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Feature: The Research 2011 Book Club
Over the last few years the Research conference has organized quite a few 'stunt' sessions. These are designed to show that researchers are also interested in things other than research and that they can be a bit wacky. Teresa Lynch looks at this year's entrant in the category.
Who can forget, in 2009, 'The Research X Factor'? Or last year's 'Research Dragon's Den' and 'Big Thinkers'? Very few of these sessions in the past have achieved lift-off or been repeated the next year. However this year's 'Viewpoints - This Book will Change Your Life' was an exception.
It wasn't particularly high concept, which may have been an advantage since it was on at 2.15 on a day when a large percentage of the potential audience had been up till the early hours the previous day. Introduced by Chloe Fowler of Razor Research, four young researchers gave a three-minute pitch for a business book which had changed their working lives.
Tom Woodnutt, a freelance Conversation Strategist picked the somewhat predictable What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis. Woodnutt mentioned all the regular things people say about Google: the twenty percent time for individual project and the 'dare to fail', but he still managed to make the book sound like a good read - which having battled through it myself, it really isn't.
Next up we had Alison Winter of the BBC on Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace by Gordon Mackenzie. According to Winter this is the book for all those worker ants slaving in the big colony, hemmed in by the inflexibility of historic systems, and unable to break free. Winter spoke well about the book's advice to try to change small local things rather than whole monolithic organizations like, for example, the BBC.
Caroline Hayter Whitehill of Acacia Avenue followed with a Q and A for the audience. We had to put up our hands if we agree with various marketing mantras such as '20% of your customers give you 80% of your value' and 'certain types of people like certain brands'. Given that all of the statements were deemed to be wrong by Byron Sharp, author of How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know, the audience learned pretty quickly not to make twits of themselves putting up their hands.
Lastly we had James Mitchell of BBH singing the praises of Mastery by George Leonard, a book applying the principles of Aikido to achieving life goals. Mitchell proved a very engaging performer and used some very basic hand drawn visual aids to draw us into what was essentially a self-help book.
However the best part of the session was still to come. The audience were asked to make a one-minute pitch for a book they felt had changed their lives, the reward being their choice of one of the platform books. This was a fascinating exercise and the audience, caught off-guard, were shown to good advantage as they responded. Your correspondent's favourite of all these instant summaries was not one of the many management or infographic books mentioned but the lady who stood up and said reading novels not manuals had made her a better researcher since they gave her insight into the human condition.
In all about 12 members of the audience went out clutching an unexpected prize. This was a good session, well conducted, with good speakers and no razzle dazzle. It would be easy to repeat next year instead of trying a new borrowed-from-TV format. After all, everyone loves a book club.
More conference reports to come next week at the - we hope pleasant and relaxed - rate of one or two a day.
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