Erik on Software

New Book Review: "Million Dollar Speaking"

New book review for Million Dollar Speaking: The Professional's Guide to Building Your Platform, by Alan Weiss, Ph.D., McGraw-Hill, 2011, reposted here:

As Alan Weiss states in his preface, this book was written for the professional career speaker (one who gets paid to speak), even though "amateur" speaking is also a worthwhile endeavor and an activity that the author recommends pursuing. After discussing the trade, the author discusses marketing, fee rates, and career management, followed by numerous topics associated with career growth and career challenges. If you have read other texts written by Weiss, you will find the same high degree of practical advice offered in this work. Some of the advice provided easily applies to areas of the consulting profession on which the author has written extensively in other books, but bear in mind that this book concentrates on professional speaking.

As always, a review in such a small amount of space is difficult for a work such as this, since Weiss covers a lot of ground and there is very little of the filler content that many business books seem to possess these days. This reviewer especially appreciated chapters entitled "Establishing Your Market", "Establishing Fees", "Lean and Mean", and "Yawn: Passive Income". In addition to the practical advice that Weiss offers, the other qualities to which this reviewer is attracted is his humor and occasional sarcasm, together with his originality. In the opinion of this reviewer, it is the many succinct lists and original line diagrams the author provides that especially demonstrates this originality, and always provide value to the reader seeking to understand the material rather than simply going through the motions of learning.

For example, in the first chapter referenced, which asks questions such as "Who are the members of your audience?", "Whose actions and behaviors do you wish to improve?", "Who are your buyers?", and "Whose condition can you improve by appearing in front of those audiences?", the author does not just talk about the three elements that are required to speak successfully, he draws lines representing market need, competency, and passion, and asks "Where do these paths intersect?". And in the second chapter referenced, Weiss visually shows how fees can surpass value as reputation or brand increase after remarking that "I once thought that as value increased, fees could increase. I was incalculably wrong. The lines actually cross as trust and a brand are developed, because people expect to get what they pay for!"

List favorites of this reviewer include "40 Ways to Increase Your Fees", "Five Facts to Challenge Your Assumptions About Bureaus", "Techniques for Professional, Honest Feedback", "The Six Rules and Eight Steps for Creating a Speech", "15 Conditions that Support Raising Fees", and "20 Great Ways to Engage Almost Any Audience". Read this book alongside texts in this genre by other authors to get a balanced view. This reviewer also recommends the following books by the same author: "Million Dollar Consulting: The Professional's Guide to Growing a Practice", "Life Balance: How to Convert Professional Success into Personal Happiness", and "How to Establish a Unique Brand in the Consulting Profession: Powerful Techniques for the Successful Practitioner" (see my reviews).

New Book Review: "Unthinking"

Recently posted book review for Unthinking: The Surprising Forces Behind What We Buy, by Harry Beckwith, Business Plus, 2011, reposted here:

In my comments on Beckwith's "Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing" a couple years ago, I indicated that in the words of the author that text was a "'how-to-think-about book', not necessarily a 'how-to' book, 'because if you think like these new marketers - if you think more broadly and deeply about services and their prospects - you will figure out dozens of better ways to grow your business'". In recently revisiting that earlier Beckwith masterwork in comparison with "Unthinking", while both can be seen as "how-to-think-about" books, the former contains many elements of a "how-to" book, while the latter moves more in the other direction. As Beckwith discusses in this new text, this move led him to discuss the consumer. More specifically, the American consumer: "what leads us to choose what we choose and to buy what we buy".

I am not so sure that what the author provides here are "lessons of a lifetime", because of the book format, which essentially consists of case study after case study rather than lessons per se as were presented in "Selling the Invisible". However, the segues provided between each of these case studies are among the best I have ever read, and the categories of case studies ("Childhood", "Culture", and "Our Eyes") to discuss the major sources of influence, the unconscious marketing choices on which the author writes, were well chosen. Following my reading of this book, the number and location of dog ears in my copy indicate that greater interest was concentrated in the latter half, and while this work is apt to find a general audience, it is also probable that those in the marketing space will especially find the material interesting, and I could not help but come to an obvious conclusion that readers are bound to summon ideas of their own following a reading.

The ability of a book to lead readers in such a way should be the goal of all business texts. Remember, the title of this book speaks to the fact that consumers often make decisions without conscious thought, and is not about the book itself, which is actually a "how-to-think-about-book". In some aspects, "Unthinking" reminds me of "Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others" (see my review). Especially interesting to me are the author's discussion of Community as a Service (CAAS), human error concluding too much from too little (statistically), the repackaging of unchanged products to capture greater market share, high product return rates due to complexity, and the increasing prevalence of product name brevity. Some of the information provided here has already become outdated, such as the number of smart phone "apps" currently available in the marketplace, but this is to be expected in works of this genre.

The part of this book that helped me tie the case studies to the marketplace is the "Unthinking Marketer's Checklist" in its concluding pages - questions that marketers need to ask themselves in several categories, such as "Shortcutting and Stereotyping", "Big Versus Little", "Play", "The Power of Surprise", "The Power of Stories", "The Importance of Me", "Simplicity", "Clarity and Cognitive Fluency", "Appealing to Feeling", and "Conquering Our Attention-Deficit Disorder". Potential readers of this work might consider reading the "Unthinking Marketer's Checklist" at the outset, prior to reading the case studies comprising the bulk of the text. Doing so might help set the context. A reading guide that addresses this checklist during a reading of the broader sources of influence might prove to be a good move by Beckwith, but overall the goal of this book is met: "to find some patterns in our fascinating complexity and share them with you".

New Book Review: "Rules to Break & Laws to Follow"

New book review for Rules to Break & Laws to Follow: How Your Business Can Beat the Crisis of Short-Termism (Microsoft Executive Leadership Series), by Don Peppers & Martha Rogers, PhD, John Wiley & Sons, 2008, reposted here:

 

Purchase of this text by this reviewer followed on the tails of "The Strategy Paradox: Why Committing to Success Leads to Failure (and What to Do About It)" by Michael E. Raynor (see my review) and "Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour through the Wilds of Strategic Management" by Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand, and Joseph Lampel (see my review). While initial interest in this work by Peppers and Rogers was due to its seeming focus on the strategic versus the tactical, however, potential readers should note that the authors instead investigate and present general principles that any firm should follow.

At the outset, this text does not beat around the bush. For example, in the first chapter the authors respond to the following first three rules to break by writing "No, no, no. No to all the above. These Rules to Break are really just assumptions about how business works, at the most basic level. They probably aren't written down anywhere in your strategy document, but they have almost certainly backed up your thinking and your company's actions for as long as you remember.": (1) "the best measure of success for your business is current sales and profit, (2) "with the right sales and marketing effort, you can always get more customers", and (3) "company value is created by offering differentiated products and services".

The authors further this instruction by pointing out that all of these assumptions are wrong. "If you operate according to these false assumptions, not only will your business fail to create much value, but you'll also soon find yourself trapped in a Crisis of Short-Termism. Everything you do will be so furiously centered on making today's numbers that you will become increasingly blinded to everything else. Business swept up by this crisis find that even as they try to do the right thing for their shareholders, they end up destroying value rather than creating it. So while these Rules to Break may look no more dangerous than ordinary common sense, in truth they're deadly."

According to the authors, executives need to change their mental models of what it means to succeed. The new model that Peppers and Rogers is based on the understanding that long-term business success relies on customer success as a prerequisite, and that employee trust of their employer precedes employee drive to earn customer trust. Interestingly, even though new technologies are presented as making possible sophisticated analytics, subverting the power of hierarchies, connecting consumers electronically, and undermining the advantages of new products, the authors state that it is customer trust that will provide a guideline for action even if financial metrics are not yet at the needed level of sophistication.

In the opinion of this reviewer, the third chapter entitled "Customers Are a Scarce Resource" is one of the best in the book, and if the potential reader does not have enough time to read all the chapters, they need to read this one. In this chapter, the concept of customer lifetime value (LTV) is discussed. "New customer acquisition has always been the quintessential goal of traditional marketing and is something often trumpeted to shareholders. But raising your customers' lifetime values is just as important, because over and above whatever profit you are earning currently, increasing your customers' LTVs increases the value of your business."

The authors continue by stating that the philosophy of some businesses is "based on the belief that as long as its sales and marketing effort is effective, it can always acquire more customers from somewhere. But this is a false assumption - a Rule to Break. Instead, to make the right decisions as a business, you must always take into consideration the population of customers and prospective customers truly available to you. After considering the whole population of customers and prospects, your job is to employ that population to create the most possible value for your firm. Because customers are scarcer than other resources, using up customers is more costly than using up other resources."

The fifth chapter was also especially enjoyed by this reviewer, where in discussing how to increase the value of one's business the authors present the concepts of "customer equity" and "Return on Customer" (ROC) that follow a discussion of ROI. The examples and accompanying tables in the third and fifth chapters are very well done. The thoughts that the authors share on innovation in the tenth and eleventh chapters were also appreciated, where the production of new ideas is said to be more important than making money from every new idea, and where the need to differentiate between "wise failures" and "fiasco failures" is said to be an important distinction, reminding this reviewer of a quote by James Cameron, who was recently quoted as saying "If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success".

Copycat Advertising Campaign

First of all, some readers of my blog might be curious as to why the category tag cloud in the upper right hand corner of the page includes "running" as a category. Where does running fit within a blog entitled "Erik on Software"? I eluded to an answer within my first post in this category. The answer is simply that the mind is software, and the body is hardware. Personal interest in the human mind crosses over from my fascination with software designed and created by humans. (And interestingly enough, two of my three posts on running are now #1 and #6 as the most viewed by visitors here, something that I find humorous since the subtitle of this blog touts "musings on business and technology".)

Posting on this topic has been light, mainly because I am so much more intimately involved in the latter category of software in the workplace, although of course I interact with other human software systems every day. My two last posts on running were associated with the ASICS brand of running shoes. In the first post, I discussed my long-term ASICS brand loyalty and raved about this year's ASICS advertising campaign ("The Cleansing Power of Sport"), and in the second post, I discussed my (only recent) disillusionment with ASICS mainly because of the latest iteration of its Gel Nimbus line of running shoes.

The trail running I normally do each morning for work has taken a backseat to the treadmill recently due mainly to the long commute I currently take to and from work each day to my new client, and one of the new channels I typically bounce between while running (CNBC, CNN, and Fox) played an advertisement by UnitedHealthcare during a commercial brake this morning that I had not previously seen. And the advertisement, part of a new "Health in Numbers" campaign, showed a runner eerily reminiscent of the runners in this year's ASICS advertising campaign. Check out the print version of this ad:

And here, re-posted for your convenience from my first post, is a close-up of one of the ASICS advertisements from earlier this year:

While words - in this case, associated with sadness (the other three ads of the campaign are associated with anxiety, stress, and worry) - flow away from the ASICS runner as part of a seeming exorcism-through-run, numbers congregate around the UnitedHealthcare runner like an aura (the company claims that they "use information and numbers from across the health care system to help you access health care that is simpler and more responsive").

Perhaps these two campaigns were created by the same advertising agency. Let's see. The ASICS advertising campaign is apparently being run by Vitro Agency. The UnitedHealthcare advertising campaign is apparently being run by Ogilvy & Mather. Uh-oh. You might have read in my bio that I worked for a company which is now global marketing intelligence firm Synovate. As an individual with both advertising and marketing research experience from that company, the similarity between these two campaigns is too close for comfort. What do you think? Send me your thoughts.

Global Leadership Summit 2010 Day 2:Blake Mycoskie

From the conference notes:

Acknowledged as one of today's most dynamic serial entrepreneurs, Blake Mycoskie launched five successful companies before the age of 30.

Best known as the founder and "chief shoe giver" of TOMS Shoes, a for-profit company with a unique "One for One" business model that provides a new pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair sold. To date, TOMS has encouraged conscious consumers to purchase and give more than 400,000 pairs of shoes to children around the world.

In December 2009, TOMS Shoes was awarded the State Department's Award for Corporate Excellence by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Between business ventures, Mycoskie competed in the CBS primetime series The Amazing Race. With his sister, Paige, he came within minutes of winning the $1 million dollar grand prize.

---

From my personal notes:

• Buy one pair of shoes, give one pair away - "One for One".
• A spontaneous response to the desire to give shoes to the needy.
• Giving feels good and is also a good business strategy.
• "All we have to do at TOMS is focus on giving."
• TOMS has given away 600,000 shoes since the business began 4 years ago.
• Employees are encouraged to give.
• All employees with the company 2 or more years are paid to travel to hand deliver shoes.
• TOMS began through the reinvestment of profit gained from selling Mycoskie's online education business.
• Mycoskie explained that if he had instead started a non-profit, resources would have been depleted quickly, and asking for donations would have been required in order to continue the business.
• The first "Day without Shoes" involved 250,000 people not wearing their shoes for one day. The word got out in part by the "tens of millions of dollars" that was donated by Microsoft.
• Strategic partnerships have enabled the giving away of more shoes than would have otherwise been possible.
• Asking people is a requirement for change - you can't be bashful when you want to see change.
• Proverbs says to give your first fruits - it's a Biblical principle that has blessed TOMS shoes - they really did give their first fruits by not giving away after first wasting financial resources.
• "It's never too early to start giving."
• The next "Day without Shoes" will take place in April 2011.

New Book Review: "Don't Just Roll the Dice"

Recently posted book review for Don't Just Roll the Dice: A Usefully Short Guide to Software Pricing, by Neil Davidson, Simple Talk Publishing, 2009, reposted here:

This white paper sized introductory guide to software pricing is very well put together. After Davidson walks the reader through some basic concepts from economics and marketing that specifically relate to pricing software products, he addresses some of the more advanced aspects of pricing that include areas such as versioning, bundling, and licenses. The discussion provided in the fifth chapter, "What Your Price Says About You (and How to Change It)" is especially well written.

The author reminds the reader that one should never forget that practice trumps theory, and that product pricing is as much art and craft as it is science: "Sure, it helps to understand the economics and psychology of pricing, but theory can only tell you so much. At some point, you need to make a decision and do it. Use the information in this handbook to make an informed stab at what a good price would look like, and how your customers will react, and try it out. The exact price almost doesn't matter - get it broadly right, don't screw up totally - and you can tweak it later. You're never going to know if you've chosen the exact right price or not, but you should experiment once you've set your initial price; not experiment in the scientific sense of forming a hypothesis, changing a single variable, and accepting or rejecting the hypothesis, but in the sense of changing something and seeing what happens."

Especially well recommended to those new to economics and marketing theory. Note that this book is currently available free of charge as a PDF document download at the author's "dontjustrollthedice" website.

Digitally Distinct

According to the algorithm(s) in use by the "Online ID Calculator", my online brand is "digitally distinct" rather than digitally dissed, digitally dabbling, or digitally disastrous:

This is the nirvana of online identity. A search of your name yields lots of results about you, and most, if not all, reinforce your unique personal brand. Keep up the good work, and remember that your Google results can change as fast as the weather in New England. So, regularly monitor your online identity. That way, if something negative, such as an anonymous ad hominem attack on your character on a blog, crops up, you can address it quickly, before it gets out of hand.

My surname, while it might be "verbally dissed", is apparently helpful in the online world. The dimensions of input originally entered to compute my online brand resulted in the following graph:

According to the creators of the "Online ID Calculator", this tool is "the first and leading tool" of this type, and that "until now, there has been no way of evaluating the strength of online personal brand".

Results are based on seven dimensions:

• total number of Google responses for provided name
• total number of Google responses on the first page of results
• total number of Google responses not about provided name (i.e. they are about someone else with provided name) in first three pages of results
• relevance of Google results on first three pages of results in regard to personal brand relevance
• aspirational career level
• whether personal web site or blog appears on first page of Google results
• whether any negative or unflattering Google results appear on first page of Google results

It is quite apparent that the "Online ID Calculator" is not only Google-centric, but uses two rather subjective dimensions in its calculations, both of which are associated with personal opinion on brand relevance.

Substituting "Manager with 5-10 years' experience, Director, Consultant or Small Business Owner" with "VP, Highly-regarded Consultant or Acknowledged Thought Leader", for example (there are only five closed-ended choices provided), results in the following:

Still "digitally distinct" according to the algorithm(s), but a bit closer to "digitally dabbling".

Other than the dimension for the total number of Google responses for provided name, which affects the Y axis, however, the permutations of possible entries for the various dimensions covered by the algorithm(s) that affect the X axis are rather limited.

In addition, of course, reside the presumed interpretations of the following:

• reputation of the Google search engine
• volume range of search results for the upper two quartiles and lower two quartiles
• volume range of search results within each aspirational career level
• definitions of aspirational career levels, especially in light of a broad spectrum of careers
• other definitions, such as "negative" and "unflattering"

It is possible that some of these interpretations are relative, based on the growing pool of respondents, in which case calculation results might prove interesting, but in the absence of such statistical relativity, results provided by the "Online ID Calculator" essentially boil down to one of four quartiles that can be easily visualized by stepping through some simple reasoning.

New Book Review: "The Integration Imperative"

Recently posted book review for The Integration Imperative: Erasing Marketing and Business Development Silos - Once and for All - in Professional Service Firms, by Suzanne C. Lowe, Professional Services Books, 2009, reposted here:

Author Suzanne C. Lowe writes that many professional service firms exist in a state of confusion due to a less than optimal structure for deploying marketing and business development. "Business development (selling) is a one-to-one activity. Practitioners' brains (well, their brain power) are the 'products' clients are considering for eventual engagement. But marketing is a one-to-many activity, and is best deployed from a firm-wide, centralized purview." And "without an optimal structure for marketing and business development, the potential for confusion creeps in when one-to-one fee-earning practitioners want to get involved in the one-to-many aspects of marketing". She continues to write that "any misunderstanding of the optimal scope of the marketing and business development function causes 'disconnectivity' and waste". After a discussion of the structural and cultural challenges to marketing and business development integration, Lowe discusses how individual "doing things differently" efforts within a professional service firm can impede effectiveness if such initiatives do not have integration as a springboard.

Lowe's Integration Imperative concept, which consists of the Process Imperative, the Skills Imperative, and the Support Imperative, three interdependent structural frameworks, embeds marketing and business development into the function of every individual within a professional service firm. Through these three frameworks, respectively, the author suggests that professional service firms "broaden the scope of their marketing and business development functions, better balance them strategically, make them more discernible to everyone in the firm, and make them more obviously iterative", "reframe their advancement pathways - for practitioners and nonrevenue-generating staff - to more clearly outline the steps every professional can take toward competency growth in marketing and business development", and "create more formal avenues for function-to-function collaboration, shared accountability, and co-leadership for marketing and business development".

The third part of this book presents 11 case studies (from Korn/Ferry International, Holland & Hart, Perkins+Will, Moss Adams, IBM Global Technology Services, Haley & Aldrich, Baker Donelson, Ross & Baruzzini, Jones Lang LaSalle, R.W. Beck, and Randstad) to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Integration Imperative when applied to professional service firms, and the frank business leader quotes liberally provided throughout are one of the best features of this book. A quote by Scott Jensen, the first Moss Adams director of sales, illustrates the practicality of these case studies: "I knew our people got the message that there is a difference and dependence between marketing and selling. They understood that we cannot effectively sell unless we market, and that we cannot market unless we sell, and finally that without superior service, both are wasted. Marketing is too expensive without selling. Selling is too hard without marketing...When we market effectively and sell correctly, we establish the basis for serving passionately." Similarly, a quote by Ranstad's chief marketing officer Frans Cornelius: "The key lesson is that it is all a matter of organizing and communicating internally. To win outside, one must start on the inside. One would think that the marketers would be excellent communicators, but sadly this is not a skill that is learned a lot in marketing education. Typically, marketers tend to communicate within their own circles - with agencies, other marketers, seminar participants and the like. Yet marketers must become expert at communicating to general managers and CFOs!"

This reviewer also appreciates diagrams such as Figure 9.1 which shows the connection between passive and active aspects of marketing, sales and service along the path from messaging to revenues. The appendixes are also well done, especially the second that includes several templates, including the Skills Imperative template which outlines how associates, consultants, and senior consultants can be involved along with principals/senior managers and owners/management executives in the Integration Imperative. Regardless of whether you read this work in an as-needed "à la carte" fashion like Lowe suggests, or start-to-finish, as a consultant this reviewer expects that all individuals working in professional service and business to business firms stand to benefit. Well recommended.

Past Book Review (February 15, 2009): "How to Establish a Unique Brand in the Consulting Profession"

Past book review (i.e. posted prior to starting this blog) for How to Establish a Unique Brand in the Consulting Profession: Powerful Techniques for the Successful Practitioner, by Alan Weiss, Pfeiffer, 2001, reposted here:

This book was written for independent consultants and small consulting practices, and Alan Weiss effectively focuses on the core subject of branding. While the content that the author provides is written for those new to branding, Weiss also mentions that his discussion is targeted at successful consulting entities, although in the opinion of this reviewer the material can also be applied by those who have relatively less experience and who wish to start positioning themselves.

In the introduction to this work, the author mentions that he did not write for those consultants who position themselves in a way which does not explain what is in it for potential clients, but for successful professionals who understand that "acquiring business is about convincing the prospect that a partnership will improve the latter's condition by a huge multiple of whatever investment is required" and "want others to seek them out because they have created a great interest in who they are and what they do".

This book slowly walks through the reasons why consultants need brands to thrive, why experienced consultants already have the makings of a brand at hand, how to use brands to attract buyers, the branding power behind writing a book and hitting the lecture circuit, myths of branding, publicizing brands and creating products to boost brands, and other related branding topics.

The introductory chapters are written especially well. For example, the explanation provided on "positioning a brand so that the brand positions you" depicts a Venn diagram that shows very clearly how the three converging paths to establish brands (market need, competency, and passion) are "as much about passion as customer's needs. But both are needed. Too many consultants have a beloved methodology that has one drawback: No one else is interested in it".

Weiss also shares some of the same insights that McKenna provides in "The World's Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century" (see my review for that book). For example, the author notes that "this is not a profession that carries a great deal of endemic respect, and it's made worse by the fact that it's totally unregulated. Hence, good consultants need to separate themselves from those between jobs, those who are just dabbling, moonlighting college professors, and the generally inept" and shares his rule of thumb that "about 50 percent of the people claiming to be consultants actually do not know what they're doing and have no methodology or even operating philosophy".

Some of the thoughts which Weiss shares are reminiscent of Gerald M. Weinberg's "The Secrets of Consulting" (see my review for that book, also written by a consultant's consultant), always practical though void of some of the humor in that other work, such as: "You have to wield the branding iron. You can't wait for the world to brand you. It's too slow, too erratic, and always quite painful" and "Branding must be built on repetitive and distinctive abilities and accomplishments that can be replicated. If you can't duplicate it, or it isn't sufficiently distinguishing, it's an isolated incident and not a brand, no matter how successful at the time".

The chapter on writing a book, "How to Write a Book, Even if You've Never Written Your Mother" is a book in itself, concisely written and packed with insightful advice from the author's own experiences in writing, including a simple step-by-step approach to effectively writing and publishing a business book. Another especially well received chapter by this reviewer is "The Twelve Myths of 21st Century Branding" that explores the following myths: "a tight intellectual argument is sufficient", "you must analyze the environment for need", "clever catch phrases and adages are sufficient", "brands are developed over a long period of time", "brands must be honed for specific, defined targets", "advertising is the be all and end all in branding", "you can only brand a tangible product", "brands require active, aggressive management", "brands need to be specific and focused", "brands must continually grow toward universal recognition", "the brand is external to the customer", and "brands in and of themselves have little value without substance".

In the concluding pages of the book, Weiss notes that "one of the dangers in these intense examinations of specific techniques is that, conceptually, the entire scheme makes sense and, tactically, nothing happens!" The solution that the author provides is improving one percent per day. "The problem, of course, is that most people (and most organizations) don't even manage that modest improvement. Or, worse, they await the ephiphany, where everything is supposed to change overnight. But the truth is that we don't normally advance through the invention of fax machines or breakthroughs in new methods to exploit the Internet. We advance by accretion, a little bit at a time, but steadily, every single day. The great organizations are the beneficiaries of tens of thousands of employees trying to work a little smarter and a little better every day, and the poor ones merely house legions of people who can't wait to go home at five".

New Book Review: "Selling the Invisible"

Recently posted book review for Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing, by Harry Beckwith, Business Plus, 1997, reposted here:

Almost 150 reviews at this point for this text, spanning consistently over a period of the 10 years it has been written. This reviewer recalls the recent "The Wall Street Journal" article which questioned whether such a high number of reviews for a single product is ever warranted. In the case at hand, this reviewer believes that so many reviews, with such positive feedback, is testament to the quality of the original content as well as to the ongoing (and arguably increasing) relevancy of the material.

Services marketing is the subject of this masterwork, and while subtitles for other books can be misleading at times, "Selling the Invisible" is truly a field guide to modern marketing - in the words of Beckwith a "how-to-think-about book", not necessarily a "how-to" book, "because if you think like these new marketers - if you think more broadly and deeply about services and their prospects - you will figure out dozens of better ways to grow your business".

The author explains that "this book is for all those service marketers: the 80 percent of us who do not manufacture products - and the other 20 percent who do", and that "the new marketing is more than a way of doing; it is a way of thinking. It begins with an understanding of the distinctive characteristics of services - their invisibility and intangibility - and of the unique nature of service prospects and users - their fear, their limited time, their sometimes illogical ways of making decisions, and their most important drives and needs."

The format of this book greatly aids the content, as it is divided into chapters by subject matter and further broken down into discussions of 1 to 3 pages that are expected to be easily digestible by even the most book-weary readers. The core problem of service marketing, service quality, is first discussed, followed by a discussion on improving service quality, and later the fundamentals of service marketing: defining one's business and understanding what customers are really purchasing, positioning one's service, understanding prospects and buying behavior, and communicating to prospects.

As a consultant, this reviewer was reminded of Gerald M. Weinberg's "The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully" (see my review) while reading this text, because, like Weinberg, Beckwith brilliantly leads the reader through his thoughts one step at a time through subject matter that is not always intuitive, and is so fluent in his subject material that he is also able to arrive at his own principles and rules to elegantly apply the lessons that he has learned throughout his career.

While this book is a quick read, the content might take time to digest if the reader is not familiar with service marketing. One of the quotes on the back of the hardcover edition of this book especially rings true: "After just forty-eight pages I'd written ten pages of notes and had more ideas than I could implement in a year. Terrific." As a consultant, this reviewer highly recommends this book to everyone in business, especially the chapter that addresses what the author views as the 18 fallacies of planning.