I have just finished reading
Guy Kawasaki’s new book,
The Art of the Start – The Time Tested, Battle Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything. This was a fun book to read and at the same time, it is also a great reference for anyone who has been down the road of small biz startup before. If you are familiar with Guy Kawasaki, you know his West-Coast-Silicon-Valley-“I love Macintosh” philosophy and writing style. I probably would not suggest this book as a how-to for the first-time entrepreneur just out of the gate because Guy’s inside information and anecdotes are probably a little on the advanced side for the newbie. If you don’t know what “dilution” is off the top of your head, then this book would leave you confused in some parts. Offsetting some of the venture-capitalist speak are obvious pointers such as DON’T CAPITALIZE EVERY WORD IN YOUR EMAILS! I particularly liked the filler on T-Shirt design; but I guess those stiff, non-designers out there developing genetically engineered yogurt and pea pods, need guidance as they set up for that big IPO day…
That being said, I loved the book for its bang-on dialogue on business-building and its take on growing your concept past the simple sole-proprietorship or LLC. phase. By combining useful know-how with real-world narratives, this book is way above most of the “How to Start A Small Business” – type genre crap on the market today. Some of Guy’s flaky California Evangelical weirdness such as “Get A Morpheus” and “Achieve Humanness” are really just over-branded syllogisms for simple nuts and bolts strategy and thinking but like I said, that is Guy’s style and it works.
So I do recommend you read it. Besides, it will take approximately 4 to 5 days to read cover to cover as it is set up visually like a wordy PowerPoint presentation (something Guy advises to avoid at all costs…) and is easily organized around visual chunks of information. You could probably read this book in a day but I would not recommend it. Although the book appears simple and clean in its type and layout, the actual content is quite involved and is not so much a step by step procedural guide but rather an advanced book on strategic theory and psychology. That is probably what gives this book a fair amount of credibility with me is that it does not pretend to be a “Business For Dummies” kind of book in any way, shape, or form. Most of the startup-type business books suffer from way too much insignificant detail that is, in actuality, never applied in the real Startup World. Real-world concepts like bootstrapping and pitching are hardly touched in these stupid tomes usually written by some dufus MBA or ex-accountant. Most of those books will begin the process of building your business with the assumption that you have $25,000 cash sitting in your checking account somewhere that miraculously showed up there or was invested by someone close to you. They never start from the premise of what constitutes a true start up: no money, no employees, no investors, no board of directors, and hardly any market.
Finally, I believe that the last chapter in the book is key for any one (especially service industry types like designers). Without throwing a spoiler, I can say that the idea is that ethically, you should do what is right. This means playing by ethical rules of engagement in business and life. I know all this stuff and so do you but reading this chapter is like a little review of what we should all believe deep inside. Read it and shake your head knowingly, realizing that simple reinforcement of these guiding principles of business can keep your clients happy, keep you from over-stressing, and keep you out of court.
