Neuromancer Review

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Neuromancer ReviewAdapted from ISawLightningFall.blogspot.com
The first time I tried to read Neuromancer, I stopped around page 25.
I was about 15 years old and I'd heard it was a classic, a must-read from 1984. So I picked it up and I plowed through the first chapter, scratching my head the whole time. Then I shoved it onto my bookshelf, where it was quickly forgotten. It was a dense, multilayered read, requiring more effort than a hormone-addled adolescent wanted to give. But few years later, I pulled the book down and gave it another chance. This time, William Gibson's dystopic rabbit hole swallowed me whole.
Neuromancer is basically a futuristic crime caper. The main character is Case, a burnt-out hacker, a cyberthief. When the book opens, a disgruntled employer has irrevocably destroyed parts of his nervous system with a mycotoxin, meaning he can't jack into the matrix, an abstract representation of earth's computer network. Then he receives a suspiciously sweet offer: A mysterious employer will fix him up if he'll sign on for a special job. He cautiously agrees and finds himself joined by a schizophrenic ex-Special Forces colonel; a perverse performance artist who wrecks havoc with his holographic imaginings; a long-dead mentor whose personality has been encoded as a ROM construct; and a nubile mercenary with silver lenses implanted over her eyes, retractable razors beneath her fingernails and one heckuva chip on her shoulder. Case soon learns that the target he's supposed to crack and his employer and are one and the same -- an artificial intelligence named Wintermute.
Unlike most crime thrillers and many works of speculative fiction, Neuromancer is interested in a whole lot more that plot development. Gibson famously coined the word "cyberspace" and he imagines a world where continents are ruled more by corporations and crime syndicates than nations, where cultural trends both ancient and modern dwell side by side, where high-tech and biotech miracles are as ordinary as air. On one page you'll find a discussion of nerve splicing, on another a description of an open-air market in Istanbul. An African sailor with tribal scars on his face might meet a Japanese corporate drone implanted with microprocessors, the better to measure the mutagen in his bloodstream. When he's not plumbing the future, Gibson dips into weighty themes such as the nature of love, what drives people toward self-destruction and mind/body dualism. It's a rich, heady blend.
That complexity translates over to the novel's prose style, which is why I suspect my first effort to read it failed. Gibson peppers his paragraphs with allusions to Asian geography and Rastafarianism, computer programming and corporate finance. He writes about subjects ranging from drug addiction and zero-gravity physics to synesthesia and brutal back-alley violence. And he writes with next to no exposition. You aren't told that Case grew up in the Sprawl, which is the nickname for the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, a concreted strip of the Eastern Seaboard, and that he began training in Miami to become a cowboy, which is slang for a cyberspace hacker, and that he was immensely skilled at it, et cetera, et cetera. No, you're thrust right into Case's shoes as he swills rice beer in Japan and pops amphetamines and tries to con the underworld in killing him when his back is turned because he thinks he'll never work again. You have to piece together the rest on your own.
Challenging? You bet. But it's electrifying once you get it.
I've worked by paperback copy until the spine and cover have split, until the pages have faded like old newsprint. Echoes of its diction sound in my own writing. Thoughts of Chiba City or BAMA pop into my head when I walk through the mall and hear a mélange of voices speaking in Spanish and English and Creole and German. Neuromancer is in me like a tea bag, flavoring my life, and I can't imagine what it would be like if I hadn't pressed on into page 26.Neuromancer Overview

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The Old Rules of Marketing are Dead: 6 New Rules to Reinvent Your Brand and Reignite Your Business Review

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The Old Rules of Marketing are Dead: 6 New Rules to Reinvent Your Brand and Reignite Your Business ReviewIn an age when the unexpected can be reliably expected to occur without notice, it's imperative for companies to be prepared to reinvent at a moment's notice. While "reinvention" may sound like an unnecessarily drastic overhaul for many brands and businesses, it may be more easily viewed as the full spectrum equivalent of hitting the digital `refresh' key, one that companies must be prepared to strike today to keep brands relevant, responsive and competitive.
That's the premise of "The Old Rules of Marketing Are Dead: Six New Rules To Reinvent Your Brand And Reignite Your Business" by Timothy R. Pearson, an insightful and respected leader in global marketing and management consulting.
Every once in a while, a book comes along that dazzles readers with the writer's perspicacity and ingenious observations on current business or consumer behavior. But more often than not, such books don't fully deliver on actionable steps that businesses can take to leverage the value of these pithy insights. This isn't one of those books. "The Old Rules of Marketing Are Dead" is filled with carefully calibrated action steps that can make each of its observations, principles and rules come to life in your company.
It doesn't accomplish this by dancing around the tough questions or more sweeping challenges confronting business today. What's required to achieve brand loyalty in times affected by recession, ongoing economic uncertainty, pervasive ADD, brand choice proliferation and price war conflagration? How can thought leadership invigorate an organization from top to bottom? And just how exactly does a company successfully navigate through cycles of deep recessions, seismic shocks to marketplaces and the continually morphing tastes of oftentimes irascible and increasingly demanding consumers?
There's a carefully constructed roadmap to be found here, one that's convincingly balanced on the need to continually reaffirm a brand's fundamentals and the necessity of responding vigorously to evolving consumer and marketplace dynamics.
Along the way, Pearson redefines some of the traditional tenets taught at every business school and contrasts management and leadership, providing reality-check questions on leadership that may prompt many business leaders to reevaluate their own management style. He examines how companies often hunker down in tough times, sticking to the familiar path rather than reassessing, rethinking and reinventing in response to altered conditions, and the price that's paid for such behavior. He re-elevates the critical role of brand essence, detailing disastrous outcomes that occur when companies act on the mistaken belief that a brand's essence is chained to its brand legacy, demonstrating that the manner in which a brand essence is expressed and brought to life is something that must be continually refreshed, rejuvenated and reinvented to ensure a brand's continued vitality.
There's an ample stream of business parables and checkmate ripostes to naysayers and excuse engines, those who perpetually blame poor performance on the economy, competition or someone else's department. There are fresh-in-our-memory examples of companies that suddenly fall off the rails and flail about even further as business erodes, all because they lost sight of their core, brand essence and brand promise to consumers. There are compelling examples of how the process of reinvention can uncover hidden business opportunities, how brand marketing is inextricably linked to reputation management and how a brand's value proposition is critical to achieving differentiation and preference.
And you'll find plenty of simple, riveting truisms- one being that any product or service today needs a good story, a compelling one to ensure that consumers understand it, what it does, and how it can enhance one's life, all of which leads to perceived value, brand preference and business success.
For those who still consider customer service to be nothing more than a money-pit cost center, Pearson convincingly demonstrates why customer satisfaction and service today define the core of brand experience, and how consumers' brand experiences convert brand perceptions into firm realities, and in doing so, define a brand's fate. He redefines knowledge management as a resource critical to the vitality and competitiveness of a company, something much more than the most brilliant ideas and best practices of a company, but also its accumulated understanding of consumers and customers. He goes on to demonstrate how capturing and more fully leveraging a company's intellectual capital can generate a continuing stream of thought leadership, which demonstrates competency and value creation that can, in turn, lead to differentiation, preference and success.
Indisputably, "The Old Rules of Marketing Are Dead" is an essential resource for marketers today. It's an even more urgently essential one for non-marketing executives (CEOs, CFOs et al), at least those who aim to make marketing a fully accountable discipline within their organizations and those who yearn for a resource that can elevate overall performance, efficiency and ability throughout an organization to successfully navigate through the turbulence and uncertainty that often define modern markets.
The Old Rules of Marketing are Dead: 6 New Rules to Reinvent Your Brand and Reignite Your Business Overview

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