Top Shelf Reading Picks:

As I close out my 2008 reviews, I thought it was quite fitting to end with Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition, by Guy Kawasaki.  This is because my big beef with 2008–besides the nastiness that we all, present company included, succumbed to–was that it exposed our society as one where people could act as if they would never be held accountable for their actions.  Blagojevich; Madoff; Stevens; Spitzer; Edwards;  auto, insurance and finance execs are the obvious examples that spring to mind.  Sort of like their own version of “Guys Gone Wild!”  But we all have experienced these “not my fault” types much closer to home in our own companies and neighborhoods.

This is why I found myself hoping that one day my son would be an entrepreneur. Now, I wouldn’t wish upon him all the stress that comes with being an entrepreneur. However, I do want him to run his own business at least once in his life, even if it’s mowing lawns for a summer. Why? Because when you start a business from scratch, at least in the startup phase, you’re completely accountable for your actions as well as any success or failure.

This is where Guy’s book, Reality Check, fits in with my end-of-the-year ramblings. It’s a straightforward, blunt handbook outlining what it’s really like to start and run a business. Yes, there are truckloads of fabulous tips and common sense advice that will make you go “Doh!”  However, one theme that struck me was that as an entrepreneur, you will fail and you will make mistakes, but that’s part of learning.  Own your mistakes, learn from them and move forward.  In other words, be accountable.

At first, I thought I would be put off by the book’s style as I’m not a huge fan of books made up of blog posts and columns.  Yet I was completely won over by Kawasaki’s intro, where he explains that he noticed people using his blog to research past postings and he wanted to provide them with his best information in an easy-to-digest manner.  He definitely accomplishes this.

There’s too much in here to review, but I’ll focus on the handful of the sections I earmarked as thought-provoking enough to put down the book and rethink my business plan (for me, that puts Reality Check in the category of a Top Shelf “Must Read” Top Pick).  Although, I admit, there were more than a few sections that I earmarked simply because they made me laugh.

From: The Inside Story of Entrepreneurship

• Startups are freak-catchers.  “To join a startup, to leave a Microsoft, you have to be fundamentally unhappy with the way things are and unrealistic enough to believe the world can change.”  My thoughts?  All I gotta say, is “Bless all the freaks,” every last one of us.
• Everyone has to rebuild.  Shortcuts and problems will happen in your first version of things.  Don’t get discouraged or shortsighted; just buckle down and rebuild it.  This personally hit home at exactly the right time, as we are in the midst of rebuilding parts of www.DowntownWomensClub.com that I thought we were long done with.

From:  The Art of Bootstrapping.
I liked this section because, in reality, most entrepreneurs are going to be starting their businesses with minimal funding.  Some of it is common sense, but some of it isn’t:

1. Focus on cash flow.  “Cash is not only king, it’s queen and prince, too, for a bootstrapper.”
2. Forecast from the bottom up.  Start with what you can realistically output, rather than on what the potential size of the market could be.
3. Ship, then test.  In other words, this is not the time to be a perfectionist.
4. Forget the “proven” team.  Someone with 10 years at a large company might not be relevant in a startup.
5. Start as a service business.  Start providing services before you launch a product to the marketplace.
6. Focus on function, not form. “All the chair has to do is hold your butt.  It doesn’t have to look as though it belongs in the Museum of Modern Art.  Design great stuff, but buy cheap stuff.”
7. Understaff.
8. Go direct.  Cut out middlemen when you can.
9. Position against the leader.  Don’t try to explain your story from scratch if you can position against the leader. I must have recited this to myself one hundred times before we finally came up with the new tagline we’re launching in January.

Other intriguing sections:

How I Built a Web 2.0, User-Generated-Content, Citizen-Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09.  Not only is this a good barometer for what you should be spending to create a social media site, but also it’s a great checklist for what you should be doing and should be prepared for in a launch.

How to Kick Silicon Valley’s Butt. This interested the old commercial real estate professional in me.  Kawasaki attempts to answer the question, “How can you create another Silicon Valley?” One thing that caught my eye was his statement that the governments trying to do this should not focus on “creating jobs,” because that perverts the goals of a startup (e.g, see above about understaffing). This is directly opposed to my own state’s focus on creating programs catering to companies that will “create jobs.”

Tips from Woz (Steve Wozniak).  I confess that I have to thank Kathy Griffith for getting me intrigued with the Woz.  But Kawasaki includes a section of outtakes from a book about Woz called “iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon–How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It.”  The summation of his advice on being a great engineer is typical of the book (e.g., not what one would expect):

1. Don’t waver.
2. See things in gray scale.
3. Work alone.
4. Trust your instincts.

Stupid Ways to Hinder Market Adoption.  This was another great checklist where I found myself doing my best Homer Simpson impression and saying “Doh!” more times than I’d like to admit.

From The Art of Selling:  Sell, don’t enable buying.  “If you don’t have an iPod-like product, you need face-to-face, personalized, and intense contact.”

The Zen of Presentations.  A good section to read before you give your next PowerPoint presentation.

How to Kick Butt on a Panel.  Everyone focuses on keynote speeches, but here are tips about sitting on a panel, especially why you should never say, “I agree with the previous panelist.”  He also includes a section on how to be a good moderator.

The Art of Customer Service.  This is where accountability really comes into play. Kawasaki says that two concepts are the core of great customer service: welcoming criticism and fostering discourse.  This section covers how to do both of those things.

The Art of Sucking Down.  Sometimes it’s people we may view as beneath us who hold all the cards.

Of all the chapters in the book, however, the one that I love (maybe because it has particular relevance at this time of my life) is his excerpt from Robert Sutton’s “The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t.”  Kawasaki gives us a couple of lists in this section. The first is “How to identify if someone is an a*shole.” Somehow having a list of factors to check off depersonalizes it so that you can realize that no, it’s not you, it’s that the other person is really just an a*shole.

So next time someone just strikes you as being a bit of a jerk, you can see if he or she exhibits any of the following everyday as*hole actions.

1. Personal insults
2. Invading one’s personal territory
3. Uninvited personal contact
4. Threats and intimidations, both verbal and nonverbal
5. Sarcastic jokes and teasing used as insult delivery systems.
6. Withering e-mail flames
7. Status slaps intended to humiliate his or her victims
8. Public shaming or status degradation rituals
9. Rude interruptions
10. Two-faced attacks
11. Dirty looks
12. Treating people as if they were invisible.

Reviewer sidenote:  One thing I noticed is that all of these “actions” are very typical of individuals suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder. For more about that check out:

• Why Is It Always About You? : The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism
• The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists: Coping with the One-Way Relationship in Work, Love, and Family

The No As*holes chapter has two other good lists: How to avoid being an as*hole ; and how to deal with them.  He also recommends Googling people’s names and the word “as*hole”.  I tried this (as Kawasaki reports doing in the book) and was pleased to note that there were only 27 results.  Ironically, the majority of these were due to the fact that I was mentioned in an article on the same page as Robert Sutton and his “No As*hole” book.  As for the other sites, fortunately, the word was used but not in reference to me!

I have to say that section was, for me, the highlight of the book. I could have ended there, but I’m glad I didn’t.  The last section on social entrepreneurship and making change by doing good are well worth the read.

The Top Shelf Bottom Line:  This is the ultimate compendium of everything you need to know to start a business and succeed (or fail forward).  A must-read if you are thinking of or in the midst of starting up a business.

I also wanted to add in this one afterthought.  People may dismiss Kawasaki as a “social media evangelist.”  But I note that he wrote this print book as the best way to catalog his online ideas.  That’s a good indication of someone who understands how people use the web, as well as its shortcomings.

I wasn’t a fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s second effort, Blink, because I didn’t think that Gladwell really explained what he set out to do.  However, in Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell gives us some concrete ideas and examples that are relevant in a society that worships superstars or, as Gladwell calls them, outliers.

Before we get to the interesting concepts, I will say that my big criticism of the book is that it’s another one of these “single concept” books that you can read in a morning (as I did . . . stuck at an indoor waterpark with three 8-year-old boys).  Will it change your business plan?  No.  Will you become an outlier? Unfortunately, it may be too late for that.

Nevertheless, you will find some “aha” moments that might explain a lot.  For example, while I knew intuitively that birth order had a bit to do with sports success, it was shocking to see how most pro hockey players were born in January/February/March.  Why?  Because many junior hockey leagues have cutoff dates of Jan. 1. This means that players born at the beginning of the year are competing against less “mature” kids.  They are bigger, stronger, get picked for the elite leagues and benefit from better coaching, more training and competitive opportunities for the next few years.

But it doesn’t stop there.  To be a true outlier, Gladwell found that individuals didn’t just have to make the “team.” They had to put in 10,000 hours of practice.  Of course, making the elite team helps put a child on the path to that 10,000 hours.

The sports focus is what stuck with me the most, having just lived through a child not making an elite team.  Watching the tryouts, I could see how having a basketball court at your house is part of what makes the difference at this young an age–it allows kids to put in that 10,000 hours.  It also made me reflect on how the 10,000 hours I put in on the soccer fields and tennis courts is what propelled me–a somewhat coordinated but not very fast, not very agressive or very strong athlete–to more than my share of championships.

But the 10,000 hours isn’t just relevant in the sports arena.  It turns out that the Beatles, Bill Gates and countless other superstars have put in their own 10,000 hours before they hit it big in their industries.  For example, Joe Flom, the only living original-name partner of the firm Skadden Arps toiled over 10,000 hours in obscurity doing what was then the “distasteful” work of hostile takeovers before the white-collar firms realized the profits in it.

This is perhaps the main lesson entrepreneurs can take away from the book:  There are no overnight sensations.  Many of us are putting in the time now to catch a wave that will hit sometime in the future.

There are a few other interesting ideas in the book, such as how when you were born (meaning the year, as well as the month) can also affect your ability to succeed, and how cultural influences can lead to plane crashes.

Top Shelf Bottom Line:  For those of us who are trying new things and waiting for the world to catch up, it’s enlightening.  And for those of us wiping away children’s tears when they don’t make the cut, it’s validation for when we tell them that they need to practice more than the others if they want to make it the next time.  For everyone else, it’s an interesting and fun read. Good for cocktail party banter; but it’s not likely to affect your bottom line, at least not in the near future.  Yet you might want to check back after 10,000 hours.