Positioning, by Al Ries and Jack Trout, has long been on my to read list, and I wish I had read it sooner.

The core message of how to position a product is becoming more relevant as the marketplace continues to crowd.

In our overcommunicated society, the name of the game today is positioning. And only the better players are going to survive.

The book draws on a wide range of examples of different products, where a product could be a type of beer, the Catholic Church or your own career.

The key message is that your products position is determined by how it fits into the consumer’s mind. All the things that matter to you, to your company, are irrelevant if you can’t create a distinct position to separate you from everything else.

Experience has shown that a positioning exercise is a search for the obvious. Those are the easiest concepts to communicate because they make the most sense to the recipient of a message.

The authors are quite scathing about “me too” products that attempt to beat out a competitor by going head-to-head. Many examples are provided within the book.

The suicidal bent of companies that go head-on against established competition is hard to understand.

To repeat, the first rule of positioning is: To win the battle for the mind, you can’t compete head-on against a company that has a strong, established position. You can go around, under or over, but never head to head.

The leader owns the high ground. The No. 1 position in the prospect’s mind. The top rung of the product ladder.

The book covers a range of detail levels, and dips into more detail on key areas such as product naming:

As a guide, the five most common initial letters are S, C, P, A, and T. The five least common are X, Z, Y, Q, and K. One out of eight English words starts with an S. One out of 3000 starts with an X.

The authors are often quite blunt as to how they see things. This is a refreshing change from most business books:

Creative people often resist positioning thinking because they believe it restricts their creativity. And you know what? It does. Positioning thinking does restrict creativity.

I gained a lot of insight into how products have succeeded, or not, by reading this book. The examples are clear and will easily map to situations you are experiencing.

I recommend Positioning for anyone involved in creating something new. This is a book that I will re-read.

Quantitative trading is something I know almost nothing about, but is a topic that I find interesting. Mixing computers, math and some luck to automate trading strategies just sounds fun.

When a friend recommended Quantitative Trading by Ernie Chan, I quickly added to my reading list. What surprised me, was that I finished the book within 24 hours!

There are a few things to like about this book. Ernie’s writing style is very no-nonsense. Every chapter has a logical flow to it, and he is crystal clear about the material he is introducing.

The other part I really like is the practical examples. Theory is introduced only as a way of getting to a measurable outcome. Examples are provided in both Excel and Matlab, and could easily be extended to other automation approaches.

Ernie also covers a the wider business aspects of getting setup as an independent quant, such as the trade-offs between retail and proprietary accounts, risk management, finding, tuning and backtesting trading strategies.

At each point, references are made to further material on each topic, such as books, research papers, online articles and implementations. I certainly felt that I had enough knowledge to go about setting up a simple quantitative trading business.

Even though I do not intend to actually set up as a trader, I found it very informative to understand the industry better. It is something I may come back to in a few years.

Joseph Pine’s talk at TED really has me thinking.

This is a table outlining the difference between the types of economic output, using the example of coffee.

The drive to software-as-a-service makes the software industry jump to service. It takes Apple to move it to an experience. Disney is another example of experience based economics.

I like this framework for thinking about what business I am working in. The trick will be to figure out how move up the ladder to render an authentic experience.

His book is now on my to-read list.

Tom Kelly, of the design and development firm IDEO, gives a brilliant speech at Stanford’s ETL program.

He breaks innovation down into five habits:

• Think like a traveller; be child like with a sense of wonder & exploration.
• Treat life as an experiment; be willing to fail provided learning is attached.
• Nurture an attitude of wisdom.
• Use your whole brain (and your tortoise mind).
• Follow your passions.

The ETL series is available as a podcast on iTunes and continues to be a valuable resource.

Social media is the latest buzz phrase to describe the trend in normal people creating content. Something previously the realm of professional journalists.

In a recent article, Nina Simon investigates how much time is involved per week for different types of participation:

I’m considered fairly involved as I participate in a number of services, including this blog, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and monitor a forum here or there. Some of my friends are participating with Twitter alone, as Twitter dropped the barrier of entry to virtually nil.

This raised a question of how journalists are allocated time for social media. The trend in traditional media is to attempt to integrate social media into the news process. This includes using user generated content in the print product and on the web. But it also involves journalists becoming members of the community.

The obvious implication is that more time is required. However, with newsrooms shrinking and with print and online operations attempting to converge, available time is reduced.

Until time is allocated to social media, the voice of the traditional media will continue to broadcast rather than participate in the conversation.