Motivation, Formats, and Metrics

Motivation

I use to choose my books by reading the reviews in Amazon.

In general, the metrics I use are:

• Average rating - the higher the rating, the higher the quality (really?)
• Amount of reviews - the more reviews, the more credible the rating

Even though this is an excellent starting point (I love Amazon), I still have two open questions for my "business" reading:

• Is it funny and easy enough to read in my rare free time?
• Is the content really useful for me, my team and/or my startup?

This last point is very important, because I don't just want to learn new things, I also want these new things to improve my own work, and the work of my team.

Formats

I will try to stay as simple as possible, by posting:

• Summary - the shortest summary I can distill
• Models/concepts - a compact description of the models/concepts
• Impact - my experience in the application of those models/concepts

Additionally, I will post few metrics (see next section).

Metrics

Well, as you can imagine, I will use metrics answering to my needs (in the hope that they are useful for someone else):

• Rating Amazon - average rating (amount of reviews)
• My rating - my general rating about the book
• Fun factor - how funny or boring is the book (there are a lot of boring books in management)
• Simplicity - rating of structure and style for easy reading
• Impact - how much and how easy to apply

That's it.

Stay posted...