“Eat like a bird, poop like an elephant“

• To think different, purge your prejudices, procedures and suppositions; prod by attacking challenges in ways that force you to consider new solutions; and precipitate great thought.

• To prod, look for feelings of powerlessness, frustration, inconvenience and pain.

• Great products are deep (satisfy desires you didn’t know you had), indulging (more than what you need and costs more than you would have spent), complete (all the attributes that make it delightful), elegant and evocative (because they enhance people’s lives and threaten some people’s comfort level).

• Great teams have strong leaders and idealistic members, are small and physically separated in “lousy” quarters, and operate in a casual, unregimented environment.

• “Too much money is worse than too little” because “companies with too much funding and not enough real world experience tend to solve imaginary problems”.

• “Get on base and leave home runs to chance.”

• There are five types of barriers that prevent adoption of your revolutionary environment: Ignorance, inertia, complexity, lack of a distribution channel and price.

• To overcome barriers, enable trial, create a sense of ownership, position your product or service “outrageously” or ride a larger trend. Or eliminate barriers by focusing on a subset of customers or creating a subset of customers.

• You can also erect barriers against competitiors by gaining exclusivity or mindshare, being the cheapest, customising your products, being the acknowledged expert, envisioning and controlling the big picture, and forming the right alliances.

• To sell effectively (“evangelise”), add emotions to facts, develop a multi-appeal pitch, explain it briefly and then observe what resonates: flow with what people want to buy, even if it is not in your plan; and provide an easy first step for the buyer.

• Collect information from many sources (“eat like a bird”) and spread what you collect and as widely as possible (“poop like an elephant”).

Source: From “Rules for Revolutionaries” by Guy Kawasaki and Michele Moreno