Some people are born to greatness, some achieve it and some accidently stumble upon it while getting lost stumbling down the slopes of K2. This book is the story of mountaineer turned school builder Greg Mortenson whose chance encounter with the people of northern Pakistan after an unsuccessful attempt on K2 led to a new mission to educate the poor in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Mortenson builds schools mostly for girls and has learned how to work with the the leaders of this mostly islamic area in a way that the united states as a whole has not yet learned.

This book should be required reading for every member of congress as it shows that the root of some of the problems we are fighting with bombs and bullets might be better fought with books and blackboards.

So many people who I follow on the Internet had mentioned Tim Ferris’s “The 4-Hour Workweek” that I thought it was finally time for me to read it. Ferris’s book proposes working with a goal in mind, working less and spending more time on whatever it is that would be fulfilling for you, travel for instance. He proposes a plan to get there by creating a largely self running business using the Internet and relying heavily on outsourcing. It was an interesting book and I am glad I read it but I was left with a more mixed impression of the book.

What I liked

I thought the book was for me a fresh and different perspective. I do like to read things that challenge me and my perceptions, at least from time to time. I am still hard pressed to come up with a product that I could sell as Ferris has (fitness supplements) that would be the good basis for a business. He give some suggestions for how to find or create such a product and a large list of useful links for companies that can partner in manufacturing, fulfillment, sales and support of such a product. I found the list of links to be one of the most valuable parts of the book.

What I did not like

Ferris actually has very little work experience in corporate America and takes pride in the number of jobs he was fired from or deserved to be fired from. His personal experience centers mostly around sales where he found ways to be more productive and spend less time doing it by changing when he made his sales calls and by eliminating clients that were not worth his time. I find that his experience in the working world bears little resemblance to mine. His picture of the working world is a soul sucking machine. No doubt others will relate to that description but I did not. I work as the EVP of Engineering and Operations at a small Internet company focused on creating communities. Before that I have held a variety of positions in software engineering in Silicon Valley. Work has often been for me a part of my creative expression. Most of the time I have derived joy from the people I worked with. There are also fewer shortcuts (at least that I have found) in software engineering than he found in sales.

As Ferris describes the kind of business he is trying to create it is clear that money is the bottom line. What kind of product can I create so I won’t have to work as much? From my Silicon Valley background this seems a passionless exercise. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to have the time to travel all the time as Ferris does. But I am not sure that the unconnected untethered lifestyle that is his personal goal would be a good match for me. The process of product and company creation that Ferris describes seemed to me to be passionless and even a bit cynical.

But the biggest problem I had with Ferris’s book was the number of times he expressed an approach to life that I find unethical. I did not count the number of times that he suggested lying to your employer but it was definitely a running theme. His just “Call in sick…” approach to work probably means that it is a good thing for all involved that Ferris is now an entrepreneur. Certainly, I am glad I was not in a position as his boss, but I would probably also not choose to be his partner.

Conclusion

I would repeat that I did find this book interesting. I think that reevaluating “a work hard play later” philosophy could be beneficial to any number of people, myself included. I found the homework that Ferris assigned in the book to be thought provoking if not yet for me life changing. I can recommend the book, even with some serious misgivings about the author’s philosophy.

You might get the impression from the books that I have been reading that I am working on a “do it yourself MBA by mail” course. The truth is not far from that.

As the chief technologist at a community marketing agency and in my previous endeavors I have lived through many of the triumphs and pitfalls chronicled in numerous business and marketing books.

• I learned, among other things, the value of a “sincere tie” at Watson’s IBM.
• I searched for excellence at Hewlett-Packard back during the days of the HP Way.
• My first startup (Momenta) died trying to cross Geoffrey Moore’s Chasm.
• I learned to start a project with a t-shirt design at Apple as instructed by Kawasaki.
• I bet on the value of internet community with the author’s of Net Gain (dedicated in part to the 3 founders of my current company).

I have built and launched products, hired and managed teams. I have debated the 5 P’s of marketing as they apply to my business, but it turns out I had never actually read about them. I became increasingly aware of my ignorance. Those of you who know me know that I am uncomfortable with ignorance.

And so the process of re-educating, re-making and re-branding my self continues.

I just finished reading two books by the prolific marketeer Seth Godin: Purple Cow and Free Prize Inside. I had heard a number of people discussing Godin’s latest book and thought I would see what I was missing.

Purple Cow is a battle cry to make remarkable products. It is a passionate plea that a product that tries to be all things to all people will be nothing to everyone. Godin makes a case that a product should leave the happy middle ground. Make the cheapest product, or the most expensive, the most elegant or the simplest. The early adopters are the people that you need to win first and they are not drawn to the average product. A remarkable product, literally one that would make someone remark and take notice, will produce “sneezers” who will distribute your “idea virus”.

Free Prize Inside! argues that a series of small incremental changes to your product to add value is better than either a huge marketing or a huge research budget. When Amazon took their large marketing budget and instead spent it on free shipping they created value, a “free prize”, for their customers. Give your customers a free prize, give them value, and they will talk about it.

I enjoyed both books even if I did not always relate to the world he was writing about. Having worked in Silicon Valley startup companies for so long I did not relate to some of the information in Free Prize Inside! about how to sell your ideas to a management chain that would clearly be resistant. I did not disagree that this happens, I just did not relate on a personal level. Also I find Godin’s terminology like “sneezers” to be something that I am likely to remember but embarrassed to repeat.

My favorite part of both books are the concrete examples that I look for in a book in this genre. I am left with questions like “how would I do something similar for my company, my blog or my podcast?” “What free prize could I provide my customers, my readers or my listeners?” So I am left with questions, but those are exactly the kind of questions I am looking for.

Neil Howe is one of the two authors of the book Millennials Rising. He spoke yesterday at the Sun Worldwide Education and Research Conference 2008. He is an interesting speaker but the topic itself, the difference between baby boomers, gen x-ers and millennials is fascinating. He argues that millennials have gotten criticized for how they are different but not valued for how they are different. He also asserts that time makes the generations and that the millennial generation is shaping the technology rather than the other way around.

His talk awkwardly starts 50 minutes into this video:

and concludes in this video:

Sadly those video taping this presentation never show what the speaker is displaying on the screen.

I finally got around to reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine. If you are not familiar with the “long Tail” concept (which seems unlikely) the basic idea is that while you can make a lot of money selling hit movies, music, books, etc, you can also make a surprising amount of money selling a little of a lot of less popular movies, songs, books, etc.

Amazon.com has been one of the biggest poster children of the Long Tail effect. As they started their business they carried many more books than it was possible to carry in the local Barnes and Noble. Both Amazon and the local book store would carry the latest New York Times best sellers but Amazon would also carry books that were not economically viable in a local store. They might only sell 100 copies of one book a year, but they might have a million books that they sell 100 copies of. The long tail is a graph of a demand curve.

I have been putting off reading this book not because I thought the idea was uninteresting or unimportant but because I had not grasped the depth of the idea and just how much more there was to glean from this simple idea. Anderson no only explains how Amazon.com is a natural progression from previous long tail ideas like the Sears & Roebuck catalog but also how the long tail is not one demand curve but the some of a larger number of niche demand curves. This is made most obvious as he analyzes how the music business sells fewer “hit” Cds any more but has numerous niche hits and an amazing variety of niches. Part of what is driving the long tail is the ability to search and find products of interest.

Anderson’s book should be a must read for anyone who is interested in business or working in a business that is effected by the change in demand curves, which is just about everyone. It is a well-researched and insightful book about a topic that was deeper that I realized.

I just finished reading Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. In this wonderful book on communicating ideas so that people will remember them the author has 6 principles:

• Simplicity – Find the core or your idea, don’t bury the lead of your story
• Unexpectedness – Surprise will get people’s attention
• Concreteness – Ideas that are concrete on more memorable than those that are abstract
• Credibility – Authorities or details can be used to increase credibility
• Emotions – People will remember what they care about
• Stories – Stories are useful to get people to act on an idea

I find that I examine communication ideas now through the lens of these principles. A friend pointed out a good example of these principles in an ad from the American Lung Association. Kids know that cigarettes are bad for them but how can you truly get that message across in a way that is in this case simple, unexpected, concrete and emotional. One third of the people who smoke will die from it. That’s the statistic. How to communicate that? The American Lung Association made this ad that equated what it would be like if you had a one in three changes in dying by crossing the street. This is an idea that is made to stick.

I recently finished Punk Marketing by Richard Laermer and Mark Simmons. As the subtitle of the book is “Get Off Your Ass and Join the Revolution” it may come as no surprise that this is a marketing book dripping in attitude. Since the book was just published this year it is the best book I have seen to incorporate web 2.0 and social media into more traditional marketing methods. This book is a wonderful companion to Guerilla Marketing. It focuses on how to get more marketing done with less money and is filled with good examples of people doing just that.

Mr. Laermer also blogs at: Richard Laermer “Author, Full Frontal PR”’s Amazon Blog

Abibliophobia (noun)

Definition: The morbid fear of running out of reading material.

This was my word of the day today from Dictionary.com and when I saw it I suddenly had insight into Amazon’s new book reader the Kindle. I may simply not be the target market of the Kindle, nor for that matter all the technology pundits who have been panning the device. And yet Amazon says they sold out quickly on the device. So who is buying the Kindle? Abibliophobes.

To test my theory I talked to one of the two co-workers who first told me of the device. They were excited. It could hold 200 books and if you ran out you could quickly get more? Cool. Abibliophobia. These are the sort of people that Amazon should create a 100,000 page club like the airline’s 100,000 mile club. These are voracious readers who belong to multiple book clubs.

So it may be time to admit that the Kindle is a product targeted for a set of people who Amazon knows well. Maybe they aren’t crazy. So the question I am left with is how many abibliophobes are there and do they have $400 in their pocket?

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