Anybody can have ideas – the difficulty is to express them without squandering a (stack) of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph. – Mark Twain
Photo by: cayusa (Flickr CC)
Thanks to Bruna Martinuzzi, author of The Leader as a Mench, for sending me just before the holiday break a copy of What Matters Now, a free e-book compiled by marketing author and visionary Seth Godin.
Over 70 authors, executives, and entrepreneurs each share an idea, using no more than a couple of “glittering paragraphs,” for you to think about and act upon in 2010 and beyond.
Among my personal favorites that are food for thought related to marketing and personal branding:
As much as I am an advocate for blogging, being networked on LinkedIn, etc., author and entrepreneur Howard Mann shares his idea on being too Connected:
There are tens of thousands of businesses making many millions a year that still haven’t heard of twitter, blogs or facebook…Have they missed out or is the joke on us?…More megaphones don’t equal a better dialogue…
CEO Michael Hyatt on Vision:
Vision is the lifeblood of any organization…(but) in a down economy – particularly one that has taken most of us by surprise – things get very tactical…We are just trying to survive…When times are tough, vision is the first casualty. Before things can improve, it is the first thing we mist recover.
Marketing authors Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell on “the 1%“:
[Business success can begin] with a small – very small – group of self-identified fans within a category…It’s usually a small percentage of the tribe within a larger tribe who spread the word [about your product] – usually about 1 percent…The One Percenters are often hidden in the crevices of niches, yet they are the roots of word of mouth. This year, your job is to find them and attract them.
For many, many more succinct and inspiring ideas, get What Matters Now – now – via Seth Godin’s website.
Mike Urbonas 
That’s a great compilation Mike.
Another of Seth’s volumes, Tribes, inspired (at least in part) my currently underway series entitled 30 Day to Become a Better Monarch Modeler, while his Purple Cow led to my first attempt at a remarkable offering, the Monarch Batch File Generator, which has now been downloaded by thousands of site visitors who seem to love it.
One last one: read The Dip if you feel like you’re struggling with a task or a process.
Hi Sandy, glad to hear from you! For the record, Sandy is one of the leading “power users” of Monarch software, a report-mining tool to transform report-based information into customized data for easy export to Excel (I
worked at Datawatch, sellers of Monarch, for 10 years.
I am very impressed with the response to your Monarch Batch File Generator (IIRC, it creates a batch file to run Monarch with all the right ‘switches’ as is desired). This is very much in keeping with Seth Godin’s own remarks on Generosity in What Matters Now, “In a digital world, the gift I give you almost always benefits me more than it costs.” Great work, Sandy.