The one-sentence summary

Treat information with great suspicion until you know the real story.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Eighty per cent of companies think that they are fraud free, but a recent survey actually revealed fraud in forty five per cent of them
• There are seven degrees of deceit:
• White lie: told to make someone feel better or to avoid embarrassment
• Fib: relatively insignificant, such as excuses and exaggerations
• Blatant: whoppers used when covering up mistakes or apportioning blame
• Bullshit: a mixture of those above combined with spin and bluff to give the best impression
• Political: similar to bullshit but with much bigger scale and profile
• Criminal: illegal acts from fraud to murder, and their subsequent denial
• Ultimate: so large that it must be true. As Joseph Goebbels said: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• It confirms what we all suspect – that the workplace constantly bombards us with lies, fakery and spin
• Case histories of Enron, Boo.com, the European Union and others provide the proof on a grand scale
• Deconstructions of other levels of lying help the reader to navigate their way through the day-to-day types. You can then decide how to react.
• It has tips on how to suck up to the boss, pass the buck and endure meetings
• Everybody should read the chapter on Lies and Leadership

“The truth is more important than the facts.” Frank Lloyd Wright

“Those that think it is permissible to tell white lies soon grow colour blind.” Austin O’Malley

“Honesty may be the best policy, but it’s important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.” George Carlin

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• The book essentially condemns most corporate cultures and so needs to be viewed lightly by those who have to work in them
• There is a moral dilemma lurking within: do you tell the truth and get trod on, or join the liars?

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• This quirky book explains the benefits of making bad decisions, why unreason is better than reason, and shows how risk is the security in your life. It’s about having the confidence to roll the dice.
• The problem with making sensible decisions is that so is everyone else. They are dull, predictable, and lead you nowhere. Unsafe decisions cause you to think and respond in a way you hadn’t thought of.
• I want is better than I wish
• It’s better to regret what you have done than what you haven’t.
• Too many people spend too much time trying to perfect something before they actually do it. Instead of waiting for perfection, run with what you’ve got, and fix it as you go.
• There is no right point of view. There are personal, conventional, large and small ones. You are always both right and wrong. Advances in any field are built upon people with the small or personal point of view.
• What is a good idea? One that happens. One that doesn’t isn’t. If an idea is not taken up as a solution to a problem it has no value.
• Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Authenticity is invaluable. Originality isn’t. “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.” Jean-Luc Godard

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• The booked is packed full of inspirational and contrary thoughts – just the place to start if you are bogged down or suffering from inertia.
• Until the Mexico Olympics of 1968, high jumpers faced the bar, and the record stood at 5′ 8″. Dick Fosbury turned his back on it and leapt 7′ 4″, by thinking the opposite of everyone else.
• In 1889 George Eastman invented the Kodak brand. It means nothing but was chosen because it was short, was not open to mispronunciation, and could not be associated with anything else.
• “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man adapts the world to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw
• Meetings are for those with not enough to do. They are performances, acts to convince people of their own importance.
• The world is what you think of it. So think of it differently and your life will change.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• Not much. This book is all about jumping off points, so don’t expect to be guided by hand through the creative process.

The one-sentence summary

You can be more creative if you train yourself to think differently.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Everyone can be creative, regardless of whether they think they are
• Creativity is variously described as “the spark that ignites new ideas”, “the infinite capacity that resides within you”, and “shaping the game you play, not playing the game you find”
• Good ideas arise when we take something we already know (light bulb no.1) and consider it in relation to another thing we already know but which is unrelated (no.2). Merging them creates light bulb number 3 – the new idea

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• It explains the origin of the phrase “thinking outside the box”. The Gottschaldt figurine, or nine-dot game, requires you to join all the dots without taking your pen off the paper. You can’t solve it if you view it as a box
• ROI is used to stand for relevance, originality and impact. Your ideas won’t work if they do not have all three
• Barriers to creativity have been placed in our way since childhood: don’t be foolish, grow up, work before play, do as you’re told, don’t ask questions, obey the rules, be practical, and so on
• There are six techniques which you can use in any awayday to generate ideas:
• Random Word: take a noun randomly from somewhere and apply it to the subject. You can also use pictures
• Eyes of Experts: choose three respected experts from other fields and consider how they would deal with your issue. There is a variation called Industrial Roundabout where you view it through a different category
• What’s Hot?: use popular current things to appeal to your audience
• Curly Questions: use analogies, speculation, role reversal and imagination to re-phrase the issue at hand so that more original answers emerge
• Exaggeration and Depravation: over-exaggerate the benefits of a product, or push to ludicrous extremes what happens if it isn’t present
• Exquisite Corpse: based on surrealist thinking, different people randomly select five words to create a sentence in the pattern adjective/noun/verb/adjective/noun. Eg. The peculiar bicycle swims a brilliant banana. Each word is then scrutinised to review the problem

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• You need to control the exercises so they don’t seem trivial
• You need to be open-minded

The one-sentence summary

Customer perception of brand quality is a combination of pre-existing expectations and experience when interacting with it, so companies need to practice what they preach.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Companies need to align their internal and external brand values to build a self-confident organisation
• Customer perception of quality is a function of their pre-existing expectations of the brand, coupled with their experience when interacting with it
• Brand reputations can be ruined by a poor interaction
• The Brand Manners Improvement Cycle has five stages:
• Individual Behaviours. It’s not enough to talk about missions and values – they have to be manifested in the concrete reality of individual actions
• Encounters. Stay close to customers and staff, and engender an atmosphere of trust
• Brand Promise. Technology and automation must not be allowed to remove humanity from brand interaction
• Happy Surprises. Direct human interface generates defining gestures, pledges to customers, and moments of truth that should reflect the brand
• Feeling Good. The art of ensuring continually satisfied customers is to define your version of outstanding service, realising the importance of under-promising and over-delivering, and recruit in line with the brand’s values

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• The Brand Manners cycle makes good sense and enables you to start a strategic debate with clients that goes way beyond marketing communications
• The philosophy of the book is a useful antidote to macho marketing styles
• Case histories include Orange, Tesco, Coca-Cola, Ronseal, HSBC, and Pret a Manger – many of which could be directly applicable to your business
• The format is in user-friendly chunks, with lots of diagrams that may help to inspire the content of other presentations

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• Face-to-face interaction with customers may be one step too far removed from the briefs for most marketing campaigns
• You could end up having a lot of theoretical debate about the behaviour in an organisation without making any particular progress on marketing issues

The one-sentence summary

When you start looking at exactly how much things cost and how much profit you are making you become a much better marketer.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Marketing today is all about image, but it isn’t working properly
• Marketing is a science, not an art
• Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department
• Marketers must be accountable to shareholders
• Focus on results, not activities
• Megabrands are a rotten idea

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• It is full of ballsy assertions such as Traditional marketing is not dying, it’s dead, and Why have marketing? To make money
• The section on How to sell the most stuff and make the most money has some helpful steps you can copy:
• How to make positioning a two-way street
• How branding creates identity
• How to stop brands becoming static
• How to compete against yourself
• How to define consumer expectations that your competitors can’t meet
• All the quotes you want are in bold for easy picking:
• “When you start looking at exactly how much things cost and how much profit you are getting…you become a much better marketer”
• “Narrow how your competitor is defined to a single trait or quality whilst simultaneously broadening yours”
• “The old conventional thinking that said that if you grab people’s hearts, their wallets will follow is dead, kaput, finished…people need reasons to buy”
• At the end there are the 28 principles of new marketing (see list)

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• The author is the former Chief Marketing Officer of Coca-Cola, so there are a lot of Coke examples
• He has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about being disliked by creative ad agencies, which can make some of his points defensive (“Agencies can never make smart, fully informed decisions because they are never going to be fully informed”)
• The 28 principles of new marketing aren’t exactly new
• Implementing his approach might encourage machismo in the office