August 2011 

Our Smarter Advertiser Book Club Choice this quarter is enchanting. Literally. Enchantment, by Guy Kawasaki examines the idea of not simply selling to people, but of delighting them. Kawasaki’s experience at Apple (he was one of the team that launched the original Macintosh) qualifies him to discuss the importance of Likeability in business (and indeed in life).

The other two books we’ve reviewed this quarter are Seth Godin’s latest, Poke The Box, and Dan Gardner’s Future Babble.

Godin’s book advocates disruption – an attitude of: even if it ain’t broke, fix it anyway if you think you can make it better. Clearly, in a world that is changing all the time, a company that stands still will soon be in trouble, so Godin’s encouragement to value change more than you fear risk is worthwhile.

Future Babble examines the phenomenon of experts predicting the future, looking at when they get thing right, when they get things wrong, and how we can decode and decipher such predictions to help us in business.

Enchantment by Guy Kawasaki

What the book says:

As one of the quotes on the front cover says "Read this book to create a
company as enchanting as Apple" Steve Wozniak (Apple Co-founder)

Guy Kawasaki - who has spent the vast majority of his working life
enchanting people as either a serial entrepreneur or Chief Evangelist of
Apple - has written a thoroughly enjoyable book about the power of
Enchantment. By this he means the basic principle of not selling to people,
but delighting them. It’s a simple, but hugely significant shift in mindset
for a lot of people that can form the difference between success and
failure (and often appears to have done so). Guy's lovely start point is
that only two human attributes matter - Likeability and Trustworthiness.
With these as your backbone, passion in your heart and his series of handy
tips both small and large the world can be your oyster. Enchantment
transforms situations and relationships, turns cynics into believers and
changes hearts and minds.

What’s good about it:

This is an amazing book, excellent at every turn (bar a couple of chapters
I'll highlight below). It opens with an incredible story about Karin
Muller, a film-maker who survived the somewhat tricky situation of 17
members of the NPA turning up to interrogate her by offering them a cup of
coffee as they arrived.

Each chapter contains small, simple, everyday, executable advice - among my
favourites are "Swear" (it’s not the latest hip acronym – he just means let your feelings out occasionally); Be useful and
interesting often and without reciprocal expectation (one we've banged on about for years); bake a bigger pie, don’t take a bigger share of a smaller pie; and position yourself clearly (A great man can be summed up in one sentence). Each chapter  also closes with a lovely
personal story from a variety of people, which bring the key points of the
chapter to a clear, concrete, resonant full stop.

You'll have to pick your own favourite chapters, but they include advice on
How to Launch, How to Enchant Your Employees, How to Enchant Your Boss and
even How to Resist Enchantment.

What’s bad about it:

There are two chapters i found slightly less enchanting - How to Use Push
Technology & How to Use Pull Technology - feel free to read them,
personally I’d skip past, that world has kinda moved on a little, but then
2 out of 12 not so good chapters is excellent for most business books

Poke the Box by Seth Godin

Godin latest book is about energy and risk taking.  It is a manifesto for challenging the status quo.  For disrupting what is working ok in order to create things that work better.

During 80 or so very energetic pages Godin encourages organisations to stop ensuring that everything runs smoothly all the time and instead to allow initiatives to flourish.  His thesis is that any organisation that needs a competitive edge (and that is all of us I think), needs to nurture and encourage individuals to be as disruptive as possible.  The culture should allow everyone to initiate change and improvement as opposed to doing as they are told. 

He explains that people running things often come to fear risk more than they value change.  Indeed those who fear risk “also begin to fear movement of any kind… people act as though flux, the movement of people or ideas or anything else that’s unpredictable exposes us to risk, and risk exposes us to failure.”

So the fear of getting things wrong means that we try and preserve the status quo as much of the time as possible.  Obviously in a world that is running according to Moore’s Law (especially in the world of media) this just isn’t possible. 

In Australia they call it the “tall poppy” problem.  If you stand up and stand out then you run the risk of being cut down.    But in this culture there is a huge risk that nothing new will grow.  So if you have an idea for change then make a start on it – don’t wait for permission. 

There is no seven step process here, just lots of examples and stories to encourage you to start something, or to get your team to try new things.  Godin does not shy away from the problem that can also exist where someone starts too many things all at once and never sees them through.  He sees this as the other side of the same coin.  While some of us hesitate when we should be acting – waiting for confirmation or permission – others of us “overstart, constantly dreaming up the next big thing, bigger than big”.  He diagnoses this as a form of hiding from risk. If you’re constantly starting new things you never actually commit to any one of them. 

Instead of this Godin demands that you be the one that makes things happen.  Don’t wait for a road map – start something new today.

Future Babble by Dan Gardner

Dan Gardner's Future Babble provides a definitive explanation of the seemingly prophetic skill possessed by "experts", those select few that are trusted to predict the complexities and anomalies of future events. Throughout the book, Gardner conveys a slightly biased, sceptical opinion, although the reasons for this are quickly conveyed to the reader as we are taken through the history of monumental yet inaccurate predictions. These include advocates of a Third World War, a never-ending supply of fossil fuels, the future prosperity of the Soviet Union and those misguided experts in the early 1900s who guaranteed decades of peace and perfect international relations.

Gardner uses an interesting analogy throughout his book, separating the truly awful experts from the less dismal, by comparing the former to 'foxes' and the latter to 'hedgehogs'. Whilst unusual, this extended metaphor accounts for many of the characteristics of the worst seers; like foxes, they are convinced by their own prophecies and hence have no margin for error when they're proven wrong. Hedgehogs, however, make many predictions but more tentatively, hence allowing them to accept their failures and try to explain away their mistakes. Future Babble explains that when the fate of a business depends on such predictions, these minor differences in human nature can be the difference between total failure and recovery, and hence this book is particularly useful from a professional viewpoint. Gardner delves into the allegedly "expert" minds that attempt to control our economy and analyses the reasons behind centuries of global dependency upon those who claim to see the future, which, on a human level, is an interesting insight into our species' instinctive avoidance of uncertainty.

Most tragic, perhaps, are the complete failures; the renowned economist Ravi Batra's extremely popular book, 'The Great Depression of 1990', topped the New York Times bestseller list before the adequate economic stability of the given year proved him wrong. With the benefit of hindsight, it soon becomes clear that these so-called "experts" are nowhere near as infallible as we would like to believe, and yet the most fascinating theme explored in this book is our almost overwhelming desire to trust them. Gardner attempts to provide justification for this blind faith whilst using numerous examples to disprove the validity of any expert opinion. The success rate is, in fact, alarming, in more ways than one, and this phenomenon provides many different routes for intellectual exploration, making Future Babble an informative and worthwhile read.

 

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