I have been obsessed with management literature ever since I passed out of my Business school. Like any true researchivore, I have had this strong penchant towards sifting significant bits of information from pounds of  literature and subsequently,  making notes. People who read to remember often have this tendency to pen down those special bits of information or wisdom in a scrapbook/A4 sheets for their future reference. This incessant practice, in my case, resulted in maintenance of stacks of notes, printouts and notebooks, often leaving me clueless and making the access to right material all the more difficult. All too often, I ended up misplacing those notebooks/papers. This mismanagement spurred me to choose online as an option to write my thoughts and share them with others simultaneously.

There is one other issue I wish to address here. Let me put it across with an example. One of my favorite books is Dr. Gary Hamel's 'Leading the Revolution'. I first read this book three years ago and then, I reread it last year. However, as I type in, I can recall only the following -

• It's a book on path-breaking innovation and entrepreneurship where the author takes to task the old guard, the establishment and lack of novel ideas, thereof.
• Book has borrowed real-life examples from Sony, Shell corporation and DuPont.

Needless to mention, I hardly remember anything specific from that book.  Let me say this that barring some exceptional breeds, retrieval of specific bits of information from our memories is actually difficult, especially, when we are no longer studying that particular topic.  I haven't done any research in Neuroscience. Nonetheless, I will hazard the guess that this is how our brain works. As the time passes by, we can barely recall the specifics. Our brain(may be!) is programmed to remember only the 'non-specifics' or the general stuff. But then, it's very hard to build upon the general stuff. General Knowledge can help us win Quizzes and accolades but in order to do something radical, we should have the knowledge of the  underlying factors. To further shape up our thinking, I believe, we must be able to tease 'particulars' away from the general. Books we read have many such specifics - 'the pearls of wisdom' or the 'take-aways', as I call them. With every book review, I also list down the key take-aways from the book as well as insert some 'pearls' in 'Pearls of Wisdom' section.