Acting on the Essential

Book Reviews / Productivity

Prioritizing across roles and responsibilities is a daily task for most of us. This is especially amplified at the intersection of research careers, faculty life, and family.

The dogma for scientific careers – especially those driven by extramural funding – is that giving your science priority over all else is a crucial academic survival strategy. Yet now, we are confronted with valid needs for institutional service, challenging new teaching structures, contributions to professional organization and community groups, and special projects. The need to choose wisely is paramount.

Searching online for guidance about establishing one’s “why” and setting and reaching goals retrieves best sellers and webinars pushing productivity methods for filling every waking minute and working ten times harder than others. Alongside is coaching advice to follow your bliss and simplify work and life to achieve flow and balance. Actionable steps framed by research evidence and consideration of personal values rarely coexist in this genre of career self-help.

Bringing both into focus is why we love Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. Greg McKeown’s lucid and practical guidance weaves together a balance of encouragement and probing to identify, own, and control your direction with realistic advice about how to implement changes to stay focused on what is essential to your success. He includes just enough requisite case examples and research findings from fields like neuropsychology to be convincing without breaking pace.

His practical lineup, perhaps even more valid now than when published in 2014, asks:

  • What is the core mindset of an Essentialist?
  • How can we discern the trivial from the vital few?
  • How can we cut out the trivial many?
  • How can we make doing the vital few things almost effortless?

His main order of business – bringing focus to the cloud of activities that we feel we have to do, need to do, or just find ourselves doing – is made to order for academic faculty in early career and plays just as well to those in mid and later career seeking new energy by sharpening their focus on what is essential, compelling and generative.

He hits the nail on the head so often you come to love the hammer even as you see that what he’s aiming for is a renovation of how we run our lives. CliffsNotes would include these blows:

Core concepts

  • The way of the Essentialist is the relentless pursuit of less but better.
  • Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done.
  • We forget our ability to choose and we learn to be helpless. Drip by drip we allow our power to be taken away until we end up becoming a function of other people’s choices. Regain your choice.

Necessity of un-committing

  • Sometimes what you don’t do is just as important as what you do.
  • Many capable people don’t reach the next level of contribution because they can’t let go of the belief that everything is important.
  • The reality is that saying yes to any opportunity by definition requires saying no to several others.

Actions to take

  • Be unavailable at times: we need to escape in order to focus.
  • Play: it expands our minds in ways that allow us to explore…makes us more inquisitive, more attuned to novelty, more engaged…helps us to see possibilities we would not otherwise have seen.
  • Recognize that if we under-invest in ourselves – our minds, bodies, and spirits – we damage the very tools we need to make our highest contributions.
  • Learn that if an opportunity isn’t a clear yes, then it is a clear no.
  • Practice until saying “no” gracefully doesn’t have to mean using the word no.

Reflect and refine to shape what is essential to you

  • What do you truly want out of your career in the next five years?
  • If you could be excellent at only one thing, what would it be?

McKeown’s examples build insights and provide coaching on topics like a repertoire for saying no, how to gauge what is essential, and teaching yourself to uncommit. They provide an actual roadmap, unlike so many books that convey only the theory of success or glimpses of the wins of others.

Before you agree to coordinate a new webinar series, or link together the neighbors who are COVID-homeschooling, or to be on the faculty senate ballot, get this book and dig down to what is essential to you. Then choose to do that.

More

McKeown Essentialism Videos

Five Minute Appetizer about Essentialism

Greg McKeown’s Big Idea speech at the 2018 VitalSmarts REACH conference.

 

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Practical Writing Advice from a Writing Teacher

Book Reviews

How to Write an Essay Like an Equation, by Eric Sentell, PhD, a writing instructor at Southeast Missouri State University, offers step-by-step advice for communicating ideas clearly. While some sections are more applicable to undergraduate essays, most chapters feature strategies to strengthen and clarify any writing. The book will teach you how to highlight your main ideas, link thoughts and sentences, and edit your own work.

Early chapters cover writing with the audience in mind, thesis statements, and paragraph structure. Chapters crucial for teaching or editing your own scientific writing include:

Content-Lexical Ties (Ch 6): Emphasizes “techniques for enhancing the organization of your writing and achieving the mysterious ‘flow’ that writing teachers talk about.” If ideas flow seamlessly, readers find content easier to comprehend—useful when yours is one grant to review in a stack of dozens. Sentell shares four methods of tying your sentences and ideas together, including repetition, related words, categories, and transitions, and provides examples of the effective use of these methods.

The Paramedic Method of Editing (Ch 7): Includes a checklist for paring your writing to the essentials, reducing reader fatigue and allowing the critical details to shine. Again, useful examples abound.

Sentence Boundaries (Ch 8) and A Practical Style Guide (Ch 9): Answer questions like why sentence fragments are fragments and how to correct them (or not write them in the first place). These chapters also provide clear explanations of when to use specific punctuation marks and what the effects of each are, among other details about sentence-level style.

You want this book if you find writing to be a fuzzy, amorphous activity and want clear steps to follow for creating solid written work. Happy writing!

Dr. Sentell is also an Edge for Scholars blogger. Check out his posts on writing for your audience and making writing memorable:

How a Jail-house Letter and Goat Research Can Get Your Grant Funded

How to Make Writing More Memorable and Persuasive

Other must-read books on writing:

Dreyer’s English

The Art of Scientific Storytelling

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StrengthsFinder 2.0: Discover Your CliftonStrengths

Book Reviews / Faculty Life

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened. – Lao Tzu

I cannot sing, dance, or act. Regardless how passionately I longed as a kid to be a Broadway triple threat, my desire could not compensate for lack of talent. Lining the pockets of coaches and teachers for years would never have moved me beyond the level of barely competent, at best. Fortunately, I recognized the folly and pursued the path of visual artist. A path well-chosen.

Do you need reassurance that your path was the right vocational choice, or do you need to reevaluate the decision you decided on? StrengthsFinder 2.0: Discover Your CliftonStrengths from Gallup and Tom Rath can help.

The backflap verbiage unpacks the book’s title: “In 1998, the Father of Strengths Psychology, Don Clifton (1924-2003), created the original StrengthsFinder assessment and its 34 talent themes. In 2017, Gallup changed the name to ‘CliftonStrengths’ in honor of its inventor. Rooted in 40 years of Clifton’s research, CliftonStrengths has helped millions discover their innate talents.”

To summarize: CliftonStrengths is the assessment tool and StrengthsFinder 2.0 the book, is the portal (via an access code) to the online assessment (170+ questions) as well as a guide to implement the results.

70 years ago, Dr. Clifton asked: What would happen if we studied what was right with people rather than what was wrong? What if we identified and developed what people have in abundance naturally?

The premise of the book is that the key to human development is building on who you already are. And that’s a motivating notion to mull over as we continue to hunker down.

I am larger, better than I thought; I did not know I held so much goodness.                                                                                                                            – Walt Whitman

How to use this book:

  • Take the test. 30 minutes later you will be anointed with 5 “strengths” (or rather 5 talent themes, but “talent theme” won’t sell a book).
  • Read about each of your strengths. The book describes all 34 in detail and provides 10 helpful “Ideas for Action” to develop your talents at home and work.
  • For leaders: Use the results and leverage the strengths of your team! A how-to-work-with-others section for each strength will help you ensure they thrive and flourish.

Here’s a compilation of my co-worker’s results (names have been changed):

If a leader devised a project that required a person of action, amenable to last minute changes, to contribute to the grand vision and enthusiastically promote it, a wise and strategic leader would look to Andrew. Andrew would shine and reward the leader with genuine engagement.

Assigning the task to anyone else would be a mistake. Rachel, for example, would be miserable with the promotion and outreach aspect, and could potentially sink the whole endeavor along with her morale.

A wise and strategic leader would instead assign Rachel a project that benefited from her behind the scenes talents. Another approach might consider how her and Andrew’s working styles complemented each other on the same project.

Asked to evaluate the usefulness of workplace personality tests in general, one of my co-workers shared:

They can be great — if the assessments end up actually being utilized. A lot of times people take these tests, get their results, share them, and then forget about them. Imagine if leadership, tasks, and follow-through were all box-ticked based on the result of each team member’s personality. Imagine if our strengths were put to use: someone else could take up the slack for our so-called “weaknesses” – because that would be their strength.

In search of inspiration as you shelter at home or transition back to a workplace? Consider this book. It just might brush the dust off your finer self, or, you might find, in the words of Quiet author Susan Cain: “…a new found sense of entitlement to be yourself.”

More Resources

The Key to Handling Stress is Massive Egotism

To Succeed, Forget Self-Esteem

Think You’re an Imposter? Here’s How to Know for Sure

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Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended on It

Book Reviews / Job Search / Negotiation

Getting to Yes may still be the bible of negotiation books, but Chris Voss’s Never Split the Difference offers an intriguing alternative perspective. Instead of preaching objectivity and separating the people from the situation, Voss, a former FBI crisis negotiator, teaches how to wade into the messy emotions of a negotiation and make tactical use of them to get what you want.

Voss introduces each chapter with a case study from his FBI career before dissecting the situation and tools he used to handle it, which makes this book more of a page-turner than you might expect from a business book. Key to Voss’s approach is empathy for the other party in the negotiation. This doesn’t (necessarily) mean being nice to them, but rather understanding why the other person’s actions make sense to them. Once you have developed empathy with the other party, several tools become available to you.

Voss posits that behind each objective argument lies an emotional driver, and speaking to that driver results in a better outcome for you. Through labeling emotions and “accusation audits,” strong emotions can be identified and defused. (Tricks such as the “Late Night FM DJ Voice” help here too.) Examples of this in the book include overcoming a potential donor’s reluctance by labeling her fears (the charity won’t use the donation in the way she wants); representatives from one company acknowledging their actions look bad to a partner company, thus breaking through animosity to work on solutions; and Voss himself acknowledging two fugitives’ fear of the FBI team outside their door until they gave themselves up, convinced they would not be shot on sight.

Along with labeling emotions, one of the most valuable strategies Voss recommends is using questions that begin with “what” or “how” to elicit more information and work towards agreement. For example, instead of “does this work for you,” ask, “What about this works/doesn’t work for you?” With these kinds of questions, you implicitly ask for help, which triggers goodwill, and gently engineers the situation so that the other party uses mental energy and resources to overcome your challenges, thus guiding him or her into helping you design a solution.

These questions also engage the other party and allow them to feel in control. Voss uses the example of kidnappers asking for a large sum of ransom money; he (calmly!) replies, “How am I supposed to do that?” thus engaging the kidnappers in building resolution. This tool might be useful if a chair asks you to take on so much clinic time that it interferes with your K’s 75% protected time. Try asking, “How am I supposed to balance X days of clinic with the time the NIH requires I spend on research?”

Dozens of strategies like this wait inside the pages of this book, well-explained and exemplified with situations where they have worked in the business, personal, and law enforcement realms. How can you afford to pass it up?

More Resources

Asking for What You Need: Intentional Negotiation

Like It or Not, You’re a Negotiator: Getting to Yes

You Can’t Always Get What You Want, But It’s Worth a Try

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Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

Book Reviews / Management & Leadership

Are you a genius or a genius maker?

We’ve all had experience with two dramatically different types of leaders. The first type drain intelligence, energy, and capability from the ones around them and always need to be the smartest ones in the room. These are the idea killers, the energy sappers, the diminishers of talent and commitment. On the other side of the spectrum are leaders who use their intelligence to amplify the smarts and capabilities of the people around them. When these leaders walk into a room, lightbulbs go off over people’s heads, ideas flow, and problems get solved. These are the leaders who inspire employees to stretch themselves to deliver results that surpass expectations. These are the Multipliers. And the world needs more of them, especially now, when leaders are expected to do more with less.

In this engaging and highly practical book, leadership expert Liz Wiseman and management consultant Greg McKeown explore these two leadership styles, persuasively showing how Multipliers can have a resoundingly positive and profitable effect on organizations–getting more done with fewer resources, developing and attracting talent, and cultivating new ideas and energy to drive organizational change and innovation.

In analyzing data from more than 150 leaders, Wiseman and McKeown have identified five disciplines that distinguish Multipliers from Diminishers. These five disciplines are not based on innate talent; indeed, they are skills and practices that everyone can learn to use–even lifelong and recalcitrant Diminishers. Lively, real world case studies and practical tips and techniques bring to life each of these principles, showing you how to become a Multiplier too, whether you are a new or an experienced manager. Just imagine what you could accomplish if you could harness all the energy and intelligence around you. Multipliers will show you how.

Benjamin Tingey is leading the Edge Conversations virtual book club on Multipliers. It’s not too late to request to join this closed group discussion – the format is read-as-you-go: https://www.facebook.com/groups/edgeconversation/

Benjamin Tingey is an Innovation Manager with the Atrium Health Innovation Engine. In this role he champions the voice of the consumer in the designing of care experiences. He co-leads the community partnership and social innovation efforts with the YMCA of Greater Charlotte, as well as Atrium Health’s corporate intelligence and environment scanning. He and his team apply human-centered design, disruptive innovation strategy, Jobs to Be Done theory, Lean Startup, and other demand-side innovation tools to transform Atrium Health into a more consumer-oriented system of health. Benjamin also curates the voices of his brilliant Innovation Engine teammates and other innovation thought leaders as host of A Sherpa’s Guide to Innovation podcast. 

Most importantly, Benjamin is the proud husband of Jackie and father to Ian, Spencer, Truman, and John. They fill his days with endless wonder, his nights with interrupted sleep, and his heart with gratitude.

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Reviewers & Editors Share the Secret Sauce

Book Reviews / Writing & Publishing

Publishing Your Medical Research, 2nd Edition reveals the secret sauce for maximizing the palatability of your manuscript submissions.

Edge reviews have featured exceptional books about the mechanics, inspiration, process, and editing of writing. What differentiates this offering by Daniel Byrne, MS, is data from two rounds of surveys of reviewers and editors identifying the most common flaws of submitted manuscripts that lead to revisions and rejections. Complete with figures that analyze top concerns. This data from inside the peer review machine is the key ingredient well-paired with practical guidance about how to avoid mistakes at each step from the initial design and implementation of research through reply to reviewers.

Byrne is a biostatistician and has more than two decades’ experience teaching and consulting in a Master’s of Science in Clinical Investigation program in which all students – most of whom are physician-scientists – develop, conduct, and publish research projects. Virtually all seek him out for stats consultation and pragmatic guidance. As a result, the core recipes in his book provide sufficient detail that a new cook can garner everything they need to craft a solid paper themselves.

We particularly like these tables and figures (from among more than 50):

  • Self-Education Reading List for Medical Researchers, a solid starting inventory for what should be on the bookshelves of academic investigators and teachers
  • Reviewers’ most common criticisms of manuscripts
  • Editors’ most common criticisms of manuscripts
  • How to avoid annoying a reviewer/an editor
  • Elements of a good title
  • Sentence beginnings to avoid/use sparingly
  • Suggestions for resubmitting
  • How a paper fills a niche in the literature
  • Manuscript section that is most often responsible for rejection
  • Frequency of presentation problems
  • Internal peer review form

And dozens of additional pointers.

If you are refining your writing or research, or teaching others to do so, you won’t go wrong to have a copy of this book to supplement conventional academic writing guides. Don’t be surprised if it becomes the most referenced one on the shelf.

Conflict of interest: Dr. Byrne is faculty at Vanderbilt, the operational home of Edge for Scholars. So far he doesn’t give us any of the royalties. We can always hope – the Keurig needs supplies.

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Like It or Not, You’re a Negotiator: Getting to Yes

Book Reviews / Negotiation

 

“Like it or not, you are a negotiator,” state Harvard Negotiation Project faculty Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton in the introduction to this clear and concise guide to negotiating on principle rather than position.  This book will help you navigate all the negotiations in your life, from hiring lab staff to deciding where to go to dinner with your spouse.  Originally published thirty years ago but still full of sound advice, this revised edition is newly updated with contemporary examples of each component comprising the method of principled negotiation.

The authors begin by identifying the problems with traditional, or positional, bargaining: namely, that by digging into their positions, each side misses opportunities to work toward mutual gain and to retain good relationships with the opposition.  In clearly-delineated and focused chapters, the authors go on to detail each step of their negotiation method.  They teach you the best ways to invent options for joint gain—frequently, the parties in a negotiation do not want mutually exclusive things, and in fact can both stand to gain much of what they want, as with the parable the authors use about two children squabbling over an orange and finally dividing down the middle only to learn that one child wanted the fruit and the other the peel.  They teach you how to insist on using objective criteria, and the best ways to separate the people from the problem and see things from the other side’s point of view.  The dialogues they use to illustrate each of these concepts, ranging from union members speaking with management to a tenant negotiating with his landlord, are especially helpful as starting points for your own negotiations.

If something goes wrong, the authors have your back.  In a section on the major problems that can crop up in negotiations, they tell you how to make the most of their method even if the other side has more leverage than you do, or how to use “negotiation jujitsu” when the person on the other side won’t go along with, for example, using objective criteria like average salary for a position across multiple organizations when discussing a possible raise.

Step-by-step structure makes nebulous ideas we have about negotiation strategy concrete. For that, this book is invaluable.

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (Revised Edition)
Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton
New York: Penguin, 2011

More Resources

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Your Guide to the Unspoken Rules of a Career in Academics

Book Reviews

Not Discussed: The Unspoken Rules for a Career in Academic Medical Research is a travel guide for academics at any stage of their careers. Instead of Rick Steves, it’s a master mentor giving you the tips and tricks for getting the most out of a research career, as well as the pitfalls and places to avoid. “Master mentor” just so happens to describe Dr. C. Michael Stein. He’s mentored many high performing K scholars at Vanderbilt over more than 20 years, and in this book he shares the information that made his mentees so successful.

The book starts at the beginning of a career, with how to choose a mentor and a project, moves on to several chapters on effective writing of papers and grants, then lands on mid-career topics like promotion and tenure. It ends with cross-cutting chapters on topics including “How not to give a bad talk,” “Avoid an E-mail Mess,” and responsible conduct of research. Students and others very early in their careers can benefit not only from chapters aimed at them, but also from peeking ahead to the challenges of and strategies for continuing a scientific career.

In each chapter he gives practical, concrete advice on what to do and—maybe more importantly—what not to do. For example, from the chapter on sections of a scientific paper:

Your limitations paragraph need not blow your foot off: Towards the end of the Discussion it is usual to have a paragraph about the limitations of your study. This is not a place to shoot yourself in the foot. All studies have strengths and offsetting limitations, so instead of: Our study was small and underpowered, offset the limitations with some strengths: Our study was small, but the homogeneous group of patients allowed us to detect a significant difference in…

Like any generous mentor, Dr. Stein includes examples like the above throughout the book for readers to learn from. In one chapter, he even reprints the entire introduction to a triaged grant he resubmitted (p. 145).

On subjects where there are multiple correct courses of action, such as picking a mentor, Dr. Stein lays out a list of qualities to look for in great and spirited detail, without dictating which should be weighted more than others. As long as a mentor has time for you, for instance, a work style of “I’ll see you at 8 a.m. and we can talk about what you are going to do today” versus “Let’s meet in a few weeks when you have completed these experiments and look at the data” is up to your personal preference.

While there are plenty of books, articles, and websites with great advice for grant-writing, getting papers out, and careers in academics, it’s rare to find one that pulls together what you need to know across the arc of a career. It’s even rarer to find one with the depth of detail in Not Discussed. A research career is challenging already; read this book to lift the veil on the unspoken rules and sharpen your academic edge.

Book Giveaway

Leave a comment with your unanswered career question or best piece of advice, and you’ll be entered in our giveaway contest. On December 18, we’ll pick one commenter at random to receive a copy of Not Discussed.

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Research Manuscripts Should Tell Really Good Stories

Book Reviews / Writing & Publishing

Book Review: The Art of Scientific Storytelling by Rafael E. Luna, PhD

Chapter 1: Introduction

Skim or skip. This section promotes the book and the promising ideas it conveys, when many of us (me, me, me) just want to get to the meat of the book. After several pages it reads as blah, blah, blah.

Key takeaways: The author, (who is Executive Director of the National Research Mentoring Network), has golden credentials and oodles of experience to share to help you write better.

Figure 3

Chapter 2: Fashioning Your Scientific Story Using the Basic Elements of Narrative Craft

Here’s the content I expected earlier. If you’re already familiar with narrative arcs, this section will feel familiar. If storytelling form is a new concept, then this can help identify the various narrative structures and prepare you to think creatively about how they apply to a research manuscript.

Figure 3 (at right with modifications) helps make the connection without needing to read the entire chapter. The Essential Toolkit of Storytelling Terms is basic, but does teach how to apply these terms directly to the scientific paper you are writing.

Key takeaways: Lifecycle of a Scientific Story begins with the Introduction, Results Section 1, Results Section 2, Results Section 3, Results Climax, Results Validation, and ends with the Discussion.

Chapter 3: An Order of Operations to Streamline Scientific Storytelling

A bit too wordy when telling stories within the larger story. I would prefer to cut to the chase and lay out the steps needed, which does happen by about the fourth page of the chapter, along with some solid general writing guidelines to consider in early drafts.

Key points are summarized in the following excerpt:

“The Introduction ushers your protagonist into a scene with a major problem/scientific unknown, which sets up your hypothesis. Results Sections 1, 2, and 3 show the protagonist undergoing increasing tension by step-wise experimentation to address the major problem/scientific unknown (overall hypothesis), which drives the reaction forward to its highest tension. The Climax experiment is the critical experiment that is centered on the protagonist and provides the strongest evidence for the major findings in the research study, which drives the reaction toward completion. The Validation step lends the most credibility of the study by making a step that makes your story believable. The Discussion section places your results in the context of the current literature, returning your protagonist to his original scene and showing how he is irrevocably changed.”

Key takeaways: The structure of research narrative mirrors other stories, and you can break it down by section. In fact, you should break it down by section and carefully include essential supporting details.

Chapter 4: Specifics for Writing Each Section (Here are the meat and potatoes!)

In the longest (and best) chapter of the book, we get section-by-section guidance on topics like selecting the best title, abstract essentials (sentence by sentence), storytelling through figures, results, introduction, discussion, and finally revision. These steps read a bit like recipes, and offer concrete and clear guidance about what to include.

The author notes:

“If you remember only two things from this book, it should be the following:

1.) A hypothesis can be defined as Conflict Resolution, which is the basis of all stories, especially Scientific Storytelling.

2.) Boldly state your testable hypothesis in your Title and throughout the text of your manuscript provide scientific evidence to substantiate your hypothesis (or in the urban vernacular: Drop the Mic!).”

Included at the end is a quick-start guide to hosting a Scientific Storytelling workshop of 6-18 participants along with critical analysis questions, which can be helpful even outside of the workshop setting and in solo editing.

Key takeaways: Use this section of the guide when crafting your first draft, then refer back to it throughout the revision process. If you mentor, consider if the Scientific Storytelling framework offers a fresh way to bring out more nuances of the flow of scientific writing.

Additional Resources:

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Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide

Book Reviews

“My goal is to help rid the world of ineffective graphs, one exploding, 3D pie chart at a time.”

Drawing from the fields of graphic illustration, functional art, behavioral science and storytelling, Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic is a must for academics who present data for others to understand.

The first seven chapters focus on specific topics such as context, clutter, color and design.  Included is a chapter on story construction and verbal language, which helps for quickly assessing the inference from the data sets. No matter how effective your graphics are, some people will remember the ‘story’ you tell more easily than the graphics you show.

Putting it all together (chapter eight) applies the lessons to a particular situation.  Each step takes the pretty, colorful, but complicated chart to a clear line graph that speaks for itself.  Add the verbal story to the new graphic and no one will be in doubt about the conveyed message.

Five case studies are compiled into chapter nine making them easy to find.  The chapter includes specific examples of how clear, simple graphics can paint your picture.  With data sets, graphs and charts, we forget that others can’t always see what is obvious to us.  Knaflic creates clear and simple graphics that tell the desired story.

Take note of her advice to improve your posters, proposals, and papers.

Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussnaumer Knaflic

Storytelling with Data BLOG

Storytelling with Data PODCAST

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