Book Review: Natural Born Heroes by Christopher McDougall

I had high expectations to Christopher McDougall's new book Natural Born Heroes. His previous book was really enjoyable journey to endurance athletes and especially to ultrarunning world. I thought this book would be natural continuation to that one.

The book tells stories about human abilities that go beyond our thought of normal human abilities. So it tells stories about heroes. Heroes and especially endurance heroes looked like an interesting topic to read about.

Quite early in the book I noticed that it isn't as easy to read that I would have hoped to. The challenge with the book was that it was filled with so many stories, that it becomes almost impossible to follow all of those.

Main stories were about Greece, but even there the stories jumped from mythologies, to World War II to McDougall's own experience from there. In addition to these Greece stories, book jumped once in a while to stories from former China, UK and US. Many of the stories connected to each other, but there were so many characters in the book that it was laborious to keep track on whom was whom.

As such I liked the book and it thought some good things about humans and endurance overall. In that sense it was enjoyable. With better planning and organization the book would have been excellent. At least for my type of reading, I kept loosing track which story was being told at which time.

It is bit hard to give recommendations about the book. At least if World War II interests, then I recommend to read it. If you want something lighter about endurance once in a while, then it would be good option look into. If you expect clearly structured fact based book about endurance, then maybe there are other choices to consider.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Peer training inside organizations can be very effective

In one organization I was working with, there was a desire to improve overall coding skills. The guys had used some external training sessions, but as most often those were in such a general level, that those didn't give much value to the environment they were working in. We started to think about solutions for the problem.

Team had couple of people who were thought to be gurus, who could easily train the others, but as always, the gurus were also the busiest guys in the organization. Creating a proper training takes lot of time and effort. Anyone who have ever created tailored training sessions, know that it takes at least 5-10 times more time to create the training than keeping it. If the training is for 2 hours, you easily need 10 hours of work on creating it.

So the answer didn't lay on the gurus. We also did have a look for external tailored training, but there wasn't much of a budget prepared for this. And also, the external trainers are never as effective as internal ones. So we decided to try peer training. We decided that everyone in the team needs to keep one session to everyone. At that point, we came up with an idea of taking few valued books of the subject and divided chapters from the book to be the subject areas people had to make their training sessions.

In addition there was created a good template for the training. Template made people to explain the basic theory from the book and then it was made mandatory to bring examples from their own production code as a reference learning for the training.

Exercise was successful. Of course people were hesitant in the beginning, but the feedback after the sessions was good. One of the best ways to learn is to teach. When you have to teach others, you have to know the subject much better than you will ever learn from any training sessions.

This example was from actual coding, but in can easily be taken in to use in different professions. I believe the ability to take learning from a valued book and consider and show the examples from organizations daily life is really beneficial. Experienced external trainers are excellent in keeping the atmosphere and proofing points, but they rarely know enough about the daily life to actually be able to make a change to stick.

I have experience in doing tailored training sessions. I've kept close to 50 sessions during change projects inside companies. Even though I normally know quite much about the companies, the challenges people have and the practicalities, still I've seen that my teachings are much more effective when there is internal experts backing me up.

I highly recommend this practice to all teams. I can guarantee it works. It might work differently than you think, but it will definitely make people to learn and find ways to improve.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Top 5 Books I read Year 2013

As I've been blogging so much about books lately, I thought it would be valuable to share the best books I read 2013. From these books only one was published this year, so it's not a review of best books of 2013, but what I read year 2013. All of these are books I'm really happy I read. All of those changed my world and view of the world. Here the list and few words why I think those were so important. I highly recommend all of those.

1. Thinking in Systems: A Primer

I've been familiar to systems thinking before the book, but this was the book that fully opened my eyes. This book works bit like the famous "red pill vs blue pill" scene from Matrix which promises to show the world as it is. Systems thinking should become a mandatory subject to school, it's so important.

2. The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

I'm mainly sad that I didn't read this book earlier. This is a book everyone in SW industry should try to understand. It's not easy to read and it's even harder to understand. It gave me so many new ideas how to improve SW development organizations. I'm sure it had good thoughts for everyone else too.

3. Green Illusions

Green Illusions opens eyes about the state of the world currently. There are many controversial thoughts in the book and I didn't believe everything as such, but that doesn't matter. I believed the main point, world has a consumption problem. To fix consumption problem we should put much more focus to different things that
we are currently doing. Today's economy is based on consumption and supporting cheap energy. How should we change this? Read the book and think yourself.

4. Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

This book I enjoyed the most in the whole year. It's the first book over 400 pages that I wouldn't have liked to finish. It is packed with so much information about current technology and future predictions, that I bet all the tech freaks will love the book. The author is very familiar how hard it is to try to guess the future, but him if anyone in the world have information and sources to make good guesses. If there would be more books like this existing, I would read many of those in a row.

5. To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

To Sell Is Human was an excellent book. It goes through some of the same topics Daniel Pink has been writing already previously. Dan Pink writes good stories and every book from him is a fun to read. Also the books are filled with really important information. I'm still honest to myself, this book got to the list because Daniel Pink is my favorite author. I've read almost everything he has written and his writing doesn't light me up as they used to. I still own him so much. His books have been the ones that got me back to reading again. I hope this book could do the same for someone else.


Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Wordle 2013

Here's this years wordle about from my blog posts. This is tradition to me and here are my previous wordles (2010, 2011 & 2012). Word cloud reveals what has been obvious to me the whole year, I've been mainly writing about books.

Because book stole so much from my words, I decided to do another wordle without the word book on it. I also took some other obvious words away from the cloud to see what really have been the subjects in books and other posts that have been raised up.

I was gladly surprised to see that people, business, development and world raised to be such a popular words. Also there were words like ideas, systems, thinking, training etc mentioned so many times. It is fun to see in this format what I really have been writing.

Happy new year to everybody.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Reach For The Sky

Reach for the Sky is a real life story about Douglas Bader, man who lost both of his legs in flying accident and still became one of the greatest pilots in the world. His story is inspiring in so many different ways. His journey through all the difficulties and his time in German prisons would be worth to read even without him losing both of his legs, but that makes it even more important.

Douglas Bader gives important lesson to everyone about the willpower. He knew what he wanted and kept trying long enough to get his answers. Some might say he was stubborn, but I would say he was consistent. He did realize that some of the things became impossible to him, but he had to learn it himself and didn't let anyone to tell him that. That's the lesson we all should learn, we shouldn't let anyone else tell us what we can and what we can't do.

The Author, Paul Brickhill, is a pilot himself. That has given him a skill to describe flying quite comprehensively. Also Brickhill was a prisoner himself in German prisons, so the stories about escapes are really authentic and detailed.

Story is good dive in to the World War II and to the incredible life of Douglas Bader. I haven't read many biographies, but I'm happy I read this one. I really enjoyed the book and I'm happy to recommend this book to everyone. It teaches about history, but also it teaches us about how important willpower and believing to your own skills is.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Hot Spots by Lynda Gratton

Hot Spots by Lynda Gratton is a book about building well working teams and workplaces. It gives reasons why some teams learn to work together effectively and start create new innovative ideas. Also it tells why some teams don't ever get to this state and why even the most effective teams die away at some point.

I love the idea of the book. I think it is important to try to learn building more effective teams. The theories and ideas in the book are good ones, but still something is missing. Theories and ideas do make sense, but I'm not sure are those more than just theories. It is really easy to like the contents of the book, but still I didn't.

I had hard time to believe the contents of the book. Maybe one reason was the it used Nokia team as one of the main examples in all around the book. I've been working at Nokia for 7 years and I have seen few great teams there, but I didn't really believe the story in this one. It's so easy to use companies like Nokia as example, at the time of the example Nokia was doing so great that even the adequate teams were seen as great.

I didn't really believe any of the other examples in the book. Maybe it was the style those were written, but there was nothing really special on those teams. There was no actual prove that those teams really were hot spots as Lynda Gratton tells us.

I liked the ideas and theories, but I didn't get any actual prove that those really work. Maybe my expectations were just much higher for the book.

I don't really recommend this book. It's much praised and it has been getting good reviews, but I will not give it to anyone to read. There are good insights, but there's nothing that person who have seen many teams couldn't figure out themselves.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Green Illusions

Latest book I read was Green Illusions by Ozzie Zehner. For once it was a book I have no preconceptions and I didn't really have a clue what was coming. I don't even know how I actually picked it up and ordered it, but I'm glad I did.

Green Illusions is a book explaining what current green initiatives there are ongoing in the world and why many of those will never solve the actual problem of us ruining the globe. It goes through in very detail solar power, wind power and all other electricity based green thinking ventures.

Book is provocative and maybe even exaggerating about some of the things, but it definitely makes people think. Raising thought is the sole purpose of the book, so I at least forgive the colorful and bit overstating way on looking at these things. I don't believe all the things are so black and white as proposed in the book, but I do undersign most of the thoughts from the book.

Book goes beyond normal green thinking philosophies as it talks about women's rights, population growth, cutting consumption and lot more. It is a comprehensive look on what the problems currently are, why the current solutions don't work and what are the best things to start with for the future.

It is an excellent book and really glad I read it. It is bit too much looking the world from American perspective, but that is understandable from the writers background and also because US is big part of the problem and the solution.

I recommend this book to everyone. I don't see who shouldn't read this. I really hope this raises thoughts within everyone's head. Maybe this book gets people to not to buy the second car or from building too big house or even cutting the trees from shadowing houses. It is provocative book and no one should buy everything from the book without thinking, but there's a lot to learn for everyone here. Please read it.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Business Model Generation

I've been interested on business models for some time. I often try to understand what is important for companies for their success. For this interest I wanted to read Business Model Generation, highly appraised book about business models.

At first glance the book seemed bit too entertaining and easy to read for actually have valuable information. I admit being bit pessimistic to start reading it, but luckily I was wrong. Even though the design and layout of the book are far from normal business book, the actual content is 100% full of valuable information.

Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur have done a wonderful job of inventing and representing a good way to evaluate and invent business models. They also nicely compare their business model generation to other ways to evaluate business models.

Book is also filled with good real life examples of usage of business model generation and also mapping real life business models to the business model canvas, as they call it.

I think this book has raised to be one of the business books everyone needs to read. It's easy and fun to read and there is lot of value in different sections of the book. Authors have decided not to go deep in any of the subjects, but that's understandable for now. I bet they'll write another book going deeper in to the world of business models in the future.

I highly recommend the book for everyone, it's time well spent. And I really mean everyone, it is valuable to all employees to understand where the value is actually coming. Also it offers good ways to raise new business ideas within companies.

It's an excellent book and it will become part of everyday bookshelf. I will definitely reopen to check things from there in near future.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Tapering and Peaking for Optimal Performance

Once in a while I'll try to read something related to my endurance hobbies. This time I wanted to know more about tapering, preparing for competitions. From some blogs I run into Inigo Mujika and his recent book Tapering and Peaking for Optimal Performance.

Inigo Mujika is respected researcher and also have lot of practical experience from coaching many teams and individuals. His background made it is easy to believe what he is saying about the subject.

I did expect book to have more practical tips about tapering, but book had lot of scientific knowledge about the subject. It went through tapering from so many different approached based on scientific researches, that it was even bit hard to follow all the differences. Information was really valuable, but I have to admit sometimes I didn't fully understand all the nuances of different studies.

At the end of the book there were real life stories and plans from world class athletes, coaches and teams. It was excellent, that those examples were really from the best, olympic medalists and world champions. Those gave excellent practical knowledge on tapering. Of course tapering is different for world level athletes, than for normal amateur athlete, but same laws mainly should apply.

I recommend this book to all coaches and athletes who really want to make it to the top. For amateur athletes, like I, book is bit too technical. One need to be really into understanding small details, if they're going to read this. So I recommend this book, but with a small note aside.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Little Book of Talent - 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

I loved Daniel Coyle's previous book the Talent Code. That's the reason I wanted check another book from him, The Little Book of Talent - 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills.

Quite soon after I started to read this book, it became obvious that this book has the same contents as his previous one, just in much simpler form. For that reason, it is hard to review this one as a separate book. The ideas and information behind all the tips are good ones. Formatting these to the form of short tips although drops something out of the credibility of the content.

Formatting book in form of short tips about how to make things better, makes books easy and enjoyable. It hopefully then helps to get more people to read the message. Once in a while I do read books formatted like this, but I always miss the background information. Same happened this time, I would have liked to really get some more information about facts and stories behind each tip. I guess it just me, for many people this kind of formatting might be enough.

Content of the book is excellent. It tells about how people learn and gives good tips on learning. It is based on visits on, what Daniel Coyle call, talent hotbeds and actual scientific proof on nervous system studies. So there's a true basis where these tips are based, it just doesn't come out in a good form.

I recommend to read either this book, if you are bit lazy or the other one, if you want to know the backgrounds too. Daniel Coyle's message is worth of checking out.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review - Scaling Lean & Agile Development

I haven't lately read that many books on Agile and software development, since I have felt that I learn more about software development reading about other subject than software development. Also some of the books have been quite boring, but I wanted give Craig Larmans and Bas Voddes book a change based on good reviews I had seen.

Too often books about Agile or Lean say mainly the same things that all other books are saying. Scaling Lean & Agile Development was a fresh exception. Although it did explain many of the basic things, but it did those with easy and compact form, so it wasn't disturbing.

Book goes thoroughly through many different aspects of Agile development in larger scale. It does concentrate on Scrum in it's name, but it does look the things from really from organizational perspective. It doesn't only look from certain layers, but it tries to cover many different aspect. It actually tells about the agile transformation and thinking tools also to get into scaled agile development.

It is easy and fun to read, but it does require background knowledge of agile development, scrum and lean to  get most benefits from it. So it isn't the first book to read about agile, but somehow I feel it never is the first book.

I enjoyed it a lot and highly recommend it to anyone who are in organization which have more than one development team doing software development.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel C. Dennett

Evolution theory and all the things related to it, has been an interest for me. This time I wanted to dig deeper and read Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel C. Dennett. It is highly appreciated book with good reviews.   It was a book I wanted to check out.

I had assumptions that this book dives in to the subject deep, but still I got amazed how deep it went. It started from old philosophic thoughts and then worked its way to Darwin and to latest thoughts in 1990's. All the topics were covered thoroughly with scientific way of comparing things from all perspectives.

Book covers subjects from the beginning of the whole universe to meme's. It talks about God and evolution theory. It covers philosophical thoughts. There is almost anything one can think that affect Darwin's original thoughts.

As an ordinary, non biology or philosophy expert, I was sometimes overwhelmed about all the information there was. Even tough sometimes I wasn't able to understand everything, I just kept going and tried to catch up later on.

I did enjoy the book. It was pretty hard to read, but the contents were such a valuable and brilliant, that it turned the book to positive experience. I did learn a lot during this book. It raised a lots of thoughts all the time I was reading it. For sure this wasn't the last book about these subjects I read. I need to know more sometimes.

I can recommend this book to people who are genuinely interested on Evolution theory, philosophy or biology overall. Without this interest, book might get too hard to read and follow. It is an excellent book, but pretty laborious to read. 

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review - This is Service Design Thinking

Service Design has been an interesting topic for me for a some time. Finally I wanted to get more understanding about it and its basic. That's the reason I got my hands on a book that was saying to be "the book" for service design -This is Service Design Thinking by Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider.

I was super excited to start reading about the wonderful world of service design. I read and read and read and became really bored. First hundred pages of the book the authors are trying to say WE ARE IMPORTANT. I knew it already, designing good services is important and doing it structured way with service design must be even more important. After this start, I wasn't anymore really sure. If someone needs to state in so many different ways that they are important, maybe they really are not.

In the middle section book got better. It told in short articles, bit like blog posts, methods to do service design. Unfortunately these were quite simplistic and didn't dig into most of those properly. If you think of a book like Gamestorming, that's about ten times more useful for these methods than this book.

My hopes was for the last section of the book, examples of service design. As the whole book, that turned out to be a disappointment too. Examples were not really interesting and the way those were presented was quite dull. In one of the examples the designed service never got in to use, but they stated project was still a success. I think the exact opposite. Service which was designed but never got live, is a failure, real big failure.

Book was planned by top service designers and that might have been that the reading experience also failed. They tried in top of everything to renew the concept of a book with coloring, icons and lines going here and there. That made the book complex to read. Maybe there would not have been need to renew a such a working concept that a book is.

I honestly don't recommend this book to anyone. I want to believe Service Design and the people behind service design. This book does no good to the practice. There must be better books about the subject than this one.

I don't think I learned anything about this book. At least not in the positive way. Do yourself a favor, mark this to the "no go" list.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review - Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows

I've been wanting to get in to a systems thinking for some time already. As I often do, I'll try to find the best book for the subject. With systems thinking, book from Donella H. Meadows seemed to be it. Thinking in Systems was written already in 2001, but it feels as fresh as any book.

Book starts from very basic systems and theory round those. Even though it goes to very basics, it's not dull and boring, but interesting way to look on familiar systems. Via these basic systems book explains the underlying theories behind systems thinking.

Thinking in Systems builds cleverly up from the basics to more complex systems and to theories around systems. It is quite easy to follow, but it requires thinking to keep up with system feedback loops and other things affecting systems.

What is funny about the systems theory in this book, is that everything is actually quite simple and easy to understand as a system, but then on the other hand, no one can really tell how complex systems will actually work. I think this is actually how the world works, no one can really certainly tell how changes in system will at the end turn out.

Book introduces common pitfalls with systems. Most of are the things that can be seen almost everyday. People overcompensate on problems or react too heavily on some things. Often the underlying logic of system is forgotten and people are will fix something that has no effect in the overall or will make things actually worse.

It was an excellent book and I recommend it to everyone. This book will help everyone understand more about the world we live in. I'm bit sad to know that not that many will actually read this book. Systems thinking is not the trendiest subject out there. That's a pity. You can be different and read it.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Racing Weight by Matt Fitzgerald

Since my triathlon enthusiasm started I have been trying to get in to a lighter weight for better results. Losing weight has never been easy for me and with raising amount of training load, it has been even harder. That's the reason I got my hands in to a book from Matt Fitzgerald: Racing Weight.

Matt Fitzgerald is a sport nutritionist with a background of endurance sports, coaching endurance sports and working for food companies making products for endurance sports. For me that was background enough to prove he knows what he is talking about.

Book takes comprehensive, but simple enough approach to endurance nutrition. It talks through the basics of diets and different sources of nutrition. It quotes many studies from different points of view to diets and training. It also explains different trends in dieting and their pro's and con's.

Racing Weight ideology brings eating back to basics. It supports foods that are natural. It tells athletes to concentrate on quality of the food and then your own appetite.

Book offers simple methods to improve food quality. It recommends to think or even to calculate a bit what you are eating, but it still keeps things pretty simple. Book also offers good ways to manage your appetite and concentrate that you eat for real need of energy.

I loved the simplistic and naturalistic approach of the book. This type of methodology is not about trends or one truth about dieting. It is a comprehensive way to improve your diet and with that your racing weight. It will be easy to not lose weight or improve fat percentage after reading this book. This doesn't offer any magic tricks, but it makes you think of the elements what makes your body to lose or gain weight. For results that will last, that is essential.

I recommend this book even for the people who are not endurance sports enthusiastic. It gives so much good information to everyone about diets that it's valuable reading for all. It's easy and fun to read, so it's really for everyone

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Implementing Lean Software Development

For about half a year, there was laying on my table the book Implementing Lean Software Development by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. I was working mainly as a Product Manager for a year, so software development issues were not the number one thing on my mind. Now I have been for four months in a really
interesting project to improve software development of a company. I've been really excited about it and for that reason wanted to remind myself on excellent insights I knew Poppendieck's have.

I've read Poppendieck book's before and followed their teachings for some time already. This book had slipped my radar for some reason and I'm actually glad it had. It was really nice to go through thoughts from basics of Lean and Agile software development, without still wasting many pages on those. This book excellently reminds on the basics, but still give valuable information for the more experienced ones.

Book is full of excellent examples starting from the 70's and 80's, but coming back to the latest years. It explains all the things shortly, but understandably. It is excellent source for information and ideas for further information seeking.

What I've always liked about their thinking, is that they don't ever seem to get in to the hype's. They understand that hype's are hype's and Lean and Agile are something more sustainable. Getting better in software development is never about some specific ways of working. It is always about improvement and doing things better than previously.

I don't recommend it to be the first book about Lean or Agile software development. It gives something for everyone, but it is more valuable when one has got more experience to map the information against.

It was an excellent book and I enjoyed it enormously.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson was addictive dive in the madness industry nowadays. Jon really knows how to grip reader to a journey with many interesting twists.

This was the first book I read from Jon Ronson, so I didn't know what to expect. Still I was waiting for more scientific approach to psychopathy, but the book turned out to be really entertaining. Book told a lot about psychopaths, but also about so much else in the whole madness industry.

I have to admit I got to know much more about Scientology and mental illnesses from the book that I could have never imagined. The best was, that everything was told in really interesting ways. Jon introduced many persons in the book, some with their own name, some with fake names. He did it so interestingly, that I at least had to go and search for more information about many of these people later on.

Maybe suitably for a book about madness industry, book jumps from subject to subject so rapidly, that sometimes it was bit hard to follow. For some other book it would have been annoying, but for madness book, it suits the picture.

I can recommend this to everyone who is interested in people and behaviors in general. It explains some of the madness's happening in the world quite well.

The worst thing for me reading this book was, that now I must find a book with more scientific information about mental illnesses and psychopathy.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Dangerous Ideas by Alf Rehn

By a coincide I bought Dangerous Ideas by Alf Rehn. I had forgotten book I'm reading to home and I had to go to dentist waiting room that day. I didn't want to go there without any book and I stopped by in a local book store to pick up just some book. There this book was and as I knew the book already I quickly decided to give it a try. I'm glad I did, it was excellent.

Due to Alf Rehn being a Finn I had followed his career from media for some time. For some reason it hadn't raised my expectation towards the book. I actually had decided not to read the book. I'm happy I gave it a second change .

The book is about creativity. It challenges the whole creativity business and is provocative towards many other things also. That's what I liked in the book. It at least tried to be different from other creativity and innovation books I've read. It made me think differently on many things.

One reason I liked the book was that it matches my thinking in many things. I've seen in many occasions, that these creative persons actually all think alike. Also they quite often hate criticism and questioning their thinking. Which I think is funny, they say to be open minded for all ideas, but can't work with new ideas from other people. I think Alf Rehn has similar message whole out the book

Dangerous Ideas was an excellent book for those who have to create new things once in a while. I highly recommend it to everyone. It is provocative enough to hate and love some parts of the book. I'm sure everyone will get something out of it.

I got the impression from the book that Alf Rehn wouldn't be always nice guy to work with. My own experience is that best guys to work with are really the ones who are not the nicest and easiest. With the guys who are hard sometimes, I at least have done the best work so far.

This is a book I do remember reading for some time in the future. That is what makes a book special for me.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

P.S I have to admit I read the finnish version: "Vaaralliset Ideat". Book was originally written in Swedish (as that's Alf Rehn's native language) and the Finnish translation was actually quite bad. It used language not suiting well to Finnish language. That's not Alf Rehn fault, but translators. That doesn't concern most of you, but I had to mention for those who can speak Finnish and might think of getting the Finnish version.

Book Review - To Sell Is Human by Daniel Pink

The first book ever I have pre-ordered was this Daniel Pink's To Sell Is Human. I have to admit, that I am a big fan of Daniel Pink. I waited for this book for some time and it was well worth it.

As the title says this book is about sales. Dan Pink tells how sales has changed in recent years due to the increasing availability of information. He also explains how we are all more or less in selling business. At least we are all everyday trying to persuade others for something. So at the end we are all in sales.

As the previous books from him, this was really enjoyable to read. It's fluent and fun to read. Examples are good and text is interesting. He also dives in to sales world nicely. He gets himself involved and tells about those experiences interestingly.

Main idea in the book is that, selling is changing from stereotypical sleek car sales to more human listening and true understanding of the needs of a person. But the whole book is not only about soft values of moving people, there are also many good tips on closing the deal with certain behavior. Even if you would be in the traditional mindset of sales, this book has valuable tips to think of.

I enjoyed the book. I recommend this to everyone. It's easy to read and I can guarantee you get at least some behavioral tips out of it. If you think you are not sales at all, think again. There is always some situations where you need to sell your own point of view to someone else. That's as much selling as all the other selling.

Worth of mention is the inspiring pre-order campaign Dan Pink and his crew had created. They had exclusive webinar, exclusive material available and signed bookplate for those who pre-ordered the book. That got me to pre-order also. Only sad part is that I haven't received my bookplate yet, maybe they didn't post it to outside US. Still it doesn't change the way I feel the book, it was excellent.

Update 27.2.2013: I did receive my bookplate this week. Now I'm a happy owner of signed book.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Daniels' Running Formula

My latest reading was a sports training book for a change. I've read about triathlon and swimming training, so it was time to concentrate on running. I got my hand on, what was said to be the best running training book ever made, Jack Daniels' Running Formula.

Jack Daniels is a professor of physical education, coach of Olympic athletes and olympic medalist himself. That was proof enough for me, to take a closer look on his ideas.

For me there were two important things in this book. First one was the idea of training load. I've understood that there is different load for different type of exercises, but this book got me to understand more about it and quantify the loads to some extend. I took that part directly in to use on my training diary and will use it for this training season to know if it really works or not.

Second important thing in this book was the different running speeds and the VDOT index for those. VDOT wasn't totally new concept for me, but since it was invented for this book I got to understand all the background information behind it. Other than just running speeds, it gives pretty good tips for different type of running trainings.

Running speeds in VDOT are Easy, Maraton, Threshold, Interval and Repetition. From those, the separation between Interval and Repetition was not clear to me at all before this book. No it is much more obvious that those exercises and speeds are for different purposes; Intervals for training VO2Max and Repetitions are for speed and technique.

Big part of the book is also training programs. There are training programs from elite athletes to first time runners. Training programs also varies from short 800m runs all the way to marathons. So there are training programs for everybody, except for triathlonists. For me the best thing about training programs was to get some good ideas what kind of exercices could be done.

From content point of view, book was excellent. It's filled with good information and ideas about running training. Then from editoral point, it was bit messy. It wasn't as easy and pleasurable to read as it could have been. I blame publishers for that one. They should have put more focus on readability.

I still recommend this book to everyone who wants to understand running training. It gives such a good information about the endurance side of running training, that it is valuable to read. It's also quite quick to read, so I recommend to get it in to your hands and at least scim it through.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen