EMBA的小眼睛

Here it is: My fall book list—this time, it's half a dozen new books, some music and even a gadget.

(Here are three past lists).

For the first time, I'm building my list using the beta version of a new Squidoo tool we call postcards. Now it's simple and easy to highlight a product or an idea and share it with friends. We take the postcards you build and arrange them into stacks, organizing them by creator, topic and popularity. You can even embed a postcard onto a website (see below).

What you see are the first steps of what we hope will be a powerful platform. I hope you'll try it out by recommending a few finds of your own.

Too simple

If the explanations you're demanding for what works aren't working, perhaps it's because you're avoiding nuance in exchange for simplicity.

It would take Lee Clow far more than five minutes to explain how to design an ad that works. Clive Davis didn't have the words to tell you what would make a hit record. Even the ostensibly simple food of Alice Waters can't be easily copied by an amateur.

And yet your boss keeps asking you to explain your whole plan in three Powerpoint slides.

The VC who allocates one minute to understand why your business will work has done everyone no favors. The blog reader who clicks away after a paragraph wasted his time visiting at all.

When everyone has access to the same tools

...then having a tool isn't much of an advantage.

The industrial age, the age of scarcity, depended in part on the advantages that came with owning tools others didn't own.

Time for a new advantage. It might be your network, the connections that trust you. And it might be your expertise. But most of all, I'm betting it's your attitude.

The fermata

A bias for trust

The end of should

Banks should close at 4, books should be 200 pages long, CEOs should go to college, blogs should have comments, businessmen should be men, big deals should be done by lawyers, good food should be processed, surgeons should never advertise, hit musicians should be Americans, good employees should work at the same company for years...

Find your should and make it go away.

Confusing lucky with good

This is why internet successes fade. This is why amateur salespeople so often fail to become professionals. This is why one-off sports analogy stories make no sense. Successful at the beginning blinds us to the opportunity to get really good instead of merely coasting.

The only thing more sad than the self-limiting arrogance of the confusion between lucky and good is the pathos of the converse: confusing ungood with unlucky.

Most people with a big idea, great talent and/or something to say don't get lucky at first. Or second. Or even third. It's so easy to conclude that if you're not lucky, you're not good. So persistence becomes an essential element of good, because without persistence, you never get a chance to get lucky.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/12/confusing-lucky-with-good.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29

Would you consider pre-ordering?

At the end of the year, I'm bringing out three new books at the same time.

Copies of the books recently arrived at my office. Paging through them, I'm thrilled at how they came out, and together, they might represent my best ever effort at communicating the revolution we're living through. I hope you'll take the time to give them a read.

Three books at once might be crazy, but with your help, it might turn out to be a great idea. This is about making books for my readers, as opposed to finding readers for my books--and it all depends on whether you choose to read the books and to spread the word.

The first, the core book of the three, is The Icarus Deception. (BN) (5 pack) (outside US) It's about the death of the industrial economy, the need for art and the chance of a lifetime. You can read a free sample here.

桑原晃彌/日本CULMAN公司顧問

　我們的終點，不在於何時。創造出最好的產品，才是我們的終點。

　在工作或人生這種長期抗戰中，會因為終點設定的地方，而產生極大的差距。

　賈伯斯重回蘋果的隔年，在產品發表會的演說尾聲，加上了「危機解除了。營收增加中」這句話，被視為是曾經面臨倒閉危機的蘋果，正朝著復活之路前進的宣言。

　但是，賈伯斯卻認為，這不是所謂的終點。

桑原晃彌/日本CULMAN公司顧問

　賈伯斯的創意來自「夢想」。但這絕非癡人說夢。賈伯斯的夢想，是能夠賭上自己一生的遠景。孕育並實現這些夢想的自由樂園，便是蘋果。

　「我們以自己所描繪的遠景作賭注。與其跟別人做一樣的東西，不如以自己所描繪的遠景作賭注。大家都做得出來的東西，就交給其他公司來做就好了。下一個要描繪的夢想，對我們來說，才是最重要的。」

　「必須不斷思考下一步。」

　賈伯斯的宿敵比爾．蓋茲所創立的微軟，可說是藉由不斷改良Windows而致富的公司。相對於此，蘋果的策略絕非改良，而是不斷地推出新產品。

荒河菜美 /時間設計師

　與其擁有十個杯子，倒不如一個杯子使用十次

　物品變多，一點好處也沒有。整理起來費工夫、使用時也得花時間選擇、房間的空間也被壓縮⋯⋯。正因為現在是個放任不管，物品就會慢慢增加的時代，所以思考盡可能不增加物品，用少少的物品生活，才是聰明的生活方式。

　物品一少，就變得會去思考運用的方式。暢銷書《少少的物品富裕的生活》（大和書房）的作者，同時也是料理研究家的大原照子女士，聽說她曾經用一個行李箱體驗英國的生活，而她也真切感受到，即使是少少的物品，也能過著富足的生活。所以，她就幾乎把家中大量的調理道具、家具等物品都處理掉了。

　正因為物品少，才得以運用

Persuade vs. convince

In a hurry to be generous

史萊渥斯基(Adrian J. Slywotzky)、卡爾．韋伯(Karl Weber)/奧緯國際管理顧問公司(Oliver Wyman)合夥人商業與當代事務作家

　美國頂尖交響樂團設法去除需求絆腳石對於有意成為需求創造者的人士而言，最微妙也最重要的一項挑戰，就是「一般顧客的迷思」。

　以美國頂尖交響樂團的行銷經理為例。這項職務的工作非常困難，因為要設法吸引消費者，讓他們願意購買高價的入場券，並且奔波到市區去聆聽現場演奏的古典音樂，而不是將時間與精力投注在其他各式各樣的娛樂上，特別是其中還有許多是免費的。

　長久以來，這項挑戰總是令人望之生畏。不過，現在終於發現為古典音樂開啟未來需求的祕訣，就在於揚棄「一般顧客的迷思」，正視世界的真實狀況，即所有人以及他們的需求，其實都各自不同。

　大部分的音樂行銷者向來認定，說服潛在的新聽眾嘗試聆聽交響樂乃是擴大需求的關鍵。幾乎每個交響樂團的行銷人員都常把這句話掛在嘴上：「把人拉進音樂廳的大門！」他們認為，只要民眾走進當地的音樂廳聆聽一場音樂會，音樂本身的優美就足以吸引他們再次回來。

賈斯汀．曼克斯(Justin Menkes)/高階主管能力評鑑專家

　想像一下，你目前為一家大型醫療產品供應公司工作，業務團隊目前正使用的公務車，三年租賃合約馬上要到期了，你在考慮改租油電混合車。不過，雖然油電混合車很具吸引力，但它們的租賃價格比一般汽油車高出二○％。你有個直接部屬做了下列評論，你會如何反應？

1.在某些車禍事件中，已知油電混合車的電池會裂開，造成人員受傷。
a.沒有交通工具是絕對安全的。
b.如果油電混合車發生車禍傷亡事件的整體比例較高，那這點很值得考慮。

鄒景平/總裁學苑專欄作家

　大規模網路公開教學(MOOC)這股風潮中，主要有兩大類教學網站，一類以名校名師為號召，例如Coursera、edX等，另一類是以達人為號召，如Udemy，Lynda等。只要你胸中有料、有熱情，又想開課，那麼隨時都可透過Udemy，達成這個願望。

　因為我曾使用Udemy的網站功能，嘗試編寫一門課，Udemy常寄些訊息給我，教我一些如何開課和吸引學生的招數。這種關係給我的感覺，是很商業性的，直到最近我收到Udemy的創辦人Eren Bali的來信，他分享自己的創業故事，突然讓我產生出一種全新的感受。

　我感覺自己變成Udemy的朋友，很希望看到它順利成長，也希望自己能幫上一點忙，看來說故事的力量真的很大！

　Eren Bali說他自己是土耳其人，出生在土耳其的小鄉村。村里的小學只有一間教室，聚集五種不同年級的孩子，一個老師要盡力教好這些不同需求的孩子，真的很難。所以孩子們必須想辦法自學，或透過書本來學習。

The cycle of customers who care

Four questions worth answering

Vendor shout out

Yelp and other sites make it easy to honor a favorite restaurant. Amazon lets you praise the author of a book that touched you.

But what about the hard-working and insightful organizations we work with to make our businesses succeed? We spend all day with them, and bet our reputations on them, but it's not often we get to highlight the vendors who bring humanity to their work. It's so easy to focus on the broken software and the broken promises that take up so much of our time, but it turns out that it's the miracle workers that actually make our best work possible.

As I finish up my huge Kickstarter project, I wanted to share the names of some of the folks I counted on to make it work:

Michael Quinn is a print broker who keeps his promises, no matter how complicated the job is.

Broken events