It's a bit outdated, but Randy Komisar's novel is a great read. Not only does it help solidify the impact that passion and purpose (two of reasons, if you were wondering, why OMC has become the amazing company it is today) have on our lives, but it's a decent outline for both new and time-tested entrepreneurs.

Keep this book on your radar: No Man's Land: What to Do When Your Company is TOO BIG to Be Small but TOO SMALL to Be Big by Doug Tatum.

Portfolio, the publisher, is really excited about this book. We first heard about it when we were in NYC in May. Here's a snippet from the introduction:

The entrepreneurs I encounter are routinely stymied by their inability to "get out of the weeds," to rise above chaotic operational firefighting and see their businesses in a new strategic light. To traverse No Man's Land, however, entrepreneurs need to become radically objective about their situation and knowledgeable about the strategic choices available to them.

They also need a plan.

Tatum proposes a four-part plan which he calls "the four Ms." These are "fundamental navigational principles for managing a rapidly growing company." Here they are:

• Understand the transition that will occur in the business's Market.
• Address the changes that will be required in its Management.
• Test its economic Model to assure continued profitability as the business scales upward.
• Understand the practical requirements for attracting the needed Money.

You'll hear more about the book after its pub date, but for now, you can hear about it from Doug Tatum himself in an Inc. Magazine interview here:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070901/welcome-to-no-mans-land.html

Here are the books and resources he recommended. Click through on the WSJ link to read Shaer's comments.

• Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
• The Lessons of History by Will Durant and Ariel Durant
• The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
• The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone: 1932-1940 by William Manchester
• Shackleton's Way by Margot Morrell and Stephanine Capparell
• Mao's Last Dancer by Li Cunxin
• TechCrunch
• Apollo 13 (the movie)
• An Inconvenient Truth (the movie and the book)

Which brings me to Lavine’s great offering. Starting a company will always be such a challenging and in fact mysterious process to newcomers that there's always going to be a need for smart books that help make sense of the process, while giving practical advice at the same time. How can anyone make the core wisdom of entrepreneurship new? By weaving smart lessons learned from experience within a personal narrative of launching a successful business.

Mommy Millionaire deftly shifts from Lavine’s story of building a business around an “aha� moment of creating a cute little neck-comforting pillow stuffed with corn, to sidebars and charts and lists of how-to material. She tells her story with great detail and refreshing candor—including moments of failure, of being conned, and suffering a near fatal cash crunch. She has an inspiring story to share of becoming a successful business owner who learned to stop apologizing for being a mom and in fact turned this to her advantage. And, she shares a wealth of smart information on everything from the real value of a business plan (and how to write one) to finding the right investors to taking the right steps in safeguarding your trade secrets. Her website has excerpts and resources.

Presentation Zen has pulled together video clips of Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, and Tom Peters. He also gives some great commentary on each of them and what make them "work".

I have been asking people lately if they have read anything by Peter Drucker and I am shocked by the number of people you have never read anything written by the Father of Modern Management. While I was getting my MBA, we were never assigned to read anything by him. I sit here shaking my head wondering how this can be.

I decided to do some more research. Last week, we asked the inBubbleWrap crowd two questions having to do with Drucker.

First, we asked if they knew who Peter Drucker was. It was hard to give you an exact answer by I would say 15% of the people did not know he is was. I don't consider that too bad considering the often reported polls showing people's lack of knowledge on current events and world geography.

The second question we asked was "Have you read any books by Drucker?". The following is a list of all the books that people listed and the number of times they were mentioned in the answers.

The Effective Executive - 52
The Essential Drucker - 45
The Daily Drucker - 28
Managing for The Future - 21
Innovation and Entrepreneurship - 18
The Practice of Management - 16
Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices - 11
Managing The Non-Profit Organization - 11
Adventures of a Bystander - 6
Managing in Turbulent Times - 5
Management in the 21st Century - 4
The End of Economic Man - 4
The Age of Discontinuity - 3
Temption To Do Good - 3
Classic Drucker - 2
Drucker On The Profession of Management - 2
Concept of the Corporation - 1
Effective Executive in Action - 1
Future of Industrial Man - 1

It was good to see one of Drucker's complete works beat the two "best-of" books. For my money, I would recommend The Effective Executive and Innovation and Entrepreneurship (both of which I am going back and reading again).

We have some plans for bringing back some of the classics. Stay tuned for that...

Tindell says that Co-Opetition is:

"probably the best business book I've ever read. It talks about not being typical, paranoid business people, but rather looking for ways that your competitors and you can cooperate to strengthen both your businesses. We've followed some of the principals in this book by putting our stores right next to some of our competitors. It makes the shopping center a stronger draw."

Here is his complete list:

• Minding The Store: A Memoir by Stenley Marcus
• Co-Opetition: 1. A Revolutionary Mindset That Combines Competition and Cooperation 2. The Game Theory Strategy That's Changing the Game of Business by Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff
• Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends On It by Al Ries
• Discovering The Soul of Service: The Nine Drivers of Sustainable Business Success by Leonard Berry
• A Thousand Barrels a Second: The Coming Oil Break Point and the Challenges Facing an Energy Dependent World by Peter Tertzakian
• Churchill on Leadership: Executive Success in the Face of Adversity by Steven F. Hayward
• Appetite for Life: A Biography of Julia Child by Noel Riley Fitch
• It's a Wonderful Life directed by Frank Capra

There are a couple of cool things he is doing to promote the book. First, Jake has an audioblog. He is using Audioblog.com and leaves one to three minute audio pieces. I think it is a great use of the technology and allows Jake's fans to get a dose of him every day.

The second thing is a little bigger. Today, Jake was on Fox & Friends (that is what started this whole post) and he announced the Live Your Dream Contest to go with the book. He is going to giveaway $200,000 to the best business idea he sees submitted for the contest. The winner also get $50,000 worth of flight time from Marquis Jet.

Here’s another link about his new book. Feel free to check it out.

People who start with a dream need to respect unfair advantage. Without it the dream pops very quickly and painfully. New enterprises are deeply personal. They are packed with emotions, spiritual passions and even impact the health of the participants. The cost of naïve failure is very high.

With unfair advantage, the unborn baby has a chance to not only survive, but to thrive. The parents can confidently proceed to consummate and give birth, expecting to finish with a healthy infant, able to be managed into adulthood. The child can win the Grand Prix of the modern new enterprise race. The race is to dominate a new market category just like Google, Yahoo, Cisco and many before them. That produces the gorillas that become world-class brands. They go IPO in less than a decade. They create hundreds of millions of dollars of company value and rapid job growth. They are the envy of countries around the planet. Everybody wins.

And it all started with an unfair advantage. So go score your own unfair advantage. Use the score sheet in the Appendix The Power of Unfair Advantage: How to Create it, Build it and Use it to Maximum Effect.

Do you know of good ideas that started without an unfair advantage and ended up more like struggles to survive than winners who thrived? Tell me about some of them and what happened. We can all learn from the examples.

I finally got it! What the veterans meant was that their initial unfair advantage had to be able to change over time. It had to react to counter-moves by competitors. It had to drop some elements and add others as the new enterprise grew from child to adult. Those changes made unfair advantage a living thing. It is organic.

As soon as you launch your new product, the competition reacts. Then you have to react to their reaction. When CEOs and their core teams that can do that, year after year, they can build a wildly successful new enterprise. They have a competitive advantage based on their ability to react dynamically with swift, powerful strategic responses. They are able to anticipate as well as deal with good and bad surprises, much better than their arch rivals. You can read examples of this in Chapter 9 of The Power of Unfair Advantage: How to Create it, Build it and Use it to Maximum Effect.

So what in your core management team is evidence that they are people with the ability to dynamically respond to tough reactions by tough competitors, and then emerge from the battle as the winner, the gorilla that dominates the new hill? Icons of Silicon Valley like Don Valentine founder of Sequioa Capital look for such managers in the companies his firm invests in because they produce the Ciscos of the world.

Try writing how you plan to react to your competition’s reaction after your next product launch. Do it in less than a page and tell me what you discovered as you wrote it. For instance, did it reveal a weakness in your competitive position? How will that affect your story to investors and potential employees?

"So what should they focus on?" was my reply. The answer was quick and simple: "Focus on creating such a compelling value proposition that the ideal customer will leap out of his chair and race to buy what you are offering."

So now I know. And so can you.

Give this exercise a try:

1. Who is your Ideal Customer?


2. What is so compelling that that Ideal Customer will rush out and buy what you are selling?


3. Why is that so much more compelling than what your main competitor is offering your Ideal Customer?

Tip: Make the definition of Ideal Customer as narrow as possible, including gender, age, income, lifestyle, employment, location of work and home. Remember that people make decisions to buy things, not companies. For details see The Power of Unfair Advantage: How to Create it, Build it and Use it to Maximum Effect.

When you are done with that homework, let me know what you learned from the exercise. Did it strengthen your competitive advantage? Did it move you into the category of an unfair advantage competitor?

In fact, without unfair advantage, the end result was not a gorilla brand. Instead it was a starving monkey. Only with the power of an unfair advantage did the idea for the new enterprise move from infancy to a name that stood for something important to millions of people around the globe. That is what manager after manager told me. They gave countless examples.

The trouble I had in seeing this was because there are so many misconceptions about how to build a brand. From misused advertising to foolish choices of strategy, the blind were leading the blind. That included me.

I reluctantly saw the light after being introduced to works by the godfather of modern market positioning, Al Ries. His insights were on the mark, coincident with the newly arrived world-class venture investors and serial entrepreneurs. They too had discovered how to use PR to build a brand. They were great at positioning to out-maneuver competitors and constructed value propositions to compel ideal customers to rush to the store to buy their products. Proponents like Geoffrey Moore Crossing the Chasm agreed.

So now I can see how it is done. And so can you. For instance, read about how the Blackberry was born and converted into a world-class brand in Chapter 1 of The Power of Unfair Advantage: How to Create it, Build it and Use it to Maximum Effect.

So give it a try: Tell a quick story about how you will convert your idea into a world-class brand that so excites your ideal customer that that person races to make the purchase. I’d like to read your version.