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Small Is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas
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Sales rank 46,827
Customers rating (based on 51 reviews)
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More provocative business thinking from the bestselling author of Purple Cow and All Marketers Are Liars As one of today’s most influential business thinkers, Seth Godin helps his army of fans stay focused, stay connected, and stay dissatisfied with the status quo, the ordinary, the boring. His books, blog posts, magazine articles, and speeches have inspired countless entrepreneurs, marketing people, innovators, and managers around the world. Now, for the first time, Godin has collected the most provocative short pieces from his pioneering blog—ranked #70 by Feedster (out of millions published) in worldwide readership. This book also includes his most popular columns from Fast Company magazine, and several of the short e-books he has written in the last few years. A sample: • Bon Jovi And The Pirates • Christmas Card Spam • Clinging To Your Job Title? • How Much Would You Pay to Be on Oprah’s Show? • The Persistence of Really Bad Ideas • The Seduction of "Good Enough" • What Happens When It's All on Tape? • Would You Buy Life Insurance at a Rock Concert? Small is the New Big is a huge bowl of inspiration that you can gobble in one sitting or dip into at any time. As Godin writes in his introduction: "I guarantee that you'll find some ideas that don’t work for you. But I’m certain that you're smart enough to see the stuff you’ve always wanted to do, buried deep inside one of these riffs. And I’m betting that once inspired, you’ll actually make something happen."
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| Publisher | Portfolio Hardcover | | Release date | 08/2006 | | Availability | Usually ships in 24 hours | | Edition | Hardcover |
| | List price | $25.95 | | Our price | $17.13 (you save 33.99%) | | Used price | from $3.5 |
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 Caution: This Book will Change the Way You View Marketing, For the Better
Small is the New Bigis a collection of insightful entries from Seth Godin's blog and his articles for FastCompany. It is an unconventional read that doesn't flow as poetically as a novel and lacks the organized structure of a Harvard Business Review publication. But the pages filled me with fresh ideas and made me think of common sense approaches to everyday marketing challenges.
For example Godin injects realism by stating, "You don't get the priveledge of deciding what people will think. If they think it, then their truth is already established. The challenge of marketing is to get ideas to spread". He states that the Internet was a commercial success because it spread an idea virus.
He tells the story of Apple trying in vain to convince Windows customers to switch to Mac OS. Apple failed because people weren't thinking about switching, their mindset was not open to the idea, let alone the reasons. Sort of like interrupting someone with a bargain as they are making their way to board an airplane, no matter how good the bargain people aren't in the frame of mind to accept it. It wasn't until Apple changed people's mindset by getting them to accept the iPod. Once customers say yes to the iPod, it opens their worldview to accept other Apple products that they were previously not open to. By starting a 'cascade of flips', Apple is flipping customers from PC to Mac at a growing rate. Could Lenovo leverage this strategy by getting people to accept saying yes to Lenovo with enticing accessories, and leverage the 'yes' mindset to reverse attach a Desktop PC, Monitor or Notebook?
Seth also highlights the importance of design and style by stating that 'design is free'. An illustration is the stylish carpeting, lighting and layout of an Apple store. The Apple store Godin argues, needed carpeting, lighting and a layout anyways, but Apple management took the time to think about the guts of the experience, not just the store fixtures. This example mirrors Seth's statement that "disrespectful method of communication quickly turns into no communication". Can Lenovo corporate website, storefronts, and presentations be enhanced through even more intelligent design and style?
The final key point I learned from Seth is that in today's Web 2.0 with Flickr, Twitter, youtube, Facebook, slideshare...Marketing is no longer about TV ads, sports sponsorship or tradeshows, it is about Interaction. So we should stop waiting and design that webpage, develop that new form factor and pick up the phone to reach out to the customer. "Waiting is pointless".
Stay on top of change and spurn some creative thinking
Very inspiring and entertaining. Spurns creative thinking. Good book on staying on top of change. Some really good short essays. Again, so much to learn about yourself and your business with Seth Godin's writings I highly recommend.
Tidbits and insights from best-selling author Seth Godin
These collected entries that best-selling marketing author Seth Godin gleaned from his blog offer a variety of world-of-work musings, from the reasons benchmarking can boost employee performance to the nature of hard work and the challenge of change. Godin himself warns that this is not a dense, researched report, but a compilation of bright ideas, inspirations and tales from the work of business. His fairly random assortment of observations includes some that are interesting, clever and useful, though perhaps not independently book-worthy (or they would be books), and others that are a bit breezy and insubstantial. He suggests reading a few pages until you find a juicy segment and coming back another day for a new sip. getAbstract thinks that's just the right recommendation.
 Life's too short to waste time on this
Okay, I tried to get through this tripe, but Mr. Godin's newest is so negative that I just could not digest the entire thing. I could not imagine actually spending a day in person with a man who seems to spend his entire life looking for what is wrong in this world. I drove back to work today to retrieve a Stephen Covey book that I started about the same time as "Small." I felt like I had pulled up my anchor and reset my sails.
 Not Business as Usual
If you are looking for some ideas to jump start your creative juices, take the few hours necessary to breeze thru this collection of blog posting from Seth Godin, blogger extraordinaire and seller of confidence for those needing to step outside their box. You do not need to have read his best-seller, "Purple Cow", or even be your company's marketing chief to find useful ideas and some interesting perspectives on inconsistencies that show-up in our everyday business transactions or even personal interactions.
Being someone who promotes personal responsibility in organizational process, I loved his statement, "...anonymity as the enemy of civility...", and thus transparency and accountability as the answer to email spam or telemarketers. And, I loved it when he wrote "benchmarks = mediocrity": If everyone is doing the same thing; it delivers, by definition, average performance. I doubt that you will agree with every one of his opinions, as expressed in these 183 blog postings, but you will surely find enough to make this book a keepers; or, as I shall do, something to pass along to a friend or relative.
Dennis DeWilde, author of "The Performance Connection"
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