Review # 26 Long Tail

The world is changing, surprisingly some companies do not quite aware of this change and that can be extremely dangerous. 

It’s quite certain that 90% of the companies that still conduct business the same way 5 years from now will be out of business. 

Change is inevitable, do you have the “change strategy” in place yet? 

The long tail suggests the phenomena where most individual now have their own version of how they perceived themselves to be and do not want “one size fits all” products and services anymore. We can no longer categorized the client to be in age, sex, income or other demographics as before. The diversity of cultures and interests are far beyond that. 

Therefore, market is now looking for more of an individualization and will jump to it when its available. The need to be “unique” is much stronger now than anytime in our history and the tools in the market allow that to happen as well. 

Chris Anderson defined the long tail phenomena as follows 

1. The tools of production become widely available 
2. The costs of distribution are cut appreciably. 
3. Some way of connecting supply and demand is established. 

Perhaps the easiest example is to look at your friends’ iphone, you will find out that no two iphones are alike. It basically customed to fit each person’s lifestyle and interests. This is the simplest example and if you look around you will see much more. 

Let’s see

Do you know how many variations you can get in Starbucks?

guess...guess....guess

19,000

Wow, this means that I can go in to Starbucks everyday for the rest of my life without having to order the same coffee ever again.

Another issue is demonstrated via the 20/80 concept. 

For those who knows me personally, you probably know that I was a big fan of 20/80 however I do have to agree with the author that the below curve of 80 has a great potential (which normally underrated). To capture this potential, the important element is to understand how the information travels. 

The world of invisible market has turned visible. The long tail market is a multi billion dollar business. 

I would like to take part of the book that kind of sum it all up. If you not going the read the entire book at least read the next paragraph.

“For around $30,000, you can now buy a machine called a Solidscape T66 3-D printer for your home. A 3-D printer is a domestic factory, capable of manufacturing almost anything in lot sizes of one. 3-D printer us a laser to turn a bath of liquid polymer or power into hard plastic in any shape you desire. Feed it a 3-D object file, such as the output of a CAD program or even the screen captured polygon file of a character from a video game, and the laser will go to work tracing it out. Layer by layer, a perfect plastic reproduction of the object emerges out of the bath. It’s like magic. Someday, they may be as common as inkjets and not much more expensive. Just think about what that might enable. As 3-D printing technology extends beyond brittle plastics to range of materials, from metals to synthetic fibers, we may be able to self-manufactured spare parts, toys, perhaps even entire machines that we’ve downloaded from some virtual retailer. Today you can print your own photographs at home, tomorrow you may print the frame, too Like everything else, tomorrow’s long tail of things will be aggregated, efficiently stored as bits, and then delivered to your home via optical fiber. Only then will it be materialized, coming full circle to atoms again at the point of consumption. It sounds like science fiction, but then again so did having an entire music library in your pocket just a decade ago. In the worlds of entertainment and information, we’ve already lost the capacity constraints of shelf space and channels, along with their one-size-fits-all constraints. Soon we may lost in our culture thanks to digital efficiencies will extend to every part of our lives. The question tomorrow will not be whether more choice is better, but what do we really want? On the infinite aisle, everything is possible. ”

One flaw about this book is that I don’t like the way they arrange the paragraphs. It’s kind of difficult to read. 

All in all, it’s a nice read. 

8.5/10

Cheers

Tab

book review # 25 what got you here, won't get you there

Book review # 25 what got you here, won’t get you there

When my friend who bought me this book told me that “ this book change my life”, I knew at that instance that this is not an ordinary book and I was right.

It’s not my usual practice to read any books more than once but I read this book three times already and probably will going to read it again in the future. 

First of all, this book is written for a certain group of people i.e. those who has certain level of accomplishment in their professional life (however the context of this book can also be apply to improve personal life as well) but knows that something is holding them back of from become even more successful. 

The book presents us with simple yet profound concept. The 20 bad habits of successful people that keep them from excel further. When I go through this book, I realize that every high achievers, executives and entrepreneurs  I have met in my  entire adult life (my self included) has at least couple of these habits. 

Let’s look at one example from bad habit #7 i.e speaking when angry 

“a buddhist legend tells of a young farmer who was covered with sweat as he paddled his boat up the river. He was going upstream to deliver his produce to the village. He was in hurry. It was a hot day and he wanted to make his delivery and get home before dark. As he looked ahead, he spied another vessel, heading rapidly downstream towards his boat. This vessel seemed to be making every effort to hit him. He rowed furiously to get of the way, but it didn’t seem to help. 

He yelled over the vessel, “ Change direction, you idiot! You are going to hit me. The river is wide. Be careful!” His screaming was to no avail. The other vessel hit his boat with a sickening thud. He was enraged as he stood up and cried out to the other vessel, “ You moron! How could you manage to hit my boat in the middle of this wide river! What’s wrong with you?”

And he looked at the other vessel, he realized that there was no one in the other boat. He was screaming at an empty vessel that has broken free of its moorings and was going downstream with the current. 

The lesson is simple. There is never anyone in the other boat. When we are angry, we are screaming at an empty vessel. 

A sage would say that the person making us so angry cannot help who he is. Getting mad at him for being who he is make as much sense as getting mad at our desk for being a desk.” 

quite sharp isn’t? 

let’s try another one

“Being smart turn people on, announcing how smart you are (directly or indirectly) turn them off.”

simple yet powerful massage 

This book is similar to a mirror, when you read and think about yourself you will see that you have at least couple of these habits. I personally think that I have quite a lot and I determine to fix it as much as possible. 

As we advance through the ladder of our personal and professional life, we usually find out that outcome of our effort is no longer based on what we “do” but rather on what we “manage”

I strongly recommend this book for everyone who needs to “manage” someone. 

9.8/10

Cheers

Tab

Book review # 24 Team Turnarounds

Book Review # 24 Team Turnaround

by: Joe Frontiera and Daniel Leidl

It has been about 6 years since I quite my job at Citibank and work on my own. From quite a tiny company we have grown into somewhat a small-to-medium size company. During that time, my management team and I focus almost all of our energy to improve sales. Which is quite intuitive considering our dream of becoming a listed company one day. Along the way, our staff has gone from 30 something to 120 people. However, we still don’t have any kind of intact modern strategy to deal with human management. As a matter of fact, our management still have little to no idea what HR is. The problem is quite obvious, while the sales is growing strong, the soul of the company isn’t. I can’t even define a real company culture and I realized that this is a problem.

Before I go hire a consultant to fix the problem, I want to know more about the sciences of human resources, perhaps even into team building. Therefore, my latest books  purchase will mostly team building and human resources not just marketing and strategy like before. I have to know what the principle behind these sciences is, or else I won’t be able to distinguish good consultant from the rest of the crowd. Hence, the arrival of this book in my library. 

This book is very concise, although it has 215 pages, it feels like only a hundred. It might be becuase the spacing is so wide. Anyway, it as simple reference book that give you six steps to turn around the failing team into a winning. This book has lots of examples but most of them focus on the turnaround of sports teams (I’m sure that the author is a big fan of NFL). The six steps are 

1. leading past losing 
2. committing to growth
3. Changing behaviors
4. embracing adversity
5. achieving success
6. nurturing a culture of excellence

My favorite part of this book is on pages 165 onwards which give you a concise playbook you can use in workshops and internal meetings that is easy to understand and will generate real value if use correctly. Most exercise sample in this book has a very good  philosophy behind it. 

My experience with this kind of book is quite limited therefore it would be kind of difficult to me to compare this book with its peer. However, judging by my own personal standard, I think it’s good for managers with no HR background. The book is simple just the way I like it. I recommend those who really want the frameworks in the book in workshops and meetings should take note of your understanding of the framework before you actually use it like I did. I'm sure that it will be very useful

8.5/10

Cheers 

Tab

book review #23 the lean turnaround

Book review # 23 : The Lean Turnaround 

I currently attracted to all the things “Lean” recently, considering quite a new management concept that start out but not exclusively as a part of manufacturing management model. However, it is now considered as a strategy that have to be applied across the company. 

The author of the books has been implementing lean strategy in various US based companies both in manufacturing and services business. Therefore, lots of example will be mentioned in this book about those companies. 

This book stress that contrary to popular believes, lean is not just a “manufacturing thing”, it’s a strategic approach that covers all angle of business management.  

The main thing that considered most importance is that the transformation must come of people in the company not the machine or technology. Lean is also a time-based growth strategy which takes time to implement, don’t expected to get it done in days or even months even. It takes a committed team to be able to pull this off. The mindset is to get the ideas generated from the people in the line of work not just couple managers in the meeting rooms. 

“in any business, the only element that are capable of true transformation is people” 

Lean strategy needs to start with lean leadership which is the opposite of a traditional leadership where the working mindset is give orders, hire the experts and stay out of nitty-gritty. Lean leadership is about involvement, if we are talking about manufacturing firm, the CEO will have to be involve on the factory floor to some extend detail instead of giving orders in his or her ivory tower office. 

“if you don’t try something, no knowledge will visit you” 

Before reading this book, I highly recommended that you should get yourself familiar with the kaisen concept becuase it was referred to many times in this book. Also, it’s one of the fundamentals of lean strategic implication. 

This book is quite practical is the sense that it has laid out couple useful framework. For example, it stated that standard cost-accounting is the “anti-lean” concept it rewards the activities that the lean concept trying to avoid. Take the inventory for instance, in the lean world, inventory is considered the root of all evil becuase inventory itself is a waste to value-generating. However, in  the cost-accounting world, it rewards those who built inventory by allowing them to defer portion of their production costs to later period. This concept is very interesting that I myself needs to get another book which give me more details of this issue. 

Since there might be some technical stuff needs to be review later, I recommend that you should take short notes along the way while reading this book as I do so. 

It is a nice book for top management and CEOs who really wants to transform the way their company works and thinks. Hopefully, it will be the fundamental of your “lean” organization in the future. 

8.5/10

Cheers 

Tab 

Book review # 22 The Launch Pad 

If you read the inner cover of this book it will said that its about investment firm  Y combinators which is a famous incubator for startups in Silicon valley. The book is about Paul Graham, a visionary in this business who has funded many successful start-ups. 

In the first chapter of this book Graham said

“If you start a startups, you will probably fail. Most startups fail. It’s the nature of the business. But it’s not necessarily a mistake to try something that has a 90 percent change of failing, if you can afford the risk. Failing at forty, when you have family to support could be serious. But if you fail at twenty-two, so what? If you try to start a startup right out of college and it tanks, you will end up twenty-three broke and a lot smarter. Which, if you think about it, is roughly what you hope to get from a graduate program. “

Brilliant guy isn’t he? 

However, after finish this book, I believe this is the book about determination, the story of people who wants to be different, who wants to stand out, who believes is total devotion and perhaps who wants to change the world. 

They all start off small, some of them end up where they start but a lot smarter, some of them end up big. Neither, all of them inspires generations to come. They are the seeds of the true revolution of this world. 

However, it does come with a hell of responsibility. As Graham said 

“Here we don’t fire you. The market fires you, If you are sucking, I’m not going to run along behind you saying  You’re sucking, you’re sucking, c’mon, stop sucking.”

Graham stress that the most successful startups are the ones that completely remove all distractions. “ They just sleep, eat, exercise and program” that’s the kind of devotion you need to have. Forget parties, movies, long sleep or  fancy dinners. It’s just 30 mins jogging in the morning, 16 hours of work and 5 hours of sleep and tons of frozen food  along the way. 

That’s what built greatest companies in the world in this century 

As Harj Tagger, 19, and Oxford University student and cofounder of Auctomatic, which was acquired by Canadian media company for $5Million, wrote

its suddenly dawns on you that there’s actually a chance you can succeed  despite stupids odds. Logically speaking you can argue success stories there’s a hundred failures, you might say. And you might well be right. The point is that sometimes you just need to forget what logic tells you and just go after something because you want it that bad - YC gives you the belief to do that by placing you in the perfect environment. 

 

What you will definitely learn from the book,  more than anything, is that devotion is what makes these start ups a success story. 

Is this book for everyone, I certainly don’t think so. You will definitely enjoy more of this book if you are in the IT business. But generally it is good for all people who wants to start a startups. 

8.5/10

Cheers

Tab

book review # 21 Steal like an Artist

Book review #21 Steal Like an Artist 

“the only art I”ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from”

This nice small cartoonish book has packed something much stronger than it looks. With 140 pages but not so many letters, anyone can finish it within less than an hour. 

It talks about how to unlock your creativity in a down-to-earth manner (yep, there are  books that talk about creativity like something godsend). The book itself is very pure and sample. Nonetheless, I do not agree with all the ideas written in it but as the writer said on the back === “Y.M.M.V” which, according to him, means your milage may vary. In other words, the writer told us to feel free to take what you can use and leave the rest. Which is exactly what I did. 

Let’s go through the book a little

It started by giving the idea that nothing is actually original, all of the work (not just art) are copied from sources. I like how the writer define the difference between copy and plagiarism. The definition of the the title “steal like an artist” is the fact artists have a way copying idea that create not destroy. Unlike many people nowadays that their so called “ copy” actually destroy as it gets away, just like plague. 

Now things start to get interesting, the book challenged you that you shouldn't wait for anything and start your dream right in moment of uncertainty when it seems like all things around you can collapsed like house of card. Give yourself a try, we only have one life to live. Normally, it will turn out not to bad. 

And when you achieve it, it’s very important to share it to others or else it wouldn’t be an achievement at all. 

The rest of the book is somewhat inspiring (i would say that I agree to about 80% of the content). However, even though it’s against what you believe, it’s still nice to read. Isn’t that the beauty of differences? 

This book should is what I classified as a self-help-inspirational-generated book where I’m sure that everyone will find pieces of the persons we want to be. it’s good to have it by your bedside just to cheer you up a little when bad day comes.

it’s cost a little bit more than a nice lunch, I think you should give it a try 

8.5/10

Cheers 

Tab

MrRawit: Book Review # 20 : Winning at Innovation ตีกรอบให้...

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