Rules for Revolutionaries

Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist at Apple Computer and an iconoclastic corporate tactician who now works with high-tech startups in Silicon Valley, is back in print with his seventh book: Rules for Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services. Entertainingly written in collaboration with previous coauthor Michele Moreno, it lays out Kawasaki's decidedly audacious (but personally experienced) strategies for besting the competition and triumphing in today's hypercharged business environment. The book is divided into three sections, whose titles alone epitomize its thrust and tone. The first, "Create Like a God," discusses the way that radical new products and services must really be developed. The second, "Command Like a King," explains why take-charge leaders are truly necessary in order for such developments to succeed. And the third, "Work Like a Slave," focuses on the commitment that is actually required to beat the odds and change the world. A concluding section is filled with entertaining and inspirational quotes on topics like technology, transportation, politics, entertainment, and medicine that show how even some of our era's most successful ideas and people--the telephone, Louis Pasteur, and Yahoo! among them--have prevailed despite the scoffing of naysayers. --Howard Rothman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

If music (Big Yellow Taxi) and television (That '70s Show) can look to the 1970s as a source of current inspiration, why not business books? That's the implicit argument of Forbes columnist Kawasaki's (How to Drive Your Competition Crazy) new book, which tries to capture the attitude of Apple Computer some two decades ago, when its goal was to make "insanely great products." This tone doesn't occur by accident. Kawasaki was director of product development at Apple. To his credit, Kawasaki, who now runs garage.com, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, succeeds in being inspirational as he lays out his three steps to success: "Create Like a God," "Command Like a King" and "Work Like a Slave." Each section is filled with dozens of ideas about how to approach a market differently, and he gives pithy examples of how firms ranging from bicycle companies to Internet enterprises applied one of the three steps on their way to market. But while long on inspiration, Kawasaki is short on "how to." He has sprinkled the book with "exercises," but they are primarily there for comic relief, rather than instruction (e.g., "The next time a telemarketer calls you at home, ask for his phone number and tell him you will call him back that night"). Ultimately, however, these shortfalls probably don't matter. Kawasaki gives entrepreneurs and team leaders battling entrenched corporate bureaucracies more reason to keep up the fight. It is very hard not to like a book whose major theme is "don't let Bozosity grind you down." 
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.