"...out-learning the competition"
HEADLINES:
Fascinate -- it's no longer good enough to get noticed; you need to fascinate - something Apple has done beautifully. There happens to be a formula for doing this - for any product or service - and Sally Hogshead has written it down. Raved about by Seth Godin, Alan Webber, Tom Peters, etc. Sally's book is entitled Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation.
7 Triggers -- Here's a quick online slide presentation (just 23 slides) that walks you through the 7 Fascination Triggers: Power, Lust, Mystique, Alarm, Prestige, Vice, and Trust (hope this list makes it past your SPAM filters). And come hear her keynote at the upcoming Fortune Growth Summit, Oct 25 - 26 in Phoenix. Book club members will get her book this week. Go right to Part 2 to dig into each trigger with concrete examples that will help you brainstorm ideas for your own products and services - Part 1 was a little too racy for me!
Business Model Generation -- still in the top 50 of all business books since being published in 2010, Business Model Generation has been a smash hit providing an one-page look at your company's business model - and allowing you a way to visualize and improve it. If you don't get the business model right, the rest of your time is a waste. I had co-author Alexander Osterwalder keynote our European Growth Summits earlier this year and followed along as he helped me model Gazelles (I carry it with me). It was so helpful I'm flying him over from Europe to keynote the Fortune Growth Summit where he'll walk you through the same one-page process and demo his iPhone app. It's also a great way to model new products and services.
#1 Business Book -- at least at the moment I'm writing this insight it's also the #1 of ALL books - Fred Reichheld's dramatically updated Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World was released today. And several of you, including Rackspace, are featured in the book. We've been pushing the use of NPS as a simple measurement of customer advocacy since Fred keynoted our Summit several years ago, and Fred credits us for getting the tool pushed down into the mid-market company sector. Fred is producing a one-hour online seminar for Gazelles and we're hosting him in Sydney March 15 - 16 at our National Growth Summit in Australia.
Bob Parsons, Dan Pink, Youngme Moon, Sally Hogshead, Alexander Osterwalder, Travis Bradberry, Todd Klein, Alan Miltz, Stephen Baars (and me) -- all in one place. If you haven't absorbed their ideas (or know who they are), you'll fall behind those who do!! See you in Phoenix.