Ok ok… Too many book reviews! I know. Unfortunately this last book that needs to go back to the library TODAY is going to drive many many more of them. I just finished Guy Kawasaki’s Reality Check. 
. Full disclosure, I *love* Guy Kawasaki and I have ever since I read “The Macintosh Way” back in 1993 when I worked for IBM. My team was trying to learn how to evangelize products like the did at Apple – and Guy was the best.
He still hasn’t changed. He is funny, he uses great stories to illustrate his points, AND he brings in a lot of published experts to help him make his case. Hence my realization that I will be reading more books – many many more books. This is a fantastic book for anyone who wants to start or run a company. A bit of the content in here can be found on his blog as well as some in the presentation “The Art of the Start” which you can find on my twitter feed.
One of my favorite quotes is “If the two most popular words in your company are “partner” and “strategic,” and “partner” has become a verb, and “strategic” is used to describe decisions and activities that don’t make sense, it’s time for a reality check.” This is so true. If the partnership doesn’t enhance BOTH of your bottom lines in some way then it isn’t worth doing!
Other concepts that I have seen in real life before include:
- For a new product – add 6 months to a year to your scheduled ship date depending on the status of your prototype.
- For new product sales – take your “conservative” top down estimate and divide it by 100!
Yep, sounds crazy but I’ve worked for companies creating very complex new products that were well over a year late! One was a startup, one was a big company that should have known better.
I’ve also been in all hands meetings where month after month the sales pipeline looked so huge, but nothing ever managed to close. Because the sales projections were so high we all felt like a bunch of losers. It takes a lot of time to sell a new product if you are an unproven startup!
This book is great. It talks about raising money, planning and executing, innovating, marketing and much much more. I highly recommend it.
This is a followup book to their Extraordinary Leader tome that I recently read. I have to say that I was a little bit disappointed by this book. On the whole, it wasn’t bad, but it was very predictable. There was really nothing in it that made me go “AH HA! That’s the key!” I found it to all be common sense and many of the studies and literature that they referenced were things that I have already read. I do think that this book has value, especially for someone who hasn’t been in the management trenches for a long time or for someone who really isn’t big on reading management theory or self-help books in this area. It’s a good concise read that gathers a lot of loose ends together.
