The Seven Secrets of How to Think Like a Rocket Scientist

This is a great book on practical innovation, and generally just getting things done. Although it takes the "Rocket Scientist" as the model (understandable, since Longuski is one), it largely avoids the trap of being elitist and sycophantic. It's just an honest and thoughtful analysis of how rocket scientists work, and presented almost like a pattern language for knowledge workers.
I wrote a reflection on the book called "Code like a Rocket Scientist" http://tardate.blogspot.com/2008/09/code-like-rocket-scie... (read less)

At first I thought this book was going to be old hat to me, because it starts off with how to create ideas (the "DREAM" chapter), which I've read a lot about in other books. But then as the book went past "dreaming" and into "judging", "asking", "checking", "simplifying" and "optimising", he brought up some very good thinking tips that I haven't seen elsewhere.

Perhaps because he's an engineer (and this book is called "how to think like a rocket scientist"), he puts some emphasis on transforming your problem into a maths problem - so that you can bring "the full power of mathematics to bear on your problem". He also reassures the math-phobic that being good at math is all about desire - look at Einstein, for example - which I think is excellent advice. (And not just in maths, too: I've found that people who desire very strongly to learn a foreign language tend to do better than those who're just doing it to satisfy a requirement.)

Another few that you probably won't see elsewhere: check your arithmetic, do a sanity test (great advice), name the beasts, correct it on the way (another piece of great advice), ask "animal, vegetable or mineral?", run a thought experiment, etc.

Overall I enjoyed the book a lot, each piece of advice is backed up with a short anecdote, often related to NASA, and is just 2-4 pages long which makes it a great book to dip into from time to time.

My favourite story from the book, the Parable of the Pots: "An art instructor tells his pottery class that the left side of the classroom will be graded on the total weight of the pots they create during the semester. At the end of the course, the teacher said he'd bring in his bathroom scales and weigh their pots: fifty pounds of pots would be an "A", forty pounds would be a "B", thirty pounds a "C", and so forth. The right-hand side of the class would be graded on teh quality of only one pot. Their job was to make the best pot they could and to turn it in for a judgment on quality alone.

"So at the end of the semester, guess what happened. The quantity students not only made the most pots - they also made the best pots. While the quality students sat around and theorized about the perfect pot, the quantity students were busy making lots of pots. The quantity students larned from their mistakes and didn't get hung up on perfection. Their quality steadily improved with the pots they made and they ended up surpassing the quality students." In other words, get out there and start making stuff! (read less)