If you threw these 10 books in a blender and poured the results into a PowerPoint file, you might start getting close to what my new book Beyond Bullet Points is about:
- The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. & E.B. White
- Screenplay, by Syd Field
- Story, by Robert McKee
- Stealing Fire from the Gods, by Jim Bonnet
- Moving Mountains, by Henry Boettinger
- The Minto Pyramid Principle, by Barbara Minto
- Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud
- Multimedia Learning, by Richard E. Mayer
- Eloquence in an Electronic Age, by Kathleen Hall Jamieson
- The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle
Each of these books added a particular substance or flavor to the blend, enhanced by a tasty topping in form of the 17 interviews I conducted this year about PowerPoint with experts, luminaries, and plain nice folks including Don Norman, Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Rich Mayer, Larry Lessig, John Seely Brown, and others.
If any of this is tempting your intellectual and creative taste buds, the main course arrives in February 2005 - a larger version of the cover is on my website.
I'm looking forward to hearing what you think about it, and especially to continuing a dialog with you about using media to open up dialog with other people. Someone made a comment to me the other day that one of the things they enjoy most about this blog is seeing how creative other people are. I don't know that we always get the chance to properly express ourselves in organizational cultures that are sometimes paralyzed by the bullet point paradigm. Maybe if we mix things up a bit in 2005, we can look forward to presenting our authentic selves, well beyond bullet points.
P.S. You may have noticed that the title of the book was originally Beyond Bullets, like this weblog, but someone in the marketing department thought that some potential readers might think the book had something to do with guns. So we changed it to Beyond Bullet Points. In case you've been reading the Beyond Bullets weblog hoping for some advice about whether to buy an M-16 or an AK-47, you're in the wrong blog. You're welcome to hang around, though, if you're ready to lay down your arms and aim instead for clear communication and engaging conversation.
