Agent Palmer

“Chasing Black Unicorns: How Building the Amazon of Africa Put me on Interpol’s most wanted list” by Marek Zmyslowski is entertaining, educational, and more vain than you would expect.

It’s equal parts tell-all, vanity press, and fish-out-of-water. This is, after all, the story of a Polish entrepreneur in Nigeria.

I was too young to experience the Late Night Wars. They were well over – or at least not as hostile – by the time I was able to stay up late enough to watch any of the Late Night offerings, but I did choose a side. I was a Letterman guy.  At the time, I just preferred Letterman to Leno. Since then, I’ve enjoyed his post-Late Night era Netflix series “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman.”…

The Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success by Penelope Trunk is two-thirds of a great book. The good parts are about finding a job or career and then finding success therein in the new world with new goals, objectives, and dreams.

The other third of it is dated, because it was written in 2007 and things have changed. In reality, this book is great to read and then promptly discard in favor of finding an actual mentor.

If you’re ever in need of some inspiration, documentaries can be a good place to find some. Art and artist documentaries often carry the weight of the inspiration that inspired those artists and their works.

And so here are five I’ve recently watched that may be worth your time if you’re in need of a little inspiration.

Sexy Little Numbers is a book designed to sell books and the services of marketing agencies. For me, this book was about as exciting as a bad TED Talk. The speaker, or in this case author, thinks it is interesting and the members of the audience who are just discovering this topic find it interesting.

However, for anyone who has a small understanding of the complexities of data as a concept, it’s just analytics 101. It’s hardly as exciting as author Dimitri Maex of marketing goliath Ogilvy & Mather attempts to make it.