Book Review: The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

This book is on Joel's reading list and was occupying space on Pat's bookshelf so I decided to steal...errrr...borrow it for the week. Working for a company that is heavily driven by marketing, it's important for me to learn as much as possible on the topic. This is the second book I have recently read on marketing. The first was “The Purple Cow” written by Seth Godin. I found both books very good and hard to put down. This book is a little more outdated in terms of the examples that it provides, but is nonetheless a great book. As I was reading the first few chapters, I had the urge to argue in my head the validity of the laws. But after reading the entire book I understand now understand each law and I would argue that each one is indeed immutable.

2007 Goals

The end of 2006 is only days away and I've done a good job accomplishing many of my 2006 goals. Looking back, I'm very pleased but some goals were rather unrealistic, some were just not easily measured. So this year's goals are going to be more measurable. I have also broken out my personal goals and my work goals. My work goals are posted on the door to my office.

My personal goals are as follows:

1. Read for at least 30 mins every day.

2. Run the Draper Mile in under 6 mins.

3. Run a 5K.

4. Do abs three times per week.

5. Bench press 250 lbs.

6. Spend at least 30 mins cleaning the house every day.

7. Try to force myself and my kids to eat at least 1 vegetable every day.

8. Get my weight to 175 pounds.

One of my work goals is to work at least 60 hours every week. Looking back over the last year, I've averaged 51 hours per week. That's just not good enough. So I've laid out a plan to workout less, work more from home and on weekends, and sleep less. If I stick to the plan I shouldn't have any trouble fitting in an extra 9 hours. And since football season is over there is really no reason to even have a TV, so no more TV for me either.

Hopefully all of this will still leave me plenty of time to spend with the kids and most importantly, Velvet. ;)

Bench Press Results

Friday was the last day of my 12 week workout. I can't believe I started that workout in September. The end result is that I was able to complete each workout successfully, except for the last week. The last week I benched 205 pounds 2 times on the first set, which would put my max at 217 pounds. Seventeen pounds over my goal for the year. 225 is still my nemesis...I'm taking a week off but I'm determined to get it in 2007!

Book Review: User Interface Design for Programmers

The book is written by Joel Spolsky (www.joelonsoftware.com) who provides an entertaining look at user interface design from a programmer’s perspective. Joel is good at seeing things from both a non-technical and technical perspective. He provides some great guidelines in this book, which for the most part I agree with 100%. The book could be updated to reflect a lot of the changes that have occurred over the last few years in the area of web development. The non-web parts of the book are excellent though, and I would recommend this book to anyone who builds user interfaces. The book stays focused on usability and not “use this color and this font” type of issues. The book is not for designers, it’s for programmers, but even designers could learn a thing or two from reading this book.

My two favorite quotes from the book are:

“A user interface is well designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.”

and

“Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point font sans serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.”

Book Review: First, Break All The Rules

This book was recommended by Pat and it is based on an in-depth study of over 80,000 managers. The book's title says it all, the world's best managers are not afraid to break every rule held sacred by conventional wisdom. This book is one I would recommend to anyone who is in a management position. As I was reading this book I jotted down several notes and the page numbers for reference. I plan on going back through these notes and making a detailed summary of this book so that I can refer back to it often.

If I had to summarize the book with a picture, I would steal the one from Appendix A, which is summarized in text as:

• Identify the strengths of every employee

• Based on these strengths, find the right fit for each employee

• The right people in the right roles with the right managers drive employee engagement

• Engaged employees drive customer loyalty

• Loyal customers drive sustainable growth

• Sustainable growth drives real profit increase

• Real profit increase drives stock increase

I strongly encourage everyone to read this book, even if you don't manage people.