| | |  | Andy Sernovitz | | Home » | | | | | | | Product Promotions: | | | | | Description: | | 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 | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Guy Kawasaki | | Paperback:
| 224 pages | | Publisher:
| Collins Business | | Publication Date:
| May 01, 2000 | | ISBN:
| 088730995X | | Package Length:
| 8.22 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.34 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.56 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.43 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 105 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
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Good reading overallAug 27, 2008
After reading the Art of the Start, I decided to purchase it and this book, Rules for Revolutionaries. As with the Art of the Start, I found the book motivating and an interesting read. The one downside of the book is that there is some overlap between it and The Art of the Start.
 A good book, but buy 'Art of the Start' insteadApr 23, 2008
Mr. Kawasaki is an ethusiastic author and this book is an adequate primer on the subject of entrepeneurship and general business 'starts'. The best book on this though is his 'Art of the Start'. That is the book you want for the same material, refined, updated and better organized.
1 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 Valuable advice that stands the test of timeMar 05, 2008
Guy Kawasaki is a genius. I mean it: here's a guy who wrote a book back in 1998, who is most famous for being the Chief Evangelist at Apple. Yet his book bypasses tech talk altogether as its focus and succeeds at presenting us with a volume that, even ten years later, is loaded with wisdom that any self-respecting entrepreneur ought to be reading.
The philosophy underlying the rules for revolutionaries sounds quite simple yet it's very powerful: create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave. Each of these parts in his book is further broken down to facilitate digesting it. Since others here have done a find job at analyzing the three main components in the past, I am focusing on the aspects that stood out for me.
Work the edges: Kawasaki borrows the concept of "edges" from architecture to have revolutionaries focus their energy where it is going to be best spent. By edges, he means where one surface or material meets another or changes into another. He says: "The action is not in the centers or areas of sameness," and he is very much right about this. Examples of this are: how a customer service representative deals with a customer, even more so with a customer who is bringing up an exceptional issue; and the user interface of software or product, where the user interacts with the functionality.
"Revolutionary products don't fail because they are shipped too early. They fail because they aren't revised fast enough." He doesn't condone poor product design with this comment. He rather condemns poor product management. In coming up with a recipe for great products, he expands a concept he introduced in a previous book seven years before: DICEE,
-D for deep: the mark of a deep product is wishing it had a feature after you've used it for a while and then discovering that it already does.
-I for Indulging: it is more than what you minimally need and costs more than what you could have minimally spent.
-C for complete: this focuses on the documentation and the customer service.
-E for elegant: without elegant design, people cannot figure out how to use deep products.
-E for evocative: you should strive to create something that some people will love rather than something everyone will merely like.
"Sometimes you have to 'hear' what people would say if only they knew better." How many times, while managing a product, have you heard nice-to-have feature requests that sounded like essential to the people requesting them?
"A significant gulf, the 'chasm,' exists between the market made up of early adopters, and the markets of more pragmatic buyers." Do everything you possibly can to make the chasm as small as possible, which means tearing down barriers for your product users to learn about your product, care about your product enough to change their existing habits, gain access to your product, be able to afford it and learn how to use it.
After you have broken down or lowered the typical barriers to adoption of your product, you should build a cocoon around your customers so the competition can't attack you.
Evangelism starts with a great product or service. With success typically being equal to Facts (features customers want) divided by price, one can increase success by adding more features (increase the numerator) or reducing the Price. Evangelism provides a third method for increasing the numerator: adding Emotions to the Facts before dividing them by the Price.
"Make the optimal solution feasible -as opposed to making the feasible solution optimal." -this is one of the most brilliant phrases in the whole book!
"Ensure backward compatibility for evolutionary improvements to your product. But when it comes to revolutionary leaps, make your product so innovative that people won't care about backward compatibility."
"The more information you give away, the more you get as people come to trust you and see mutual benefits." -who remembers that movie?
"Big titles mean little to revolutionaries. All you care about is that a person 'gets it' and wants to help you." -very true!
"Tolerate criticism. Not only should people feel free to plug competitive products, they should be able to criticize your own... first, this produces good PR because tolerating criticism on a company-sponsored site is unheard of; second, this produces few and voluminous customer feedback."
And last, but not least: "As long as customers are still complaining, they still want to do business."
Now I am reading "Selling the Dream", another one of his books. I am convinced!
EntertainingOct 20, 2007
This is one of my favorite books on the right mindset for startups. Go against the grain, overcome all obstacles, spend as little as possible, be excellent. Highly recommend.
Nice read for unexperienced entrepeneursJul 04, 2007
I like this book a lot, it's clear, simple and fun to read. It has a step by step approach. And if you like to know certain clues about how nice products like the iPod and the Macs have created their way into the consumer's world, you will like this book even better.
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