 Amazon reviews are super helpful in marketing a book but are also great feedback mechanisms for authors. Here is one of our more recent reviews:
'Make Yourself Clear' is an excellent guidebook with useful applications for applying teaching insight to the business world. Educators and entrepreneurs Reshan Richards and Stephen Valentine lead you through their process including 1) pre-assessment; 2) formative assessment; 3) understanding by design; 4) design thinking; 5) active/visual listening; 6) brain breaks; 7) reflection; 8) personalized feedback; 9) differentiated instruction; 10) storytelling. These concepts can be applied to sales, working in teams, and training. The authors stress the importance of personalizing the topic to get an audience engaged. As a marketing professional, this book spoke to me personally and reminded me how I should 'think like a teacher' rather than simply push forward my own agenda.
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 "In their book Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, three professors devoted an entire chapter to what they call “illusions of knowing” (Brown, Roediger III, & McDaniel, 2014). Steve picked up this text, and this chapter in particular, because he was preparing to teach the play Oedipus to a group of 9th graders. He wanted to skip the usual fare — plot, character development, poetic structure — and dig into the ways in which the main character’s ego and bias blinded him to what he clearly should have seen. Increasingly, for Steve, this seems to be a lesson worth teaching and learning.
Oedipus, the main character, begins by setting out to find a murderer and bring him to justice. Oedipus is known as a person who invests his considerable resources and competencies, first and foremost, in being a good citizen of Thebes. He wants to serve the people of Thebes and be known as a first-rate fixer. This behavior is important to the story others tell about him, and perhaps more critically, to the story he tells himself about himself. The main problem is that Oedipus, himself, is the murderer he seeks. So it’s a mystery story wherein the detective is seeking himself. However, it is also a story about human psychology, because Oedipus can’t find himself (back in roughly 430 b.c.) for the same reasons that some professors must still write a book for teachers (back in roughly 2014) that exhorts them to help students avoid illusions of knowing. Each of us is an astounding bundle of perceptual and cognitive abilities, coexisting with the seeds of our own undoing. When it comes to learning, what we choose to do is guided by our judgments of what works and what doesn’t, and we are easily misled. (Brown, Roediger III, & McDaniel, 2014, p. 123) The very mind that helps Oedipus, and any human being, to thrive also causes him, and us, to stumble, often making thriving a mere afterthought. As Steve was grasping the combined insight of a Greek poet and modern day learning specialists, he was in the process of making the largest purchase in his life, a new home. And as he went through the buying process, he realized that he wasn't searching for money, because, with his wife, he had saved what he needed to reach his goal. And he wasn't searching for time, because he was a school administrator heading into the summer. He was searching for something else."  We're grateful for this review from Andrew Bevan in the latest Klingbrief newsletter.
 It is helpful to help others understand your operating beliefs so that they better understand the ways in which you are trying to help them.
 Steve and I were guests on Rose Rock Dynamics' podcast The Intersect with Dr. Nabeel Ahmad, one of that firm's founders and principals. Check it out here.
 Our latest column on Edsurge features an interview with the valuation expert Aswath Damodaran who currently teaches at NYU's Stern School of Business.
 Our latest newsletter features a story about email and speed.
 It was nice to see Elm Street Books in New Canaan, CT carrying Make Yourself Clear. The store manager asked me to sign a few copies and added an 'autographed copy' sticker to each one. That's a nice move.
 Steve and I were thrilled to be guests on Donald Kelly's Sales Evangelist podcast. Read the excellent summary and listen here.
 I realized I have a small collection of doodles that were created for the book but were not included in the final version because the related sections were edited out. Here is one that was connected to a section on my screen casting origins.
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