“How little things can make a big difference” is the subtitle of this book. “The Tipping Point” was written by Malcom Gladwell and covers a theory about how messages, especially marketing messages, spread along a population and what are the key factors that drives the “epidemic growth”. The theory is primarily based on network theory, especially on social hubs or connectors as the author calls them.

Besides the connectors the author also identifies salesmen (charismatic persons) and mavens (information specialists) as important. He calls them the few and the general law The Law of the Few. The key message is here that you have to convince these few people to promote your product. The two additional aspects are the Stickiness Factor and the Context, i.e. a message must be memorable and they must be relevant to the given context.

The overall message is: there are many variables that affect success and a few are such important that small changes to them lets a message become mainstream or lets it disappear in the noise. The authors gives many examples of successful messages and also explains some of the success factors, however it’s not like a textbook that helps you to develop your business but more like a collection of exciting stories. So read it but do not expect too much from it. And have a good time!

Martin

This time I like you to present the book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. The term Wikinomics reminds of the New Economy. The principle argumentation is the same as in 2000: changes in the Internet economy will change the real economy.

The Internet started as a mass information medium, became a mass communication medium and is now turning into a mass collaboration medium. Everyone is connected to everyone and everyone can collaborate with everyone – on a global scale. This creates new opportunities for companies: crowdsourcing is just one of them. The technological foundation for this development are open web applications like Wikis that allow anyone to participate. If you apply the Wiki principle to economics you get wikinomics: companies are open structures that allow customers, partners and suppliers to participate in the development and in the innovation process thus adding value to the company.

Sounds fine in theory - in reality it will take a generation or more to become true. Most companies are closed structures and are protecting themselves against competitors and influences from politics or society. The Wikinomics works in Internet-based companies, but not necessarily in traditional companies. However if you are a Internet company this is a must-read!

And have a good time!

Another book I’ve not read but listened to the last months was Bang!. The subtitle is: “Getting Your Message Heard in a Noisy World” and that is what the book is about. It’s mainly about successful marketing or to be more precise advertising campaigns. The two authors run a very successful marketing agency in the US and they created many big bangs – how they call advertising campaigns which explode. Their main concept (in my opinion) is: be paradox! Don’t make what everyone does or what everyone expects or what you would do in the first place. Think about it a second time, from a different perspective. Think about: what wouldn’t you do and why. And then do exactly this. The authors also describe in detail how they generated an environment where such ideas can pop up. My favourite story for example is this one:

The AFLAC insurance company, for example, was turned into a household name when a member of the KTG team realized that AFLAC sounded like the quack of a duck. The AFLAC duck raised the company’s profile from zero to instantly recognizable.

The quote is taken from Amazon btw.

To summarize: the book is at first entertaining, at second it will change maybe slightly the way you think about advertising, but it won’t guide you in creating big bangs! You know the reason why: don’t do what someone tells you to do – be different, be paradox, be unique!

And have a good time!

Martin

Sebastian already has introduced himself. I make the next. My name is Martin Szugat and I’m the CEO of the company. So I do everything what no one else does. My primarily work at the moment is public relations (you didn’t guess this, I know) and talking to our investors, partners and customers.

(click here and read more…)

In my first semester at Manage&More (a support programme for young entrepreneurs from the UnternehmerTUM GmbH; see list of our partners) I participated in an innovation project at IDEO. IDEO is a famous design company – see Wikipedia for a detailed description. They were involved in the development of the first mouse (from Apple) and also helped dozens of other nameable companies like Microsoft or Pepsi to innovate new products and services or to significantly improve their products and services. We (twenty creative students) did a project for a well-known chemical company and it was an exciting project. I’m sorry, I can not tell you more about our project and its outcome – we signed a NDA. But I can tell you, we learned a lot, what helps us now to generate rapidly insights on a certain topic, to produce unexpected ideas from these insights and to finally build a consistent concept from the ideas.

(click here and read more…)

What have AIDS, the society, the human brain, the biochemical network of any living being and the Internet in common? They all rely on scale-free networks. Scale-free networks are a special kind of network where some nodes have a high degree of connectivity, so called hubs, and most nodes have only a few connections. The distribution of the connectivity degree follows a power law. Scale-free networks are typically formed by a process called preferential attachment: new nodes connect to those nodes that already have a high number of neighbors. This makes sense e.g. on the Internet: you link to web pages that are already popular. The first who studied the structure of the Internet were Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and his colleagues. He published a fascinating book about his discoveries and analysis: Linked.

So why should you read this book? Because social networks are scale-free networks, of course! People tend to form relationships to people who already have many friends and so seem to be attractive.

Have a good time!

You are interested in how complex behavior emerges from the connection of simple elements, e.g. genes, cells or humans? Then this book is a must read: in his book At Home in the Universe Kauffman explains what patterns, principles and laws lead to self-organization on the level of primitive life but also on higher levels like human shaped organizations. He uses a simple concept: boolean networks and explains on the basis of this simple concept complex topics like evolution.

Read the book and have a good time!

The Wisdom of Crowds is a popular science book that explains many of the mechanics of the Web 2.0, but which is also quite misunderstood. The common misunderstanding is that many people can solve a problem better than a few experts in general. The book tells the opposite: that there are certain problems that can be solved by many people better than by a few experts. These problems include in particular estimations of unknown variables or predictions of future values, e.g. the size of the market of digital music downloads. The trick here is statistical sampling: of course, most people guess wrong, but because the wrong estimations are balanced the outliers compensate each other. Most interesting is that the author, James Surowiecki, identified conditions which are essential for crowd intelligence.

There are four conditions that can be reduced to one simple, but in its consequence complex statement: network connectivity. It’s about the density of the network and the strength of its connections. A too dense network with too strong connections ends up in a uniform mass with no intelligence at all. The opposite is bad either. Information won’t flow between the nodes. The same you can learn from the observation of biochemical networks: they have to balanced.

So stay independent, but connected and have a good time!

I can not confirm that, because I obviously didn’t die, yet. However, Tim Renner, the author of the book “Death is not so bad.”, accompanied a whole industry sector on its dead march: the music industry. As former CEO of Universal Music Deutschland he know what he is talking about. He tells in this book the story about a industry which (in parts) is not acting for its customers but against them.

The book is a must-read! So read it and you’ll have a good time!

This question comes from my favorite movie WarGames. It’s about an artificial intelligence called WOPR, which is hacked by Matthew Broderick. The computer is trained to fight the World War III and loves to play Tic Tac Toe (btw: my first computer program, written in Pascal, was Tic Tac Toe; not so easy as you might think). However, the computer can not distinguish between game and reality and so it is beginning to launch the nuclear weapons …

There are four insights I’ve learned from this movie:

1. Arthur Rubinstein makes remarkable movie soundtracks.
2. The most used password of this time was “Joshua”, because everybody watched the movie and thought, this a cool password to remember (btw: there have been several famous hacks, where hackers used this password, so don’t use it!)
3. With the right strategy on both sides no one can win Tic Tac Toe, or a nuclear war!
4. Playing games makes you smart!

You don’t believe #4? This insight isn’t new – or take for example this famous book:

Johnson, Steven [2005]. Everything Bad is Good for You. Riverhead. ISBN 978-1594481949.

However, the debate is still actual as more and more people spend their time playing games. The good news: computer games becoming more and more social games. In the old times of video games people play alone against the computer. Thanks to multiplayer consoles like the Wii (a lot of friends of mine arrange regular Wii parties) and multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft people play together and not only learn strategic thinking or train their reactions, but also gain social intelligence while playing together.

The next step will be to use online gaming for dating. Think about how you made your first friends in live! Probably by asking: “Do you want to play?”

So play games and have a good time!