Survival is Not Enough/Godin 57-61

58 Edison knew that if he made inventing stuff his regular job, he could happily move from invention to invention without getting stressed. Picasso took the same approach to his art.
The goal of the zooming process is to redefine change at work to be something that doesn’t cause the change-avoidance gene to kick in with waves of fear and panic. If we can bypass that reflex, we can define “normal” as being an environment in which new memes appear on a regular basis.

60 Zooming…is not the same thing as evolving. You need to zoom before you can evolve.

61 Why is there so much pain in the business world? One reason is that most companies are now stretched beyond the zoomwith. Everthing that’s new is seen as a threat; nothing is an opportunity. By increasing your zoomwidth—by learning how to zoom and then hiring people who want to zoom with you—your company can grow, adapt and maybe even transform itself.

The Long Tail/Anderson 132-134

133 Because of low cost of inventory, the margins for non-hits can be far higher in Long Tail markets than in traditional bricks-and-mortar.

134 That’s why Long Tail retailers have such an advantage—they have the shelf space to carry the older titles.

Long Tail products may not account for most of the sales, but because they’re often cheaper to acquire, they can be very profitable, as long as inventory costs are kept close to zero. So the 80/20 Rule changes in 3 ways in Long Tail Markets.
1) You can offer many more products.
2) Because it is so much easier to find these products (thanks to recommendations and other filters), sales are spread more evenly between hits and niches.
3) Because the economics of niches is roughly the same as hits there are profits to be found at all level of popularity.

Never Eat Alone/Ferrazzi 182-184

183 Aspirational Contacts

…plan is a list of activities and names.

A”1” gets contacted at least each month.

184 …solidify the relationship with a least 3 different forms of communication.

A “2” rating indicates my “touch base” people.

“3” are people I don’t know well…at least once a year.

…..taking names…is segmenting your network into call lists.

“ Hi Jan. Just landed in New York and it made me think of you. No time to meet this trip, but I just wanted to touch base.

Plaxo is neat new program.

“It was a pleasure meeting you the other day. You mentioned your love of jazz. It just so happens that I have a rare recording of Miles Davis. I thought you’d get a kick out of it. Let me know what you think.”

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 53-57

54 Organisms that avoided situations filled with sudden changes were less likely to get killed and thus more likely to pass on the genes to their children.

According to one study, 38 percent of all workers are afraid that if they lose their job, they’ll have trouble finding another one quickly…and 16 percent have withheld a suggestion for improving efficiency at work because they fear it will cost a coworker’s job.

Companies can evolve whenever they choose to.

56 Two of the best change success stories of recent times are IBM and Corning.

57 Yet the market is demanding that we change over and over. To succeed, we need to have plastic surgery on a regular basis.

The Long Tail/Anderson 126-132

130…give people unlimited choice and make it easy for them to find what they want, and you discover that demand keeps on going into niches that were never even considered before.

…New music accounts for about a third of sales and older music accounts for two-thirds.

131 The 80/20 Rule is chronically misunderstood, for three reasons.
1)…it’s almost never exactly 80/20
2) The 80 and the 20 are percentages of different things, and this don’t need to equal 100/
3) ..the Rule is misunderstood because people use it to describe different phenomena. The classic definition is about products and revenues, but the Rule can just as equally be applied to products and profits.

132 In Long Tail markets, where the carrying cost of inventory are low, the incentive is there to carry everything, regardless of the volume of its sales. Who knows—with good search and recommendations, a bottom 80 percent product could turn a top 20 percent product.

Never Eat Alone/Ferrazzi 176-182

177 You can be more successful in two months by becoming really interested in other people’s success than you can in two years trying to get others people interested in you own success.

181 80% of building and maintaining relationships is just staying in touch.

You have to keep pinging and pinging and pinging and never stop. You have to feed the fire of your network or it will wither or die.

182 Repetition
People you’re contacting to create a new relationship need to see or hear your name in at least three modes of communication.
Once you have gained some early recognition, you need to nurture a developing relationship with a phone call or e-mail at least once a month.
If you want to transform a contact into a friend, you need a minimum of two face-to-face meetings out of the office.
Maintaining a secondary relationship requires 2-3 pings a years.

When it comes to relationship maintenance, you have to be on your game, 24/7, 365 days a year.

Winners Never Cheat/Huntsman 110-121

111 Doing better is the healthful response to most anything.

Courtesy and love are contagious and are far more effective over the long haul than trying to ruin the reputation and well being of another.

113 Moving on gets you back to business.

In reality, getting even is a form of self-pity. I view self-pity as one of the worst human weaknesses, a virus that can incapacitate otherwise decent, effective people.

118 What separate winners from losers is how fast we banish these demons.
Pay attention to that voice inside you saying. Life is short. Move on.

121 Few human traits are as critical to one’s relationship with others as graciousness. It embodies love, kindness, sensitivity, and charity.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 51-53

52 Because as companies mature and grow, they are far more likely to hire people to do jobs as opposed to hiring people who figure out how to change their jobs for the better.

The worst possible outcome of what you’re proposing must be better than the best possible outcome of what we’re doing now.

53 …before going into a meeting, your critics promise to follow these two rules:
Criticize an idea based on how well it meets its objectives. If you don’t like the objectives, criticize those separately.

Fairly compare the idea to the status quo, warts and all. No fair accepting your current problems just because you already have them.

The Long Tail/Anderson 123-126

124 Blogging…what they may lack in polish and scope, they more than make up in credibility: Their readers know that there is a real person there that they can trust.

126 Powerlaws are a family of curves that you can practically anywhere you look, from biology to book sales. The Long Tail is a powerlaw that isn’t cruelly cut off by bottlenecks in distribution such as limited shelf space and available channels. Because the amplitude of a powerlaw approaches but never reaches zero as the curve stretches out to infinity, it’s known as a “long-tailed” curve, which is where I derived the name of this book.

As far as consumer markets go, powerlaws come about when you have three conditions:
Variety (there are many different sorts of things)
Inequality (some have more of some quality than others)
Network effects such as word of mouth and reputation, which tend to amplify differences in quality.

Never Eat Alone/Ferrazzi 172-176

175 Who you know determines how effectively you can apply what you know. Getting things done, and climbing the walls of your company, requires having the right relationships.

I was going to push my company’s product into an important brand position among those who mattered, I needed to be able to converse with the players inside and outside the industry who could help me make that happen.

176 The solution is knowledge, one of the most valuable currencies is social arbitrage. Knowledge is free—it can be found in books, in articles, on the internet, pretty much everywhere, and it’s precious to everyone.

Buy the book, read it, and take some notes summarizing the Big Idea, a few of its interesting studies or anecdotes, and why it’s relevant to the people you’re thinking about passing your knowledge on to.

e-mail them your work…”Here are some cool ideas think you’d like to be on top of “

Winners Never Cheat/Huntsman 100-110

104 It is courage that separates those with wisdom from those who commit that wisdom to action. It is courage, and not the title, that separates genuine leaders from the pretenders.

105 A problem not worth praying about is not worth worrying about.---Unknown

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.—Mark Twain

110 Getting made for a brief time is far better than a long and costly plan to get even. Make your reaction fast, furious, and finite. Vent your hurt, your anger, your frustrations. Let emotions rip. Then say to yourself: “There, I feel better. It’s over”

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 48-51

49 If there are ten people on a task force, however, you now need forty-five one-on-one meetings just to get everybody interacting.

The bigger the committee, the longer it takes to meme to change.

The standard a successful company requires from a new winning strategy is far higher than the standard anyone else would ask for.

51 …most organizations make it easier to say no to a project than to approve it.

…3 criticism curses
Successful companies fear external criticism
Successful innovators are more subject to harsh criticism
The less innovative employees of a company unfairly criticize the innovators

The Long Tail/Anderson 117-123

118 One person’s noise is another’s signal.

119…filter technologies are so important. They not only drive demand down the Tail, but they can also increase satisfaction by connecting people with products that are more right for them than the broad-appeal products at the head.

121 “power law” distribution, a term for a curve where a small number of thing occur with high amplitude (read:sales) and a large number of things occur with low amplitude. A few things sell a lot and a lot of things sell a little.

Since most stuff doesn’t sell very well, the volume of the material available—and by extension the volume of stuff you don’t want—rises as the Long Tail falls.

123 …the survivors obtain a credible reputation for having some sort of mystical insight into the consumer psyche.

…in Long Tail markets—where distribution is cheap and shelf space is plentiful—the safe bet is to assume that everything is eventually going to be available.

Never Eat Alone/Ferrazzi 170-172

172 Social Arbitrage: a constant and open exchange of favors and intelligence, as Greg had so wisely advised.

When someone mentions a problem, try to think of solutions.

First key is, don’t wait to be asked. Just do it.

Real power comes from being indispensable. Indispensability comes from being a switchboard, parceling out as much information, contacts, and goodwill to as many people—in a many different worlds—as possible.

…if you want to make friends and get things done, you have to put yourself out to do things for other people—things that requires time, energy, and consideration.

Winners Never Cheat/Huntsman 91-100

92 Cultivate relationships with those who are teachable.

95 Without lasting respect, relationships won’t long survive. Stand for what is right, not what is popular.

98 In every walk of life we must believe we can succeed or, by definition we already have failed.

99 If a member of your team no longer believes you can attain success, that person—or you—should leave.

100 Failure often is the result of following the crowd.

I want to know the character of the person I am about to put at my side, and it’s not hard to spot.