When I finished reading "The Purple Cow", one thing that came into my mind is that, I’ve got to find myself a purple cow. Since my passion is in programming, my purple cow would be to build/develop something remarkable.

I remember the author says that its better to focus on niche market of a big market, than on the big market itself. The biggest market in the world wide web would be Search Engine (google) and Social Networking (facebook).

Developing search engine is complicated, so I’m definitely not going to that direction. If the thousands of developers that Microsoft has couldn’t get it right, what chance do I have?

This leaves me to Social Networking. Despite the fact, this market has been dominated by facebook, I think there should be some undiscoverable purple cows in the market. If one ever find the purple cow in social networking market, its a guarantee success as long as you get it right.

The success of twitter and foursquare are perfect example of purple cow in social networking market. Twitter and foursquare can be considered as a social networking website, but it’s nothing like facebook or myspace. Twitter focuses on sharing status, and foursquare is geo based social networking.

On the other hand if you try to build a facebook esque website, like orkut, it won’t be as remarkable. It will be ordinary, just another social networking website.

I think it’s worth looking at social networking to see if there’s unexplored ideas, I believe people are still hungry for more remarkable social networking sites.

RWendi

Finished reading this book a few days ago. It’s written by marketing guru Seth Godin. This book primarily tells us about the “Purple Cow”, something remarkable and extraordinary. If you saw a purple cow on the road, you will notice it straight away. This remark applies to marketing, whereby rather than focusing on marketing the product, one should focus more on creating a remarkable/extraordinary product. A product that’s remarkable will market by it self.

The author also tells us to not be afraid to develop a product that already has a big market in it. In fact we should market products that already has high demand for it. The trick to be successful is that to, rather than marketing for the masses (focus on the bigger market), find a niche market and focus on that smaller market. Marketing for the masses works in the past where there aren’t many products circulating around the market and didn’t cost as much. But now it costs a lot and does not guarantee success. One should start from niche market and it will eventually spread to the masses, if you got the “Purple Cow” right.

Moreover, the author points out that its important to market products to “sneezers”. Sneezers are ones that will use your product, and tell everyone they know about it. Sneezers are usually inovators/early adopters who will influences the masses to use your product. They’re the ones that will make your “Purple Cow” successful, they’re one of your marketing tool for success.

The idea of purple cow can be applied to everything, not just to your product. It can be applied to your service, packaging, pricing, publicity, etc. The author gives a lot of case studies to back his argument, and to show that purple cow works.

So how one create a purple cow? While being passionate in the product does help, but it’s not necessary to have it. One could just learn of:

• The art of projecting of getting inside the heads of the people who are passionate about the product, and making something they love and like to share.
• The schience of projecting – to build discipline of launching products, watching, measuring, learning, and the cycle goes on.

I think the purple cow is a fantastic book. Really inspires me to create a purple cow, rather than being the first to create/develop a product. Nowadays being the first is rather impossible, because everything that everyone ever need has been created.

RWendi

Last week I mentioned that I would start honing up my business skills by reading more business books/blogs. I haven’t started on blogs yet, but I have picked up a book that’s called “The One Minute Manager ” written by Kenneth Blanchard & Spencer Johnson. This book is light weight and only contains 106 pages. It’s a fairly easy reading book, which is good for me. Having very low business skills, I think it’s a bad idea for me to start reading books that is very in depth and hard to follow.

The writers deliver their ideas in a form of a story of a young man who was looking for the most effective manager, so that he can work for him and learn from him. His search led him to many kind of managers, and they can be sum up to two categories: managers who were primarily interested in results (autocratic, bottom-line, hard-nosed, realistic, and profit-minded), and managers who were primarily interested in people (democratic, participative, supportive, considerate, and humanistic). He learnt that those two type of managers are just partially effective, because they can only benefit/profit either the organization or the people, not both. The young man search finally led him to the “One Minute Manager” where he finally learnt the most effective way to be a manager.

The book promotes three management techniques, which are: 1 Minute Goal Setting, 1 Minute Praising, and 1 Minute Reprimand. If you wander if 1 minute actually means 1 minute, it’s not. It’s just an idiom to remind us that they are not as complicated as they seem. They should be clear and simple.

Management “lifecycle” has to always start from 1 Minute Goal Setting. Before starting any work/project, it’s important that all the goals/objectives and the desired output clearly defined and agreed on. The purpose of this is so that the people you’re managing are able to see what good performance behaviors look like. They’re encouraged to constantly review their performance to see if the current behaviors/situations match with the goals. The goals should be written on a piece of paper, and should not be more than 250 words. The idea is to keep them easy to read and simple to understand, so that re-reading them will re-clear your objectives.

After all the goals have been set, it is important to give constant and ongoing feedback of how your team is doing. This is where the 1 Minute Praising and 1 Minute reprimand come into play. Praising and reprimand should be given out immediately whenever you see good and bad behaviors. Constant feedbacks motivate people, because they become completely aware of how well they’re doing and progressing in achieving the goals set by the 1 minute goal setting. Here are some tips given by the writer on how to give praising and reprimand effectively:

• Let them know that you’re going to observe how they’re doing and constantly give feedback of their performance from the very start.
• Praise/Reprimand immediately.
• Tell them specifically what they did right/wrong.
• Tell them how you feel about what they did right/wrong.
• Additional steps for reprimands:
• Remind them how much you value them.
• Reaffirm that you think well of them  but not of their performance in this situation.
• Additional steps for praising:
• Encourage them to do more of the same

I think that the book gives a simplistic approach to management. It is more like the macro or brief general overview of what managers should do to give benefit to both the organization and the people their managing. His approach is pretty basic, and it sounds like it can be practical in real life. I think this book has met my expectations. I expected to gain basic knowledge in management and I believe that’s what I have got. I think I’m going to look something more of a heavy read next time.

RWendi

Working as a programmer I feel like that I’m lacking of business skills. Whether that be my business knowledge, marketing, nor management skills, I have none of them. I think I focused too much on how to be better in what I do and completely forgotten of my long term goal. It’s always been my dream to run my own business, and I think I will have better chance of succeeding if I come well prepared.

I think there are many aspects of business that needs to be explored, such as:

• Running your business.
• Managing your employee/team.
• Marketing your product/services
• Leadership
• Sales/Revenue strategy.
• Others.

Those are pretty much gray areas for me. I have no experience in any of those business aspects, nor do I have the knowledge. I’ve decided it’s time to do something about it, so that when the time comes to run my business, I wouldn’t be a complete idiot and had no idea what I’m doing. My approach to getting my business skills hone up is simple, Books and Blogs. From today I’ll start reading more and more business related books and blogs. Hopefully they will help me to gain some business skills as they do with my programming skills.

RWendi