 |
|
| Your Competitive Advantages from this
book: |
|
| You learn how to read what is worth
reading. |
|
| Facts increase information - but
insights increase understanding. |
|
| 1. The
ultimate problems to be solved are practical -
problems of action, in fields where people can do
better or worse. Nothing but action solves
practical problems, and action occurs only in the
world, not in books. But intelligent action
depends on knowledge. Facts increase information -
but insights increase understanding. Careful and
intelligent reading helps you understand. |
|
| 2. When you
take action you need to know that it works and
that its working leads to the right end. But know
too that no one makes serious practical judgments
or engages in action without being moved somehow
from below the neck. The world might be a better
place if we did, but it would certainly be a
different place. If you do not realize this you
will be ineffective. |
|
| 3. When you
invest time and a few dollars in this book you get
an enormous ROI - return on investment. From then
onwards you know how to learn more in less time.
You learn more because you can access written
information faster and more thoroughly. You save
time because you know what's worth reading and you
disregard the rest. Expect to achieve a
double-digit percentage gain in both your reading
productivity and knowledge retention. And to
maintain that lifelong benefit. |
|
| 4.
Speed-reading? No. The skill is to read at the
appropriate speed not at the highest possible
speed: slowly where the topic is important and
difficult, quickly where it's not, the aim being
to read better, always better. Reading better is
one of the primary sources that power our ability
to raise our own Business IQ. (Listening when you
talk with people and seeing when you look are two
others.) |
|
| 5. The
average high-school student is likely to be a poor
and incompetent reader. Consider the consequences
for your firm's workforce and for your firm's
competitive ability. We must become competent
readers if we are to compete in the future. We all
must know how to make books teach us well. That is
the primary aim of this book. When a person reads
it carefully s/he will achieve that goal. |
|
| 6. There is
no major authoritative work that deals
comprehensively with the field of business. Such a
book is not possible. Too many aspects, too many
changes, too quickly. So the necessity of reading
several well-chosen works rather than one is more
urgent. This is the need for syntopical, or
comparative, reading. Knowing that more than one
book is relevant to a particular question is the
first requirement. Knowing which books should be
read is the second requirement. The second
requirement is a great deal harder than the first.
Overtake® provides you with much of the solution
- our list of 'Books You Need.' |
|
| To solve many
problems in business without our list you would
first need to assemble a set of books that you
thought would cover the particular problem, then
inspect them all. Your inspectional reading would
identify the books that are are likely to be
productive when you subsequently read them
analytically and it would cut down the number of
books you need to read. To a great extent we have
done that for you. |
|
| Once you have
identified, by selecting directly from our list or
by inspectional reading, the books that are
relevant to your problem, you can then proceed to
read them syntopically. To do this you find, by
another inspectional reading, the relevant
passages in each book examined, you create a
neutral terminology that applies to all or most of
the authors examined, you frame and order a set of
questions that most of them can be interpreted as
answering, and you define and arrange the issues
produced by differing answers to the questions.
You now know what they said and how they said it.
If the problem is straightforward the solution
will now be clear. If the problem is difficult,
the solution, insofar as it is available to us, is
in the conflict of opposing answers and in the
discussion and analysis that arises from them. And
in the understanding that the resulting insights
generate. |
|
| 7. Relax.
Take a break from business. In Appendix A, Adler
and Van Doren give you a list of books worth
reading. Enough for a lifetime's rest and
recreation. And they will sharpen your intellect,
hone your reading skills and leave you mentally
fit for business yet to be done. A good book will
teach you about the world and about yourself.
Read. Live. Enjoy. |
|
|
|
