More provocative business thinking from the bestselling author of Purple Cow and All Marketers Are Liars

As one of today’s most influential business thinkers, Seth Godin helps his army of fans stay focused, stay connected, and stay dissatisfied with the status quo, the ordinary, the boring. His books, blog posts, magazine articles, and speeches have inspired countless entrepreneurs, marketing people, innovators, and managers around the world.

Now, for the first time, Godin has collected the most provocative short pieces from his pioneering blog—ranked #70 by Feedster (out of millions published) in worldwide readership. This book also includes his most popular columns from Fast Company magazine, and several of the short e-books he has written in the last few years.

A sample :
• Bon Jovi And The Pirates
• Christmas Card Spam
• Clinging To Your Job Title?
• How Much Would You Pay to Be on Oprah’s Show?
• The Persistence of Really Bad Ideas
• The Seduction of “Good Enough”
• What Happens When It’s All on Tape?
• Would You Buy Life Insurance at a Rock Concert?

Small is the New Big is a huge bowl of inspiration that you can gobble in one sitting or dip into at any time. As Godin writes in his introduction : “I guarantee that you’ll find some ideas that don’t work for you. But I’m certain that you’re smart enough to see the stuff you’ve always wanted to do, buried deep inside one of these riffs. And I’m betting that once inspired, you’ll actually make something happen.”

5 Responses to “Small Is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas”

1. J. Jacobs says:

   June 15, 2010 at 12:00 am

   This was my first audiobook ever and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I listened to it during my daily commutes to work and finished it in about two weeks or so. I was a great alternative to the NPR News drone I usually listen to.

   As for the content: it’s excellent. Inspirational even. Seth Godin is one of those visionary, charismatic types – even if his voice gets a bit whiny and annoying at times. Although I’m not someone who is in the “new media” industry – I still found his points of view the sort that spur people to action no matter what field they are in.

   Last note: at $30, get the iTunes/mp3 version and save yourself a few bucks.

   Reply
2. MR CM Grenier says:

   July 30, 2009 at 12:00 am

   Small is the New Bigis a collection of insightful entries from Seth Godin’s blog and his articles for FastCompany. It is an unconventional read that doesn’t flow as poetically as a novel and lacks the organized structure of a Harvard Business Review publication. But the pages filled me with fresh ideas and made me think of common sense approaches to everyday marketing challenges.

   For example Godin injects realism by stating, “You don’t get the priveledge of deciding what people will think. If they think it, then their truth is already established. The challenge of marketing is to get ideas to spread”. He states that the Internet was a commercial success because it spread an idea virus.

   He tells the story of Apple trying in vain to convince Windows customers to switch to Mac OS. Apple failed because people weren’t thinking about switching, their mindset was not open to the idea, let alone the reasons. Sort of like interrupting someone with a bargain as they are making their way to board an airplane, no matter how good the bargain people aren’t in the frame of mind to accept it. It wasn’t until Apple changed people’s mindset by getting them to accept the iPod. Once customers say yes to the iPod, it opens their worldview to accept other Apple products that they were previously not open to. By starting a ‘cascade of flips’, Apple is flipping customers from PC to Mac at a growing rate. Could Lenovo leverage this strategy by getting people to accept saying yes to Lenovo with enticing accessories, and leverage the ‘yes’ mindset to reverse attach a Desktop PC, Monitor or Notebook?

   Seth also highlights the importance of design and style by stating that ‘design is free’. An illustration is the stylish carpeting, lighting and layout of an Apple store. The Apple store Godin argues, needed carpeting, lighting and a layout anyways, but Apple management took the time to think about the guts of the experience, not just the store fixtures. This example mirrors Seth’s statement that “disrespectful method of communication quickly turns into no communication”. Can Lenovo corporate website, storefronts, and presentations be enhanced through even more intelligent design and style?

   The final key point I learned from Seth is that in today’s Web 2.0 with Flickr, Twitter, youtube, Facebook, slideshare…Marketing is no longer about TV ads, sports sponsorship or tradeshows, it is about Interaction. So we should stop waiting and design that webpage, develop that new form factor and pick up the phone to reach out to the customer. “Waiting is pointless”.

   Reply
3. Mark Deo says:

   April 17, 2009 at 12:00 am

   Very inspiring and entertaining. Spurns creative thinking. Good book on staying on top of change. Some really good short essays. Again, so much to learn about yourself and your business with Seth Godin’s writings I highly recommend.

   Reply
4. Rolf Dobelli says:

   March 16, 2009 at 12:00 am

   These collected entries that best-selling marketing author Seth Godin gleaned from his blog offer a variety of world-of-work musings, from the reasons benchmarking can boost employee performance to the nature of hard work and the challenge of change. Godin himself warns that this is not a dense, researched report, but a compilation of bright ideas, inspirations and tales from the work of business. His fairly random assortment of observations includes some that are interesting, clever and useful, though perhaps not independently book-worthy (or they would be books), and others that are a bit breezy and insubstantial. He suggests reading a few pages until you find a juicy segment and coming back another day for a new sip. getAbstract thinks that’s just the right recommendation.

   Reply
5. Richard P. Burd says:

   January 1, 2009 at 12:00 am

   Okay, I tried to get through this tripe, but Mr. Godin’s newest is so negative that I just could not digest the entire thing. I could not imagine actually spending a day in person with a man who seems to spend his entire life looking for what is wrong in this world. I drove back to work today to retrieve a Stephen Covey book that I started about the same time as “Small.” I felt like I had pulled up my anchor and reset my sails.

   Reply