Title/Author/Info

Pros

Cons

考えすぎて書けない人のための1分間メール術

考えすぎて書けない人のための1分間メール術 [単行本]神垣あゆみ (著)

1-Minute Email-Fu | Quick, Concise, Chronically Awesome Japanese Business Email Examples For People Who Think Too Much

KAMIGAKI Ayumi

• This book is so good that Hiroshi (fake name), one of my good Japanese friends (who went to Waseda — the Princeton of Japan — and happens to be a bureaucrat) stole it from me and took it to his office to use at work! I had to keep bugging this kid for days on end just to get it grudgingly returned so I could write this review.
• No, really, stole. He borrowed it without my permission. We regularly share books with each other. But this one he simply nabbed.
• Examples are situation-based, easy to look up.
• Very clear writing and formatting.
• Contains examples that you simply can’t find online. Frankly, all the online Japanese business email guides I have seen so far are crap. Too wordy, too complex, too presumptuous (I don’t make factory goods!): they simply don’t cover the right situations in the right way.
• Kamigaki also has another email book out called メールは1分で返しなさい. I haven’t actually seen it yet, but if this bad boy is anything to go by, then it’s probably full of awesome.
• Written by a Japanese person for Japanese people. So you know she keeps it real. This is actual contemporary Japanese: not the anachronistic, overpolite Japanese that prissy, opinionated, undersexed schoolmarms insist on trying to force foreigners to use. People who’ve taken a Japanese class know exactly what I’m talking about.

• No digital version. I mean, come on — this is email! Electronic mail. An electronic version just makes good sense. Especially since Kamigaki encourages readers to use her examples as is. I’d love to SRS the pants off her…book.
• This is kind of like how computer science/ engineering students in college are often lugging around these super heavy textbooks when they should be the very ones pioneering electronic books.
• Come on…computer scientists (1) carrying books that are (2) even heavier than the humanities students?
• That’s not a typo. Computer science textbooks usually weigh more than a humanities student.

Comments

Let me, I guess, share, by way of illustrative example, how this book has helped me. Over the past few years, I’ve done a lot of translation work since that’s something easy and fun you can do from home or anywhere else — perfect for both hermit and nomad. Sometimes I would need to turn down project offers (and I did start getting a lot </blowingownhorn>), especially when I was scaling down to concentrate on other things.

Now, the thing about turning down work is that anyone can be all “I’m busy!”. But to communicate the idea that “you have honored me with your request and with the time it took you to contact me, I can’t work on this project right now but maybe another time”, and to do so with neither arrogance nor ambiguity nor excess humility nor verbosity? That, friends, is the big email question, as it were: how do you say “no” nicely and firmly?

I mean, I’m probably overthinking all of this; I’m almost certainly overthinking it…but…anyway, that example up there (the sample page) from this book showed me how to do that. How to turn things down in such a way that both sides both feel good and get the message — clarity, concision, good feelings. Hiroshi liked it; I liked it; you’ll like it, too.

Random aside: a lot of Japanese etiquette originates from a time when life was slower and speed was considered rude; in fact, in traditional letter-writing, one would apologize for writing letters that were too short — particularly thank-you letters. Now, of course, speed is considered essential, but so is politeness. You need to be polite quickly. There’s no time to say the stuff that comes after “こんにちは”. This, I think, is a big part of what causes many Japanese people and people who simply run Japanese software — like you and I — to think too much when writing email; they’re trying to balance all these things.

1-Minute Email-Fu will help you learn to write concise, effective, clear, polite, dignified Japanese business emails. It’ll save you time and brain cycles. I’m very proud of myself for having found it . It’s that simple.

Title/Author/Info

Author: Daniel Coyle

[Official Website]

Pros

Cons

Content

• Nailing more holes in the coffin of talentism and biological determininsm. That kind of thing is always welcome.
• Gets more into the internal neurological (cellular) details of becoming awesome than other books (which focus primarily on the external mechanics of the matter).
• This book can be summarized in one word: myelin(ation). It focuses on this one point and drives it home from many different angles.
• Where Colvin (Talent Is Overrated) mentions myelin only in passing, Coyle sets it front and center as more or less the Grand Unifying Theory of skill and so-called talent. Myelin is the root of all talent. That’s what Coyle is telling us. It’s beautiful, elegant and simple (but not simplistic) message.
• Coyle isn’t obsessed with pain the way Colvin was. He’s open to the idea of things being fun. Insofar as he values deep practice, he’s still on the same page as Colvin in all the right ways. But Colvin wants you to slog; Colvin is anti-automaticity. Coyle, on the other hand, is very much open to fun and unconsciously developed awesomeness (as is the case with futsal). The automaticity thing could just be poor choice of words on Colvin’s part — of course deep practice entails a great deal of  seeking out and plugging up errors, but the fact is that those errors get plugged precisely because the correct behavior becomes automatic.

Tone

• No Japanese translation
• Occasional ageism. The last thing adults need is more excuses to not try. I am sick to far king death of this age crap. When I was a kid, the answer to anything was always always always “you’re too young, wait until you’re older”. Do not pull this bait and switch crap on me now. I’m here; I’m alive and I’m going to do stuff. End of story.
• Occasional goofy-sounding “story”-style chapter intros
• Occasionally condescending explanations of science. Hello? Think of the audience here. I’m reading hardcover book! I’m pseudo-smart!…I don’t need the smiley youth camp coordinator tone!
• The text has that Time/Newsweek habit of acting as if: “we, and we alone have the answers, and we may have been slightly wrong before, but we’re right now and we’re here re-educating, you, the ignorant masses”.
• Which reminds me of one time back in the day when Time/Newsweek (I can never tell these two apart in my memory) were chuckling at their own WW2-era print racism: “haha, we were so racist and jingoistic back then…yeah, but we’re good now and racism and jingoism are bad bad…except against Arabs. Because, of course, Arabs deserve it. Why do they hate us? Why are they so ungrateful? We’re only trying to help!”
• Yeah, basically, the text sometimes displays an annoying confluence of chattiness, condescension and (perhaps most potentially grating of all) a delightful unawareness of its own chatty condescension. Again…that Camp Counselor Effect.

Content

• This book can be summarized in one word: myelin(ation).

Comments

“[Deep practice] requires motivational fuel…In this section we’ll see how motivation is created…through a process I call ignition. Ignition and deep practice work together to produce skill in exactly the same way that a gas tank combines with an engine to produce velocity in an automobile”

Wow…so ignition, is like the starter thing that, like, ignites the energy, right? Like, in the same way that a pilot light works with methane to produce thermal energy in a gas cooker, right? The “pilot” in “pilot light” like is like the “pilot” in “pilot episode” of a television show. The pilot episode and a team of writers work together to produce a TV show in exactly the same way that one doesn’t need effing friggin fake swearing paragraph-long explanations of what the word “ignition” means! Argh! If you’re going to go to the trouble of singing me camp songs about ignition, your name had better be R. Kelly!

OK, I’ve bullied Coyle enough. Poor guy. Fundamentally, he’s written a worthwhile, informative and even inspiring book, all without ever going mushy. That’s a major achievement. Like Colvin, he’s done all this and made put it in a very readable, cogent package. By way of their respective books, both Colvin and Coyle have given us clear, unambiguous reference points that, AFAIK, didn’t exist before.

Which is not to denigrate the research of homeboys like Anders Ericsson, it’s just that Ericsson’s work mostly sits spread out across multiple, separate academic papers; there isn’t as much of that unifying ”here it is, badabing” point (not yet, at least…although…the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance kinda sorta almost counts) that Coyle and Colvin’s books have provided so well.

Anyway, with that intro out of the way, let’s pick out and dialogue with some major gems from Talent Code:

“myelin doesn’t care about who you are. It only cares about what you do”.

Replace “myelin” with “Japanese” and you have a one-line philsophy for language immersion right there: “Japanese doesn’t care about who you are. It only cares about what you do”.

“Futsal compresses soccer’s essential skills into a small box…Players touhing the ball 600% more often learn far faster, without realizing it, than they would in the vast, bouncy expanse of the outdoor game…futsal is not the only reason Brazilian soccer is great…But futsal is the lever through which those other factors transfer their force”.

“Repetition is invaluable and irreplaceable”

“Daily practice matters”

“Every skill [is] a form of memory”

I have three letters for you: SRS. Three more words: overlapping cloze deletions. Coyle appears not to be familiar with SRS. But he uses cloze deletions in all but name as a reader exercise to explain the concept of deep practice.

“Thinking that talent comes from genes…is like thinking that cookies come from sugar, flour and butter, It’s true enough, but not sufficiently detailed to be useful…prewiring a million-wire circuit for a complex higher skill is a stupid and expensive bet…Our genes…aren’t in the business of making stupid and expensive bets”

Haha. That’s a really good analogy. It’s interesting that Coyle should use cookies — and thereby cooking — as an example. Two people (or one person at two different times) can have access to essentially the exact same ingredients but make two very different-tasting dishes. One can even have access to drastically less fancy ingredients, but through better process, make a better-tasting dish. This may or not be the idea that Coyle was going for, but it is something that can be picked up from the text. Speaking of the text, this next part, where Coyle uses broadband internet as a metaphor for myelin, sent chills down my spine:

“Instead of prewiring for specific skills, what if…genes dealt with the skill issue by building millions of tiny broadband installers and distributing them throughout…the brain. The broadband installers wouldn’t be…complicated — in fact, they’d all be identical, wrapping wires with insulation to make the circuits work faster and smoother. They would work according to a single rule: whatever circuits are fired most, and most urgently, are the ones where the installers will go. Skill circuits that are fired often will receive more broadband…our genes…let our…actions…determine what skills we grow”

Or, put more succinctly:

“although talent feels and looks predestined, in fact we have a good deal of control over what skills we develop, and we each have more potential than we might ever presume to guess”

Woodshed it to get it. Use it or lose it. But Coyle doesn’t just stop there. Not even fighter pilots are safe from his myelin shotgun of righteousness:

“Early pilot training was built on the bedrock belief that good pilots are born, not made [this led to a lot of deaths before a guy named Edwin Link came along with a toy-like pilot training device -- a primitive flight simulator, if you will]…Edwin Link’s trainer worked…well for the same reason [cloze deletions do]…Air Corps pilots who trained in Links were no braver or smarter than the ones who crashed. They simply had the opportunity to practice more deeply.”

What’s good for the pilot is good for the language-learner. If any language learners are getting better results than you, it’s not because they’re smarter or more “talented”, it’s because they have a better mindset and actions. They don’t have better flour or sugar than you; they’re just using better, simpler, funner cookie recipes.

K, so…I guess I’ve spent more time commenting on quotes from the book than actually reviewing it, but…it’s just that cool of a book, what can I say ? It’s packed with all sorts of eye-widening vignettes and insights;  I’ve barely even scratched the surface. Crucially (for anyone tempted to overwork themselves) Coyle points out that deep practice is tiring (soporific even): you need to do it to get good, but you simply can’t do it for that long each day…90 minutes is a perfectly normal upper limit. In AJATT terms: have fun, SRS is small chunks throughout the day, and don’t SRS yourself to death.

The Talent Code . Definitely a keeper. This bad boy is one you’re going to want to come back to many times.

OK, I couldn’t resist. Here’s one last pearl of wisdom from Dan-Dan…wow…I think I need to be more respectful to writers…

“The more we develop a skill circuit, the less we’re aware that we’re using it. This process, which is called automaticity…creates a powerfully convincing illusion: a skill, once gained, feels utterly natural, as if it [were] something we’ve always possessed.”

Everyone worked for their language ability once. It only seems like it came effortlessly after the fact. Believe that.

Title/Author/Info

Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from the Rest of Us

Geoff Colvin
Senior Editor-at-Large, Fortune magazine

Good thing he’s not an editor-at-small, eh, lads? Eh?

Knee.

Slap.

Where do I come up with these?

Pros

Cons

• Great writing style. Very readable. Clear, concise, direct.
• Colvin lays off the story sauce and sticks to the facts.
• No attempts to weave a gripping/emotionally immersive narrative or any other such pretensions to novel-writing. Just the facts. Wham, bam, thank you facts.
• Colvin is very measured in his tone; he writes with the careful, removed, inconclusive objectivity of an academic paper.
• Minus the passive voice.
• No pushiness, no hyperbole.
• First book written by a WASP male in the last 300~500 years to discuss African-American athletes as if they were human beings.
• There’s a Japanese translation out (finally!): 究極の鍛錬.
• The UK English edition (which is the one I have) is all nice and cheap and softcover. Just so we’re clear: it doesn’t use 「UK English」, it’s just…for the UK market and in English. I’m just sayin’. I’m just…putting that out there so you don’t get confused.
• No stupid, irrelevant war stories from his past. A lot of writers conflate telling tall tales of their past with giving their books a human touch.
• No political agenda either way. Which is impressive, because this topic is nine months pregnant with opportunity to complain about the state of 「our values」, whatever you presume those values to be.
• Audiobook also available. Yeeeah.
• And not just a regular CD audiobook (as if anyone effing plays CDs any more), but an MP3 audiobook. Someone deserves hugs and kisses from beautiful women.
• I mean, think about it: why the Fargo, North Dakota would I be buying books online but still listening to audio CDs?
• No, really…think about it.

• Colvin is obsessed with ASM. For him, everything has to come back to pain and suffering. This is a major blindspot in his otherwise stellar work and brilliant mindset.
• Too many pros
• Not enough people know about this stuff
• There’s no movie of this
• Japanese translation took way too long to come out
• No bullet points/bold type and other helpful formatting that you typically find in any Japanese business book of recent years.
• Colvin (and I can’t really blame him) has never heard of SRS. Which is too bad, because it’s perfect for a lot the practice activities he proposes.
• AFAIK, no Kindle edition yet (at this writing). There is a program, and it needs to be gotten with.
• No Japanese audiobook version. This is common enough, so, it’s not a problem with this book specifically. But I’ma rant about it anyway!

Comments

Origins

Like many (all?) great things, this book started small. It was originally an article in Fortune magazine that seems to have more or less organically expanded into an entire book. It still retains the wonderful readability of an article, but combines it with the depth and breadth of a book. It’s just good effin’ writing, people.

Gems, Gems, Everywhere

This book is full of gems. As I hinted at earlier, I read this book both before the Janslation (Japanese translation) came out and before I had 「developed」/hacked together the Unified Reading Process, so my copy was underlined to kingdom come. Kingdom actually came, and they were like: 「wow…that’s a pretty heavily underlined book. Is…is this a bad time?」, and I was like 「No, Ki­ngdom, you can come, just…leave the book」, and they were like…

OK, I digress. Where were we? Oh yeah – this book is full of gems, some of which I found quite moving, actually. Rather than listen to me ramble on and on here, we’d better just let Geoff speak for himself [bold type added by me]:

「…great performance is not reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and everyone.」

「our view that intelligence necessarily produces better performance is so deep that it may occasionally even blind us to reality…in many fields, the relation between intelligence and performance is weak or nonexistent; people with modest IQs sometimes perform outstandingly while people with high IQs sometimes don’t get past mediocrity.」

Khatzlation: don’t complain about 「not being smart enough」. In truth, we don’t even know what 「smart」 is.

「Endurance runners, for instance, have larger than average hearts, an attribute that most of us see as one of the natural advantages with which they were blessed. But no, research has shown that their hearts grow after years of intensive training; when they stop training, their hearts revert toward normal size」

Khatzlation: You don’t quit practicing because you suck, you suck because you quit practicing. You don’t play because you’re good. You’re good because you play. You don’t run because you’re good at running, you’re good at running because you run.

「Memory seems clearly to be acquired」.

Khatzlation: Didja hear that, SRS fans?

「Rice was the greatest because he worked harder in practice and in the off-season than anyone else…In team workouts, he was famous for his hustle; while many receivers will trot back to the quarterback after catching a pass, Rice would sprint to the end zone after each reception. He would typically continue practicing long after the rest of the team had gone home. Most remarkable were his six-days-a-week off-season workouts, which he conducted entirely on his own.」

Khatzlation: Yeah, but he was a big, black man. They’re born that way, you know. Big,strong, runners. Kind of like deer.

「The roadblocks we face seem to be mostly imaginary」.

Khatzlation: Hear that, intermediate slumpers? Chill. You’re getting better, you just can’t see it.

On Autodidactism

「[Benjamin] Franklin…did not have a teacher to guide him…Ben in effect created his own teacher by finding examples of prose that were beyond his own abilities」

*Cough* SRS. *Cough* Sentences. *Cough* cloze deletions. *Splutter*.

「While supported by others, [Jerry Rice] did much of the work on his own…most of Rice’s work was in the off-season…he did most of his football-related work by himself」

On SRS

It’s unforuntate that Colvin hasn’t heard of SRS, because if he had, he’d see it for what it is and recommend it profusely. SRS is one of the most powerful training tools ever invented, perfect for the type of deliberate practice he describes in places like page 114:

「Conditioning…can take various forms. It can mean getting out those old textbooks and handbooks and reviewing the fundamental skills that underlie your work, becoming faster, more facile, and more confident with them」.

That there is exactly the kind of thing that SRS can handle for you, all the time, and with potentially half the review load, to boot.

「After all, what good is a ton of knowledge if you can’t remember it and bring it to bear at the critical moment?」

Best reason to SRS personal development books I have ever heard.

On Jerry Rice

Again, Talent is Overrated appears to be the first book written by a WASP male in the last 300~500 years to discuss African-American athletes as if they were human beings. I’m being facetious, but only slightly so.

Colvin devotes 4 pages – that’s about 2% of the book, kids – to discussing Jerry Rice’s work ethic and the details of his self-made training program. Not once, not once, does Colvin even attempt to give Rice the Big Black Magical Negro Man-Beast treatment. Maxwell Maltz himself, in all his greatness, couldn’t entirely see past magical blackness.

This, folks, is history. If I were a chick, I’d be having Geoff Colvin’s illegitimate children right now. In fact, if you’re a chick and looking for something to do today, then stop reading this, board a motor vehicle, report to Geoff Colvin’s residence immediately, and start having children out of wedlock with him. Yeah…it’s that good.

On Bullet Points and Bold Type

Perhaps Japanese people have bullet points in their business books for the same reason that there are very silly, slapstick moments in even the most serious of anime: Japanese people aren’t as concerned with being serious; they’re not afraid that helping readers out will be misconstrued as condescension.

Or not…I could just be orientalizing.

In fact, I know I’m orientalizing; I just made all that up because it sounded cool; I don’t actually think there’s a common cause behind these two phenomena (textual relief through formatting und comic relief in anime), although it is kind of cool to pretend that there is…makes you feel all deep and quasi-scientific and insightful and stuff. Hehe.

Softcover Love

I have the softcover edition. I’m just sayin’, dawg: hardcover books smack of arrogance to me. 「Look at me, my words are so important that they have to be heavy , too!」. I’m trying to carry books around here, chief – not lift weights.

• Clear, level-headed, while also optimistic. A refreshing break from the, I dunno, hype you sometimes get with personal development books
• Comes with a DVD

• Long-winded
• Not enough formatting (bullet points, highlighting, etc.) to help you get straight to the point
• A little too much reductio ad evolutionary psychology for my taste, but…that’s par for the course, I guess
• DVD has no Japanese audio (English audio, Japanese subs)
• Hardcover. That’s annoying. I cannot carry this spiel around. Dang, I can’t wait till Japanese books start getting the Kindle treatment.

Fluffy newspaper articles written by people who don’t actually know what they’re talking about (often touting the latest poorly done research that somehow demonstrates that it may actually be better to avoid sleep, eat more chocolate and drink more alcohol) can get old fast.

Medina’s passionate call for workplace and school reform (allow owls to work at night and larks to work in the morning; make information interesting and exciting to the senses; be kind and gentle to people – don’t use fear and intimidation; repeat important information) is a refreshing appeal to sanity and something that more people need to hear, take seriously, and actually implement.

I especially enjoyed Dr. Medina’s memory advice: “Remember to repeat. Repeat to remember.” His observation that there’s actually far too little repetition going on in schools really hit home for me. I wonder if the good doctor knows about SRS, because he should totally get all up on that.

Ultimately, I’m of the opinion that in many countries and in most cases, school does more harm than good and we’d be better off without it, or with a radically reduced, elective version of it. Certainly, we could do better than the glorified prisons we have now. Compulsory schooling: fail. Libraries: win. But…yeah, anyway.

The DVD was a great addition to the book. Simple and humorous, it was a gratifying example of someone actually following his own advice (“we don’t pay attention to boring things”, “[to learn better,] stimulate more of the senses”).

Like I said, the book was a bit long-winded for me: it feels like it could have gotten to the point much quicker than it did. Coming from me, that really is the pot calling the kettle black, so…deal with the irony as you will, hehe. Personally, I got the most out of the DVD and website. So if you do get the book, get it for the DVD. You could also get the audiobook (currently only available in English, AFAIK) and play it at high speed or something.

I’ve never actually read the English version of the book, so it could be that this is a case where the translator didn’t have time to chew the book down into smooth, fluid Japanese. Those who know, know that English can sound very belabored and heavy-handed when translated semi-literally into Japanese. (Translators are sometimes rushed into producing work that doesn’t reflect the full extent of their abilities: I speak from professional experience. I don’t think it’s a question of malice, it’s just that a lot of people — even within the translation industry — don’t realize that a good translator doesn’t simply convert text, but rewrites and re-interprets it).

Anyway, I’m definitely looking forward to seeing, hearing and reading more from Dr. Medina in the future. His is a voice that needs to be heard.

Random aside: my friend Eisuke and I were wondering why audiobooks aren’t as common in Japan as they are in the US. We concluded that it must be because so many people use trains here.

While people in rural areas move primarily by car, all Japan’s major urban centers have excellent public transportation networks up and running. You’ll notice that people in trains are always busy reading newspapers, manga, and bunkobons, so there’s simply not as much absolute need for non-text books.

Having said that, reading in a packed train can kind of suck a bit, even with a bunkobon. So I’m sure audiobooks would be a welcome development. I know I’d be all over it. I used to hate audiobooks, thinking they were for idiots who couldn’t read. And slow audiobooks still annoy the heck out of me, but high-speed audiobooks are right up there with kittens and tall women.

敬語の達人―クイズでわかるあなたの勘違い

山岸弘子

Keigo Grand Master: Quiz Your Way to Keigo Greatness

Hiroko YAMAGISHI

Language: Japanese

Furigana: No

• Good highlighting. I love the judicious use of bold type in Japanese business books — it really puts their English counterparts to shame.
• Clear formatting
• Easy to read
• Nice division by subject/scenario (e.g. “Email”, “Customer conversations”, “Conversations with senpais”)
• Tons of example sentences
• Teaches with example sentences and not just freaking verb tables and arrows. This is big . Enough with the tables already, people, dayom. Save them for something else.

• Text is all in black and white with very few illustrations, which gets…a little boring. Yes, Uncle Khatzumoto likes his colors and pictures!
• Points out a lot of keigo “mistakes” which you want to avoid…this can be confusing, in part because
  1. The mistakes aren’t clearly delineated by color or anything, which can cause you to trip up, and
  2. A lot of the “mistakes” are arguably minor technicalities, like whether to use “恐れ入ります” instead of just “済みません” — in my experience, it’s nothing that anyone would even really be able to notice. I mean, we’re not talking about clearly erroneous usage here as is the case with バイト敬語. Then again, this book is all about being a Grand Master, so…I guess I’m just looking for something to criticize .

• Quiz format really isn’t for me. I find that it hurts to point out incorrect usage more than it helps. So I just go straight for the correct answer. No use filling my head with errors.

(Maybe you can make yourself a separate keigo deck if your SRS allows easy deck management like, ahem, Surusu )

Another word of advice…a lot of people used to tell me this and I thought it was the cheesiest double McCheese thing ever, but now I think they were right: keigo is valuable and important, but basic kindness and a smile are even more important; it is possible to deliver cold-hearted keigo, but…what a waste.

Having said that, gaijin are rarely short on personality but do sometimes (frequently?) come up a teeny bit lacking in refinement and etiquette – I’m one to talk! — so…getting yourself some solid keigo would be a worthwhile exercise.

Speaking of color…gol darn, man…This is a beef I have with manga as well…I am more than willing to pay someone to get some color up in here!

Like I said, the highlighting puts English-language books to shame. A lot of English-language business book authors seem to have these weird pretensions to novel-writing. They seem to want to tell you a story.

As a reader, let me tell it straight up: I don’t need your story! Story-telling may have worked for The Richest Man in Babylon, but that was a one-book stand! We just kind of let it slide because George Clason was so smooth about the whole thing. We were young; we were inebriated; he was charming…

Business writers, businesspeople, heed my call: I know that neither academics nor artists respect you; I know you want to be considered “real” writers of artistic and intellectual value; I know that being thought of as nothing but rich philistines grates on your self-esteem, but just get over it and give me some bold type and bullet points, big fella! Tom Peters knows what I’m talking about.