About Jenga, by Leslie Scott, is a great holiday gift book for game lovers and budding entrepreneurs.
Greenleaf Book Group, LLCStumped for a Christmas gift your your boss or co-worker?
About Jenga: The Remarkable Business of Creating a Game that Became a Household Name is a great and affordable gift idea.
Written by Leslie Scott, the woman who invented the game, About Jenga is an interesting memoir nestled in the story behind the creation of Jenga. But her book also offers charming and entertaining anecdotal and experiential insights into the world of business making it a worthwhile and inspirational read for aspiring inventors and entrepreneurs.
Who Would Like This Book
Any Jenga lover interested in learning more about the origins of the game will find enough gossipy and anecdotal details to make the book enjoyable. The book puts to rest any suggestion that Scott stole the idea for Jenga from African customs or that the game had its origins in some other ancient culture. Scott briefly compares her game to others and presents enough historical data to prove her case.
The book will also appeal to any aspiring entrepreneur (especially women) who have an interest in inventing, the trademark process, and in laughing while reading a book that cheerfully delivers some serious business lessons learned the hard way.
Full Review on About.com, which is part of the New York Times Company
Tags: About Jenga, About.com, book review, Business & Economics, entrepreneur, memoir, New York Times, women in business
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Excerpts from the PLAY STUFF blog of the Strong National Museum of Play
Toy and game inventors deserve their time in the spotlight, according to the annual TAGIE (Toy and Game Inventors Expo) Awards. Bestselling books and hit songs earn authors and singers publicity as well as financial rewards. But create a million-selling toy or game and practically no one knows your name. The TAGIE Awards honor the people behind the playthings, celebrating their creations and the fun they’ve brought to our lives.
A few weeks ago, Nic Ricketts, the museum’s games curator, and I traveled to Chicago to attend the second annual TAGIE Award dinner and explore the world of toy and game inventors. Our first stop was the design studio of Lund and Company Invention. The firm and its founder, Bruce Lund, are probably best known for TMX Elmo, but they’ve created dozens of other fun and famous playthings as well. We felt honored to get a peek behind the scenes.
From there, we made our way to Navy Pier where Nic and I appeared as part of TAGIE’s two-day seminar for new toy and game inventors. We were excited to share information about Strong National Museum of Play with a group of eager inventors and to learn firsthand about their creations. Nic’s high point for the afternoon was meeting Leslie Scott, the creator of Jenga, who was promoting her new book and playing Jenga with her fans.
by Chris Bensch, Vice President for Collections at the Strong National Museum of Play
Tags: About Jenga, business book, game designer, Museum of Play, TAGIE
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Seeking further examples of Jenga metaphors has taken me to some interesting, some strange and some downright scary sites. I tell you, I’ve discovered some mighty weird ways people use Jenga – both literally and metaphorically.
But I was genuinely intrigued about the novel Jenga metaphor I came across today used in an exchange following an article about the film Krakatoa:East of Java on a blog entitled ‘ Six Mental Illness Myths Hollywood Wants You To Believe‘ by ShawnStruck
…….first comment…..
‘I am not a clinician, but I am a psychologist, and while some of the comments in this article are worthwhile, there’s a lot wrong with it. Simply put, psychology is not a game of Jenga, wherein one crucial block can bring down the entire tower of mental illness. No one factor made the person snap, and shoving one thing back into place won’t make them whole. If it did, this mental illness stuff would be easy.‘
……..In reply…….
I suppose the analogy here is supposed to imply that mental illness is not like Jenga (rather than psychology). However, the common practice of labeling people ‘imbalanced’ seems at least somewhat grounded in observation. One factor can, in fact, make a person snap. That’s not to say that there aren’t a number of slowly developing and complex underpinnings to any mental illness, but precipitating events are a very real phenomenon.
Tags: About Jenga, culture, Hollywood, metaphor, movie characters, psychology
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I’m very interested in how we use ( possibly overuse) metaphor to shape our thoughts. It’s a topic I touch upon in About Jenga in the lead up to discussing how Jenga itself has become a metaphor. When I put the game Jenga on the market, I had no idea that it would acquire a whole new meaning and become a metaphor, representing a kind of instability that I assume had never before been encapsulated in one word. Be that as it may, the fact is that, today, Jenga metaphors abound. Chapter 15
I go on to mention quite a comprehensive list of interesting examples I had come across of Jenga being used as a metaphor. But new ones keep popping up that I wish I had been able to include at the time. I came across one such example today:
Writing, especially humor writing, is a lot like the game Jenga. You spend a lot of time building up and crafting just the right amount of words, put together in just the right way, all aimed at just the right pay-off, and all it takes is for some yahoo to come along and pull out one block in the wrong way and the whole damn thing comes tumbling down. So I was a bit worried about whether the editor I would be working with on my book would want to have a lot of input on what I was writing, or whether he or she would take a “hands-off” approach. Or at least understand my Jenga analogy. How to be a writer: Pick an editor with a sense of humor
Tags: About Jenga, analogy, game designer, metaphor, writing
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Having read ‘About Jenga’, Victor Reklaitis interviewed me a few weeks ago when I was in Los Angeles for a book signing event at Chevaliers’ Books, hosted by Bob Peirce, Chairman of BritWeek.
I thoroughly enjoyed Victor’s always friendly, but challenging interview. And I really appreciate the resultant IBD article ‘Leslie Scott Raised Her Game’, primarily because Victor went to the trouble of interviewing and quoting two key figures in the story of Jenga’s success; Alan Hassenfeld of Hasbro, and Hal Ross, the toy expert’s expert.
Tags: About Jenga, BritWeek, Business & Economics, business book, Hasbro, Investor's Business Daily, Jenga, Motivational
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