Greatest Hits Blog

The one-sentence summary

To make corporations change effectively, the people who work in them have to behave differently, or be told how to do so.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Powerful brands are built by people, not by proprietary methodologies
• The real issue is not the strategy, but how we need to behave when an organisation’s systems seem more geared to slowing and diluting, than spurring and galvanising
• To achieve this you need to be a Constructive Pirate. This is not the same as anarchy where there are ‘no rules’, but it requires a different set of rules
• It shows how to write your own “Articles” in your organisation
• Even in big organisations, you need challenger sub-cultures

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

It explains nine ways of behaving that stimulate challenger brand cultures:

1. Outlooking: looking for different kinds of insights by:

• Emotional Insertion – Putting a new kind of emotion into the category
• Overlay – Overlaying the rules of a different category onto your own
• Brand Neighbourhoods – Radically re-framing your competitive set
• Grip – Finding a place for the brand to gain traction in contempory culture

2. Pushing – Pushing ideas well beyond the norm

3. Projecting – Being consistent across far more media than the usual

4. Wrapping – Communicating less conventionally with customers

5. Denting – Respecting colleagues whilst making a real difference

6. Binding – Having a contract that ensures everyone comes with the idea

7. Leaning – Pushing harder for sustained commitment

8. Refusing – Having the passion to say no

9.Taking It Personally – A different professionalism that transcends corporate man

Biting the Other Generals is a good concept based on an anecdote from the Seven Years War. A brilliantly unconventional General, James Wolfe, proved himself one of the most talented military leaders King George III had. When some of Wolfe’s detractors tried to undermine him by complaining that he was mad, the king replied: ‘Oh, he is mad, is he? Then I would he would bite some other of my generals’.

The Three Buckets is a good exercise whereby clients have to categorise all their existing projects into Brilliant Basics, Compelling Differences and Changing the Game – usually with poignant results

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

Not much. This is an excellent book and you can use the exercises with pretty much any business

The one-sentence summary

Most news stories are planted by PR agencies without verification and cannot be believed – everybody knows this, so the whole system is discredited.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Global media is full of falsehood, distortion and propaganda
• The author is a journalist who started investigating his own colleagues, only to discover that the business of reporting the truth had been slowly subverted by the mass production of ignorance
• Among the culprits are the Sunday paper that allows MI6 and the CIA to plant fiction in its columns; a newsroom that routinely rejects stories about black people; and papers that support law and order but pay cash bribes to bent detectives
• Many stories are no more accurate than claiming the earth is flat, including the Millennium Bug and WMD in Iraq. These taint government policy and pervert belief
• Most reporters do not have time to check what they are sent – instead they rely on the Press Association or PR stories to generate “churnalism”
• His research shows that 70% of stories are wholly or partly rewritten from wire copy, without further corroboration
• The rules of production are dictated by the media moguls:
• Cut costs by running cheap stories, selecting safe facts and ideas, avoiding the electric fence (any bodies that can hurt the press), and always giving both sides of the story
• Increase revenue by giving the readers what they want to believe in

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• It’s a very ballsy, well-researched book, as you would expect from an investigative journalist
• Revisiting the cosy relationship between PR and the media can’t be a bad thing

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• Public Relations and newspapers are up in arms about the book
• It names names, in a specific and authoritative way
• There is a tinge of ‘chip on shoulder’ about it
• If you work in PR, you need some decent answers to the allegations

The one-sentence summary

Endless choice is creating unlimited demand so you probably need to re-think your business model: make everything available and help customers find it easily (online).

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Endless choice is creating unlimited demand.
• Traditional business models suggest that high-selling hits are required for success. These are at the high-volume end of a conventional demand curve.
• But in the Internet era, the combined value of the millions of items that only sell in small quantities can equal or even exceed the best sellers.
• Modest sellers and niche products are now becoming an immensely powerful cumulative force. In this respect, many “mass” markets are turning into millions of aggregated niches.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• This is a very original and thought-provoking book. It takes a while to get into, but it’s worth it.
• It introduces reasonably complicated mathematical theory in a user-friendly way, particularly micro-analysis of the very end of a very long tail. This is where helpful truths about the economics of your market can be seen properly.
• Contemporary examples from music (radio and album sales), books and films lend a populist slant to the theory, which should appeal widely.
• Old theories such as the 80/20 rule receive a thorough going-over. It’s never exactly 80/20, and the percentages can apply to different things (products, sales or profits). And they don’t add up to 100.
• The nine big rules of the Long Tail are:

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• The model works best with true Internet and digital products that do not take up any storage space. For example, Amazon books still require storage space that has a cost. I-tunes do not. So careful thought is required as to the nature of the market you are analysing.

The one-sentence summary

The Internet has effectively flattened the world to the point where businesses can view the entire thing as both a potential resource and a market.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Knowledge and resources are connecting all over the world, effectively flattening it.
• These forces, which include blogging, online encyclopedias and podcasting can be a force for good – for business, the environment and people everywhere.
• There are ten forces that flattened the world;
• 11/9/89: the day the Berlin Wall came down
• 8/9/95: the launch of the World Wide Web
• Work Flow Software: making much more stuff happen seamlessly
• Uploading: everybody can contribute to online communities
• Outsourcing: your company may not do much of what it sells to customers
• Offshoring: many US services are provided in India
• Supply-chaining: making sure everything arrives in the right place, fast
• Insourcing: for example, UPS repair all of Toshiba’s laptops
• In-forming: Google, Yahoo! and MSN websearch inform people at the touch of a button
• The steroids: digital, mobile, personal, and virtual devices all fuel the machine
• He also outlines The Triple Convergence. This is where new players, a new playing field, and new processes all come together in “horizontal collaboration”.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• It is a superb synthesis of all the developments you can think of in modern communications.
• Many of the elements of globalisation are recorded in a fragmented way. Here they are all drawn together in one place.
• It is very thought-provoking because it highlights how recent so many of the developments we now take for granted are.
• There are lots of anecdotes and examples to bring the drier technological points to life.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• It is very long, so you need a bit of stamina to get through it.

The one-sentence summary

Ignore the experts, stop trying to predict everything, and embrace uncertainty

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Everything is essentially random. Black Swans (unpredictable events) disprove everything we think we know from time to time. Everyone assumed all swans were white until overseas travel revealed black ones – thousands of instances of one thing does not disprove the possibility of another. A turkey is fed for 1,000 days before Christmas, assuming all is fine – then it is killed. The highly expected not happening is also a Black Swan.
• Their impact is huge, they are near impossible to predict, and yet afterwards we always try to rationalise them – an essentially pointless exercise.
• Ignore the experts, stop trying to predict everything and embrace uncertainty.
• It is easier to predict how an ice cube would melt into a puddle than guess the shape of an ice cube by looking at a puddle.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: he has 30,000 books. It’s what you haven’t read, what you do not know, that makes the difference.
• Mediocristan is a land where everything is averaged and so unhelpful to the point of meaninglessness. Extremistan is where all the learning is.
• We can learn from some important lessons:

We focus on small parts of what we know and use them to project what we don’t (wrongly)

We use narrative fallacy (stories) to fool ourselves with reasons that aren’t there

We behave as if Black Swans don’t exist – they clearly do

What we see is not necessarily all there is

Variability matters: “Don’t cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.”

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• The book is quite long and highly technical – it is not for the faint-hearted.
• The author often veers off into anecdote.
• He quite enjoys being obscure or obtuse.
• You cannot approach this book like a dip-in textbook.