a Must Read Manifesto

I’m tired of slogging through business books hoping that somewhere within the far too repetitive pages I’ll find a few money quotes. I continue to believe most 250-page business books can be slimmed down to a svelte 25-pages without losing much. That’s why I'm a big fan of ChangeThis.

Since 2004, ChangeThis has been making me a smarter marketer through its trove of quick-read manifestos. ChangeThis is chock-full of pamphlet-sized business books with just enough information and just enough inspiration to help me make things happen at work.

The latest manifesto I’m high on is THE SECRETS OF MARKET-DRIVEN LEADERS. In 16-pages, Craig Stull, Phil Myers, and David Meerman Scott share practical advice on how businesses can be more successful by being market-driven rather than being just customer-driven, competitor-driven, or sales-driven.

It’s a smart read with lots of money quotes. For example, here is a cut ‘n paste snippet from the 7 Secrets of Market-Driven Leaders section of their manifesto. Enjoy...

7 Secrets of Market-Driven Leaders

SECRET #1: Work as a Trusted Advisor
People in market-driven companies largely ignore the competition. And they most definitely do not care about technology for technology’s sake. Instead they focus a majority of their energies on the problems that buyers are willing to spend money to solve.

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SECRET #2: Build from the Outside-In
Market-driven leaders understand the complete picture of market problems before building products. they develop solutions in the context of the total customer experience.

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SECRET #3: Simple is Smart
Whenever market-driven leaders create products or solutions—for potential new customers, existing customers, or even new markets—it is always in the context of creating a simple solution to the problems people have.

The best companies create solutions that are narrow and deep. they organize around a single market problem and solve it completely with a solution that to the buyer seems simple, obvious and most importantly handles all the related tasks in one easy step.

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SECRET #4: Leadership is Distributed
At industry-leading organizations focused on a market-driven approach, company operations are driven from the business unit or product management level. Leadership is distributed. Why? Because the business unit leaders and the product managers who work there are the people who are closest to the marketplace and best understand the problems buyers face.

Winning companies recognize it is better to distribute leadership and to employ a bottom-up strategic planning process that drives the business forward than it is for functional senior managers to collaborate on decision making and push new strategies, processes, and plans out to the organization.

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SECRET #5: Stop Being a Vendor
In our experience working with thousands of technology companies, we’ve watched a sequential decline each year in the level of “trust” between vendors and customers. We’ve learned that the most successful organizations … embrace the discipline of being a problem solver and solution-seller instead of a vendor.

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SECRET #6: Marketing with a Big “M”
Industry leaders understand that marketing is more than just “marcom” (marketing communications) and that the role of marketing involves much more than just creating a message and delivering that message with the tools of advertising and public relations.

Companies get into trouble when they throw bucketfuls of money at the promotional aspects of marketing such as advertising, tradeshows, PR, media relations, analyst relations, and the like without paying due attention to the problem identification, market definition, and product management aspects of marketing.

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SECRET #7: Measure Only What Matters
Successful companies don’t fall prey to the typical requirements of the C-suite, investors, boards, industry analysts, and Wall Street for managing the minutia and death by metrics. the problem with measuring marketing activities is that too many companies have trained their employees to measure the wrong things. Market-driven leaders measure only what matters.

(AUTHORS: Craig Stull, Phil Myers, and David Meerman Scott)

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ACCESS the FULL MANIFESTO here

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Comments

[David Meerman Scott]

Hey John,

Thanks for writing about our ebook! I love how you've taken our dozen or so pages and condensed them down to one page. Cool.

Phil, Craig, and I are now working on doing the opposite. We're doing a book length version of our ideas which will come out mid-2008. New title, and slightly different focus but same ideas.

Thanks again and take care,

David

[johnmoore (from Brand Autopsy)]

David ... I thought this was a primer for a full-length book. Y'all condensed a lot of great information into 16 pages. Hopefully your great information will not get lost in the 50,000+ words your book is sure to contain.

I REALLY enjoyed the condensed version. It reads great.

[Jay Ehret]

John,
I happen to agree with you on the length of business books and I enjoy the way you condense books for us with takeaways and money quotes.

However, I found it interesting that the top manifesto on ChangeThis is Just 1%: The Power of Microtrends. The manifesto highlights Long Attention Spanners and notes that the average page count for best selling books has increased by more than 100 pages in recent years to nearly 500 pages!

[Valeria Maltoni]

I shared this manifesto with my company this morning. As for length, it needs to stay relevant and interesting and I will read it -- no matter how many pages. No fluff ;-)

[Adelino de Almeida]

Well, John, I'm with you about the value of Change This. In fact, I have just submitted a proposal to write a manifesto about a simple and very effective approach to problem solving. The summary is at: http://www.changethis.com/proposals/1023

[Brandon Murphy]

John, great manifesto. I just wrote a blog post referencing point number three regarding simplicity. It's about the dichotomy of KISS, a long standing rule of thumb in marketing, and embracing complexity when it comes to marketing and creating conversation about a brand. Thought you might find it interesting. Love your blog, avid reader.

http://thecword.typepad.com/thecword/2007/09/k-i-s-s-vs-comp.html