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At last! A book on web design that shows proper respect to the customer without getting buried in success-proof non-marketing behaviour.

Submit Now takes web design theory beyond usability to persuasion, to find that the two aren’t necessarily that far apart. Andrew Chak does a good job of explaining the buying process, and what makes the web different from any other form of selling – the customers have an unprecedented amount of power.

Chak takes us through the steps needed to build trust, to make it easy for buyers to buy, and browsers to browse.

The book’s one weakness, though, is that it focusses solely on the site itself, without addressing how people get there. In other words, he’s neglected to put in details of how to make your site search engine friendly. (For more details, see my whitepaper on Getting the Words Right for the web and email)

Apart from that major weakness, though, Submit Now is a very useful – and usable – book! I highly recommend it, not just for web designers, but also for anyone responsible for a business website.

Buy Submit Now: Designing Persuasive Websites from Amazon.com.

Selling with Emotional Intelligence is the equivalent of an intensive one-on-one session with sales coach Mitch Anthony.

The great thing is, you don’t have to pay by the hour, and you can stop when you want. But you won’t want to very often.

Everyone’s heard of Selling, and most have heard of Emotional Intelligence, but it’s not often the two meet. This book helps you to see why, and how you can improve your sales – or simply your relationships – with more people.

You see, we like people like us. Which is great, if our customers are like us. But often, they’re not. Often they’re creeps. They talk silly, they think funny, they’re weird. And we just can’t relate to them – which is a real shame, because our job depends on us relating to them.

The self-fill questionnaires and exercises in this book help you identify how you think, and how others think. You can then recognise barriers to effective communication, and pull those barriers down, brick by precious brick.

For a sales book, Selling with Emotional Intelligence is refreshingly free of hype. As I said earlier, it feels more like a one-on-one clinical session rather than a crowd of door-to-door salespeople trembling with excitement. It’s a book that practices what it preaches – giving you room to be yourself!

So if you’re ready to change some personal habits and understand others better – and make some sales along the way – check yourself into this book. You’ll enjoy the appointment.

Reviewed by Denis Joseph
In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters, Second Edition

Current management theory has a launch date,1982 when In Search of Excellence was published. Written by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, the book clocked a million copies in its first print run. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge, staff editors of the Economist, observe in The Witch Doctors: “The book came at a time when America was worried about its declining competitiveness. Employment figures had hit a high 10%, amidst a glut of books extolling the wonders of Japanese management.”

It was just the tonic that corporate America needed to boost its morale. In Search of Excellence listed a number of leading companies, including a few high tech names, and exhorted industry to implement the lessons. The trumpeting lasted for a number of years, but a few analysts were already picking up the discordant notes. As early as 1984, Business Week published a cover story entitled “Oops!” that debunked some of the book’s claims, but the tide of popularity swamped any flags of caution being run up. (Two companies—Amdahl and Data General were in rigor mortis a few months after publication).

Over the next twenty years, enough evidence was apparent that all wasn’t well with some of the ‘excellent’ high tech companies. In fact, ‘disaster’ seemed a more appropriate word. And it needed an insider to chronicle the stupidity that led to the demise of famous names in high-tech America, as well as the successful perseverance of others, due mainly to a lesser degree of… you guessed it… stupidity.

Rick Chapman’s In Search of Stupidity is a fascinating thriller of billion dollar bungling, of loud-mouthed egos, death-wish rituals and the constant slug-fest between the suits and the geeks. Written in an easy, chatty style without the IT gobbledegook, Chapman’s book is like everyman’s journey—in search of the Tech Grail along an information highway littered with dinosaurs, demons, self-destruct advertising and well… tombstones. The stories are sprinkled with nuggets of stupidity, such as Intel’s Inside stories, Motorola’s Digital DNA, the big mouth of Netscape’s Andreessen; frictionless e-commerce, and other Venture Cap blowouts during the Lotus-eating days of the dotcoms.

(The chapter on the Internet and the ASP busts is aptly titled Purple Haze All Through My Brain!)

Of course, not everyone was plain stupid. Some made mistakes and learned from them. (Bill Gates is not the kind of man to repeat a mistake). Others fell short of ultimate oblivion, and survived to fight another day. For example,

“ Money managers swooned at Jeff Bezos’s newly found ability to simply lose money, not lose it hand over fist.”

For anyone connected with commerce, marketing, software, PR and communications, In search of Stupidity is a book that’s enjoyable to read, curled up under a lamplight. Sprinkled with anecdotes, first-hand observations, and ghoulish humour, the behind-the-scenes financial mayhem is ruthlessly documented, and complemented with cheeky illustrations by Marc Richard.

In spite of the title, the book comes with its inherent wisdom. It has ample lessons in common sense, born out of hindsight, for companies and individuals not to rush in where angels fear to tread. However, the career-minded reader has been warned. Because no tech organization is immune to hara-kiri, and if you hear phrases such as “crufty code” and “bad architecture” as launch date approaches, dig out the resume and click on Send.

Last, but not least, the book is blessed with a foreword and an afterword by Joel Spolsky, President and one of the founders of Fog Creek Software. ( The afterword is in the form of an interview)

And talking about the original corporate wisdom that kick-started it all, Tom Peters confessed, in Fast Company, that the data from In Search of Excellence was faked. “Pretty small beer” said Peters.