Friday, January 15, 2016

Smart Cuts

Why do some companies seemingly leapfrog out of nowhere to become overnight successes? In Smart Cuts, Shane Snow identifies the key success factors that have allowed certain innovators to accelerate the process of taking their startups from tiny to large.

There are exactly nine factors that Snow believes can be leveraged by anyone in order to accelerate his or her success. Each chapter is dedicated to one such factor. Snow uses seemingly unrelated analogies to creatively illustrate his points, which makes the book more entertaining than it otherwise would be.

You may recognize some of the factors, or maybe all of them. But Snow has a way of tying them together with real-life examples that can probably help you better understand and remember them.

My quibble with the book is that it is heavy on the narratives (anecdotes) at the expense of the data. Snow makes no apologies - he doesn't even address the issue that perhaps the narrative is only an after-the-fact explanation of things we don't completely understand, which is how some of the author's explanations felt for me at times.

Still, it's a good read for those interested in knowing the state-of-the-art explanations for why companies like Facebook, Google etc are so successful.

Enjoy!

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