The Art of the Start/Kawasaki 10-13

12 Design Different…4 different approaches.

1) I want one. This is the best kind of market research—the customer and the designer are the same person.
2) My employer couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do it.
3) What the Hell—its possible
4) There must be a better way.

13 The wisest course of action is to take your best shot with a prototype, immediately get it to market, and iterate quickly.

…revise it because customers already love it.

The Long Tail/Anderson 203-205

KitchenAid is considered one of the world’s trend-setters in color variety.

204 This tiny amount of variety not only distinguishes KitchenAid among the other mixers and increases its overall sales, but the company has found that adding a third color actually improves the sales of white.

If you shop for mixers on Amazon or KitchenAid.com, you can now pick any of those colors from a drop-down menu.

But all the others sell, too—every one. And each year, somewhere in the top ten, there is a color that nobody expected to be popular.

205 But until KitchenAid had an online channel that allowed customers to pick from its full range of products, it had no way of knowing that there was latent consumer demand that it hadn’t previously tapped.

Never Eat Alone/Ferrazzi 241-242

242 Getting the word out.

Think Small—go local first.

Make a Reporter Happy—Never blow off an interview, and try to facilitate the contacts they’ll need to produce a good story.

Master the Art of the Sound Bites—Tell me why I should write about you in ten seconds or less. Learn to be brief—in both your written and phone pitches. Pick the three most interesting points about your story and make them fast, make them colorful, and make them catchy.

Don’t Be Annoying—It is okay to be aggressive, but mind the signals, and back off when it’s time.

It’s All on the Record—All press is not good press, even if they spell your name right.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 97-103

98 The challenge companies face is not in inventing new ideas. It’s in moving the old ideas out of the way so that they can implement the new ones.

99 Get the incremental, continuous innovation stuff right and the bigger, scarier innovations are likely to take care of themselves.

102 Getting comfortable with a winning strategy makes it incredibly difficult to embrace change.

103 The first is that following someone else’s path is often an excellent substitute for the perceived risk of original thinking.

The second disincentive is that sticking with tried-and-true approaches helps justify past decisions.

The third reason is that until recently, feedback loops were slow and unreliable.

The Long Tail/Anderson 198-203

199 Demand will shift to shorter content for convenience and entertainment, and longer content for substance and satisfaction.

202 filters…mostly in the form of search and a multilevel category structure, to help buyers find what they’re looking for.

eBay…it’s the ultimate small business aggregator.

203 eBay, surprisingly, often doesn’t know what’s being sold on its site.

…own Web sites, too, and Google’s Froogle, Yahoo! Shopping, and other aggregators are finding smarter and smarter ways to extract the necessary information from these hundreds of thousands of merchants and create a virtual marketplace that can offer product-comparison features eBay cannot. The challenge for eBay will be to do the same within its own service, keeping competitors at bay by providing better filters to help customers find what they want and buy with confidence, not just in the seller but in the product.

KitchenAid is considered one of the world’s trend-setters in color variety.

Never Eat Alone/Ferrazzi 237-241

238 Over time, the hours you put in developing relationships with journalist will pay off..

239 The best journalist are almost always also the most ethical.

239 If a reporter calls you, states his story and the angle he’s taking, you can be sure you’ll be used as an example to buttress his angle.

241 send a press release

Nothing infuriates reports and editors more, I’m told, than to get a pitch from someone who clearly has no idea what their publication is about or who their audience is.

I’ve got a story for you that I know your audience will be interested in, as I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

What’s your slant? Anything that screams ‘NOW”

The Art of the Start/Kawasaki 5-10

7 Postpone writing your mission statement…instead craft a mantra for your organization .

Mantra…A sacred verbal formula repeated in prayer, meditation, or incantation, such as an invocation or a god, a magic spell, or a syllable or potion of scripture containing mystical potentialities.

10 No one ever achieved success by planning for gold.

You should always be selling---not strategizing about selling.

It’s not how great you start—it’s how great you end up.

The enemy of activation is cogitation.

3 key principles of getting going.
1) Think Big.
2) Find a few Soulmates. Successful companies are started, and make successful, by at least two, and usually more, soulmates. …the innovator gets the credit, but it always takes a team of good people to make any venture work.
3) Polarize people

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 91-97

93 Rather than treating jobs as cogs in a well-tuned machine, management could treat building an organization as an opportunity to perform artificial selection.

94 Quotas are worse than useless unless they’re accompanied by control.

More important than pruning his ranks, Jack’s artificial selection policy has a huge impact on the people GE has an opportunity to hire. People who are afraid of being in the bottom 10 percent are far less likely to apply. He’s breeding a group of super-managers.

95 Companies that know how to zoom will attract employees who want to zoom.

When your company start hiring zoomers, it’s going to zoom faster!

97 The Innovator’s Dilemma---points out that incremental change in big companies sets them up to fail when the really big things come along.

The Long Tail/Anderson 194-198

195 Of all the traditional media industries, television is now the industry with the greatest potential to be transformed by Long Tail forces. Here’s why:

TV produces more content than any other media and entertainment industry

Only a tiny fraction of it is available to you.

…the ratio of produced content to available content is higher than in any other industry.

198 Google Video content…most is three minutes long or shorter.

…a medium that lies somewhere between passive television watching and interactive Web surfing.

Suddenly, it’s about what we want; not what the distribution channel wants.

Never Eat Alone/Ferrazzi 233-237

234 create buzz: Buzz is marketing on steroids

234 catalytic moments. Buzz is like that. It needs a situation, a pivotal moment, an inside scoop, a crazy giveaway—something that will get the crowd whispering.

Another way is to report compelling news by leveraging the power of the media to get your brand sizzling.

It’s imperative that you identify those people and get your brand in front of them.

237 While money can certainly be a substitute for good PR, it’s hard to have enough of it to offset the credibility one gets from just one article in Forbes or the New York Times.

Reports continually ask, “But why is it important NOW? If you can’t answer that sufficiently, your article will wait.

Once you light a fire and get the buzz going, you want to get your story in front of journalists.

You have to start today building relationships with the media before you have a story you’d like them to write.

…offer to be interviewed for print, radio, or TV. Never say “No Comment”

The Art of the Start/Kawasaki xii-5

3 …top list of the most important things an entrepreneur must accomplish.

Make Meaning….makes the world a better place.
Make Mantra...take your meaning and make a mantra out of it.
Get Going…Start creating and delivering your product or service.
Define your business Model…figure out a way to make money. The greatest idea, technology, product, or service is short-lived without a sustainable business model.
Weave a Mat (milestones, assumptions, and tasks) a) major milestones you need to meet; b) assumptions that are built into your business model; and c) tasks you need to accomplish to create an organization.

5 Do I want to make meaning?

Make the world a better place.
Increase the quality of life.
Right a terrible wrong
Prevent and end of something good.

I want to enable people to create products, build great companies, and change the world.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 89-91

90 Too often, companies organize themselves around one and only one winning strategy and then rely on plan P when the external factors don’t pan out. Alas, plan P is to panic.

90 Just because you picked the numbers on the lotto card doesn’t mean that you’re more likely to win the lottery.

91 But there needs to be far more chaos and far less control.

91 Wal-Mart. Sam was obsessed with testing, measuring and implementing. He organized to evolve.

For 20 years, Sam Walton tested and measured and then implemented every principle he could.

The Long Tail/Anderson 184-194

185 There are no masses, there are only ways of seeing people as masses.

190 …the blogosphere is the greatest vector for new voices ever created. The convention of linking to ideas and information of merit, wherever they come from, be it professional or amateur, is a powerful force of diversity.

191 It’s the end of the couch potato era.

Online today we’re doing different things, but we are more likely to encounter other individuals, either by reading their writing, chatting live, or just following their example.

194 But the day when the Internet become a real rival to TV appears near.

Never Eat Alone/Ferrazzi 228-233

229 Package the Brand: Everyone sees what you appear to be.

230 Broadcast you Brand: Take on the projects no one wants at work.

232 …those people who are known beyond the walls of their own cubicle have a greater value.

If you don’t promote yourself, however graciously, no one else will.

Like it or not, your success is determined as much by how well others know your work as by the quality of your work.

233 …once you get written about, other reporters will come calling.

The key is to view the exposure of your brand as PR campaign.

Everyone you meet and everyone you talk to should know what you do, why you’re doing it, and how you can do it for him or her.

The Art of the Start/Kawasaki xi-xii

xi …entrepreneurs bring the future closer. They dream up “the next big thing,” change the world.

The reality is that you need both microscopes and telescopes to achieve success.

And doing, not learning to do, is the essence of entrepreneurship.

xii My presumption is that your goal is to change the world.

The key to their success is to survive the microscope tasks while bringing the future closer.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 86-89

87 Evolution works because the tireless efforts of trillions of entities will always defeat central planning.

88 She can build an organization that responds to change by evolving, or she can design a company that relies or decrees from top management about strategy and tactics.

…people frequently confuse control with impact.

…because they enjoyed feeling as though they were in control and transferred that feeling into the irrational belief that is would increase their odds of winning.

89 We’ve got really smart people, an excellent attitude and an organization that’s designed to evolve and change. We’re not sure what he future brings, but we are sure that we’ve got the fast feedback loops and bias to evolve that we’ll need to stay ahead of the competition.

Understanding how your business will thrive given one particular set of facts is critical if you are to have any hope of building a real company, or of making reasonable business-building investments.

The Long Tail/Anderson 180-184

181 The result is that more and more individuals, who had been using only the (generic) mass medium because that’s all they had, have gravitated to these specialty publications, channels, or web channels, or websites. More and more use the mass medium less and less. And more and more will soon be most. The individuals haven’t changed; they’ve always been fragmented. What’s changing is their media habits. They’re now simply satisfying the fragmented interests that they’ve always had. There are as many fragments as there are individuals. Always have been and always will be.

184 In short, we’re seeing a shift from mass culture to massively parallel culture. Whether we think of it this way or not, each of us belongs to many different tribes simultaneously, often overlapping (geek culture and LEGO), often not (tennis and punk-funk).