The other day, this book ended up on Andre’s desk from O’Reilly: slide:ology – The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations. This book is less science and more art, but it’s full of inspiration and practical advice for people giving presentations. As someone who has seen a few talks, good and bad, a lot of this book rings true. In fact I think a lot of Nancy Duarte’s philosophy is similar to Edward Tufte, who is also a great presenter in his own right and a philosopher of the art of presenting – except maybe for the idea the Powerpoint is a tool to be tamed rather than one to be left out entirely.
Pick up a copy here.
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I stumbled onto a copy of Making Things Happen (Second Edition) a few weeks ago here at Nitobi and I’ve finally had a chance to give it a good going-over when I was at the lake this weekend. This is a good book – let me say right off. I liked both the style of writing (very straightforward, employing limited amounts of jargon), and the methodical experience-based approach to explaining project management. Its definitely written from a software-development perspective (the author having worked on projects like Windows and Internet Explorer for Microsoft) but the insights contained would pretty much apply to any team-based project situation.
The author speaks from a place of experience. The book is littered with insights one could only gain from years of ground-level project management – probably with the same types of quirky software developers you and I deal with all the time (ourselves included, no doubt).
Topics covered include:
- How to make things happen
- How to make good decisions
- Specifications and requirements
- Where ideas come from
- How to manage ideas
- How not to annoy people
- Leadership and trust
- Midgame / endgame strategy
- The truth about making dates
- What to do when things go wrong
- Power and politics
- Team communication & relationships
- Visions and plans
These items above are the broad strokes (lifted from the author’s website). Getting into it, I also encountered such gems as:
- What to do when there are no winning choices
- How to use research as ammunition
- What to do if there is no time for project planning
- How to come up with new ideas
- Managing the chaos of idea generation
- How to know when specs are ‘complete’
- Why projects run long
- Managing difficult team members
- How to write diplomatic emails!
- Run meetings that don’t annoy people
- What to do when everything goes to hell
- How pressure affects the project and productivity
- All about the ‘Hero Complex’ (this is a good one)
- Basic tools for getting things done (prioritized lists and such)
- All about the politics of teams and projects
He caps each chapter off with some exercises, making this a useful resource for teaching a course on project management, although I rarely did more than just glance at them.
Rotten-tomatoes style I give this a rating of 90%. The only substantial criticism I would give is that sometimes it does seem a bit rambling, but those digressions were usually quite entertaining so its hardly a reason not to go pick up a copy of your own. BTW you can buy it right now from Amazon by clicking here: Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management (Theory in Practice (O’Reilly))
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