As part of my commute in my previous job, I would see commuters each day in the streets of San Francisco and my curiosity had me asking:  “has the proliferation of smart phones made listening to or looking at their phones as essential to the daily commuter as getting that Starbucks coffee before making that last stroll into the office.” My analytical inclination led me to do some simple, research of pedestrian commuter habits in downtown San Francisco.

As part of my commute each work day, I took the Caltrain near my home  to the final stop at 4th Street and King Street in downtown San Francisco.   From there, I decided to walk to the financial district of SF where my office was located—a daily one way walk of about 25 minutes—a great way to get exercise.   Here’s a map of my walk with pins for the beginning and end locations.

I decided to use these daily walks to perform a social experiment and measure some urban commuter demographics.

Here’s what I did.

Step 1: I used the Iphone apps TallyCounter and Tallymander to tally the number of people I passed while making my walk over the course of several weeks.

Step 2: Each tally was done at the same time on different days of the week—I’d usually arrive at the Caltrain station around 8:40 and make the walk between 8:40 and 9:10 AM.  My route was the same each day, up 3rd Street and ultimately to the office on Sutter Street.

Step 3:  I only counted people who I passed, those walking in the other direction.  That way I could get a good look at them.  I did not count people walking with me in the same direction.  Thus, people who were also coming from the train station and making the same walk were not counted.

Step 4:  My first count was to count the baseline—how many total people did I pass during my walk.   I took the average tally of two walks to serve as the baseline.

Step 5: I then chose a few different activities or characteristics and made my tallies—counting each one twice over the weeks and using the average.

The activities I measured:

1. People walking with earphones in their ears
2. People walking with a coffee cup or other beverage container in their hand.
3. People walking while talking or reading from their phones.
4. People walking while talking to someone else.

My baseline count turned out to be 328 People, 55% Male and 45% Female.

Now, comparing the % of each activity to the baseline, here’s the results:

Conclusions:

• People walking with earphones (16%) is as common as many more human needs activities- drinking coffee (14%), talking with others (11%).
• More people while walking are using their phones (16%) to listen to music or podcasts than talk on the phone, text with their phones or read content (7%).
• Majority of people are just walking—not listening to music, not talking on the phone, not even holding a coffee cup.

Overall, the answer to my initial question about whether using their phone has become as integral as getting coffee in the morning for urban pedestrian commuters would have to be a Yes!

While of course a small sample size and not statistically signifacant, it seems that people don’t necessarily have to have accompaniments like music or coffee while walking to work, but of those who do, they’re as likely to be listening to music as they are to be drinking coffee or talking to a fellow commuter.    This research won’t lead to any Nobel Prizes, but hey, I needed some way to make my morning commute more interesting.

Either someone took the phone or the phone stopped working and the telco company didn’t see the need to replace it.  In any case, I wonder if many people even noticed or cared if the phone was there or not.   Given that a developing country like Thailand has mobile phone penetration rates near 100%, the need for public pay phones certainly doesn’t seem that high, particularly in urban areas.  You see this same phenomenon in the US and Europe, with long ago installed pay phones that have little to no use.

This visual scene got me to reflect on my days working at Intel in the Silicon Valley with their wireless products group in 2004- 2005.   At that time, Intel along with others in the wireless industry were looking at ways to economically proliferate hotspots and help build a market for wireless devices with their silicon products.  In developing countries, where wireline broadband  penetration at the home was low, kick starting a mobile broadband ecosystem in economies where users could access broadband on mobile devices such as laptops or smartphones away from home was critical.  Hotspots would be a critical part of that strategy.    But finding available locations for the Wifi access points would require time consuming negotiation and co-ordination with different levels of governments.   So, it seemed natural that the carriers would turn their existing pay phones which were increasingly sitting idle into public hotspots.   Again, this was 2005, and I expected this would be common place for years to come.   But it never really happened then nor become part of the mainstream in developing countries, and the US for that matter.

Fast forward now to 2011, and in China, we’ve recently seen this headline:”A total of 500 public telephone booths in downtown Shanghai have been equipped with WiFi hotspots to enable the city to go wireless, bringing new life to the almost abandoned public phone booths.”   Ultimately, China Telecom will look to make these phone booth hotspots also offer other services such as photo printing and access to anti-virus software and expand coverage throughout urban and suburban areas.    Better late than never as they say– six years later from when I worked on strategies like this but it appears the strategy may be getting some traction.

Living in Silicon Valley, you often hear about how fast it moves here.  Two years can be a lifetime, often a make it or break it time frame for a startup or the beginning of a swift downfall or rapid ascension for established companies.   Silicon Valley companies like Zynga have reached 100 million users for a new game in less than 60 days; unbelievable and unprecedented growth.  And on the flip side, companies such as MySpace and Friendster often fall out of the collective consciousness seemingly overnight   So, given all of the reinforcement of speed and pace, sometimes it’s nice to see examples of slow changes and adoption, that patience at times is an essential virtue, and concepts and products may be ahead of its time or adopted in other parts of the worlds while not sticking in Silicon Valley.    The payphone as a hotspot is perhaps one such example.

My key takeaways

1. Pay well to take money off the table as an issue.
2. Monetary incentives after you’ve taken money off the table may actually be counter-productive.
3. Allowing one the creativity and autonomy to master a skill or concept can be quite empowering and lead to better performance.

Per their website, the Technology Pioneers programme is the World Economic Forum’s way of identifying those companies – normally in a start-up phase or in their first rounds of financing – from around the world that are involved in the most innovative design and development of new technologies.

Each year, approximately 30 are recognized as Technology Pioneers in three categories:

1. Energy and Environment
2. Information Technologies and New Media
3. Life Sciences and Health

Now, 9 months later, this post is one of the most visited postings on my blog.  Given that I often write about the Internet and technology, that isn’t too surprising.  To get a further pulse on the preferences of my readers and see which of these startups seemed to have captured more of the public at large’s imagination, I thought it would be interesting to see which companies URLs readers most often clicked on.

Below you’ll see the number of clicks on my site for each of the 31 startup winners.

Interstingly, Asterdata is the most clicked company of the 31 winners.  Being a lower profile data analytics firm, I wouldn’t have expected it would generate much attention.  I would have expected more mainstream sites like Foursquare (#10) , Scribd (#11), or Spotify (#6) to occupy the top spot.   I’m actually not surprised that Second Market is the #2 site, given the attention it has received by generating liquid markets for shares of Facebook, it’s certainly raised its profile.  Getjar, the leading independent Appstore, at #3 is also not surprising given the popularty of Appstores on the Iphone and Android devices.

What’s the most epic photo ever taken?

One interesting passage in the Business Week article is from 5th grade teacher Richard Julian from Los Altos, California, who is using Khan’s videos in his classroom.

Often, the lagging students are tutored by the students who are ahead. “The kids know whom to call on,” says Julian. “It happened on its own. They just began to get out of their seats and work with each other. They’ve identified their trustworthy peer tutors. They know they can call on Sriram and Akhil and Albert, and that they know what they’re talking about. Mainly, I’ve had to spend time teaching them how to teach.”

The concept of child peer teaching that Julian is recognizing builds upon an important theme that researcher Professor Sugata Mitra has observed in his  Hole in the Wall research projects.   Mitra first introduced children in a Delhi slum to computers in 1999 by embedding a computer in a wall facing the slum. The computer was left there with no adult monitoring the computer or providing training on how to use the computer.  It was left there for anyone to access.  Here’s a passage from a BBC article on what happened next when children started to use the computer on their own.

“The children barely went to school, they didn’t know any English, they had never seen a computer before and they didn’t know what the internet was.”

To his surprise, the children quickly figured out how to use the computers and access the internet.

“I repeated the experiment across India and noticed that children will learn to do what they want to learn to do.”

The experiment has been repeated in many more places with very similar results

He saw children teaching each other how to use the computer and picking up new skills.

One group in Rajasthan, he said, learnt how to record and play music on the computer within four hours of it arriving in their village.

“At the end of it we concluded that groups of children can learn to use computers on their own irrespective of who or where they are,” he said.

His experiments then become more ambitious and more global.

In Cambodia, for example, he left a simple maths game for children to play with.

“No child would play with it inside the classroom. If you leave it on the pavement and all the adults go away then they will show off to one another about what they can do,” said Prof Mitra.

Now, if the $10-$35 laptop which the government of India is sponsoring and says will be available in 2011 (although their January launch goal has come and gone) ever comes to fruition, there may be a cheap computing device available in developing countries.  These devices, which would have browsing, communication, and basic educational capabilities and need provisions for internet connectivity and power access,  could allow children to explore and develop on their own if they aren’t fortunate enough to have teachers or go to schools.   As Mitra points out in this lecture, “There are places on Earth, in every country, where, for various reasons, good schools cannot be built and good teachers cannot or do not want to go. ”  Of course, those children would ideally get some formal education but this could offer real improvement in poorer areas around the world.  And as the success of the Khan Academy’s videos and offerings in Los Altos, California point out;  innovative use of technology, access to that technology, motivated facilitators, and allowing children to complement and even propel each other’s learning can have a dramatic impact on the education of children of developed countries education.   While based on only a small sample size, these two concepts could offer real improvements in education for children in both developing and developed countries—isn’t that  a great use of technology!

In this speech he made at TED11, he talks about the Egyptian revolution including his specific role.

One of the comments he makes is that in the revolution, there was no single leader, that they were all leaders contributing to the goal of change in Egypt.  In Wikipedia, they cite a similar statement that he made:

“Our revolution is like Wikipedia, okay? Everyone is contributing content, [but] you don’t know the names of the people contributing the content. This is exactly what happened. Revolution 2.0 in Egypt was exactly the same. Everyone contributing small pieces, bits and pieces. We drew this whole picture of a revolution. And no one is the hero in that picture.”

A very interesting concept that makes me think about leadership—can a revolution really occur without true acknowledged leaders?   Social media has been acknowledged by Ghonim and others (documented in the slideset below) to be instrumental in mobilizing and inspiring the movement, but you don’t see individual names associated with the movement.

Now, in reality, there were most certainly leaders in the movement as any successful organization has leaders.   This quick 3 minute TED speech by Derek Sivers is a classic explanation of the leaders and first followers instrumental in making a movement happen.  In Egypt, Ghonim was certainly a leader.   Mohamed ElBaradei was, at the minimum, an inspirational leader for the movement as well.   But the consensus has been that there isn’t an acknowledged single leader of the the movement.

But the fact that the movement went forward without individuals seeking or demanding the recognition as a primary leader of the movement is an astonishing development.    Something I haven’t seen much before signaling perhaps a generational, philosophical, technological, and ideological shift in today’s younger generations.

Foer spent six months traveling to the world’s soccer capitals trying to assess if the growing  internationalization of the game could help explain the rapid globalization of the world’s economy and lifestyle.   Foer concludes that globalization hasn’t eliminated the need for local cultural characteristics and norms and a single global soccer culture hasn’t emerged.  Rather, he believes that local cultures have engaged in spirited campaigns to maintain local ties, which often aren’t in the best of ways.  Examples of this include fans of Red Star Belgrade in Serbia who became “Milosevic’s shock troops, the most active agents of ethnic cleansing, highly efficient practitioners of genocide.”  In Glasgow, Scotland, Rangers and Celtics fans keep the Protestant Reformation fight going.  Ultimately, as Jay R. Mandle describes in his review of the book in the Washington Post, Foer believes that globalization is not likely to deliver on the promise of a more humane world order that some of its proponents anticipate.   While Foer’s conclusions are debatable, it is certainly an intriguing and compelling way to look at the question of globalization.  In fact,  just recently, I’ve seen two articles use the same premise of soccer as a baseline to explain the recent revolutionary dynamics and disruption to the norm in the Middle East and Libya.

Now, let’s fast forward to 2011.  In early April, India won the Cricket World Cup, it’s first championship in 28 years.  Congratulations to the Indian team and Indian fans around the world!   Prior to the finals between India and Sri Lanka, I saw this tweet from renowned Silicon Valley technology blogger Om Malik.

this has to be one the best pieces written on cricket in modern times. http://t.co/bwWUvL4—
Om Malik (@om) April 03, 2011

As a regular reader of Om’s column, his suggestion was enough motivation to read the article by ESPN writer Wright Thompson.  Thompson had never watched cricket before and with the World Cup being held in India, followed and chronicled India’s quest through the initial rounds of the World Cup (the article was written before India’s heart pounding victories in the semi-finals against Pakistan and then the finals vs Sri Lanka).   Additionally, he studied the legend of the great Sachin Tendulkar, winding down his remarkable career and the decades of holding the country’s hopes on his shoulders.   While the article gives insight into the sport of cricket, what I also found to be quite impressive was how Thompson linked the changing dynamics and culture of India as a whole to the changing dynamics of cricket in India.  Some noteworthy passages:

India’s aggressiveness as a country and quest to be seen and respected

As we all know, India’s experienced substantial economic growth over the last two decades, become a nuclear power, and created a new place for its’ self in the world order.  A more confident, aggressive India emerged.  This also can be seen in how Tendulkar’s approach to the game coincides with this change in India.

Before Sachin, typical Indian cricketers took few risks. For the first hour, shots were deflected, frustrating the bowler, tiring him out, forcing him into mistakes, a perfect sporting ethos in a country known for vein-popping passive-aggressiveness. Sachin changed that. His style was new. He swung a thick bat, heavier than Indians had used before.

He wasn’t passive-aggressive.

He was simply aggressive.

Furthermore, the new guard of cricket heroes after Sachin such as Virender Sehwag take this brashness even to the next level.

Before Sehwag, Indian opening batsmen were supposed to take the shine off the ball. That’s the cricket phrase. Take the shine off. Break it in. Wear down the bowler. Sehwag would take the shine off by going for fours and sixes. He got a reputation for dogging it on singles. And if Sachin gave birth to Sehwag, then a whole group of younger sluggers have taken it a step further. At least Sehwag still plays Test cricket. Some newer stars don’t.

“The aggression, the brashness,” says Bhattacharya, the cricket writer turned novelist. “It’s now something which Indians see that this is what we have to do to assert our place in the world. We’ve been f—ed over for thousands of years. Everyone has conquered us. Now we’re finding our voice. We’re the fastest-growing economy in the world. We are going to buy your companies. Our cricket team is like going to f—ing abuse you back, and we’re going to win and we’re going to shout in your face after we win. People love that.”

Does India really love the game of cricket, or just the Indian cricket team?

But with this new found ambition and unyielding quest to get to the top, perhaps some of the pure love of the sport of cricket in India has been lost.

He’s a former Indian cricket player turned broadcaster, Sanjay Manjrekar, and he’s been captivated by Bangladesh’s reaction to this World Cup opening in its capital. This pure love for cricket transports him to his past.

“There is a certain amount of innocence here,” he tells us, “which I think India has lost.”

Later when asking novelist and former cricket writer Rahul Bhattacharya about India’s love of cricket, Bhattacharya commented

“The thing about Indians’ love for cricket is a lot of it is having something to support India at,” he says. “A lot of it is celebrity. People in love with [team captain M.S.] Dhoni instead of the actual sport. It happens all the time. In the past five years, you find that matches not featuring India don’t draw crowds. It does seem on some level the love is not for the sport itself but for some of the things it stands for.”

Cricket is everywhere. It’s on 24/7. It’s on red carpets with Bollywood bombshells and in corporate boardrooms. But the more it is, the less it is.

“We’ve been so neutered by cricket now,” Rahul says. “There’s so much of it. It’s reached a point where you can be oblivious to it. Indian fans now just watch India.”

There are many great nuggets in Thompson’s article.  A definite must read for those interested in India’s fascination with cricket and to better understand the link between modern India and modern cricket.

About 10 years ago, noted and veteran Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist and academic Jack Gill led a high tech career planning session which I was fortunate enough to participate.   Here’s how the model would be depicted graphically.

Key points are:

• Get a solid education in either a business or technical field.
• Start your career at a large, mature, well respected giant, ideally growing 10-15% a year.  Learn the basics and develop professional maturity in a low risk, slower career development environment.   In 2000, companies in this category would include General Electric and H-P.
• From there, move to a more dynamic growing company with a 30-50% growth rate where one can latch on to mentors, gain more responsibility while making significant decisions, have more rapid career development, and participate in more meaningful equity levels.   In 2000, Microsoft and Cisco would be example companies in this category.
• After this experience, for the risk taker, one would be ready for working at startups typically at $10-30M in sales, growing 100% a year over year, be given even more responsibility and/or a management position, offered a larger equity position, and be ready for a higher potential/payoff but high risk with high failure rate experience.

So, that was a suggested high-tech career blue print a decade ago.  The question is—does that blue print still apply today for the Internet industry?

Now, let’s look at the first two career categories in 2010.   In the Work 3-5 Years at a Large, Well Managed Company, generally 10-15% annual Growth category here’s who you might see as key options for Internet professionals (although in these cases, growth was single digits).   Note, the growth struggles of Yahoo! and eBay have them in the slow growth category even though their revenue base is lower than expected for this category.

And for the Dynamic, High Growth company, generally 30-50% annual Growth category in 2010, the key players would like this, including Google.

But it’s not a big leap to add a couple of extremely high growth, very young companies to this category, albeit with a lower revenue base.  Yes, Facebook, and to a lesser extent, Zynga and Groupon.

So, by adding Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon to this category, what have we done to the career plan model?  We’ve basically moved them out of the high risk startup status which in one way they still are given their age of only 2-3 years old in the case of Zynga and Groupon.   But their growth is nearly unprecedented in the Internet space.  In this Wall Street Journal article, a comparison of growth between today’s mature Internet companies including Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, eBay compared to today’s young social media kings Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon yield some interesting results.  None of the mature companies even came close to achieving $750M in revenues in the two years that it took Groupon to reach those heights—an unbelievable rate of growth.

So, now for talented professionals early in their career, they have the option to have much of the benefits of the startup category of more responsibility, learning to lead in a company growing 100% a year, and have the potential for higher payoff without taking usual startup risk for this type of experience.    And with the mere existence of these companies in the Dynamic, High Growth company category, but with 200% or more growth rates, they’ve unfairly moved the perception of Google into the Large, Well Managed Company category, even though Google’s growth rate is significantly better than the Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s of the world who also are in the category.

So, it’s not a surprise at all that Google is having a harder time keeping existing employees from Facebook and Groupon.    The typical tech career path of a decade ago is most certainly changing.

While I don’t know whether this qualifies as a bubble or not, I do know that this topic has started to permeate regular conversations of long time Silicon Valley tech folks.  Inevitably, in these conversations, the discussion will go back to what was your Dot.com boom and bust story of the late nineties and early 2000’s. Having lived in the Bay Area for the last 11 years, I’ve shared my own story a few times of late at various social gatherings. My story isn’t about a startup that had aglorious, undeserved IPO followed by a quick flame-out, but rather a large corporate story trying to capitalize on this emerging, newly flush with cash customer base.

In 1999, I joined Intel and started working in their new Internet hosting division called Intel Online Services. In this 1999 article in the New York Times, the formation of the division and the planned $1 billion investment in the business is covered. Intel Online Services (IOS) provided managed Web services and hosting capabilities for companies worldwide through a network of data centers and a range of infrastructure and application hosting services.

Data centers were either built or partnerships created around the world with centers in the US, UK, Japan, India and Korea. Employees grew from zero to 1,500 almost overnight through transfers from other parts of Intel and aggressive hiring efforts around the world. It was an exhilarating experience for me, having recently completed my graduate studies and entering my first Silicon Valley job at a tech giant like Intel.

Employed in the operations and finance groups, I worked on the cost models of data centers, deal terms with software and infrastructure vendors supporting the data centers, and setting up profitability targets for new services. I got to experience the whole business and see first hand what kind of new growth opportunities the positional presence of Intel in the technology ecosystem would allow them to pursue.

The expectation was that with the growing emerging dot com customer base along with enhanced corporate application requirements, a large customer base would be available for Intel to offer managed hosting services. After all, Intel built world class fabrication plants for semi-conductor production and would use that same technical reputation and know how to build world class data centers.

Competitively, IOS was trying to catch  Exodus Communications, who became the leader in this space and had their own spectacular IPO in 1998. However, what happened to Exodus foretold an ominous future for IOS. In 2001, Exodusfiled for bankruptcy. With the dot com bust occurring in 2001 and 2002, their customer base couldn’t pay its bills and new customers couldn’t easily be found to fill the already built, expensive data center capacity around the world. This combination sparked the end for Exodus in 2001 and led to a similar result for IOS.

In late 2002, after many redeployments of employees along the way, Intel shut down Intel Online Services. A similar fate as Exodus, the dot com customer base expected to consume the large capacity built around the world never materialized and the capacity remained idle. Within 3 years, the lifecycle of IOS began and ended.

In retrospect, Intel Online Services was simply ahead of its time. The cloud computing craze (in essence called the ASP [Application Service Model] ten years ago) of today is what the IOS vision anticipated supporting 10 years ago. Professionally, the Intel Online Services experiences still rates at the top of my career in terms of excitement and satisfaction and I will always look back fondly on those days.

Now, back to today’s bubble. One of the real differences I see in today’s bubble is related to the investments made by large, mature corporations. In 2000, giants like Intel in adjoining but somewhat unrelated spaces made significant investments into the Internet Services space to capitalize on the gold rush. The last 10 years of maturation of the Internet space has allowed new influential giants to emerge (Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Ebay, etc.) and naturally invest and extend into new Internet, where they are already embedded, markets such as social media.

Google and Amazon are hiring rapidly and making large investments seems natural and not as risky as when Intel invested in IOS more than ten years ago. I’m sure the debate about today’s bubble will continue and many smart people will chime in on both sides. But one thing I know about such bubbles is it can lead to some of the most exciting professional experiences one will have out here; the trick is to be ready and able to bounce back if and when the bubble bursts.

Note:  This article also is available at The Next Web, a leading technology blog, here.

In San Francisco, the Japan earthquake hit at 10:46 PM local time on March 10 (sixteen hour time zone difference).   That night, I read about it online via my Twitter feed and also watched some coverage on CNN.   I soon went to sleep as usual with the next morning being a typical work day.  At around 5:45 AM the following morning, I first heard my cell phone ring followed by our home phone.  I missed the calls, but immediately listened to the voice mail left by my father calling from Ohio.  Being in the eastern time zone three hours ahead of me, he had already heard the warnings about the tsunamis and wanted to make sure I was fully aware.   After I heard the voice mail, my first inclination was to check my Twitter feed for appropriate messages and chatter about the Tsunami.  I found this tweet, retweeted by someone I followed from a local news station, that gave me a good sense about the timing of the tsunami.

#Tsunami expected to hit Point Arena at 7:26 a.m., Point Reyes at 7:39 a.m.,
Monterey at 7:44 a.m., and San Francisco at 8:08 a.m.—
  (@abc7newsBayArea) March 11, 2011

But I wanted and needed to know more.  How high would the waves be?   Would it be safe to go to work or should I work from home?  Would there be crazy traffic jams?

The only way to really answer those questions was to watch the local television news.  They had reporters stationed at the various beaches and harbors expecting tsunami conditions.  They had commentary on how high waves would be at each location—with the expected swells being only 1 to 2 feet high, it would certainly be safe enough to go to work.   However, I discovered that parts of near by Half Moon Bay were being evacuated for precautionary reasons and others on their own were moving to higher ground, creating immense traffic conditions on Highway 92 spilling onto adjoining Highway 280.  I now knew to avoid those freeways.   The local news provided all of the follow on answers I needed to know.

I’ve been one of the biggest proponents of Twitter as a news source and a frequent critic of the local news.  However, in the case of a nearby disruption (such as a natural disaster like the tsunami or unintended disaster like the San Bruno gas line explosion), the local news on television is undoubtedly the best way to be informed.   Now, if I wanted to know about what was happening in Japan, certainly the news curation I can find on Twitter was a much better source, but for knowing what to do here in the Bay Area, the local news was where it was at.

So, what is enchantment?  In the opening of the first chapter, Kawasaki conveys a story where filmmaker Karin Muller, at the time stationed in the Phillipines as part of the Peace Corps, is warned that armed members of a militia Army group was coming to interrogate her.  She defused the situation by showing hospitality to the interrogators, offering a cup of coffee as soon as they arrived.  As she states, “you can’t interrogate someone you are having coffee with.”   As Kawasaki explains, she delighted him with her hospitality and changed his heart, mind, and actions.   That’s enchantment.

Kawasaki organizes the book by first offering enchantment techniques to apply to yourself, than to prepare and launch your product or message, followed by how to communicate and enchant your customers or audience, how to use today’s technology to enhance your personal or company brand, and finally on how to enchant your employees or boss.

He uses many short sections in each chapter, with each section getting to the point quickly, often with key bulleted lists and real person examples.   It was a very easy read, captivating the reader from the beginning to the end.    For someone like myself working in the Internet industry with entrepreneurial instincts, it’s a valuable resource on how to build a personal brand.   Given that he’s known for being a social media whiz,  he does do a good job of showing how to use tools like Twitter, Linkedin, and Youtube to help build your brand and communication strategy but he doesn’t only focus on only those techniques.   He talks throughout the book about the human touch- how to become trustworthy, how to follow up kindly, how to pay it forward,  when to offer favors, etc. as even more important components of your personal brand strategy.

Some of my favorite nuggets and sections of the book:

• Use checklists.  I’m a big proponent of checklists and Kawasaki goes back to this tried and true technique throughout the book.
• Remember that the first follower is as often as important as the leader to get a movement started.   He refers to the brilliant TED video by Derek Sievers to illustrate this point.   You can see it here.
• Make it short, simple, and swallowable.  E-mails- 6 sentences, Video- 60 seconds, Powerpoint- 10 slides, Business Plan- 20 slides.
• When you meet people (who may become your early followers or influencers), be prepared and know their interests.  With tools like Linkedin, Facebook, blogs, you can generally easily find out what people’s interests are even before you meet them.
• Prime the pump- use some techniques that help with trial.   An example he sited was a study done in a wine store; when French music was being played, it was more likely buyers would purchase French wine.
• Easy,  immediate, inexpensive, concrete, and reversible– the keys to enable trial.    Also, reducing the number of choices often leads to greater likelihood of purchase.
• Conduct a “Pre-Mortem”.  I really like this one.  Before a project or launch occurs, go through a brainstorming session where you list everything that could go wrong.  Then indicate what’s in place to prevent those train derailing issues from occuring.
• Provide social proof for your cause.  An extreme example- at funerals in many countries,  women are paid to weep at the funeral creating greater social proof that the departed will be missed.

Overall, a great read.  Before I finished, I told my entrepreneur wife that she has to read this book.   The first of Kawasaki’s books that I’ve read, I look forward to now reading some of his earlier works.