Book Review: Small is the New Big

by Seth Godin.

The book is Seth’s Blog, cleaned up and presented for the book-reading (vs. the blog-reading) masses.

I’m going to take a wild guess here and say the rest of his books are probably more of the same.

Nevertheless, this is probably the hardest book I’ve read since Gene Wolfe.  Actually, that’s not really fair.  Let me say instead that this is the chewiest non-fiction book I’ve read since Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Published in 2006 (and based on posts that seem to be coming from 2003), the book seems awfully prescient.  The economy can’t keep things up and stuff is going to fall apart soon; are you going to cling to your corporate job and waste years and years of your life living somebody’s else’s plan, or are you going to make your own plans?  Well, are ya, punk?

It’s like Neal Stephenson for the masses, I tell you.  He’s only up to Snow Crash, mind you, but there’s a leap and half beyond most marketing gurus.

I don’t know if I can really call Seth Godin a marketing guru, but I will.  Not an advertising guru, but a marketing guru – that is, a guy that can tell you how to make people buy your product.  A strategy guy rather than a tactics guy.

He questions things like telemarketers – how much money do you really make, long-term, pushing spam?  Trying to get a job with a big corporation – they don’t innovate, they offload.  How MBAs are taking over the Internet and making it boring.  How excess of choices means that reaching an audience isn’t going to be the same anymore (commercials that interrupt a what you’re watching?  I haven’t seen one of those since I sat in the lobby of the car dealership, waiting for my Bug to be fixed.  And I’ll turn off the radio before I listen to a commercial).  Why does everyone think the future is going to be lame?  Where did the Jetsons go?

Good questions.  I put him on my RSS, because I wonder what he has to say about now.

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