1/ "When Motorola visited us, prepared to make a presentation with an elaborate slide show, Craig McCAw said, “Put away the slides and just discuss your proposal,” completely unsettling them and, not incidentally, seizing the upper hand."
That's Craig!
amazon.com/Flywheels-Citi…
2/ "After a meeting at AT&T’s Bell Labs in New Jersey, Craig McCaw led us on an unplanned tour around the building, barging into laboratories and asking scientists to explain the projects they were working on. AT&T executives trailed behind, not knowing what to do."
Classic!
3/ "Craig had an irreverent management style. At banquets, he was prone to lobbing dinner rolls. In the office, he might suddenly launch a squirt-gun attack. Many of us kept our own, loaded and ready behind our desks to fight back."
True! Also: Nerf gun attacks/counterattacks.
4/ One reason I'm tweeting about Tom Alberg's new book is that I suspect he won't, His effectiveness as a business leader is in no small part because he isn't a self- promoter. Books have their own need for a flywheel tho and so I'm giving the book a push. books.google.com/books/about/Fl…
5/ You want a free preview of this new book? You want proof? If you insist, read this which is just a teaser: books.google.com/books/about/Fl…
Did you know that in 1999 Amazon had a "get-the-crap-out" strategy?
Tom tells stories about Amazon and McCaw never told in this detail before.
6/ Tom writes: "I moved out of my office and in with Bill Gates’s investment group, BGI. The office was close to Craig’s [and Tren's] in the same Carillon Point development in Kirkland. " They will fix this [ ] in the next printing probably! 😉
Tom made the seed decision there.
7/ John Stanton: "The book describes two flywheels: a business growth flywheel that has worked miracles; and a second system that Tom describes as a livability flywheel."
Both flywheels are examples of feedback, which can be positive or negative. You can impact the outcome.
8/ That a flywheel approach to community development can be similar in nature to flywheels people use to build a business isn't obvious to everyone.
The core principle is a version of the Matthew Effect. Success leads to more success and failure to more failure. Tom's view:
9/ Robert K. Merton first used the term Matthew Effect in 1968 in reference to a biblical verse.
The publisher of Lynne Truss’s surprise best seller, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” who, when asked to explain its success, replied that “it sold well because lots of people bought it.”
10/ Did I mention that you can read a story about the earliest days of Amazon for free? Oh, I guess I did.
Well then, to sell a book about the importance of Flywheels in business and community development you need to start a flywheel. That's a freemium bootstrap in this case.
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