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Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends (Paperback)
by Tim Sanders
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Personal and professional success, Motivation, Marketing |
| Market price: ¥ 148.00
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¥ 128.00
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MSL Pointer Review:
Big thoughts, solid strategy and tactics, sound advice for success in the new "experience economy".
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Author: Tim Sanders
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Pub. in: July, 2003
ISBN: 1400046831
Pages: 240
Measurements: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA01211
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-1400046836
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- MSL Picks -
A great book full of practical wisdom, and a strange title. So, what is a "killer app"? According to Tim, it is defined as "an excellent new idea that either supersedes an existing idea or establishes a new category in its field". This is an important definition, because taken in the context above, Tim is saying that "love" applied in a business setting can essentially transform your work, your success, and most importantly you, and in that way supersedes the current ego-centric world of business.
Tim uses countless examples to show that tomorrow's value in the business world will be about "fuzzy intangibles" that add value to your customers and company. In fact, when reading this book there are so many examples about "how to" do things that will increase your success, it would be easy to think it's just another self help book. For example, he discusses the importance of Knowledge, Network, and Compassion in our relationships, as his main themes. As good these ideas are, they miss the point if taken as self help guidelines.
The main point here is that love is not selfish. The thread he weaves throughout the book is a message about caring for others, not with the expectation of getting something in return, but because it is the right thing to do and will make a difference to them. It is the "pay it forward" philosophy in action. Now, there is no doubt that often the impact comes back in a positive way through a network contact or returned favor, and he cites many examples of how his own success was based on these. But even when there is nothing in it for you, care for others anyway. When others are in no position to do anything for you, care for them and give to them anyway.
That is how radical this book is. It flies against the corporate gravity which pulls us into a place of self focus and measuring everything in terms of its personal ROI. In that way, love is truly a killer app.
From quoting Michael Erisman
Target readers:
General readers
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Tim Sanders, the Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo!, consults with Fortune 500 executives and world-class brands on marketing and Internet strategy. He lives in northern California.
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From Publisher
Are you wondering what the next killer app will be? Do you want to know how you can maintain and add to your value during these rapidly changing times? Are you wondering how the word love can even be used in the context of business?
Instead of wondering, read this book and find out how to become a lovecat - a nice, smart person who succeeds in business and in life.
How do you become a lovecat? By sharing your intangibles. By that I mean:
Your knowledge: everything that comes from all the books that I’ll encourage you to devour.
Your network: the collection of friends and contacts you now have, which I’ll teach you how to grow and nurture.
Your compassion: that human warmth you already possess - in these pages I’ll convince you that you can show it freely at the office.
What happens when you do all this?
－ You become a rich source of information to all around you.
－ You are seen as a person with valuable insight.
－ You are perceived as generous to a fault, producing surprise and delight.
－ You double your business intelligence in one year.
－ You triple your network of personal relationships in two years.
－ You quadruple the number of colleagues in your life who love you like family.
In short, you become one of those amazing, outstanding people to whom everyone turns, who leads rather than follows, who never runs out of ideas, contacts, or friendship.
Here’s the real scoop: Nice guys don’t finish last. They rule!
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Not long ago, after I had delivered a speech on the new economy, a woman entering the job market approached me to talk about her career anxiety.
"I'm not worried that I won't land something good," she explained. "I'm afraid that work will be too cold and impersonal. What can I do to guarantee I'll be successful but also happy?"
The answer? The same advice I gave Chris: "Be a lovecat."
At a large sales conference last month, I met two men, one in accounting, the other in management; both of them were afraid. It wasn't that they feared the changes going on around them - they feared being left out of them.
"How do I drill into this World Wide Web thing?" one of them asked. "I don't know what to work on because this isn't my skill set. Am I still relevant? Is there anything I have to offer that can add value?"
The other man said, "I don't think I can compete with these kids ßying out of schools loaded with their new-economy knowledge and jargon. Everyone else seems to be jumping into new roles, but I think the world is limiting me with all its rules and biases."
"That's not how the world is run," I replied. "It's run via intangibles - knowledge, networks, and compassion."
It never seems to change. No matter how and where I meet these people, and no matter what their age or experience level, I have found one common truth: Men and women across the country are trying desperately to understand how to maintain their value as professionals in the face of rapidly changing times.
Until recently, bizpeople could survive for years without advice, without connection skills, perhaps even without new ideas. But now that the bizworld is moving at a velocity once unheard of, many of us can't keep up. We've made some bad decisions, we've received some bad advice, we didn't get connected to the right opportunities, we're feeling left behind or left out.
Technology has revolutionized our landscape. Before the information revolution, business changed gradually and business models became antiquated even more slowly. The value progression evolved over decades and double decades. You could go to college, get an M.B.A. and work for forty years, and your pure on-the-job knowledge stayed relevant. Relationships were for the most part geo-bound, and only a handful of people comprised your entire business network.
That was yesterday. Forget about today, because tomorrow is upon us. And to succeed in tomorrow's workplace, you need a killer application. (What's a killer app? There's no standard definition, but basically it's an excellent new idea that either supersedes an existing idea or establishes a new category in its field. It soon becomes so popular that it devastates the original business model.)
What is that application? Simply put: Love is the killer app. Those of us who use love as a point of differentiation in business will separate ourselves from our competitors just as world-class distance runners separate themselves from the rest of the pack trailing behind them.
This isn't just a feel-good message that I sense audiences want to hear. I believe that the most important new trend in business is the downfall of the barracudas, sharks, and piranhas, and the ascendancy of nice, smart people - because they are what I call lovecats. They will succeed for all the reasons you will discover in this book.
But first, what do I mean by love?
The best general definition I have ever read is in the noted philosopher and writer Milton Mayeroff's 1972 book On Caring: "Love is the selßess promotion of the growth of the other." When you are able to help others grow to become the best people they can be, you are being loving - and you, too, grow.
Mayeroff actually used the word caring more often than the word love, although love is interchangeable with such terms as caring, charity, and compassion. But because "Show me the love" has such a ring to it in a business context, love is the word I prefer to use.
Mayeroff, however, talked mostly about love in our personal lives. We need a different definition for love in our professional lives.
When we start a job, whether as recent graduate or CEO, we take on a contract to create more value than the dollar amount we are paid. If we don't add value to our employer, we are value losses; we are value vampires. My definition of added-value: The value with you inside a situation is greater than the value without you.
In your personal life, you can make decisions based on personal needs. If you wish to remain friendly with a toxic person, you have every right to do so. But business is not personal. Love in the bizworld is not some sacrificial process where we must all love one another come what may. There is no free love in the new economy. Every member of your team depends on each and every other member to contribute. You can't afford to take on people who will sink your value boat. So the definition of love must be modified to guarantee that it means not only you, but all the people who populate your bizworld, are value-added for that bizworld.
Here, then, is my definition of love business: the act of intelligently and sensibly sharing your intangibles with your bizpartners.
What are our intangibles? They are our knowledge, our network, and our compassion. These are the keys to true bizlove.
Who are our bizpartners? Potentially, they are each and every person in our work life, whether our bosses or bankers, our clients or competitors, the money guys with the cash to burn, the writers who spin it up so the stocks can churn.
In the following three chapters we will discuss each of the three intangibles in detail, but here they are in short form:
By knowledge, I mean everything you have learned and everything you continue to learn. Knowledge represents all you have picked up while doing your job, and all you have taught yourself by reading every moment you can find the time. It means every piece of relevant data and information you can accumulate. You can find knowledge almost anywhere -- through observation, experience, or conversation. But by far the easiest, most efficient way to obtain knowledge is through books.
Think of your brain as a kind of piggy bank. Smart people fill it up with all they learn until they possess a formidable wealth of knowledge. Then there are those who sit around all day and never put anything in their bank; all they accumulate is a large butt. You see these people every day, on planes, trains, and in lounges, staring off into space, downing cocktails, heading off to business meetings ill-prepared. Like kids who don't know how to put pennies in their banks, these adults don't know how to accumulate knowledge.
When I give a speech, I often tell my audience that if they feel I have anything valuable to say, they should consider this: My knowledge isn't inherent. I wasn't born with an IQ of 200. I haven't started a colossal business. I am not a rocket scientist. Six years ago my career path wasn't any more remarkable than anyone else's. Then I went on a reading tear. And the more I read, the more I went into business meetings and won people's hearts - and their business, too.
So what I say to my audiences is: Don't let a guy like me get a step up on you. Maybe you've been in business for twenty-five years. Maybe you have stuff on your r?sum? I would die for. Yet you're stopping in the race to let me catch up. And it's all because I keep reading.
I can't tell you how often people ask me after a speech, "Could you give me your book list? I should have been doing this for the last thirty years."
Says Harry Beckwith in The Invisible Touch: "Instead of thinking about value-added, think about knowledge-added. What knowledge can you add to your service, or communicate about your service, that will make you more attractive to . . . business partners and customers?"
By network, I mean your entire web of relationships. In the twenty-first century, our success will be based on the people we know. Everyone in our address book is a potential partner for every person we meet. Everyone can ?t somewhere in our ever-expanding business universe.
Relationships are the nodes in our individual network that constitute the promise of our bizlife and serve as a predictor of our success. Some of the brightest new-economy luminaries, such as Kevin Kelly (New Rules for the New Economy), or Larry Downes and Chunka Mui (Unleashing the Killer App), argue that companies, organizations, and individuals comprise, and are most highly valued for, their web of relationships. If you organize and leverage your relationships as a network, you will generate long-lasting value (and peace of mind) beyond your stock options, mutual funds, and bank accounts. You will also create a value proposition for new contacts, which in turn drives membership in that network - the prime law of business ecosystems, known as the Law of Network Effects. Value explodes with membership, and the value explosion sucks in more members, compounding the result. These famous wise words put it more succinctly: Them that's got, gets.
But not all of us know to go out and get. Try out this metaphor: When we are born, we receive a fishing net. Throughout our lives we troll for contacts - while in school, at work, or through professional organizations and clubs. If we are fishing well, we accumulate a network of people who support us, who appreciate our value, who lead us to new opportunities. But not all of us use our net wisely. While some of us fill our nets with prizewinning fish, others let their nets languish and fall to the bottom of the ocean, stuffed only with the deadweight of old tires.
Those of us who end up with the best-stocked net have a most valuable commodity. When we are fully and totally networked, we are powerful. Alone, even with...
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Amazon.com (MSL quote), USA
<2008-03-11 00:00>
Is love really all you need? Tim Sanders, director of Yahoo's in-house think tank, believes love is the crucial element in the search for personal and professional success. In Love Is the Killer App he explains why. Sander's advice is to be a "lovecat," which despite the cutesy moniker is his sincere and surprisingly practical prescription for advancement both inside and outside the office. It starts with amassing as much usable knowledge as possible, which he explains can be done by religiously carving out time to read and then poring through as many cutting-edge books in your field as possible. It follows with an emphasis on networking to the extreme. Sanders offers concrete suggestions, from compiling a super list of contacts to ensuring all are regularly stored in an always-accessible format. And he concludes by advocating a true mindset of compassion, which he says involves sharing this knowledge with those contacts and ultimately helping anyone who in one way or another may ultimately help you. Through identifiable anecdotes and specific recommendations, the book promotes an undeniably feasible yet decidedly offbeat program that has worked for the author and could prove equally favorable for others who apply it. - Howard Rothman |
Publishers Weekly (MSL quote), USA
<2008-03-11 00:00>
Remember when the online biz was the playground of the business world? Yahoo! exec Sanders does, and with a vengeful nostalgia. In his almost dementedly excited book on how to get ahead in business by being loveable and smart, Sanders beats the drum of the New Economy louder and more happily than just about anyone out there. The "Big Statement" here Sanders is a proponent of reading as much as possible and boiling it down to an essential Big Statement is that a kill-or-be-killed mentality won't get you far in today's business environment. Better to spread love, by connecting with people, giving out advice, using every available moment to increase your knowledge and being a "lovecat." It's hard not to get swept up by the rose-colored glow of this gleaming "bizlove" philosophy, where people are excited to come to work and where they give out hugs and encouragement to everyone they come across. But being a lovecat, Sanders emphasizes, does not mean being a sucker. Naturally, as with most hype, the relentlessly upbeat narrative leads to some ridiculous overgeneralizations, like "during the Depression people worried about survival. Today the affluent worry about whether or not they are going to have a good experience." Sanders also vastly overestimates the availability of choice in today's job market, saying that if your boss isn't reciprocating your love, just get a new job ("A fresh start is a mouse click away"). These lapses aside, he is convincing. Cynics will argue that a sheep in a pack of wolves will simply be eaten, but a sheep armed with Sanders's brand of intelligent enthusiasm will more likely charm the wolves into submission.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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AudioFile (MSL quote), USA
<2008-03-11 00:00>
The Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo!, Sanders is a marketing and Internet consultant and a genius when it comes to connecting with customers. Love in a business context means sharing your compassion, your knowledge, and your network with people you want to do business with. It's also about the hard work of creating value in yourself by reading everything in your field and looking for any opportunities to help your clients and customers. As you might expect from a marketing pioneer, the audio is full of catchy phrases, and it moves along quickly. With a charming, boyish voice, Sanders shares more enthusiasm and intuitive insights than you'll hear in any other program of this nature. It's impossible not be energized by it. T.W. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine - Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine |
Philip C. McGraw, Ph.D., author of Life Strategies: Doing What Works, Doing What Matters, USA
<2008-03-11 00:00>
Tim Sanders shows us that being a ‘lovecat’ is a great business strategy and I wholeheartedly agree. This book teaches us the value of relationships in the workplace, and it’s rich with practical, effective strategies for enhancing and developing them. |
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