Book Review: Boardroom Bullrider: 5 Lessons Learned about Business in 8 Seconds

Bryan Merritt is a turnaround artist, a hired gun who travels around the world, helping companies who have lost their mojo to become vibrant and profitable again. If his clients are willing to take his blunt, straightforward advice, and make the changes he says they need to make, then they win, and he is successful. He loves this kind of work and it gives him great satisfaction.

Much of his approach to business was learned in the arena – the rodeo arena, to be specific. Ever since he got on the back of his first bull at 16, he was hooked. He loved bullriding, and it also gave him great satisfaction.

                                 

You don’t get a lot of time to think when you’re on the back of the bull. If you’re good, you get 8 seconds, and then the buzzer sounds, you win, and you look for a graceful way to dismount. But bulls don’t like to be ridden, so you’d better know what you’re doing if you intend to win. In his bullriding career, Merritt identified five key lessons to help him stay on the bull – the same five key lessons that he uses as a corporate fix-it man to save floundering companies.

You don’t have to hire his company, Matrix Management Systems, LLC, to benefit from his wisdom. Merritt also does webinars and workshops. Now he offers those five lessons to you in his new book, Boardroom Bullrider: 5 Lessons Learned about Business in 8 Seconds. Skillfully mixing rodeo stories with stories about the business world, Merritt presents his five lessons and, in his straightforward manner, at the end of each lesson he pushes you to “get on the bull,” to do something that will make you make the lesson part of you.

I won’t tell you what his five lessons are. That’s what the book is for. Read it yourself. I measured it against some of the classics in business literature, and Boardroom Bullrider holds its own. 

The one thing the classics have over Bullrider is page count. Merritt manages to make his points in 158 pages, not counting an absorbing introduction. Merritt is a great storyteller, but he doesn’t waste words. That’s his style. It’s part of the 80/20 principle that he focuses on so passionately. Still, you will find yourself wishing that he had spent more time on certain points, turning one sentence into a paragraph or one paragraph into several.

His advice is not just for moneymaking companies. It’s also for nonprofit organizations, government agencies – and you as an individual. Bryan’s advice can help you succeed in life.

Boardroom Bullrider is available from many booksellers, including Amazon.com, or directly from Bullrider Press.  

UBreakIFix Boulder review: lots of thumbs up for this one

So, here's a shout out to a local business. I got my cell phone glass replaced yesterday, and after I got back to work, I checked the paperwork and I got the feeling that I had ripped them off. I called them back and told them that I still owed them $20. They told me not to worry about it. But they did fantastic work - perfect workmanship, good timing, great office manners, everything. I figured that the least I could do was tell all of you about them and encourage you to take your business there. That way they will more than recover the $20 they lost on me.

UBreakIFix Boulder (Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/uBreakiFix.Boulder?fref=ts and any browser: https://www.ubreakifix.com/locations/boulder) does repair work on cellphones, tablets, laptop computers, and other small electronic devices. They will do it by appointment or while you wait. Their prices are reasonable. Please give them as much business as you can. Just don't try to rip them off.

About those product reviews on Amazon.com

I have some advice for you about the product reviews on Amazon.com. AND on Cnet.com.

After you read this, you may think, "Well, duh, Ray. That's just common sense." To which I respond, after looking at the reviews again, "Apparently not."

1. Never buy anything online without checking the reviews first.

If you find something online that you want to buy, first read the reviews available at Amazon.com and Cnet.com. Even if you don't buy from these two places, they have the best collection of reviews on whatever it is that you want to buy.

And it doesn't matter if you're looking to buy a tech gadget, a stuffed animal, a book or jewelry. NEVER buy without checking the reviews first. It's as close as you can get to handling the thing in the store before putting it in your basket.

2. Ignore the canned, professional reviews. Go straight to the USER reviews.

Cnet.com, PCWorld and other sites are given products for FREE, by the sellers or the manufacturers, so they can try them out and write glowing reviews of them. And they DO write glowing reviews. Those reviews are based on the literature provided by the seller or manufacturer, a demo performed by the seller, and a few hours spent tinkering with the product before they move on to the next product review.

So these reviews are generally glowing reviews, praising the product in superlatives and highly recommending you spend your hard-earned money for something that they got for free. Skip them.

Go past the professional reviews, straight to the user reviews. Cnet.com and Amazon.com both have a core of serious users, who will give a wide variety of useful reviews based on actual experience with the product.

3. Read both the five-star reviews and the one-star reviews.

You need to know what people LIKE about the product, but sometimes it's more important to know what people DON'T LIKE about it. Also pay attention to the quantity of five- and four-star reviews versus the quantity of one- and two-star reviews. If more people DON'T LIKE the product than DO LIKE it, then you'd better be very careful about parting with your money.

4. Ignore the reviews that complain about purchasing or shipping problems. Pay CAREFUL attention to the ones that complain about product quality and customer service.

I'm not saying that sellers aren't going to rip you off. And I'm not saying that there aren't incompetent, lazy or dishonest shippers out there. But by and large, anyone selling online has a reputation to uphold, and the vast majority of them will do their best to make you happy. That's why the order-taking-and-shipping departments in so many businesses are now called "Customer fulfillment." If there's a significant number of negative comments made about the order fulfillment process, then yeah, pay attention to it.

But the reviews that matter to you the most are the reviews about the PRODUCT. How good is it, and what problems does it have? And if the user needed to get the seller or manufacturer (that is, Customer Service) involved to fix the problem, how well did that work? See, you're going to spend your money on something, and once the money and the product change hands, you (or the gift recipient) are going to be stuck with it for a long time, until you choose to throw it away. So it had better work. User reviews can reassure you that it will work, or they can warn you that it won't work. (I know, this sounds like common sense. Unfortunately, it isn't as common sense as you would imagine.)

5. Filter out the complaints that you can reasonably attribute to "stupid users."

A large percentage of complaints are due to people who didn't read the specs right, didn't read the instructions, or somehow don't understand. Have pity on these people. Don't think, "Good grief, what a moron," about them. But figure out quickly who they are and discard anything they say.

6. Learn to detect the fake five-star and one-star reviews.

It's okay to think "Good grief, what a moron," about everyone who falls into this category.

Many sellers get friends and other people to write glowing reviews of their products. These people have never read the book or used the item, and may have never actually seen the book or item. Many of them use prewritten text or stock phrases, provided by the seller. If you look at the reviewers' profiles, you will see that they have only written one review, for one product.

One great example of this type of review are the five-star reviews for "The Price of Silence," by William D. Cohan. Commenters have pounced on most of those reviews and exposed them as frauds.

Not surprisingly, some people get paid to write positive reviews. I guess that's one way to use your English degree to make money. These shills are more difficult to detect, but you will notice that their reviews are filled with useless, overly general verbiage.

Some sellers are also dogged by psychopaths who write negative reviews about anything they have to sell. Fortunately, they're not very subtle and you can spot them instantly.

7. Snort derisively at the five-star reviews from anyone who has had the product for less than three months.

THIS is the one that will get you. So many five-star reviews read something like this (best read in an airheaded, Valley Girl voice) : "Well, I don't know what all those bad reviews are about. Maybe some people just get lemons. I've had my product for about three weeks now, and it works great! I love it! So does my significant other! It's never given us any problem."

I want to phone these people six months later and see what they have to say about it. You never hear from them once the thing goes south. ANY five-star review less than three months old is not a reliable indicator of actual product performance.

Tangled: A Movie Review

I took my sweet wife to see Tangled on Friday night. I want to buy it. My computer graphics professional's eye was tuned to the quality of the CG animation. It was an interesting contrast to Tron, which is a mixture of live action and deliberate CG.

In Tron, the storytellers and artists went for photorealism. They expected the audience to do the suspension-of-disbelief thing that sucks people into Star Wars, Star Trek, and so on. In most of the scenes, they succeeded.

In Tangled, instead, the storytellers and artists went for cartoony effects. The characters were caricatures, the scenery elements were fanciful and exaggerated, the physics was cartoon physics -- and yet they sucked you in anyway.

And just when you were getting comfortable with the cartooniness of the thing, they gave you a visual effect that was stunning in its realism. I offer you four examples:

1. Rapunzel's dress
Disney being Disney, I'm sure they made several real dresses, put them on several models, and took hundreds of videos and stills for the artists to work from. Well, their meticulousness paid off. The laces on the back of the dress were not spaced perfectly, just as laces on a real dress would not be, and yet the laces kept their imperfect spacing when Rapunzel moved - just as they would on a real dress. The hem on the white petticoat looked and moved just like a lace-trimmed hem on a real petticoat.

And the sleeves! Did you notice the sleeves? I'm not talking about the puffy shoulders, but the delicate, sheer, skin-hugging material that went all the way down her arms and ended with embroidery? binding? some kind of fancy trim, anyway, at her wrists. Maybe these subtle touches were missed on most of the audience, but without them, the film would have felt a little less polished. It's like a dressmaker drew every frame with the dress in it.

One other subtle touch, and please don't think I'm a perv for noticing this: In real life, a wide neckline gapes open just a fraction of an inch at the sides, at the reverse curve on the front of the shoulder. (Shoulder straps can often be seen in this gap.) The gap widens and closes according to the wearer's posture and movement. Few, if any, animated movies get this right. No, change that. Until Tangled, every animated movie ignored this gap completely. Even Shrek ignored it. I don't know how, but Tangled got it right.

Again, you might ask: why go for all this realism if you intended to make a cartoony movie in the first place? I dunno. But the fact that they did, and got it right, makes the movie that much richer.

2. Water
Everywhere there was water, its modeling was a mixture of cartooniness and realism. The cartooniness was deliberate, and so was the realism. How they decided which approach to use, and when, is beyond me, but again they got it right. The waterfalls, the dam, the flooding of the cavern, and - oh my - the lake that surrounded the island town, were all modeled so perfectly that they enhanced, rather than distracted from, the film. For a contrast, look at the CG water in The X-Men, which was a nice try but still obviously fake, and in The Incredibles, which was also intentionally cartoony, and felt more like plastic than water.

3. Light
If you watch the film again, you will notice that "light" was a central theme throughout the movie. That was deliberate, and they put real money into "light". The Lighting department got a major portion of the credits at the end.

The story line followed the light, emanated from light, and always returned to light. Starting with the fireflower in the prologue, then with the incident in the nursery, light against darkness mattered. It was central to the story. It told the story. The interplay of light rays and shadows in the tower told of good versus evil, knowledge versus ignorance, courage versus fear, hope versus despair, freedom versus captivity. The complicated animation that was Rapunzel's glowing hair was fascinating. But to me, the most breathtaking use of light was during the festival of the lanterns.

4. The lantern scene
When the first lantern was lit and launched, that was okay. Yeah, it was amazingly realistic, but by then I was used to the amazing realism. But then the entire town lit up lanterns - and I gasped out loud. These glowing tissue-paper lanterns lifted off and floated around, hundreds of them, in individual paths, all around the palace towers. It was a powerful visual representation of hope. It brought tears to my eyes.

Then, combining the water and light effects, the camera zeroed in on the boy and girl, sitting in a small boat in the middle of the lake, surrounded by lanterns in the air and lantern reflections in the calm water. Right then, I wished we were watching the movie in 3D. That's the kind of scene 3D cinema was made for.

I sat there with my mouth hanging open until the lantern scene ended. Between the tears and the mouth agape, I'm glad the theatre was dark.

***

It was a good story, too, and well told. There's a reason G and PG movies still pull in most of the money in the movie industry, in spite of the fact that they are outnumbered by all the other titles. And I'm not embarrassed by the fact that I prefer movies like Tangled over most of that other stuff.

Having said that, I am looking forward to Cowboys and Aliens this summer.