The Big Moo and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Learn more



or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
Start reading The Big Moo on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.
Sorry, this item is not available in
Image not available for
Color:
Image not available

To view this video download Flash Player

 

The Big Moo: Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable [Hardcover]

The Group of 33 , Seth Godin
3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)

List Price: $21.95
Price: $13.97 & FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save: $7.98 (36%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
Only 20 left in stock (more on the way).
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.
Want it tomorrow, May 24? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
Kindle Edition --  
Hardcover $13.97  
Audio, CD, Bargain Price $10.00  
Audible Audio Edition, Unabridged $9.95 or Free with Audible 30-day free trial
Shop the Money & Markets Store
Are you a finance, investing, economics or accounting professional? Find books, read blog posts, and discover new authors and thought-leaders in Money & Markets, a new home for finance industry professionals on Amazon.com. > Shop now

Book Description

October 20, 2005

Most organizations are stuck in a rut. On one hand, they understand all the good things that will come with growth. On the other, they’re petrified that growth means change, and change means risk, and risk means death. Nobody wants to screw up and ruin a good thing, so most companies (and individuals) just keep trying to be perfect at the things they’ve always done.

In 2003, Seth Godin’s Purple Cow challenged organizations to become remarkable—to drive growth by standing out in a world full of brown cows. It struck a huge chord and stayed on the Business-Week bestseller list for nearly two years. You can hear countless brainstorming meetings where people refer to purple cows and say things like, “That’s not good enough. We need to create a big moo!”

But how do you create a big moo—an insight so astounding that people can’t help but remark on it, like digital TV recording (TiVo) or overnight shipping (FedEx), or the world’s best vacuum cleaner (Dyson)? Godin worked with thirty-two of the world’s smartest thinkers to answer this critical question. And the team—with the likes of Tom Peters, Malcolm Gladwell, Guy Kawasaki, Mark Cuban, Robyn Waters, Dave Balter, Red Maxwell, and Randall Rothenberg on board—created an incredibly useful book that’s fun to read and perfect for groups to share, discuss, and apply.

The Big Moo is a simple book in the tradition of Fish and Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff. Instead of lecturing you, it tells stories that stick to your ribs and light your fire. It will help you to create a culture that consistently delivers remarkable innovations.


Special Offers and Product Promotions

  • The Domino Project: Designed for organizations big and small, the ideas in The Domino Project will change things for the better.


Frequently Bought Together

The Big Moo: Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable + Purple Cow, New Edition: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable--Includes new bonus chapter + Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers
Price for all three: $48.87

Buy the selected items together


Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Godin derived the title for this engaging anthology of business homiletics from his marketing manifesto Purple Cow, which extolled the importance of garish new products that grab customers' attention. Phrased as a feel-good kindergarten platitude ("you are not ordinary/In fact, you're remarkable"), the principle seems a harmless nod to fancy-free individualism. But set in an adult business context of constant "change" and cutthroat price competition, where "winning the game has absolutely nothing to do with hard work and paying your dues" and "a constant stream of industry-busting insights and remarkable innovations" is the only guarantee of survival, the exhortation to uniqueness becomes terrifying and demoralizing. Fortunately, the cacophony of unsigned contributions from a "Group of 33" writers (Malcolm Gladwell and Tom Peters are in there somewhere) includes more reassuring and realistic lessons. There's a lot of New Economy histrionics ("They say, 'sure, we need change'"/ "I say, 'we need revolution now'"), but also comparatively restrained parables about marketing and customer service. Some writers note that competent imitation of proven ideas is often a better strategy than innovation, that self-effacing Bill Murray did better than self-aggrandizing Chevy Chase, and that, yup, hard work and paying your dues does pay off. The selections are for the most part brief and pithy, and while they don't add up to a coherent viewpoint, browsers are bound to find something that hits a chord.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"{An}engaging anthology of business homiletics...browsers are bound to find something thai hits a chord."
--This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 208 pages
  • Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover; First Edition edition (October 20, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1591841038
  • ISBN-13: 978-1591841036
  • Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #38,878 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Authors

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
75 of 87 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars Have they no shame? January 31, 2008
Format:Hardcover
I don't know what came over me in the bookstore. Mysteriously, when I got home, this book was at the bottom of the bag. It's an embarrassment.

I would have thought it impossible to come up with something more stupid, more openly contemptuous of the very managers purportedly being 'helped', than the horrendous "Who Moved My Cheese?" of a few years back. You remember, the one which portrayed employees as mildly retarded rodents. But one shouldn't underestimate the intellectual arrogance of the consultant class, nor the gullibility of corporate management.

This book is infinitely worse. It turns out that there is no apparent limit to the degree of atrocity of the rubbish that can be generated (and printed) in an "unprecedented collaboration of the world's smartest business thinkers". Despite the separation of material in this book into separate chapters, there is no individual attribution of responsibility for the individual chapters. This is not a good sign.

Seth Godin, the nominal 'editor', obviously sees no problem in publishing a book which, for any concrete piece of strategic advice that is included, hedges its bets by also advising the diametrically opposing strategy. Thus, to succeed companies should:

1a. Stick with what they know and do it well. (Focusing on your specialty is key).
1b. Not get stuck in the rut of what they know, they should branch out. (Focusing on your specialty is fatal)
2a. (page 23) "ignore your customers" (the customer is ignorant and wrong).
2b. (page 64) the customer is always right.
3a. (page 31) "Every organization that gets into trouble falters because it waited too long to change...". (urgency is crucial)
3b. (page 136) "Remarkable doesn't always mean right now" (urgency is detrimental).

And so on. Because chapter authors are not individually identified, should your coin toss happen to choose the wrong option between 1a and 1b, 2a and 2b, 3a and 3b, there can be no assignable blame.

However, at least the examples above have the virtue of giving concrete, specific advice. If that makes you nervous, there is also plenty of this kind of gibberish:

Plant rocks.
Embrace the power of storytelling.
Ignore the regulations. (I'm trying to imagine how this would play out in, say, the pharmaceutical or biotech industries).
Imagine there's a tiger loose in your office. Breathe the fear. Fear is good.
You are not a cog. You are not ordinary. In fact, you are remarkable.

But if you're dumb enough to buy this book, you're a complete moron. Even by the extraordinarily lax standards for business advice books, it sets a new low.

Zero stars.
Was this review helpful to you?
34 of 38 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Quick bites on how to become remarkable October 20, 2005
Format:Hardcover
Seth Godin, editor of the book, has collected 33 inspiring ideas and they become _The Big Moo_. The Group of 33, as the book references these successful business people, includes Mark Cuban, Dave Balter, Malcolm Gladwell, Tom Peters, and Guy Kawasaki. The aim of the stories or ideas is to show what it takes to become remarkable.

The book's title comes from Godin's previous best seller, _Purple Cow_ which shows how to stand out in a world of brown cows. According to the book's synopsis, "... sometimes you need something even bigger than a purple cow. You need a big moo — an insight so astounding that people can't help but remark on it."

While _Purple Cow_ focuses on standing out, it lacks the second and very important step — getting others to talk about your business. Standing out alone doesn't lead to business. How do people find out about you? That's what _The Big Moo_ is about — sharing ideas and real-life examples of how to get people talking.

"Some Things Just Don't Translate" points that the way we see our products may not be the way customers see them. Sounds obvious, but it isn't. An Italian in the house ware business opened a store in the U.S. His foot traffic wasn't match by sales. He observed his customers and remained baffled as to why they were looking and taking an interest, but not buying.

He asked a customer how she liked the store and merchandise. It turned out that what Americans considered vases, Italians saw as glasses — and vice versa. The owner, of course, was selling glasses of six in a case and vases as singles. Americans didn't want to buy six vases — they could've bought six glasses with ease, though. This type of valuable advice appears throughout the book.

Most essays clearly get the point across although a couple aren't as strong. The book does what it sets out to do: motivate the reader to get out there to put ideas to work to develop a remarkable organization that gets everyone buzzing.

Though the book explains the contributors gave up their by-lines for the book, I would've liked to know who wrote each story. There's no way to guess who wrote which story as few of them relate to the businesses associated with the people. What does knowing who wrote it do for me? It tells me who made the observation or how the person thinks. It's like sharing a quote without the author's name.

It's an easy, gratifying, and fast read. I read the whole thing in about an hour. Each essay is about two pages on the average. All the proceeds from the book go to three charities.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars "The Big MOO" Gets a Big BOO April 26, 2009
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I can't stand self-help books in which the author does no more than serve up a laundry list of ideas with no coherent thread. "The Big Moo" takes this one step further by having 33 authors (not properly credited) each serve up one item for the laundry list. Seth Godin said he did not identify which author wrote which chapter "because it makes it easier to read the book as a whole, to avoid being interrupted by the noise your brain makes as it shifts gears from one voice to another." What nonsense! Just because the author of each chapter is not identified does not mean there is a common voice from chapter to chapter. Each chapter is unrelated to the others and there is no development from one chapter to the next. "The Big MOO" gets a big BOO!

P.S. I wanted to give it zero stars but that's not allowed.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars Thanks!
Fast & clean! I love the book and i'll certainly come back to your shop! Thanks again my friend! J.s
Published 2 months ago by Jakub Sz
5.0 out of 5 stars Older book with timeless advice
Mindset is so important for entrepreneurs. I find that it's not something you get once, but instead I need to keep feeding myself good advice. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Susan Gregory
4.0 out of 5 stars This is one loud cow
Inspirational, irreverent, insidious and irresistible, this is a very big moo in a very slim volume. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Rob Fitzgibbon
3.0 out of 5 stars Terrible
This book is terrible. Sure, there is some decent advice. "Look at me, I'm so quirky and innovative!"
That's the basic idea behind the book. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Eric Alexander
5.0 out of 5 stars My review of "The Big Moo: Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being...
This book was written by Seth Godin and thirty-two of the world's greatest thinkers. "The Group of 33," as they call themselves, has written a book that is both informative and... Read more
Published 13 months ago by Chad Thiele
4.0 out of 5 stars Ideas aplenty
Packed with ideas. Written in an inclusive, easy going style. Like everything Seth does, you'll get something from it. Recommended!
Published 18 months ago by Stanley Johnson
4.0 out of 5 stars A Grande Mudanca (resenha em portugues)
Antes de mais nada, năo confundir com "A Grande Mudança" (The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google) de Nicholas Carr, que trata de TI - Tecnologia da... Read more
Published on January 28, 2011 by Andre Varga
3.0 out of 5 stars Ok, but not remarkable
The big Moo is a small book with short stories about "how to be remarkable". Each of the stories are written by one of the 33 'famous' authors and business 'gurus'. Read more
Published on October 9, 2010 by Bas Vodde
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing
Everything perfect, the book in great conditions, and also a really nice book to read 100% Recommended vendor
Published on September 21, 2010 by Diego
5.0 out of 5 stars The Big Moo ~~ Being Remarkable
Got many good concepts from this "teaching" CD. I trusted the person who steered me to purchasing this CD and it was everything I hoped it would be. Read more
Published on July 14, 2010 by Mrs. Order
Search Customer Reviews
Only search this product's reviews


Forums

Topic From this Discussion
Welcome to the The Big Moo forum
No thanks.
Jun 10, 2009 by J. Ahrens |  See all 2 posts
Have something you'd like to share about this product?
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions




Look for Similar Items by Category