Hawaiian Pizza – Story of the Enterprise Intelligence Book Cover

After a slew of fairly heavy posts to support the release of my book, Enterprise Intelligence, here’s a light-hearted one.

I didn’t create the book cover of Enterprise Intelligence. I was presented with a small set of choices and both my wife and the publisher (Steve Hoberman – Technics Publications) genuinely liked the one with the “Hawaiian Pizza” (pineapple and ham toppings). I believe that theme made its way into candidacy from conversations I had with Steve Hoberman about combinations of things that produced something much different from the parts. Hawaiian pizza and Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups came up. It was in the context of the book being about the mixing of AI and BI – “you got AI in my BI, you got BI in my AI”.

I’m not sure what the designer of the cover had in mind. But this was my interpretation when choosing it:

• The pizza represents the BI side of the book. The pie shapes of a pie chart, various shapes of the toppings as different BI visualizations.
• The angular lines of the pineapple are like the edges of a knowledge graph, representing the AI side.
• The numbers in the Venn-like intersection of the pizza and pineapple are actually part of the OpenAI embedding for the text: Enterprise Intelligence, by Eugene Asahara. This was my only contribution to the book cover. It was originally 0s and 1s.

Additionally, the Green and Yellow (gold) colors the designer happened to pick are the colors of the high school of the town I mostly identify as my “home town”-Leilehua High School of Wahiawa, HI. Wahiawa is an old pineapple plantation town. It’s where I spent about half of my childhood and with the exception of myself, Leilehua is the high school where all of my siblings and dozens of relatives on my mother’s side of the family “when grad”.

I thought that my brother who passed away the day after I turned in the first draft of the book would like the sentiment of the Leilehua High School colors. He taught at one of the elementary schools in Wahiawa (Ka’ala) for about 17 years.

I don’t particularly care for Hawaiian Pizza, but I don’t dislike it. And I’m not a pizza snob who is adamant of pineapple having no place on a pizza. Spam musubi – yes, I have many opinions. The only time I actually ordered a Hawaiian Pizza was the night we agreed to this book cover to celebrate (“Island Pizza” from Curry Pizza in Bicknell, UT – near Capitol Reef National Park).

Call to action: Please everyone, DM Dave Portnoy (El Presidente on X) from Barstool to have me as a guest for a special “Hawaiian Pizza Review”. He’ll hate it so much. I rated my celebration Hawaiian pizza from Curry Pizza 5.8, which is very high for a Hawaiian Pizza.

Note: Enterprise Intelligence is available at Technics Publications and Amazon. If you purchase the book from the Technics Publications site, use the coupon code TP25 for a 25% discount off most items (as of July 10, 2024).