Intellectual Capital/Stewart 16-21

18 You would be hard-pressed to find a single industry, a single company, a single organization of any kind, that has not become more “information-intensive”—dependent on knowledge as a source of what attracts customers and clients and on information technology as a means of running the place.

20 If you want to figure out what a business is doing, follow the money. The trail leads straight to information.

21 …year one of the information age…ever since, companies have spent more money on equipment that gathers, processes, analyzes, and distributes information than on machines that stamp, cut, assemble, lift, and otherwise manipulate the physical world.

The Art of the Start/Kawasaki 35-44

38 Positioning is more powerful when it’s personal because potential customers don’t have to take the step of imagining how a product or service fills a need.

40 A far better way to distinguish your product is to offer concrete proof points so that people can deduce its unique qualities.

Example: Intuitive…you can set it up in one day, and end users need no training.
Secure…No one has ever hacked it.
Fast…Real-world results show a fivefold improvement in throughput.
Scalable…It has handled as many as 20,000 transactions per second.

44 I pitch, therefore I am.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 117-119

118 The lesson of the cassowary is that sexual selection is as important as natural selection in creating interesting species. Sending fitness signals efficiently saves you time and money and, more important, leads to better mates and more offspring.

Signals that give a company an edge over the competition that is worth more than the cost of the waste are probably worthwhile.

119 Instead, it will take brave bosses who start small and invest in their employees and make zooming a requirement for job success.

In order to get people to embrace change, the office has to be not just safe for people to admit what they don’t know, but unsafe for those whose conduct discourages change.
Culture as it is practiced in many companies, is overrated, while the importance of the day-to-day interactions between employers and employees are underrated

Never Eat Alone/Ferrazzi 272-275

272…can’t be their best unless they have a good coach in the corner.

…mentoring is one of the most effective strategies to get the best out of each and every individual.

274 …mentoring—a lifelong process of giving and receiving in a never ending role as both master and apprentice

No process in history has done more to facilitate the exchange of information, skills, wisdom, and contacts than mentoring.

275 “Always try to rub up against money, for if you rub up against money long enough, some of it may rub off on you.”

The Art of the Start/Kawasaki 30-35

33 As a startup, you’re trying to start a fire with matches, not flamethrowers.

34 In other words, put one niche in your basket, hatch it, put another niche in your basket, hatch it….

35 Don’t Compromise on your name
1) Have a First initial that’s early in the alphabet
2) Avoid Numbers
3) Pick a Name with Verb Potential.
4) Sound Different (as Opposed to Think Different)
5) Sound Logical
6) Avoid the Trendy

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 115-117

116 Signals matter

Apparent over spending on high-leverage signals may be the best investment you make in a new project.

117 Six ways companies can use signaling strategies.
1) Have a very fancy receptions so the potential employee will be more likely to accept your job offer.
2) Hire an extremely well-paid, highly esteemed executive, regardless of price, if the presence of that executive signals the gatekeepers at crucial clients or backers.
3) Run intentionally wasteful direct mail campaigns that reach very small numbers of influential targets. Send signed leather hardcover books by Federal Express to the fifty people you most want to seduce.
4) Fire a profitable client in a very public way.
5) Hire a beautiful receptionist.
6) Pay your receptionist $10 million in bonuses for no good reason.
The goal of each of these strategies is to waste money, but to do it in a way that brings maximum impact. Because if you waste the money the right way, you’re not really wasting it, are you? All too often companies waste money indiscriminately.

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 12-16

14…you’re paying for his brainpower.

16 Brian Arthur, an economist who divides his time between Stanford University and the Santa Fe Institute, summarizes the shift this way: In the old economy, people bought and sold “congealed resources”—a lot of material held together by a little bit of knowledge. (Think of an ingot of aluminum, for example made of bauxite and huge amounts of electricity according to a 100-year-old smelting process.) In the new economy, we buy and sell “congealed knowledge”—a lot of intellectual content in a physical slipcase. (Think of a piece of computer software, or a new aircraft, most of whose cost is R&D.)

Never Eat Alone/Ferrazzi 264-272

272 It wasn’t enough to get things done. You had to get things done and make the people around you feel involved, and not just part of the process but part of the leadership. I learned that commitments weren’t commitments unless everyone involved know what was on the table with absolute clarity.

Never let the prospect of a more powerful or famous acquaintance make you lose sight of the fact that the most valuable connections you have are those you’ve already made at all levels.

272…can’t be their best unless they have a good coach in the corner.

…mentoring is one of the most effective strategies to get the best out of each and every individual.

The Art of the Start/Kawasaki 29-30

30 What do you do? Developing a good answer to this question involves seizing the high ground for your organization and establishing precisely how it differs from the mass competition.

Qualities to aspire to:
Positive: They want to know what benefits they drive from patronizing your company or service.
Customer-Centric: Positioning is about what you do for your customers.
Empowering: Employees must believe that what you do (that is, your positioning) makes the world a better place.

Good positioning also embodies these qualities:
Self-Explanatory
Specific: Good Positioning targets the intended customer
Core. The core competencies of your organization
Relevant.
Long Lasting. Aim for positioning that will last one hundred years. Differentiated.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 112- 115

13 The way we used to do business—depends on highly profitable physical goods and manageable cycles of change—is over.

You can’t manage change. Change manages you.

14 Business That Don’t Change Are in Danger: Winners change; losers don’t

15 The first is that you should never take a job that requires you to bring your own grease rag to work. Second, jobs in which you don’t initiate change are never as challenging, fun or well paid as those in which you do. And third, companies that don’t change, vanish (my snack bar is now a shoe store)

Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence—only in constant improvement and constant change. That is, excellent firms of tomorrow will cherish impermanence—and thrive on chaos. Tom Peters

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 1-12

3 …knowledge-based economy, evidence of how knowledge has become the most important component of business activity.

4 …managing intellectual capital should be business’s first priority.

Information age economy, whose fundamental sources of wealth are knowledge and communication rather than natural resources and physical labor.

12 Knowledge has become the primary ingredient of what we make, do, buy, and sell. As a result, managing it—finding and growing intellectual capital, storing it, selling it, sharing it—has become the most important economic task.

Never Eat Alone/Ferrazzi 258-264

259 People are always hungry to congregate with other people with similar interests, to make a difference in their communities, and similar interests, to make a difference in their communities, and to create an environment that makes it easier to do business.

What is your unique selling proposition

263 Rally people behind them and make your own difference.

264 …you’ll benefit from belonging to something larger than yourself.