Ryan A Graves.com

I recently read Purple Cow by Seth Godin. Seth is a professional speaker, a writer and an agent of change! It has been said that “Seth Godin may be the best intuitive marketer alive today”.

I’ve read marketing books before and this one is different! The idea of the purple is this…

When you drive by a boring road in the mid-west (and they all are, I speak from experience) you see cows a plenty. You don’t notice them at all, one cow after another and it literally has no affect on you whatsoever. But, if one day you were driving down the same boring mid-west road and you saw a purple cow you would FREAK OUT. You wouldn’t know what to do and you’d probably stop to look at it. But if later that day you continued to drive down the road and every cow was purple you wouldn’t stop anymore. You’d probably still be stunned that you saw purple cows but how long do you think that would last? Eventually you wouldn’t even care that there were purple cows at all.  You’d continue down the boring mid-west road just as you had when the cows were black and white.

At first as Godin explains, a purple cow is something remarkable. It commands demands attention. But, eventually even the remarkable becomes the ordinary and something else ‘remarkabler‘ takes its place.  Godin teaches in Purple Cow how to continually create remarkable products! This book and Godin’s thoughts on the subjects of R&D vs. Marketing and how they are inter-related are invaluable. This book is a must read for any start-up, marketer, or product developer.

Godin’s sums it up best (as the author should) “Marketing is way to important for the marketing department”.

Seth Godin, author of many great business books, most recently The Dip, wrote a ‘how-to’ that I found interesting and useful on his blog. His premise is that a business book is not like a cook book. It’s not just a recipe, its a recipe for 2 or 3 pages but the rest of the book is the convincing or motivating that needs to occur in order for the reader to act on the recipe. If you are looking at a business book as a how-to, you’re wasting your money. Here is Seth’s recommendations on…

How to read a business book:

1. Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you’re reading, find the three things and do it. The goal of the reading, then, isn’t to persuade you to change, it’s to help you choose what to change.

2. If you’re going to invest a valuable asset (like time), go ahead and make it productive. Use a post-it or two, or some index cards or a highlighter. Not to write down stuff so you can forget it later, but to create marching orders. It’s simple: if three weeks go by and you haven’t taken action on what you’ve written down, you wasted your time.

3. It’s not about you, it’s about the next person. The single best use of a business book is to help someone else. Sharing what you read, handing the book to a person who needs it… pushing those around you to get in sync and to take action–that’s the main reason it’s a book, not a video or a seminar. A book is a souvenir and a container and a motivator and an easily leveraged tool. Hoarding books makes them worth less, not more.