My Next Book: Letting a Hundred Flowers Blossom

It’s been two years since The Art of the Start hit the streets, and I’m ready to write another book. I have some ideas, but I'd like to tap the “wisdom of the crowd” in order to ensure that it appeals to “the long tail” in this “Web 2.0” world. :-)

So...I’ve created a wiki for the book that’s located here. The password for contributors is “kickbutt”. I’ve used PBwiki. The syntax is that you enter an “!” at the start of a line to create a heading—that is, the book title or a descriptive phrase. Then you can explain your idea in the next line.

For example, this:

! Title: Venture Capital for the Clueless

An explanation for beginners of how to raise venture capital

will look like this:

Title: Venture Capital for the Clueless

An explanation for beginners of how to raise venture capital

I appreciate your ideas very much!

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Comments

[Nick Garner]

I was listening to you on webmaster radio and you were asking for ‘speech’ generating stuff….

Demystify online marketing for Corporates, using your status and respect in the industry, you interview the most successful people that corporates would never ordinarily talk to. Aaron Wall for instance. And extract simple ideas that can be easily turned into solid business cases and ‘sold on’ internally.

Corporates will have a respect for those geniuses on the margins and you are the right person to do the translation.

[Steve Morsa]

Guy--a great "will sell 500,000+ copies" title/idea would be to let everyone know the various options available for profiting from their great ideas (buyout/partnership/licensing/IPO/etc):

Cash Out: How to Retire Rich with Your Great Idea

ps: Shoot--sounds so good I'm ready to buy a copy and you haven't even written it yet :-)

[Nicholas]

I just went to your wiki page for this idea-building session... There's a lot of nice ideas over there... I think the most interesting is currently the following:

How to let your smartest friends make you rich

About how to create and gather a group from the intelligence that you know, and how to use it to make the best start up in this decade.

[Vincent]

Comment to:
My Next Book: Letting a Hundred Flowers Blossom

Dear mister Kawasaki

I realy like your books and your ideas in general.

There for i send a mail about the use of the quotte "Letting a Hundred Flowers Blossom"

As you your self said it was a quotte of Mao Zedung.

It can't be that you want to give this person, those credits or let him be the reflection of your ideas. Its like saying Hitler made great autobahns. Mao Zedung was responsible for the dead of millions of people. Not a person that wants a hunderd flowers blossom.

So your intensions about the blossom can't be meant in the same way. I understand what you mean, but the reference is at least a little unfortunate.

It is strange to me that no one has told you this, of if so why you still use it? I can't imagine that it is for the lack of quotes in this world.

With regards
Vincent
Amsterdam The Netherlands

*************

Vincent,

Thanks for the info. I am aware of the origins and irony of this quote. I continue to use it because I think it's a poke in the eye at history. However, I do see your point.

Thanks,

Guy

[Jeff Lim]

"Find Your Woz"

(How To Meet Your Genius Co-Founder)

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I stole this from John Nguyen's comment on Dec 12. I wanted the exact same title, but I wanted a three-word mantra, with a practical HOW-TO focus.

I'm from Melbourne 2006, so I don't have the luck of Jobs to be born in San Fran as a baby-boomer and meet Woz. And without Woz, there'd be no Apple...and no Jobs.

Even if you're not a super-salesman/connector/business-major, an engineer needs to team up with a like-minded genius, who is preferably more talented than themselves, to create excellence and success.

It's a very niche title that solves the most important problem for a young company, that's within its control (eg. timing, luck). Even Paul Graham says that success rests on luck, commitment and brains (in that order). Commitment and brains are found in the founders (no pun intended), so a book that solves the problem of 'How to Find Your Woz' would provide great value, that contributes in changing the world by creating our generation's great startup stories!

Inspire Me, Guy!

[Espen]

"The Devil's Guide to Angel Money"?

[Lena West]

How cool! I interviewed the two guys behind PBWiki for an article I wrote for Jupitermedia a couple of months ago - great people!

Ok, here are my two ideas that I just added to the wiki:

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The Start of the Art
Answers the "what now?" question after you've mastered the Art of the Start.
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Premonitions (or Intuition)
Interviews the SAME people from Hindsights and asks them what they think is going to happen in business and technology over the next decade.

Can't wait to read the new book - whatever the title.

-Lena
CEO, http://www.xynoMedia.com

[jerina]

heh, you a big fan of Mao?:) (totally unrelated, but the title of your book put a broad smile on my face:)

Other than that, i enjoy reading your blogs for geeky-purposes (again, unrelated:)
cheers,
j

[Morgan Ramsay]

Anon: It's called being realistic, not Luddism. It's also pretty silly to describe a technology marketer as a "Luddite".

[Sylvain]

a book "An explanation for beginners of how to raise venture capital" .... who did you choose for the introduction ?

[Anon]

Are Luddites allowed to post on blogs like this one? Just wondering after reading the Ramsay comments..

[Morgan Ramsay]

Marc Duchesne: I'm uncertain whether wikis, blogs, and Web 2.0 are "state-of-the-art" tools for communication.

Think about it:

-- Wikis are... websites... that you can edit. Give everyone FTP access to the website and there you have a "wiki" with a standardized markup and the ability to upload anything.

-- Blogs are websites you can... post things too. They're content management systems at their core. There were blogs before there were "blogs". It's just a new name for an old game.

-- And Web 2.0 seems to be quickly losing its meaning; although, "no visible backend" seems to be the rallying cry of these applications. I don't think I've seen any radically innovative "Web 2.0" applications.

The way people talk about wikis, blogs, and Web 2.0 makes these technologies seem like these developments happened overnight. These things have parents too.

Anyway, all I was saying that "it's all about framing". An aging feedback system disguised as a grand experiment in "wisdom of the crowds" is still an aging feedback system. It's not new. It's not innovative. Guy could have just asked for the same feedback in the form of comments on a blog post. It's just an old way that looks like a new way to get people to do what you want. ;)

[Marc Duchesne]

To Morgan Ramsay : Thanks for the comment. The idea of asking other people to feed your next book is not new : in the early 90's, there was a trend here in Europe where some TV and Radio * stars * wrote tons of books based on inputs from their audience. Wikis, blogs and other Web2.0 stuff are just the state-of-the-art tools for putting together enough material to make it a book. For instance, I am pretty sure that we will sooner or later see books with the most popular photos of Flickr, the most popular presentations of Slideshare, etc.
However, I am sure that Guy is not using the wiki for such basic purpose. My guess, since I read his post, is that he's doing a kind of market survey, for one. Of course, Guy might select one of the entries as the title of his next book (as the front cover of 'The Art of The Start' was designed by a reader), but that's not his main purpose here. Remember : a customer interview is like an iceberg : there is the visible part, and the hidden one. At least with smart guy-s ;-)
_Marc

[John Nguyen]

Title: How to find your Wozniak...
The business major's guide to find an engineer.

[Roger von Oech]

My experience writing books (and I've written four) is that each one takes about 18 months to do. Of course, you're precocious so maybe you can do it in 12 months.

But the question becomes, "What subject matter and set of ideas do you want to be living and breathing and exploring and honing over the next year?" Do you want to do something you're genuinely interested in, or something other people and a publisher want you to do? [Of course, it's great if there's a huge overlap there.]

Whatever the case, good luck with the project. I hope you've got a fire in your belly for it!

[Morgan Ramsay]

Marc Duchesne: Er, I'd say this "excellent idea for accelerating the new product development process" is all about framing. If Guy wrote, "Hey guys, I want to write a book, but I don't know what to write about. Give me some ideas," then you probably wouldn't have seen the excellence of this approach. But by calling it "wisdom of the crowds", "Web 2.0", and "the long tail", this Noachian social skill was transformed into something totally new!

[alfred chew]

This must be your best of the best!

[Serenata Flowers]

Looking forward to reading your book guy! You are a great motivational author. Your ideas are brilliant, like the Success Through The Side Door, which is very inspiring.

Serenata Flowers - Online Florist

[Marc Duchesne]

Hi Guy,

What an excellent idea for accelerating the new product development' process. Combined with panel interviews via IM, and brainstorming workshops using WebEx type of collaborative tools, that's a tremendous step forward the ultimate 'OpenSource' model to be applied to any kind of industry.
Thanks again. Oh, there is one more thing : I contributed to the wiki. "iBlog, therefore I am".
_marc

[Andrew Michael]

"From Knowledge To Wisdom"

To help those with an unstoppable dream transform simple skill (knowledge) into a passionate reality (wisdom). There is a difference. Guy has excellent insight into topics such as this.

Best wishes for your new book. I'll pre-order it :-)

Kind Regards,
Andrew

[Rose Water]

Too many buzzwords!

[Taylor]

Title: How to put the Puck in the Net without using a Stick

See you in Kelowna

[Vincent]

It would be great if you can mention how startups benefit from outsourcing in the Web2.0 era in your new book. Many Thanks!

[Cindy Nemeth Johannes]

Great idea, Guy.

I would be very interested in contributing info on how to tell genuine opportunities in networking from people who make their money just on the meetings.

Jay just got back from a spectacular conference in Boston that provided really great actual contact with the entities that actually need what we do AND interfacing with other SBIR awardees - many of us are looking at providing collaboration and partnership within the group. I can't tell you how many meetings we've been invited to that simply focus on selling us expensive advisory services without a particularly good track record.

I'd say that in the last 3 years, our very first SBIR conference was valuable. Others provided additional networking and some contact updates, but only now are we truly getting practical advice and potential partnerships that lead to commercialization.

December 19th, we'll be starting presenations to local angels, other businesses and also the personnel we'll need to hire (all two of them have to be pretty versatile. I empty the trash on Thursdays:-). What we are blowing people away with is that we've got production units rather than plans and wishes.

Best,

Cindy NJ

[jason]

will I get a cut off the profits?