nickshanagher

Start With Why is a TED talk by Simon Sinek that has been watched more than 24.8 million times. Plus a further 701,000 views on YouTube. It takes 18 minutes to watch and is inspiring. There is also the book , advertised as a global bestseller. It will take you four to six hours to read and I recommend that you take longer than this. While the talk is brilliant and the book seems to say not much more across its 200 pages, the benefit of spending time with Sinek’s ideas comes from challenging how well you can answer the question: “Well why should I do business with you?” The first part of the book is all about business as usual. The manipulations that companies use to keep customers - price, promotions, fear, aspirations, peer pressure, and novelty (a.k.a. innovation) - are all entertainingly eviscerated. “Price always costs something. The question is, how much are you willing to pay for the money you make?” Sinek prompts. Manipulations are perfectly valid strategy for drivin...

I don’t fear Amazon, it’s One Stop, a senior wholesale executive told me recently. But a flick through The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age ofAmazon by Brad Stone might make him rethink. I am sure that Jeff Bezos will write a better book about his business ideas 20 years from now and while Stone’s book has been slated by some insiders, it is a great read. For anyone involved in distribution it is a must read. Famously frugal with company funds, the Amazon attitude to burning up money buying companies that failed during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s will dazzle you. Even more impressive is Bezos pursuit of the best brains from Walmart. He started his career in a New York hedge fund run by David E Shaw, whose mastery of maths and computing made him a billion dollars exploiting inefficiencies in the way Wall Street worked. DESCO had a policy of hiring the best brains and Bezos was a prodigy. He left this well paid job to set up an internet business that had a 70 ...