At the recent behest of an old employer and mentor I have been reading Jim Taylor's communications planning manifesto Space Race: An Inside Veiw of The Future of Communications Planning. 

The book is wall-to-wall common sense. Admittedly, it is a little dated - being written in 2005 and so pre-iPhone, pre-Facebook's hegemony and pre-everything else we now take for granted. However, the issues it attempts to resolve are still as pressing as ever. The sense of urgency it accords them, all of six years ago, is perceptive if not clairvoyant.

This has made me wonder: why hasn't this book, full of so many sensible suggestions and so ahead of its time, not changed everything? Why are the skirmishes it predicts still being fought even now? Where is the revolution?

The pace of change of course has much to do with the fact that talk is cheap and client trust is priceless, however I think it also has something to do with how many of the smartest people in this business choose to express their ideas.

In the elevator this morning, some sharp tongued account-person spied the copy of Space Race under my bookish arm and quipped: "Yeah, I've read that, it's only really worth it for the last chapter."

This shocked me a little. I wondered whether that could possibly be true. If this whole book boils down to essentially a single chapter of content? Why bother with the book? Particularly so as this is a book who's primary objective is to change and improve the way we do business. Then I reflected on my own experience with it. I realised that I had been skipping large swathes of illustrative examples of high level concepts, glossing over anecdotes from the author's career, stumbling a little when the same point was made for a second or third time. I remembered looking at the contents page and wondering what on earth chapter title's like "cutting through the earths atmopshere" and "the ROI of snow" meant.

There is much useful, if not essential, knowledge in this book. But, If I'm being brutally honest, it requires cutting through a thick layer of blubber to get to.

I now think it was a mistake to make Space Race a book. The irony is that one of its central tenants is that comms planners should be using the most appropriate media and technologies to solve a given business problem without predisposition and without presumption of what that solution may be. I feel like Taylor, in disseminating his own ideas, should have practiced what he preached.

I don't know why it is that this happens: Self indulgence? The need to answer to a higher publishing power?

There are a lot of reasons why this was one of the most influential texts of the last 200 years. Among them, however, I believe has to be the fact that its original printing run only ran to 25 pages. It's ideas are radical and brutally concise. When you consider that it's audience was the time and cash poor workers of Europe, it makes perfect sense. Even more extended runs that are double that, read today, still capture that immediacy.

Marketing and Advertising folk love books that make powerful statements. Planners love writing lists of them for their blogs. The books that do it well are concise by their nature and straightforward in their delivery (I'm thinking particularly of Eat the Big Fish). Even so, do even these best in class examples really need to be full flown books? This is a medium incongrous with the ideas it is used to express, padding the pearls with needless digression, and incompatible the pace its consumers are forced to work at.

We need a genre of writing in marketing and advertising that extends beyond the length of a 2000 word Admap feature, yet can be easily read in a weeks worth of commutes and still leave time for reflection. 20,000 words should be the absolute ceiling. I don't think any manifesto for behaviour that can't be explained in that time is either a) poorly defined, or b) too convoluted in the first instance be enacted.

If I had been Taylor's editor - or friend whose paycheque didn't depend on the sales of the book - I would have challenged him to take his 293 pages and turn them into 100.