
company, spend your time on building/strengthening the organization.
Key Aha: Caused reviewer to confront whether he wanted to be spending most
of his time composing music or building a company.
Relevance to Game Industry: Many people get into Games industry because of
talent at some skill, e.g. programming, 3D art, music, etc. If you
subsequently find yourself in a leadership position, this book gets you to
think about whether you should be continuing to use your particular talent,
or whether you should be stepping outside of that in to focus on building
your organization.

Reviewer: Justin Berenbaum
Title: Ideavirus
Made reviewer think about disconnect between game developers and marketing.
The marketer is not and should not be the center of the message, the consumer is.
what ideas are virus worthy?
lots of game applications
dynamic ideas are virus worthy
if it is simple and smooth

Reviewer: Jason Della Rocca
Title: The Medici effect
Awesome book, best he has read this year
true breakthrough innovation happens at the intersection of diverse fields etc
key aha’s:
it’s hard for experts to be able to see problems in new ways – associative barriers such as a deep level of expertise can be a hindrance
The highest producers have the highest success and fail the most as well. Quantity leads to the rare quality idea.
Venture into unknown communities. Gaining success by bridging to other communities is useful
Applicability:
workforce diversity
specialized game dev edu hurtful to industry? We may be training particular expertise that may be limiting true innovations and breakthroughs.
Prototyping – need to fail often and fail fast, and learn from the failures.
self-referential designs limit innovation — why are we just regurgitating other game designs in our designs.

Reviewer: Mark DeLoura
Title: 4 Hour Work Week
Mentioned Mark Hutchinson’s death, and the team of retro studios finishing off Mark’s book on 3D Real Time Cameras. Look for it at GDC timeframe.
4 hour work week is a self help, not management.
xbox live points war for life. I’ve done all these interesting things, so can you. However did he find time?
Book’s full of cheap hacks.
1st part of the book, self evaluation
2nd part – techniques to start dumping stuff, like email.
3rd and 4th chapters: how can I make a business out of my dream and how can I outsourse most of it?
Last quarter of the book is the litany of resources. Here’s all the stuff I found really useful.
Applicability to games:
helps you refocus your priorities, huge amount of resources

Reviewer: Darius Kazemi
Title: Managing Humans
Book sounds like the ramblings of of a fever addled madman. Ostensibly about the task of managing, but is more about interpersonal than spreadhseet stuff. Breaks down situations. Book in 4 parts, scattershot. People skills, hiring. Managing up, book is also for software engineers or anyone who wants to understand where their managers are coming from. Taxonomies – mnemonics of patterns to recognize, such as meeting creatures, like the Big Cheese, Laptop Larry,Translator, Synthesizer. 2 different kinds of managers, organics and mechanics.  The book also contains many diversions.
Very opinionated, gives lots of specific and sometimes irrelevant examples. Meeting bullshit detector.
Applicability: helped him not hate a former co-worker.

Reviewer: Uma Menon
Title: Influence: the psychology of persuasion
Concise book, talks about weapons of influence:
Reciprocation – Hare Krishna gives a flower before asking for donation
Commitment and Consistency -
Social Proof – if everyone looks up you will too
Liking
Authority – push button experiment
Scarcity – the downloadables

Aha’s:
Influence as Science made a lot of sense to reviewr
Why do ppl say yes

Sales, Marketing, Game Design, and ppl mgmt are all applicable areas in games.
Reviewer: Robert Nyberg
Title: Thought Leadership
overview and insight into common modes of thinking. we follow paths in thought processes
Managing the thought process – group thinking
flipside versions of the 6 common methods of thinkins

Ahas:
Ways to identify the modes of thinking
eg – deficit thinking, tendency to find faults and risks. flipside is strength thinking – finding strengths instead of weaknesses.

this book is great for managing meetings and decision making at different phases during production, and helps kep meetings on track for the topic at hand. Recommended.

Reviewer: Tobi Saulnier
Title: Small Giants

Companies that choose to not follow the bigger is better rule – applies to her own company. goes against b-school conventional wisdom to focus on businesses that chose to stay small. Presents it as a valid and businesslike option.

3 AHA’s:
Why companies chose that bigger is not better, and how there’s a different path to Great.
Lots of Examples.
Shared traits includes high intimacy with locale, customers, suppliers, workers. techniques for dealing with these relationships.
The leaders of these companies have the characteristic of turning down advice quite a bit

applicability: new industries need balance to make a healthy long term profession,
Alternate view of bigger is better

Reviewer: Tobi Saulnier
Title: Strategy Pure and Simple II

Using elements of strategy to dominate the marketplace. Highly recommended as a strategy book. this falls in the middle between too simplistic aphorisms and dense b-school reading. Digestible but rigorous.
aha’s:
Control the sandbox – successful strategy allows you to choose and influence your competition. When you’re the industry leader, you can influence the competition.
how strategic thinking is not the same as long range planning. w examples. Good level of detail. Do them in parallel and don’t confuse the two.
The idea of knowing/shoosing your companies driving force and how that impacts strategies. What is your company’s strategic drive? product driven versus tech driven versus user driven versus capacity driven. Different approaches for each.
Applicability:
strategy little used in games.
one stop reference for ppl new to strategy

Jessica Tams recommends Good to Great, changed her view of self, company. Also recommends First, break all the rules.

Scott recommends Awake at Work.

Respectfully submitted,
Robin McShaffry
www.mary-margaret.com

Looking to roll up your sleeves and dive into the Leadership Forum? Here are a few areas you can participate/contribute:

1 – Swap topic ideas
We are running two “ideas swaps”, one for the Project track and the other for the Management track. These fully interactive group driven session are like speed-dating for ideas. Tables will focus on different related topics determined by you ahead of time. Several group/topic rotations will be done so participants can explore various topics of interest, and interact with many different peers along the way. Room-wide report outs and summaries will close out the session.

So, have any topics you’d like to explore more deeply with your peers? Topics should be either related to Project Leadership (ie, the nuts and bolts of game production) or Management Leadership (ie, broader scale topics that go beyond a single team or project).

If you have some ideas to propose for our list, either email Jason directly at jason @ igda.org, or post your ideas a comment to the following page:
http://www.igda.org/leadership/?p=91

2 – Book reviewers
We are running a “book review jam” as a session in the Personal Leadership Track, where ten participants will each provide a rapid-fire 5-minute review+summary of a book related to leadership, management, game production, etc.

If you would like to be one of our jammers, please email Jason directly at jason @ igda.org with the title of the book you’d like to present. In turn you will be provided with a “template” to help guide your review (and keep you on time).

3 – Blogging volunteers
Any bloggers among you?

One of the cool things we do is to “live-blog” the Leadership Forum (ie, post a brief summary of each session to the conference web site more-or-less right after each session).

We would like a handful of such volunteers, so we can get full coverage without burdening any one person.

There will be wifi at the conference, but you’d have to bring your own laptop. Also, FYI, we’re using the oh-so-user-friendly WordPress, so should be quite easy to post, etc. We’re not looking for transcripts or super long/detailed posts (well, unless you can type crazy fast). More just summaries of the key points; to give a sense of what was said overall, etc.

If this is of interest, please ping Jason directly via jason @ igda.org.