This is well worth getting. In the tradition of Freakonomics and Blink etc, but a bit more about the real world of life and brands we all deal with, rather than rarified worlds of art or drug-dealing.
Mr Harford's site is well worth visiting too. There are lots of great links on there and a fantastic piece on presentations the easy way.
Kevin Jackson has written this splendid book - Fast: Feasting On The Streets Of London. (the image above is from the book, off of Amazon). Portobello books were kind enough to send me a copy.
It's splendidly enthusiastic about all the brilliant varieties of Fast Food you can get in London from kebabs to eels. (Though it's predictably sniffy about the corporate varieties.) It's dense with all the little facts you want to know about the histories of London's coffee houses, Milk Bars and chip shops. It has a nice line in mixing the trivial anecdote with the heavyweight academic reference and I really like the photography. You really get a sense of an author who likes what he's writing about, which meant I powered through it in an evening, using little sticky notes to mark all the places I'm very keen to visit. Top stuff.
This was written during WWII by a famous american copywriter. (He also wrote 'a technique for producing ideas' which still stands up today as a great guide). It started as a diary that ran in Ad Age, and was turned into a book later. Although Young was writing in a very different age and a very different world (and clearly he could be a bit of a git) a lot of what he says about advertising (and other more trivial stuff, like life) holds true today.
I've going to fill the odd idle moment by quoting some of the stuff he said (assuming his estate don't have a big problem with that).
Here's an entry which could serve as a description of the satisfactions of blogging:
Sunday...August 16th 1942
Pleased to get from the Editor some letters which indicate that, now and then, somebody reads this Diary. Showed them to my wife - who still wonders why. If a man likes the sound of words, putting them together may be its own reward. But I notice that a neighbour of mine, who often sits on his doorstep of an evening, playing a flute to himself, doesn't mind a little audience either.
I read Kevin Robert's Lovemarks book on the flight to New York. (Very bad airplane book - takes a lots of luggage space but only about half an hour to read.)
Obviously it's easy to criticise (mostly because it's rubbish; facile, arrogant, and shockingly badly designed). But you've got to applaud the bloke's energy and enthusiasm. And at least he's trying to move the debate about brands forward. It's just unfortunate that he's moving it forward from some point in the late 80s.
just read weird ideas that work by robert i. sutton. good round up of thinking about creativity and innovation in organisations. not a ton of substantial new stuff if you work for a creative business, you can whip through it in a night, but lots of good quotes and anecdotes.
quotes:
"to invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk" - thomas edison
"discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different" - albert szent-gyorgi
"I went to Berkley (rather than Caltech or Stanford) because it had the worst computer facilities of the three. I figured it would force me to be more ingenious" - bill joy
"creativity is a consequence of sheer productivity. if a creator wants to increase the production of hits, he or she must do it by risking a parallel increase in the production of misses...the most successful creators tend to be those with the most failures" - dean keith simonton
"the best engineers sometimes come in bodies that can't talk" nolan bushnell
"fail early, fail often" - david kelley, ideo
"every strike brings me closer to the next home run" - babe ruth
"i can't ask my customers what they want. they haven't been born yet" - an engineer from Xerox PARC
thoughts:
from weird ideas that work (page 11):
vu ja de - when you feel or act like an experience is brand new even if you've seen it a thousand times before. first used, pejorativlely, by Karl Weick about a group of smokejumpers who died in a fire because they forgot what they knew. But forgetting what you know can be very useful for creatives.