Short reviews of seven new business books offering information on marketing, starting a business, and problem solving. Plus: a best-selling author lists his favorite business books from this year.
Book Value
Challenge your thinking with the wisdom in these books
If I can't sell, you can keep your revolution
Rules for Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services, by Guy Kawasaki with Michele Moreno, $25
Radical Marketing: From Harvard to Harley, Ten Who Broke the Rules and Made It Big, by Sam Hill and Glenn Rifkin, $36.50
(both from HarperBusiness, 1999)
The oldest come-on around is the one that promises something new. How many times have your eyes skidded over book jackets that insist, " Everything you know is wrong"? Or, " Throw away the old rules--these are the new rules!" It's too bad, because the best books are often the ones that go back to basics. Take, for example, Guy Kawasaki's Rules for Revolutionaries or Sam Hill and Glenn Rifkin's Radical Marketing. Despite the breathless titles, there's nothing really radical or revolutionary about either one. They're essentially books about how to be a smart marketer.
Radical Marketing is built around 10 company examples and what the authors describe as the 10 rules of radical marketing. Among them: "The CEO must own the marketing function," "Get out of the head office and face-to-face with the people who matter--the customers," "Use market research cautiously," and "Hire only passionate missionaries." It sounds like a lot of standard consultantese, but don't let the insights into the obvious fool you. Although some of the company cases will be familiar (the Grateful Dead, Boston Beer Co., Harley -Davidson Motor Co., Virgin Atlantic Airways), others offer stories you may not have heard anywhere else (like those of Snap-On Inc., Iams Co., Providian Financial). All are solid case studies full of useful stories of smart marketers.
The chapter on Snap-On's history, for example, lays out a brilliant, counterintuitive strategy. Rather than using traditional distribution channels, the company has built a mobile-dealer network. Instead of sitting on a phone in a warehouse, each of the Snap-On guys drives around in a van full of tools, bringing the goods right to the customers. Each van visits 200 to 3,000 customers every week and produces about $400,000 in annual revenues. Using that tactic, the company grew to $1.7 billion in revenues and $150 million in earnings in 1997 and captured a 60% share of the mobile-van automotive-tool market.
Compared with Radical Marketing, Guy Kawasaki's book takes a more tip-filled, cheerleading approach, with chapters broken into sections enjoining readers to "Create like a god," "Command like a king," "Work like a slave," and other crackerjack bits of strategic advice. But there's good stuff here too, including Kawasaki's guide to becoming a company evangelist (as he was for Apple Computer). He also gives a brief primer on finding market-research information relatively inexpensively on the Internet. And there's a chapter subtitled "Ne Te Terant Molarii," which translates as "Don't let the plodding millers grind you down." It is Kawasaki's entreaty not to let the naysayers keep you from driving on toward success. (He includes a copy of a rejection letter he received in 1982 from a Microsoft recruiter.)
Kawasaki writes frequently about his own trials and tribulations with technology, including an episode in which his E-mail system got corrupted and deleted a slew of his unread messages. To his surprise, no one ever wrote him back to find out why he hadn't responded to his E-mail messages. He now recommends that others practice the mass-delete tactic occasionally to manage their information overload. He's a practical guy and presumably is putting his tactics to work at Garage.com, his Silicon Valley company, which helps start-ups find seed capital.
I know what you read last summer
The Harvard Entrepreneurs Club Guide to Starting Your Own Business, by Poonam Sharma et al.
(John Wiley & Sons, 1999, $14.95)
Inc. Yourself: How to Profit by Setting Up Your Own Corporation, ninth edition, by Judith McQuown
(Broadway Books, 1999, $27.50)
The Accounting Game, by Darrell Mullis and Judith Orloff, with Larry Bograd
(Sourcebooks, 1999, $16.95)
What is it with Jennifer Love Hewitt? First she stars in teenage slasher movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer, and now she's an icon for college entrepreneurs. That revelation is the most curious thing about The Harvard Entrepreneurs Club Guide, which turns out to be a fairly standard how-to-start-a-business tome. The book covers all the basics, from marketing and finance to writing a business plan, without ever actually saying whom the authors are targeting--college students or anyone else who might want to start a business. The how-to advice is solid, but then there's the Jennifer Love Hewitt stuff. One of the contributing writers calls her his "inspiration," and the book ends by citing her motto--"Always follow your heart"--as the best advice any entrepreneur can receive. Whatever.
If you're contemplating incorporating your business or know someone who is, take note of the ninth edition of Judith McQuown's Inc. Yourself. First published in 1977, the book is a solidly researched and written classic on the topic of starting a corporation. Previous editions have sold more than 500,000 copies, and there's a good reason for this book's success: it's reliable. The new edition is updated to reflect all the changes in corporate structure, taxes, and pensions that have occurred since the last edition came out.
