Tempo: Timing, Tactics and Strategy in Narrative-Driven Decision-Making [Paperback]

I wanted to like this book as I've been following the author's blog for a few months and generally find his ideas to be interesting. I cannot, however, recommend this book. The writing and layout of the book are stilted and the presented ideas are not as groundbreaking as the author thinks.

First, the writing in the book is not good. You will enjoy it if you like reading the typical academic paper that uses lots of jargon and fancy words to express ideas that could be more simply explained. One gets the impression that the author is smart, knows you know he's smart, and yet still wants to show you he's smart. Ugh. There are many paragraphs in the text that seemingly are there for clarity and exemplification of the ideas discussed, but they often exist as one off explanations that do not build into any larger story. To riff off the author's ideas, they are notes in a piece of music waiting for resolution.

The layout of the book is like a dissertation (an observation my wife made as she leafed through the pages). It actually leads to a cluttered reading experience as each subheading within a chapter is given a number, and then each sub-subheading is given its own number. The book is 150 pages long, would it be difficult for me to find what I'd need to without these numbers?

One might say I struggle to find something to critique by pointing to the numbering of the chapters, but as the book itself notes, these subtle choices make an impression (often subconscious) on the energy or 'tempo' of a story. Ironically, it seems, the author spends many pages discussing the wide applicability of his ideas, but he never bothered to recognize his own text is laconic. Quite frankly, the book became a slog to push through despite its small size. The last few chapters were better than what preceded them, but those 30 decent pages do not make up for the remainder.He must have either not applied his ideas to this book or actively designed this layout to make the ideas seem more powerful given how difficult it is to push on.

For all the thinking the author has done on human interactions, one would think he would know pedagogical techniques that help someone learn and apply new ideas. One does not learn how to speak English by memorizing a hundred vocabulary words and then diagramming sentences. And you certainly don't expect these steps will turn you into Shakespeare. But the author seems to disagree and explains how to diagram sentences all why telling you just how marvelous the language is. In the book (and his blog posts for that matter), he prefers to lay a foundation of elementary ideas in great detail and then hurriedly tries to bring these elements back into a larger idea. This style works well for shorter online posts, but it falls flat with even this small book. The ideas of the middle chapters are presented in disjointed fashion with little clarification as to how they fit into the larger structure. Then the last few chapters makes tenuous connections, which fall flat in truly fleshing out the ideas. ("Remember this thing I mentioned 3 chapters ago that I haven't talked about since? Good, but I'm not going to explain it further.") The reader is left wondering why he bothered to push through the middle chapters.

Finally, the ideas presented in the book are nowhere near as groundbreaking as the author and reviewers on Amazon suggest. Did you know that there is a tempo to everything in the world? That is, everything has a "rhythm, emotion, and energy." This seems apparent. Did you know everything in the world must be viewed through a mental model? Again, this has been covered before by others. Did you know that with an understanding the ongoing mental model of a person and a sense of timing, you can influence an outcome to your advantage? Wow...groundbreaking stuff.

Apparently, the author suggests it is not that these individual ideas are new, but rather the book is a "work of broad synthesis and integration." Please. Mentioning Napoleon in one sentence and email in another does represent some new, broader understanding of human and nonhuman action.

I conclude with the author's quote from a former student who said: "I like the material, but I don't yet see the thin red line connecting all the ideas." The author apparently set out with clarifying the connections with this book, but that task remains unaccomplished.

Although I've not met Venkatesh Rao, I was introduced to him via email last summer after reading the book. In my personal letter to him I said:

"I finished, and quite enjoyed, Tempo yesterday.

I especially enjoyed Chapters 2, 3, and 4. While reading them I found myself increasingly dazzled by each new conceptual innovation, then wondering whether you would actually convince me that your conceptual innovations were useful, and then being profoundly grateful for the pay-off when it came through, over and over again. I LOVE the Freytag Staircase, an immense amount of good stuff is packed neatly and conveniently into that one concept. At one point I was thinking that this was one of the most original, interesting, and valuable books written in the past fifty years - and I read a LOT. I was also wondering how on earth you were going to land this plane, so to speak, after such a spectacular ride.

That said, Chapter 5 didn't quite do as much for me as did the earlier chapters (I've got nothing against Chapter 1, it just isn't a superstar as are 2, 3, and 4). It might be that I just haven't adequately digested your definitions of "strategy" and "tactic," and that when I do perhaps I'll be just as dazzled as I was by 2, 3, and 4.

Chapter 6, at this point, seems simply harmless and anti-climactic, almost banal in comparison to your earlier intellectual pyrotechnics - though again perhaps I will have a gestalt shift later after I've more completely digested the tools you've given me."

It is interesting, having read the other reviews, that the one negative review specified the last 30 pages as the best - those that I found anti-climactic.

This is not an easy book to digest, nor will it appeal to most casual readers. After reading it I found myself drawn to re-read Eric Auerbach's "Mimesis," a wonderfully personal, yet highly scholarly, account of the role of representation in the literature of western civilization. I see Auerbach's "Mimesis" as really the history of individuality from Homer to the present.

Now that I'm six months removed from Tempo I find that I still reflect on it. The concept of the Freytag staircase that he develops, an elaboration of the well-known Freytag's pyramid of dramatic structure, is a useful way for me to reflect on the emotional dynamics and decision-making frameworks that have been characteristic of various phases of my life. I'm a big fan of Alasdair MacIntyre's notion that a virtue culture is dependent on a lifelong framework of meaning, and as an educator I use the concept of lifelong goals to encourage young people to structure their lives in serious and productive ways. Rao's Freytag staircase, and the associated conceptual framework before and after, will provide adults who are serious about lifelong meaning with an additional lens through which to understand their own goal-orientation and decision structure.

Tempo covers so much ground across many different domains that it is difficult to summarize. It is a short book, and I would simply encourage those who are interesting in a much more sophisticated understanding of how they and others structure their personal narratives and decision-making to read it and integrate Rao's conceptual tools into your own personal narratives and decision-making.

Tempo contains great ideas: there is a "tempo" to everything from cooking to driving to conversing. Mr. Rao takes the word 'tempo' to mean something quite different from its context in music (tempo is like the frequency or speed of a song's rhythm); however according to Mr. Rao tempo is a measure of any activity consisting of three elements: rhythm, energy, and emotion. The book talks about how people make sense out of raw data, organize their thoughts and make decisions. He synthesizes ideas from physics, psychology, philosophy, war, theater, and a number of other domains. This is a great endeavor.

While the ideas are great, the way in which Mr. Rao conveys them is really poor. Mr. Rao seems to have written it in ways that are more difficult for the readers to understand than it needs to be. This could partly be due to the fact that English is not Mr. Rao's native language. More than once I have wondered whether he translated his concepts directly from his native language to English. I was frequently tempted to put down the book because of his poor writing style. Another irritating fact about Mr. Rao's writing is that throughout the book he often mentions ideas and stories related to the subject, but never discusses them in any meaningful way, and it seems he does this to just to show off that he knows them.

Mr. Rao seems to have failed to grasp that his readers may be laymen interested in learning about his ideas, using them, and perhaps improving their lives as a result. Instead, it appears as though Mr. Rao is rather speaking to an audience who are critiquing his intellectual ability or his grasp of the material. He seems to have been constricted by the need to 'stylize' his writing--to make it look more like the work of someone such as Dr. Eric Berne. (By the way, his chapter on Arhetype/Doctrine seems to be plagiarized from Dr. Berne's "Games People Play"). When someone like Dr. Berne writes about 'Doctrines', they come across to the readers as natural and original. With Mr. Rao, you can't help but cringe at the lack of flow or coherence. Why? I think (but I may be wrong), Mr. Rao is trying to be someone that he is not. To Mr. Rao: find your own proclivity, don't imitate another thinker.

The book has been constructed to be more difficult than it needs to be. You may have to read the book two or three or more times to fully appreciate the contents. Many sentences are vague, ambiguous and convoluted. I'm sure Mr. Rao is offering a substance in his sentences, but Jeez, they're just horrible constructs.

One other criticism I have about Mr. Rao's work is that his book is not as comprehensive and original as he may like to think. He tends to give the impression that his book is 'that' final synthesis of ideas on timing. Not so! He is also obsessed with coining new expressions and words, which is okay for some ideas, but I felt he often does it for the sake of doing it (for the sake of being another Eric Berne, if only he didn't come across as un-natural). He doesn't even seem to have a fair, comprehensive grasp of writers like Stephen Covey, whom he dismisses as mere "Calculative Rationalists" who don't have a good understanding about the art of timing or 'opportunism'. Mr. Rao, perhaps you should read Stephen Covey's chapter on: "Put first things first" and you may see that Dr. Covey knows about timing a lot more than you're giving him the credit for.

For interested buyers: this is a book with good ideas but bad writing; just know that you'll have to work hard to make sense out of it. Hard copy is ridiculously expensive. Publisher should consider selling it for something like $11 or $12.