Survival is Not Enough/Godin 32-48

36 The speed of memetic evolution is now the speed of our evolution. The faster we can spread and change memes, the faster our systems evolve.

45 If you work for a company that doesn’t look forward to change, that view change as a threat not an opportunity, then your company is failing, and it’s failing faster every day. You have competitors that will get stronger from the turbulence, And over time, they will win.

47 Four reasons people freeze in the face of change.
Pressure from deadlines
Fatigue
Fear
Bosses who desire closure, not uncertainty

48 In a start-up, if two or three people agree to try something, it gets done.

The Long Tail/Anderson 110-117

115 Filters and recommendations work best at the scale, bringing the mainstream discovery and marketing techniques to micromarkets.

116 Google, which taps the wisdom of the crowd itself and turns a mass of incoherence into the closest thing to an oracle the world has ever seen.

117 This leads to the key to what’s different about Long Tails. They are not prefiltered by the requirements of distribution bottlenecks and all those entail (editors, studio execs, talent scouts, and Wal-Mar purchasing managers). As a result their components vary wildly in quality, just like everything else in the world.

Never Eat Alone/Ferrazzi 165-170

166 1) You help someone fulfill those needs they most need met, and 2) You allow them the opportunity to move up the pyramid of needs to tackle some of their higher desires.

167 I thought of the many men and women whom I’ve helped find jobs.

I work hard to funnel customers to all my contacts who are consultants, vendors, and suppliers of all stripes.

168 passionate about mentoring

169 …their executives’ homes to have dinner, meet the family, and understand how they can really help clients as individuals.

Hell hath no fury like a person for whom you’ve promised the most intimate of help and delivered none.

Winners Never Cheat/Huntsman 78-91

84 Trust, should not be blind. Save blind faith for religion.

85 A handshake should always be as binding as a signed legal document.

90 Judge people by their deeds, not their words and looks.

Life is not a game of solitaire; people depend on one another. When one does well, the others are lifted. When one stumbles, others also are impacted.

91 There are no one-man teams---either by definition or natural law. Success is a cooperative effort; it’s dependent upon those who stand beside you.

The first and most important decision in one’s success is carefully choosing the people who will surround you. Make sure they share your values, make certain their character defaults to high moral ground in times of stress, ensure they are bright and comprehend results, and be confident of their loyalty.

The Wall Street Journal recently ranked attributes recruiters seek in hiring new personnel…were interpersonal skills, an ability to work well within a team, and personal integrity

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 27-32

28 If you can figure out how to trigger a runaway, you may be able do it again, creating a never-ending series of runaway successes.

29 Great people want to work for fast-growing companies. The power of this positive feedback loop is underrated.

30 There’s a different way. We start by bypassing our fear of change by training people to make small, effortless changes all the time. I call this zooming. Then we can build a company that zooms and that attracts zoomers. As the company gathers steam, it will enter runaway, distancing itself from its competitors and dominating markets by embracing the change that will inevitable come.

32 When there is competition, there is evolution

The Long Tail/Anderson 107-110

108 The rise of the search engine as the economic force of Silicon Valley is simply a reflection of the value that we now recognize in the measurement and analysis of the actions of millions of individuals.

The catch-all phrase for recommendations and all the other tools that help you find quality in the Long Tail is filters.

109 In a world of infinite choice, context—not content is king.

110 …we help you find great movies that you’ll really like.

Hastings believes that recommendations and other filters are one of the Netflix’s most important advantages, especially for non-blockbusters. Recommendations have all the demand-generation power of advertising, but at virtually no cost.

Netflix recommendations level the playing field, offering free marketing for films that can’t otherwise afford it, and thus spreading demand more evenly between hits and niches.

Never Eat Alone/Ferrazzi 162-165

163 The only way to get people to do anything is to recognize their importance and thereby make them feel important. Every person’s deepest lifelong desire is to be significant and to be recognized.

…show appreciation and to lavish praise on others than to take an interest in who they are and what their mission is.?

…discovering what matters to people. Helping someone accomplish his or her deepest desires is critical not only to forming a bond with someone but to keeping that bond strong and growing.

165 Every man I meet is my superior in some way, in that, I learned of him. Everyone had something to teach him.

…people’s deepest emotions are tied to…health, wealth, and children.

…But health, wealth, and children affect us in ways other acts of kindness do not.

Winners Never Cheat/Huntsman 68-78

72 Lawyers…They tend to focus on why something should not or cannot be done. Legal beagles make up the tenor and soprano sections of this choir of naysayers. Lenders, accountants, and consultants round out the hand-wringing chorale as the altos and baritones.

Problems nearly always arise when clients allow lawyers to make business decisions they are not qualified to make.

Lawyers are not business people, although many of them would have you believe otherwise.

74 Human beings are innately honest, but if you pack legal heat, the other side will do likewise.

78 Don’t misunderstand. It is important that we listen to lawyers, but only for a second opinion. Your opinion ought to be the first and the last.

The Long Tail/Anderson 101-107

103 Getting online consumers to pay for music today takes more than a catchy single; it requires a real fan base, ideally one spreading the word online.

107 “ We are leaving the Information Age and entering the Recommendation Age. Today information is ridiculously easy to get; you practically trip over it on the street. Information gathering is no longer the issue---making smart decisions based on the information is now the trick…Recommendations serve as shortcuts through the thicket of information, just as my wine shop owner shortcuts me to obscure French wine to enjoy with pasta.”

Amplified word of mouth is the manifestation of the third force of the Long Tail: tapping consumer sentiment to connect supply to demand. The first force, democratizing production, populates the Tail. The second force, democratizing distribution, makes it all available. But those two are not enough. It is not until the third force, which helps people find what they want in the new superabundance of variety, kicks in that the potential of the Long Tail marketplace is truly unleased.

Other tastemakers are celebrities, who are another sort of trusted guide, and whose influence on consumption continues to grow.

Never Eat Alone/Ferrazzi 154-162

157
Become genuinely interested in other people.
Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves
Let the other person do a great deal of the talking
Smile
Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
Give honest and sincere appreciation.

162 What’s your Mission?...What do you really want?...determines all that you do and the people who help you accomplish it.

What drives people…making money, finding love, or changing the world.

Winners Never Cheat/Huntsman 64-68

66 Courage may be the single most important factor in identifying leadership. Individuals may know well what is right and what is wrong but fail to act decisively because they lack courage their values require.

Leaders—whether inside families, corporations, groups, or politics—must be prepared to stand against the crowd when their moral values are challenged.

Courage is the first of the human qualities because it is a quality which guarantees all the others.

68 Following one’s moral compass is not for the faint of heart or the cold of feet.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 23-27

24 Successful businesses hate change. But upstarts and entrepreneurs love change. It’s not going to go away. It’s going to get worse.

Our organizations are not independent machines, standing in the middle of a stable field. Instead we work for companies that are living organisms. Living, breathing, changing organisms that are interacting with millions of other living, breathing, changing organisms.

25…it’s possible for change to present you and your organization with mammoth new opportunities.

27 As soon as some people start to have second thoughts, though, it reinforces the fear across the population, making the problem worse and amplifying it through a positive feedback loop of negative thinking.

Your CFO wants a company nimble enough to pile onto these successes, because it can transform your stock into a runaway hit.

The Long Tail/Anderson 95-101

96 Thus the economic efficiencies of print-on-demand wouldn’t just be extending the Long Tail, but also improving the economics of the head, where there are far more dollars at stake. This is, needless to day, a powerful attraction and will only accelerate the adoption of the technology.

97 The overwhelming trend of our age is to take products that were once delivered as physical goods, find ways to turn them into data, and stream them into your home.

iTunes is building a thriving pay-per-download video business for its Video IPod.

100 Yahoo! Is able to record hundreds of millions of likes and dislikes each year, measuring the taste of its listeners with remarkable precision.

101 These data streams, used cleverly, can unlock powerful new way of marketing music—word of mouth amplified by the feedback effect of adaptive recommendations

Never Eat Alone/Ferrazzi 152-154

154 By adjusting your behavior to mirror the person you are talking to, he’ll automatically feel more comfortable.

“There are so many wonderful people here tonight; I’d feel remiss if I didn’t at least try and get to know a few more of them. Would you excuse me for a second?”

…small talk needs to end on an invitation to continue the relationship.

“The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated”

…be the first person to say hello.

Show empathy and understanding by nodding your head and involving your whole body in engaging the person you’re talking with. Ask questions that demonstrate… sincerity.

Focus on their triumphs. Laugh at their jokes. And always, always, remember the other person’s name.

“You’re wonderful. Tell me more.

Winners Never Cheat/Huntsman 60-64

61 One must have the confidence that he or she will survive when others expire.

There is a great “can do” spirit in each of us, ready to be set free.

…humility is vital for good leadership.

62 Their prime focus should be to create other leaders, the long term and a certain modesty about their own capabilities.

64 Always cheer for the individual director who breaks ranks to propose a novel route, who offers a different perspective, who raises ethical concerns, or who focuses on long-term well being of stockholders.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 20-23

21 My point is that while the world still needs factories, that doesn’t mean you have to own them.

Being factory-centric doesn’t decrease your time to market, it increases it.

The internet is changing everything, but the changes are going to be less visible than we expected.

22 In many ways, the supply chain is now as turbulent as the stock market.

…because the Internet connects every company and every customer in an instantaneous web, where response times approach zero.

23 Efficiency takes a back seat to guts (and luck).

We now live in turbulent times. Everything in our world—from marketing to technology to distribution to the capital markets—is changing faster than ever (and not always in the same direction)

The Long Tail/Anderson 89-95

91 Digital catalogs of physical goods lower the economics of distribution far enough to get partway down the potential Tail.

93 As eBay can attest, selling your software and servers for a fee is about the highest-margin business around.

94 Virual and distributed inventory is a dramatic way to move down the Tail, but getting rid of physical inventory altogether can take you even farther.

95 What retailers need is an efficient, economically sustainable way to sell a book that sells just one copy per year. And that means near-zero inventory costs. (digital files until purchased then printed on a laser printer)