Chasing Cool

Remember the language of Newspeak from George Orwell's 1984? It removes all meaning from language, leaving just the dichotomies. Authors Kerner and Pressman seem to have mastered it for this audiobook. For example, they tell us that to succeed in today's marketplace, you have to be both mainstream and edgy, both David and Goliath. If you want to be trendy, you have to ignore trend reports. You get the idea--it's one of those Zen marketing approaches ˆ la Seth Godin that leaves you wondering--WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY TALKING ABOUT? Johnny Heller does a professionally "cool" job of presenting the information, but if the authors wanted to be really cool, they would have distilled this down to a ten-minute podcast. R.W.S. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine