Let's change people's minds!

Book reading made simple

Eventhough I enjoy reading non-fiction litterature, everytime a new Amazon package hits my desk I just whish: couldn't it be a way to just plug it in directly to my brain!

Still awaiting some new kind of technology that could take care of that, we all could thank Jason Kottke for summerizing some of the best recently pulished popular science titles on influence and decision making. Reading this post you will have a fair understanding of titles such as Blink, Wisdom of the crowds and Freakanomics in only one or two minutes.

Too bad I had them plugged in already.

How small things can make a big difference

That's how Malcolm Gladwell subtitled his bestseller The Tipping Point. In fact it's a line which should be rembered as much as its main title. Sometimes the difference between success and failure, between do and don't, or yes and no are only the smallest things.

This striked me again when reading Freakanomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. They have investigated a wide array of situations, relationships and events and found all kinds of correlations that nobody probably ever thought of. Like the fact that it's healthier for you to be on a death row than to be a crack dealer. Or that the willingness to pay for bagels at the office is substationally lower close to holidays.

One of the cases I found most interesting was a kindergarden in Israel where they started to bill the parents $3 for coming late to pick up their kids. This actually led to an increase in late arrivals as it now was legitimized to do so, in fact there was a price and prices can be payed. Because of that the management once again changed it and skipped the fee. The result: people continued coming late - a new legitimized behavior was born.

I know it's not the same thing but is this what will happen with the emission rights resulted from the the Kyoto treaty? Finally there is a legitimate way to pollute - buy your rights here!

What Malcolm Gladwell told me

Yesterday I listened to Malcolm Gladwell at an event arranged by ICA in London. Except for telling the stories from his new book, , he gave us insights in his own work as "idea entrepreneur".

I must admit I have until yesterday seen Gladwell as a fabulous writer with an admirable gift enabling him to explain complex research in a popular and easy-to-grasp manner. But not so much as an idea generator.

I guess I have to rethink.

In many ways Malcolm Gladwell represents a new genre of non-fiction literature, which is as innovative as the things he is writing about. Not only is that's the case for his prose but also for the way he is doing his research. "It's the stories that guide me", Gladwell told us. By putting the stories together his "theory" emerges and is basically presented only thorugh these stories and some key concepts. The stories epitomizes the theory while the key concept make them easy to remember. "If you want people to talk about your book,  you have to give them the tools to do that" Gladwell said.

He also gave us his view on intellectual property and what he thought about the fact that people are stealing his ideas as well as his words. "When I have written my words and explained my ideas I don't own them anymore", Gladwell argued. "And the funny thing is that stealing ideas is never perceived as a problem. Stealing a sentence though, is considered as a serious crime".

I believe not only the ideas of Tipping Point and Blink can be important for the innovator but also Gladwell's own ideas as idea entrepreneur:

• Don't treat your ideas as you own them - share them and profitize on the fact that people agree with them and know you can deliver the solutions

• Don't sell products - create stories about what your products can do for poeple and name behaviors that has to be changed

And lastly, which is also an advice to researcheers and academics who want to reach out with their ideas:

• Tell us what it means - not what it is, and definitely not how you found out. Entertain us!!