Could Google follow the sad history of other once-leading companies? It doesn’t take going out on a limb to believe that Google’s appearance of impregnability is only an appearance. Dominant companies can and do lose their position despite superior products, clear market leadership, vast resources and brilliant employees. Harvard Business School Prof. Clayton Christensen has made that case persuasively through his Innovator’s Dilemma series of books and talks.
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Customers Included: How to Transform Products, Companies, and the World – With a Single Step by Mark Hurst My rating: 5 of 5 stars An essential read if you care about the customer experience. This book is both an argument for attending seriously to customer experience and a how-to guide. The two authors have been enormously influential advocates and bring years of experience helping senior executives understand the supreme value of really understanding their customers. The book is a quick and engaging read that will pay off well. View all my reviews
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“Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection,” Edited by Ann Percy with Cara Zimmerman; With contributions by Francesco Clemente, Lynne Cooke, Joanne Cubbs, Bernard L. Herman, Ann Percy, Colin Rhodes, and Cara Zimmerman, Yale University Press, 288 pages, 245 color illustrations and 1 b/w, 2013. ISBN 978-0-3001-9175-2. Hard cover $60 This is a blockbuster catalog for a blockbuster exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, yet like a parade of similar volumes it is built around samples of work by mostly well-known artists, each equipped with a one- to two-page biography, followed by essays
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The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster My rating: 5 of 5 stars I read it long ago, but it’s been hugely influential on my thinking. Another case of a writer with uncanny prescience. View all my reviews
Continue readingSome times its a discomfort inside the ass to read what blog owners wrote but this internet internet site is truly user genial !
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Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier My rating: 4 of 5 stars Excessive self-consciousness meets over-the-top atmosphere, and atmosphere, much like the title character, prevails. The famous first words are “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” But the wisest lines might be these: “I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.” View all my reviews
Continue readingBuilding Stories by Chris Ware My rating: 5 of 5 stars For some perverse reason I actually find comics hard to read, and Chris Wares’ — brilliant though they be — are among the hardest. Building Stories, despite its complicated and aggressively creative packaging, is a wonderful read. It displays Ware’s depth and sensitivity, and the main characters are compelling enough to pull you through the books’ disparate pieces despite Ware’s trademark twists and turns. View all my reviews
Continue readingGreen Man: The Archetype of Our Oneness with the Earth by William Anderson My rating: 4 of 5 stars You’ve probably seen him even if you haven’t noticed. This book explores the historical, artistic, architectural and spiritual history of this pre-Christian image that has stubbornly hung on with something akin to ubiquity. The “foliate head” turns up in even the most religious of settings, from Gothic cathedrals to the title pages of Martin Luther’s writings. The book can veer a little toward the New Agey at times, but that hazard seems inherent in the subject matter. The profuse photography easily
Continue readingClaus Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum, now recreated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was hugely influential when I saw it at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1978. His collection of commercial tchotchkes (salt-and-pepper shakers, Plasticville train set buildings, robot toys, product packaging), shown with pieces of his own art and models for works in progress, validated my own nascent fascination with pop culture objects, proving that they were interesting in and of themselves. I was just starting to collect kitsch items, commercial paraphernalia, handicrafts — prosaic stuff that seemed to resonate with some kind of
Continue readingSigns of Life by Peter Sekaer My rating: 5 of 5 stars I had not heard of Sekaer until I saw this book. He was a student of Berenice Abbott and a pal — and sometime photographing companion — of Walker Evans. If you like those two you’ll most likely find his work quite interesting. View all my reviews
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