Book Review: Only The Paranoid Survive

This time I opted for a classic of business literature. The book is called Only The Paranoid Survive and was written by former chairman and CEO of the Intel Corporation Andrew S. Grove.

When the book was published in 1996, both the internet and myself were in our infancies. I was finally made aware of Only The Paranoid Survive by a blogpost written by venture capitalist Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz) entitled  Peacetime CEO / Wartime CEO. Horowitz (@bhorowitz) describes Grove as a typical "Wartime CEO".

Strategic Inflection Points
Drawing heavily on his experience as a CEO of the Intel Corporation Andy Grove outlines his idea of "strategic inflection points". These are the points in the life of every company when its business changes so profoundly that the whole company is at stake. Usually such changes are brought about by one of Michael Porter's (@MichaelEPorter) classix six forces: Competitors, suppliers, consumers, substitutes, potential competitors and complementors (for those familiar with the five forces, complementors have been added later). When such a forces changes its magnitude by roughly ten times ("10X Force"), you can be sure, you are facing a strategic inflection point.

Recognizing a Strategic Inflection Point
It is not always easy to recognize a strategic inflection point. After all, if everybody recognized them early on and was well prepared business journals would probably face serious issues. Grove argues that the only way to surely recognize a strategic inflection point is through broad and intensive debate. As a board member listen to striking news from your frontline employees and your salesforce, as an employee or middle manager report oddities early on and if your gut feeling says there is something in the dark, listen to it; after all your gut feeling might save your company. Gather data to analyze the situation early on and try to stick to the facts despite the countless emotions involved in every big change.

Navigating a Strategic Inflection Point
Andrew Grove sees navigating a strategic inflection point as a two-stage process:

Stage 1: Experiment: While you may not know the answer, someone in your company might know, or at least someone might be able to find out. Provide room for experimentation and let failures happen at an early stage of a strategic inflection point. Failures are much cheaper now than later. Sometimes you might also want to hedge different strategies or keep watching an emerging technology.

Stage 2: Set the direction: After you have experimented enough to reach a sensible conclusion, go for it with all the conviction you can afford. After a period of 'chaos' it is important to set a clear direction and move towards the end of a strategic transition even if you might not be sure how exactly the company will look afterwards. Grove describes this very imagniatively:

"When I think about what it's like to get through a strategic inflection point, I'm reminded of a classic scene in old western movies in which a bedraggled group of riders is traveling through a hostile landscape. They don't know exactly where they are going; they only know that they can't turn back and must trust that they will eventually reach a place where things are better."

This book may be judged 'old' by conventional standards and chapter 9, in which the author discusses whether the internet is a strategic inflection point or just noise is rather funny to read with all we know by now. However, the theory of strategic inflection points is still very up-to-date and important. Only The Paranoid Survive is an insightful, fascinating and quite short read that is definitely worth your time!

Currently, I am reading The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris (@SamHarrisOrg). Follow me on Twitter and share your thoughts!

Book Review: Enchantment

Another book review: This time it is Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions by Guy Kawasaki (@GuyKawasaki).

First things first: I am not going to compare Enchantment to Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People. This has been done in countless other reviews. So far all of you who have not read Dale Carnegie's book (I have neither) here is the review:

A Cookbook for Enchanting People
Guy Kawasaki (@GuyKawasaki) provides us with a variety of hands-on recipes - a successful relief from the theoretical high-level approach pursued by many other books. While the chapters form a consistent storyline (from "Why Enchantment?" and "How to Achieve Trustworthiness" to "How To Use Push Technology" and "How to Enchant your Employees") the advice discussed in the respective chapters ranges from one-to-one interactions to delivering a presentation like Steve Jobs  or managing a Twitter account like Guy (@GuyKawasaki).

One example is on page 24 where it is recommended to "Default to Yes". In other words, always agree to help people with their requests and do not say "no". My personal note to this bit of advice would be: Before you default to yes please learn to say "no". From time to time an appropriate "no" can save you from big troubles.

Thourough Research
What I  enjoyed most about Enchantment were the various references to research dealing with human behavior and perception such as the explanation of the social proof effect, which is the concept that "if other people are doing something, then it must be OK, right, cool, and maybe even optimal" (p. 72). There are many similar examples spread throughout the book and they are applicable to a myriad of situations you might encounter sooner or later.

The Small, Enchanting Stuff
It is not just the content of the book that makes it a good read. It is also how Guy Kawasaki (@GuyKawasaki) presents it. Throughout the book we find various quotations and every chapter ends with a very personal 'enchantment story'. In the end Guy even presents "Guy's Realistic Enchantment Aptitude Test (GREAT)" to test your knowledge of the book. These are textbook examples of how to invite readers to immerse themselves into a story. In this case the great story of enchantment.

You can find more information about Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions here, here and here. It is definitely worth the read!

Currently I am reading How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker. Follow me on Twitter to know if it is any good.

From music to business: How to foster, capture and communicate creativity – Part III

This post is the third of three posts to present some creativity-related beliefs from music and how to transfer them to the world of business. While I am neither a professional musician nor a business consultant or a remarkably creative person these ideas might be inspiring for some of you.


In part I and part II I wrote about how to foster and capture creativity. In this last short post of the series I want to stress the importance of correctly communicating creativity. Noone will care about your life-changing ideas if you they do not understand what you are trying to say.

Communicating Creativity - Translate your ideas into suitable language
Innovative ideas are often not easily explained to other people. If they were, they were most probably not being labeled as "innovative ideas". If you do not want to be ignored or ridiculed as a strange nerd, dreamy fool or incomprehensible stranger you better start communicating your ideas in a langugage that is understood by your audience.

Communicating Creativity in Music
I will never forget when organ player Dennis Montgomery III told drummer Victor Lewis in a jazzaar-project I was playing in: "Hey man, I need that center block country church gospel feel!" Of course noone of the Europeans knew what a center block country church is, let alone how they play gospel music there. Victor however, was right on it. By using an analogy Dennis communicated much more clearly than if he said something like: "Could please give me a snare on three and eights on the hihat?" While of course we were not playing center block country church gospel he could wrap his idea of the tune's groove into highly effective and understandable language. At least for those knowing how gospel music is played in center block country churches :-)

Communicating Creativity in Business
The principle of communicating creativity is the very same in business as it is in music. Before you tell somebody about your new, disruptive, ground-breaking innovation take a minute to reflect on how to sell your idea. Is he a number's guy? - Say something like: "My hypothesis is XY, given that assumption we should change our product to Z, which would cost approximately X." Are you talking to a social media enthusiast? - go with: "Hey, I've seen Foursquare and Gowalla adopting XY. Maybe we should follow the same principle by doing Z". For rather emotional people try: "Hey, I think XY really hurts people's feelings. Shouldn't we change it to Z?" You want to sell your idea to a consultant? - Better say nothing at all and prepare some slides instead.

What do you think of this post? Write a comment!


I do not yet know the topic of my next post. Please drop by in a week or follow me on Twitter!

From music to business: How to foster, capture and communicate creativity – Part II

This post is the second of three posts to present some creativity-related beliefs from music and how to transfer them to the world business. While I am neither a professional musician nor a business consultant or a remarkably creative person these ideas might be inspiring for some of you.

In my first post I argued how creativity can be fostered by exposing yourself to stimulus. In the next few paragraphs I will continue my explanation of the three-stage process by introducing the concept of capturing creativity.

Capture Creativity – Record, record, record

Creativity does not work from nine to five like a “normal” office worker. Instead, creativity is more like a suicide bomber. It suddenly appears, explodes and then vanishes. Unfortunately, you can never know when it will reappear again. What you can do, however, is to prepare yourself for your sudden spark of creativity: Arm yourself with recording devices, notebooks or useful smartphone apps and stay prepared to capture your personal two seconds of creativity - come what may. (Compare this idea also with Robert Fabricant's (@fabtweet) notion of the externalization of ideas.)

Capturing creativity in music

In my few short years of casual playing and writing music in and for bands and orchestras one theme has reappeared again and again: If you have an idea - be it a melody, a chord progression, or a couple of lyrics - you should record it immediately. "Recording" takes different forms whether it occurs in a group context or in an individual context: When we improvise in my band we always have a recording device running, be it a rather old-fashioned MiniDisc or an iPhone. This allows us to capture creative moments and then listen to them individually, refine them and finally write down important parts. 

Turning to the individual context, if you are on your own and you have a cool idea you should write it down immediately too, before it disappears. If you are interrupted by a phone call or an important e-mail you better start multi-tasking than forgo a potentially disruptive idea. (Here I apologize to all those people who had phone conversations with me while I was writing down a song ;-)). If you do not have pen and paper at hand there is another trick used by many musicians I had the opportunity to talk to: Call yourself at home and sing the tune onto your answering machine (in the 21^st century you can also record it onto your smartphone). It may sound weird but it is much worse to come home from a long day not remembering that one exciting melody.

Capturing creativity in business

During the last year I tried to apply the principle of absolutely recording spontaneous ideas to business. First, I was struggling because I missed appropriate tools (calling my answering machine did not seem quite appropriate). Nowadays I think there are two ways to make use of spontaneous creativity in business. The more bohemian one is the good old Moleskine, the techie way is to use Evernote on your smartphone. Both are very effective!

The first and foremost requirement, however, is to have the discipline to write down even seemingly bad or unimportant ideas that spark spontaneously. Some ideas are gems that need to be polished to recognize their beauty, some ideas are just crap. Still other ideas might not be useful now but can turn out to be important later in your life. By writing down all ideas you make sure you do not miss the gems, while you can still get rid of the crappy ideas later on. The initial concept for this blogpost sparked when I was traveling home from university. Although I did not have time to write down the full post I still could jot down the most important ideas using Evernote. Usually, it is worth taking 20 seconds to write your thoughts down. Furthermore, it might lure at least some people into thinking that you are a quite creative person!

What do you think of this post? Write a comment!

In part III I will write about how to communicate the ideas you have recorded to others. Follow me on Twitter and I will let you know when it will be posted!

From music to business: How to foster, capture and communicate creativity – Part I

This post is the first of three posts to present some creativity-related beliefs from music and how to transfer them to the world business. While I am neither a professional musician nor a business consultant or a remarkably creative person these ideas might be inspiring for some of you.

“Some people are creative, some are not!” – “I’m just not a creative kind of person.” – “You cannot learn creativity, either you are creative or you’re not.”

I have heard these statements dozens of times, be it in dark and muggy rehearsal rooms, clean and flashy offices or in crowded lecture halls. While there is a certain truth in the notion that some people are more creative than others I believe that certain elements of “being creative” can be learned, applied and mastered. While this belief originates in my musical passion as a casual pianist and songwriter I think the principles can also be transferred to the world of business. In my view, the effective use of creativity can be achieved through a three-stage process; its steps are “foster”, “capture” and “communicate”. This post presents step I – “foster”.

Foster creativity – Expose yourself to stimulus

In his book “On Intelligence” Jeff Hawkins defines creativity simply as “making predictions by analogy”. It is “mixing and matching patterns of everything you’ve ever experienced or come to know in your life”. He also gives advice on how to foster creativity, namely by letting your mind wander in order to find “a pattern that is analogous to the problem you are working on”. While this is advice on how to increase the probability of a successful match you can also try to foster creativity by exposing yourself to different stimuli (or “patterns” in the language of Hawkins).

Fostering creativity in music

Improvising jazz musicians achieve a delicate balance between developing an idea and reacting to “input” from the rhythm section and other fellow musicians thereby creating whole new melodies. One of my favorite examples is pianist Keith Jarrett who used the gong of the Cologne Opera as a starting point for his famous improvised "Koln Concerts". When we are creating a new song in our band we usually jam for one or two hours and keep reacting to each other’s different inputs or “stimuli”. Only then we arrive at a song idea that is really “in the pocket”. In a musical context emotions can serve as a huge stimulus for songwriting or composition too. Use them!

Fostering creativity in business

Exposing yourself to stimulus is rather straightforward in a business context. I love to read books, go to conferences, read my twitter feed or just talk to people (or brainstorm). In every one of these instances a myriad of ideas are generated and immediately thrown into the paper bin. But from time to time an idea is really good and useful. In choosing the topic of books, conferences or talks I believe there is an inverse relationship between “probability of creative transfer” and “innovativeness of new idea”. The farther away from your original discipline a topic, the harder it is to transfer insights to your domain of work. However, when it happens, chances are that it will seem quite innovative. As always, try to strike a health balance!

A word of caution

Exposing yourself to stimulus can be quite a lengthy, fragmented and time-consuming activity. I remember leaving our band rehearsal cellar after four hours of intense jamming without the emergence of a single idea worth this designation. I am quite sure most of us had the same experience with lengthy brainstorming sessions in a business context. Therefore, the most important bit of advice is: Have fun! There are so many ways of exposing yourself to stimulus, do not waste your time with discouraging activities. Then, sooner or later a decent idea will come to your mind. What you do then, is the topic of my next post!

What do you think of these ideas? Write a comment!

I am currently writing part II, follow me on Twitter and I will let you know when it is done.