A Simple for Smart People by Ken Walanabe - Book Report/Review Example

Special features: The cover has drawings depicting the book as purely meant for children. Inside, the book has some quirky drawings making it simple for the real target people, namely the children, to read. It utilizes a lot of colors and great illustrations. This book has also included some cartoon characters; for example, the mushroom and octopus as a way of attracting its readers. Price: 18.98 USD at BN.Com, ISBN: ISBN-13: 978-1591842422 Purpose of the book Ken Watanabe wrote the book, Problem Solving 101 with a focus on school children.

He was focusing on helping shift the kind of focus that was given to Japanese education. He sought to change the focus from memorization kind of education to critical thinking. This he did by using some techniques he had garnered when he was a consultant with McKinsey Consultancy. However, this changed as more and more adults found the book as useful as it is to children. At later stages, the book and its contents were found to be useful in guiding business people with business skills. Business people in America have also come to find the book as an important read.

It has provided an avenue to know how best to solve major problems that combat all people, whether in education or in business. The contents have also given people confidence of facing challenges that threaten to scuttle their successes in the world. In this book, Ken Watanabe utilizes sample and simple scenarios in illustrating his ideas and techniques. These however have lots of logic; for example, there is utilization of matrixes and logic trees. The book is written from a point of view of children work, but other categories of people can still find the work relevant.

The author is trying to give procedures and direction on how to manage problems affecting people. The author has not used technical terms and techniques in explaining his concepts; rather, he has utilized simple scenarios as a way of addressing his points of views. To some extent, the genre in this book is children’s education; but due to adaptation by other categories of people, and especially the business people, the contents become business. Therefore, its genre is business book. The book particular fits into this because most of illustrations and scenarios put are more oriented to business than to education for young person.

It is all about problem solving, where, these are more applicable to older people in their professions than Japanese children. This book has various target people. The first of these are the school children who are targeted by use of illustrations, diagrams and simple scenarios. Then, older students can also use the simple instructions put for solving their problems in education. Then business people can benefit greatly from the insights of problem solving from the book. The author has used informal style to deliver his message.

While his work is high quality, it however seems to be very simple to an extent that one can argue it lacks authoritativeness. There is coherence in the book as one particular point leads to the other. Clarity is enhanced, especially by use of sample and simple scenarios which make everybody understand the work clearly. There is originality as it comes out clearly that he is the owner of the content. However, it can be argued that there is no forcefulness in the work, and especially due to use of simplicity in it.

Though there are little technical words, the seemingly vocabularies in the work are well illustrated and simple to