- Email: [email protected]
Planning for video: A guide to making effective videotapes
222
BOOKS
FOR MANAGERS
The book concludes with a review chapter. This pulls together the preceding work with the editors offering their own composite set of hot tips. These include the usual messages concerning planning, marketing, maintaining staff loyalty and hard work. They also include luck. This latter point having featured large in all the successful businesses. Whether this book is successful in terms of achieving its own aims is unclear. It certainly explores the idea of multiple objectives and gives several examples of these. What is less certain though, is the amount of assistance it provides to its target audience. Whilst it may be an interesting and useful read to would be business founders and those new to the advisory role, it does not really offer anything new. As such, its attractions to the owner managers of existing firms or those advisers experienced in small firms operations, may well be limited. Martin G. Houghton Centre for Entrepreneurial Development Glasgow Business School
Planning for Video: A Guide to Making Effective Videotapes, M.H. Taylor, Kogan Page, Nichols Publishing, 1989,172 pages Trainers new to video making will find the central chapters of this practical guide crisp, clear and convincing. Domestic video manual writers could benefit from reading and echoing the style. The guide offers a basic visual grammar. For video converts the ECU will become an Extreme Close Up. Amongst wider issues which trainers considering this medium must now address neither developing material for distance and open access learning nor integrating video with computerized training material are mentioned. The advantages and disadvantages of video are considered in narrower contexts. Cost is discussed abstractly. The author is sensitive to the dynamics of video-training. The fascinating issues of people reperceiving themselves on the small screen which is such a basic common experience and so hard to exploit is of course approached but not easily developed. The penultimate chapter on evaluation has the same vigour, clarity and directness as the instructional material, but remains a beginner’s guide.
EAP European
Kitson Smith School of Management, Oxford
BOOKS
FOR MANAGERS
The book concludes with a review chapter. This pulls together the preceding work with the editors offering their own composite set of hot tips. These include the usual messages concerning planning, marketing, maintaining staff loyalty and hard work. They also include luck. This latter point having featured large in all the successful businesses. Whether this book is successful in terms of achieving its own aims is unclear. It certainly explores the idea of multiple objectives and gives several examples of these. What is less certain though, is the amount of assistance it provides to its target audience. Whilst it may be an interesting and useful read to would be business founders and those new to the advisory role, it does not really offer anything new. As such, its attractions to the owner managers of existing firms or those advisers experienced in small firms operations, may well be limited. Martin G. Houghton Centre for Entrepreneurial Development Glasgow Business School
Planning for Video: A Guide to Making Effective Videotapes, M.H. Taylor, Kogan Page, Nichols Publishing, 1989,172 pages Trainers new to video making will find the central chapters of this practical guide crisp, clear and convincing. Domestic video manual writers could benefit from reading and echoing the style. The guide offers a basic visual grammar. For video converts the ECU will become an Extreme Close Up. Amongst wider issues which trainers considering this medium must now address neither developing material for distance and open access learning nor integrating video with computerized training material are mentioned. The advantages and disadvantages of video are considered in narrower contexts. Cost is discussed abstractly. The author is sensitive to the dynamics of video-training. The fascinating issues of people reperceiving themselves on the small screen which is such a basic common experience and so hard to exploit is of course approached but not easily developed. The penultimate chapter on evaluation has the same vigour, clarity and directness as the instructional material, but remains a beginner’s guide.
EAP European
Kitson Smith School of Management, Oxford