Reading List Archive

Just wanted to mention two awesome books I’m reading. The first is called BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY: HOW TO CREATE UNCONTESTED MARKET SPACE AND MAKE THE COMPETITION IRRELEVANT. I learned about this bad boy from an article re: Nintendo’s corporate strategy.

From Publishers Weekly
Kim and Mauborgne’s blue ocean metaphor elegantly summarizes their vision of the kind of expanding, competitor-free markets that innovative companies can navigate. Unlike “red oceans,” which are well explored and crowded with competitors, “blue oceans” represent “untapped market space” and the “opportunity for highly profitable growth.” The only reason more big companies don’t set sail for them, they suggest, is that “the dominant focus of strategy work over the past twenty-five years has been on competition-based red ocean strategies”-i.e., finding new ways to cut costs and grow revenue by taking away market share from the competition. With this groundbreaking book, Kim and Mauborgne-both professors at France’s INSEAD, the second largest business school in the world-aim to repair that bias. Using dozens of examples-from Southwest Airlines and the Cirque du Soleil to Curves and Starbucks-they present the tools and frameworks they’ve developed specifically for the task of analyzing blue oceans. They urge companies to “value innovation” that focuses on “utility, price, and cost positions,” to “create and capture new demand” and to “focus on the big picture, not the numbers.” And while their heavyweight analytical tools may be of real use only to serious strategy planners, their overall vision will inspire entrepreneurs of all stripes, and most of their ideas are presented in a direct, jargon-free manner.

From Publishers Weekly
Short on pages but long on repetition, this newest book by Godin (Purple Cow) argues that lasting and substantive change can be best effected by a tribe: a group of people connected to each other, to a leader and to an idea. Smart innovators find or assemble a movement of similarly minded individuals and get the tribe excited by a new product, service or message, often via the Internet (consider, for example, the popularity of the Obama campaign, Facebook or Twitter). Tribes, Godin says, can be within or outside a corporation, and almost everyone can be a leader; most are kept from realizing their potential by fear of criticism and fear of being wrong.

These books are fun and inspiring. If you’re a wonk like me.

I read this great article in FAST COMPANY.  One more piece to the puzzle of understanding the collaborative creative process.  Very germane to my TV experiences.  Check it out HERE!

I’m very impressed by THE SPIDER-WICK CHRONICLES. A series of YOUNG ADULT novels by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black. The writing and art are terrific. But what really gets me is the way the IP has been designed to inspire fan generated content.

Of course there are the usual COMPENDIUMS of strange creatures. And the insistence that the books are based on a true story — the journal of Arthur Spiderwick, and the adventures of his descendants. With an almost ARG worthy dogma the authors keep to their story in all the interviews I’ve come across. It’s pretty awesome.

But what I really love is THE SPIDERWICK NOTEBOOK FOR FANTASTICAL OBSERVATIONS. It’s filled with blank pages to be filled in by the books’ owner. My son is walking around our garden right now — talking to faeries and drawing pictures of all the creatures he’s seeing.

HE: “Dad — the pixies are smearing goblin blood on my pages.”
ME: “Tell them to pick on somebody their own size!”

The Notebook offers sample images of creatures, guiding questions, and suggestions for how to observe the creatures. So that nobody is left staring at a blank page and wondering what they are supposed to do.

The Notebook is an ingenious iteration on the NARRATIVE GAPS concept. For a while I’ve wanted to design gaps in my own TELEVISION narrative. Spaces designed to be filled by fan generated content, in a way that the content can be incorporated into the show’s narrative as canon.

I was having trouble wrapping my head around exaclty how to do this — in a way that was both contained, and manageable. I didn’t want any of the content generators to feel I was locking their creativity in a box.

The Spider-Wick Notebook does it right. It’s a playroom. A sandbox full of toys. And anyone is invited to come over and play. I can’t wait to see how people start building this concept into their transmedia properties.

Check out the NOTEBOOK FOR FANTASTICAL OBSERVATIONS.