A summary of things you should know about Fail Fast or Win Big according to Bernhard Schroeder: Introduction In this episode Bernhard Schroeder reveals his insights on his book, FailRead More
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]]>In this episode Bernhard Schroeder reveals his insights on his book, Fail Fast or Win Big, where he reveals how the right kind of risk and embracing fast failure can really pay off.
In his book Schroeder teaches you how to create a quick prototype of your product or service, develop a business model, test it repeatedly with customers, and continue to refine your business model. The goal of the book is to help you determine quickly whether your business idea is worth pursuing, needs new direction, or should be abandoned altogether.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are starting a brand new business and need help figuring out the best way to create a business model, test a product or service, and pinpoint any failure.
I think there are some great books and content out there on entrepreneurship. I am an entrepreneur who has built a billion dollar company and helped build multiple others and so I have a lot of context and experience. I wanted to give the reader a book that was full of rich content on how you can actually test something quickly and that’s the idea behind Fail Fast or Win Big. I’ve taken some of the best principles that have come out in the last five years and I put them all together in this book.
I designed the book to be read jumping in and jumping out but if you wanted to read the whole thing you could.
The main concept would be that you really weren’t born to do anything and you should do what you want. I wasn’t born to be an entrepreneur, I became one.
I am on a college campus and I am teaching college kids in 2008 how to write business plans and at the same time I am looking at what is happening with the recession. I am looking at the idea that it’s not about business plans anymore, it’s about moving faster. It takes too long to write a business plan. I have met people that have spent a year writing a business plan only to see someone else move into the market. So in chapter one I explain why we are at the end of business plans and what you have to do next.
In chapter two I introduce the lean model framework and the four elements. The four elements are customer truth, business model, lean resources, and rapid prototyping.
The title of chapter three says it all, Ideas Are Great but Business Models Rule.
In chapter four I get into another element of the framework which is lean resources and the chapter is titled Lean Resources, Less is More. This chapter explains what the lean resources are that are out there that you can leverage.
Chapter five is about rapid prototyping. I don’t know if there has been a better time in the history of the world for creating a company. In this chapter I explain why rapid prototyping is important and how you can test it with customers so that you can get the right feedback to know whether or not you have a good idea to move forward.
In chapter six I talk about a really critical element of the model which is the customer truth. Since I started my marketing career I believe that if you really want to understand the customer you have to meet them face to face. In this chapter I explain how you can get at customer truth and what are all the ways you can get it very cost effectively.
In chapter seven I talk about why we might not need BC’s in the future. I explain regular crowd funding and I explain the new crowd equity funding that the SCC is now getting ready to release the rules on. This chapter is titled Entrepreneurs have a New Investor, the Crowd and I honestly believe this is an amazing way to fund a small startup or to get a company started without giving up very much at all. I explain exactly how to go about it including how to create a crowd funding or a crowd equity campaign.
In chapter eight I talk about where I see opportunity today. In this chapter I explain what I think the top 10 to 15 opportunities are and how people can go after them.
In chapter nine I provide people with something they don’t have easy access to and that is the first two to three years of the back story of what top entrepreneurs did to make it.
And in chapter ten I sum it up and I talk about the steps people can take if they want to be an entrepreneur.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 4:57
“As an entrepreneur you are not in the business of writing business plans.” – Bernhard Schroeder
I am a director of Lavin Entrepreneurship Center at San Diego State University. I also teach in the entrepreneurship program and I was a career marketing guy who happened to build a billion dollar company with three other people and launch some amazing companies like Amazon and Yahoo.
After I built my marketing career and a billion dollar company I decided that none of that was motivating anymore and I wanted to somehow figure out a way to help other people have an amazing life. I decided to go back to a college campus and teach and as I was teaching I was asked to Speak at a Ted event. The topic at that event was Why Failing Fast is Great. The next day I got an e-mail from a publisher in New York who said he’d heard about the talk from a friend of his who attended and he wanted to see the power point because he thought it was a book. Before you know it he gave me feedback that this is the kind of thing that can help a lot of people and so I wrote the book.
Spin Selling by Neil Rackham
Buy Fail Fast or Win Big by Bernhard Schroeder on Amazon today
Visit BernieSchroeder.com to learn more about Bernhard and connect with him
Follow Bernhard Schroeder on LinkedIn
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
How To Ruin A Business Without Really Trying by MJ Gottlieb
Selfish Scared and Stupid by Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory
Scaling Up by Verne Harnish
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Important Things That Every Entrepreneur Needs To Know About Starting a New Business
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Selfish Scared and Stupid according to Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory: Introduction In this episode Kieran Flanagan and Don Gregory take aRead More
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]]>In this episode Kieran Flanagan and Don Gregory take a deep dive into their book, Selfish Scared and Stupid, where they demystify the behaviors behind the failure and success of business ideas.
In their book, Flanagan and Gregory will help you design your business effectively with strategies to understand why the public fails to engage with your brand and why your product is falling short. The goal of the book is to teach you product survival tactics, how to offer customer strategic reward programs, how to turn fear into action, and how to make products hard to resist.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are struggling to get their product or service engaged with the public and need a proven system to increase their customer reach and sales.
We have been told that it was funny which our intent wasn’t to be necessarily funny but human beings are funny by nature. It’s real and it’s not speaking to ideas but instead its dealing with what is true and real for human beings.
This book is a fairly easy read and written in the order that you would approach an engagement program. It probably works best read in order but I have had people say to me that they dip in and out as well.
We need to design for success rather than just hoping for the best and relying on short term strategies. It’s also about swimming with the current of human nature because if we don’t we get exhausted, we go nowhere and we often give up.
We start the book off explaining why we really need to be thinking selfish, scared and stupid. We make the distinction between acting selfish, scared and stupid which is human beings default position. It is why we survived, thrived and evolved as a species and ended up in this dominant position on the planet and it’s just that they don’t sounds like particularly good things. We tend to deny those things in our decision making but our primitive brains still drive a lot of our decision making. The survival thinking drives the fundamental thinking beneath our decision making.
From there we move on to how to do it. We section the book into think selfish, think scared, think stupid and dive into each of those points. Thinking selfish is fundamentally about coming from a place of what’s in it for them, and we need to move from what’s in it for me to what’s in it for them. So often in business we see that people are so caught up in what’s in it me. This section is about how to understand the extraordinary power of flipping your mindset to how you can filter the world constantly into what’s in it for someone else. And by doing that you can engage your staff with not only your goals but there’s as well.
In think scared the reality is that fear drives us a lot of the time. We look at how to flip that fear that has a stay in inaction to how to create a fear of not taking action. It’s about minimizing the fear of action and maximizing the fear of in action. So what we look to do is how to make change seem less fearful and part of the way we do it is by linking it to the known. Thinking scared isn’t about making people afraid, it’s about understanding how fear drives us and making sure that fear is on the appropriate side of the ledger in terms of stimulating action.
Then we look at thinking stupid and for a lot of people this is the most challenging one. Again it’s not about being stupid, it’s about thinking stupid and what that means is looking for the most easy way to achieve an outcome. It’s about making sure that our tasks are really easy and how to reduce resistance to those tasks. We spend a lot of time on why failure happens and how to make failure difficult. Instead of relying on these ideas, relying on short term strategies, the fundamental idea of the book is how we design for success.
“We are all selfish, scared and stupid.” – Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory
“Make failure difficult.” – Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory
We have a long history in advertising and spent a long part of our lives getting a better understanding of what drives human behavior. Most of our careers have been in entrepreneurial startups and our interests are in what drives human behavior. We have a business called The Impossible Institute which is a research, innovation, and think tank where we look at the gap in what people say they do and what they actually do. In that gap we find interesting stuff about how to motivate, how to get results, and how to help entrepreneurs.
We saw so much inspiration around what was driving human behavior and so much of it was based on ideas. What we wanted to do was step back and take a look at what was really driving human beings and generating results.
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
Purple Cow by Seth Godin
Buy Selfish Scared and Stupid by Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory on Amazon today
Visit TheImpossibleInstitute.com to learn more about the book
Follow Kieran Flanagan on Twitter and Facebook
Follow Dan Gregory on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez | Traction: A Startup Guide To Getting Customers by Justin Mares | Hooked: How To Build Habit Forming Products by Nir Eyal
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Simple Ways Entrepreneurs Can Attract Customers | 5 Reasons Why Your Marketing Sucks
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>Latest Books for Entrepreneurs in November 2014 The Entrepreneurs Library presents the latest books for entrepreneurs in November 2014. These books are brand new to the market and the authorsRead More
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]]>Latest Books for Entrepreneurs in November 2014
The Entrepreneurs Library presents the latest books for entrepreneurs in November 2014. These books are brand new to the market and the authors are in line to share their insights with me. Stay tuned this month for the release of the interviews with these great books and the authors.
This provocative book is built on the idea that businesses must return to a more human engagement methodology in order to succeed. It is an informative read for anyone interested in improving influence, growing business reach, improving sales figures or understanding the complexities of human behavior.
Behavioral strategists Dan Gregory and Kieran Flanagan argue that if you want to increase your chances of success in business and life, you should design for reality. Offering real-world strategies with a healthy dose of wit and charm, Selfish, Scared & Stupid will help you design for success by aligning with natural human behaviors: selfishness, fear and stupidity.
Learn how the survival of the species plays into business, including delusional realities and the reasons ideas can fail. Discover how to offer customers strategic rewards, thereby making the buying process more attractive to selfish natures. Examine the link between fear and the unknown, including strategies for quelling fears and turning them into action.
“SSS is a triumph, a great read, stunning insights and the title had me laughing at myself and learning at the same time. It makes me want to be a better man–generous, courageous and intelligent!” – Matt Church, Founder of Though Leaders Global and author of Amplifiers
“Clever, rigorous and refreshingly real–this fad-free book shows modern-day realists how to unlock real results.” – Dr Jason Fox, Motivational Scientist and author of The Game Changer
Learn more about Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory | Buy Selfish, Scared, and Stupid on Amazon
Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products.
Hooked provides readers with:
Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior.
“A must-read for everyone who cares about driving customer engagement.” — Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup
“Hooked gives you the blueprint for the next generation of products. Read Hooked or the company that replaces you will.” – Matt Mullenweg, Founder of WordPress
Learn more about Nir Eyal or listen to his own deep dive into the book | Buy Hooked on Amazon
Join double-decade, quarter-billion-dollar Couple CEO Heidi and Scott Shimberg, as they explore the intricacies and intimacies of living and loving life as an entrepreneurial couple.
Couple CEO addresses the specific challenges facing you as a team and as partners with actionable lifestyle advice, proven business management strategies, and colorful guidance that answer questions like: How can you put the spark back in your relationship and make sure it stays lit? How do you live a life where your business and relationship coexist and thrive?
The challenges as a couple are unique. Couple CEOs often struggle to create balance between growing their business, enjoying a happy family, and living a healthy lifestyle. This book is great for any couple engaged in growing a business together, but also a valuable read for any couple creating a life together.
Learn more about Heidi and Scott Shimberg or listen to their deep dive into the book | Buy Couple CEO on Amazon
Drawing on her experience of great adversity–and even greater success—Patricia Walsh shows you how to set realistic milestones and describes a simple and effective process for mapping these milestones to daily tasks that will help you achieve what you previously thought unachievable.
In Blind Ambition, Walsh both inspires and educates by relating her unforgettable personal story while detailing her proven Fuel / Fire / Blaze approach to achieving any goal:
“Patricia Walsh lays out an extremely effective framework for achieving your highest goals–in business and in life. I have personally seen Patricia apply this approach to great success at Microsoft. Anyone who reads this book will be that much closer to achieving their goals.” — Steven Sinofsky, former president of the Windows division at Microsoft Corporation
Learn more about Patricia Walsh | Buy Blind Ambition on Amazon
Whether you’re a recent college graduate faced with a difficult job market, an ambitious entrepreneur trying to anticipate the Next Big Thing, or a struggling executive weathering a storm of constant global change, this book will guide you through anything the world throws at you.
This powerful book by Drucker scholar and author Bruce Rosenstein incorporates the master’s time-tested principles into a step-by-step daily plan that will change your life forever. Starting right now, you can:
“Rosenstein has opened the door to an important and often misunderstood area of Drucker’s work–why an understanding of the future is so critical for our development as leaders. It confirms my belief of a bright future ahead.” — Frances Hesselbein, President and CEO, The Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute
Learn more about Bruce Rosenstein | Buy Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way on Amazon
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