"Q: How many bosses does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: One. He holds up the lightbulb and expects the universe to revolve around him."
Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition by Guy Kawasaki is arguably one of the most humourous business books around. Despite the fact that most contents in the book are from his blog, How To Change The World, "Reality Check" is full of great business "checklists" (hence, Reality Check). And those checklists cover lots of aspect in business (be warned, this book is huge, 461 pages before an index).
Contents:
- The Reality of Starting
Guy starts with the checklist you need in starting a business or intrapreneurship (entrepreneurship inside a company) and how to construct a mantra (forget three paragraphs mission statement)
- The Reality of Raising Money
As a venture capitalist, Guy Kawasaki wrote on how to raise fund from annoying and moody venture capitalists.
- The Reality of Planning and Executing
Business plans, financial projections, etc; you've been there and done that but Guy told you how to hit a homerun from them.
- The Reality of Innovating
Before jumping into innovating-everything bandwagon, this chapter tells you the myths, sins, and art of innovation.
- The Reality of Marketing
A brief revision of branding and identity.
- The Reality of Selling and Evangelizing
From the world's top evangelist, he wrote about the art of selling, distribution, evangelism and PR.
- The Reality of Communicating
This main chapter covers lots of ground from e-mailing, presentation, demo, blogging, and moderating a panel.
- The Reality of Beguiling
There are lots of art (checklists and steps) of customer service, schmoozing, sucking up, sucking down (?!), and partnering.
- The Reality of Competing
A short chapter saying about your company's defensibility and patents.
- The Reality of Hiring and Firing
Guy wrote about Silicon Valley hiring, how to hire, how to fire, craiglist, and linkedin, among other things.
- The Reality of Working
How to prevent Bozo explosion? What are mavericks in the workplace? What's your EQ (Entrepreneurial Quotient)? This main chapter portrays the reality you face at work.
- The Reality of Doing Good
It is nice to end the book with philanthropy and how nonprofit organisations are changing the world
...
I'll humbly compare "Reality Check" to my ideal business book; the book that is "easy to understand, distinct, practical, reliable, insightful, and provides great reading experience."
Ease of Understanding: 9/10: The book is simple, straightforward, jargon-free, and very informal (even slightly rude sometimes). Forget theories and models, you will only find simple checklists, steps, and occasional interviews which are put in the main chapters (The Reality of...). One point taken because they are blog-like which make stringing nearly impossible. Guy must have tried very hard to group them together but it is not perfect.
Distinct: 6/10: From the contents, you will find nothing particularly new and we have seen and read all of them already. However, the distinct and unique characteristic of the book is its informality and straight-forwardness. It's honest and it's amusing. You won't find many authors who could make fun of those business ideas naturally like Guy.
Practicality: 7/10: Despite the short chapters (96 chapters including intro and conclusion, 3-5 pages each), they are not just a bunch of pointless blog posts. The conclusion and call to action are in each chapter. There are three key themes within the book, 1) positive chapters (chapters starting with "The Art of..", and "How To"; there are 51 of them), 2) negative chapters ("Lies of", and chapters on a-holes; there are 14 of them), 3) interview chapters (with interesting authors like Chip and Dan Heath of "Made to Stick" or Garr Reynold of "The Presentation Zen"; there are 18 of them), and there are other 13 miscellaneous chapters.
Reliability: 5/10: There is very little (if at all) supporting data. The book is from Guy's experience and rule of thumb. Complex statistics and formula might help but they will ruin the book. It is a worthy trade-off.
Insight: 6/10: The chapters are extremely short but they are compensated simply by having lots of them which are directed to the similar key points of the book. The credit is also to the interview (Q&A) chapters that Guy interviewed other authors for the different aspects of the stories.
Reading Experience: 10/10: This is, by far, the funniest (yet meaningful) business book I've read. The book make you feel like listening to Guy's rant on the business as usual. You won't get bored. Extra credit to the outrageous use of vocabularies; "bozosity", "bull shiitake" (shiitake is a japanese mushroom), "assholedom", "mediocracy" (mediocre + bureaucracy), and things like "karmic scoreboard".
Overall: 7.2/10: Those who want to read something that "sounds" serious might not like the book. But beyond the casual and informal nature of Guy's writing, what we've learnt from the book is valuable. I highly recommend the book if you want to be "clueful" (as opposed to clueless) in business. And you will have fun reading it and also a good laugh; you can't say that to most business books.
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Customer reviews
Guy has been our Mentor, and we have learned at lot from him while building our dream. The book creates a step by step flow from starting the company to facing numerous problems in the Journey of an Entrepreneurs. The various principles in the book act as guiding steps to build successful companies with minimum resistance and every Entrepreneur should read this book before he starts to startup.
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Full of nuggets and practical advice for Business People/Entrepreneurs
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 16, 2022
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This is one of the most outta world books that ...
Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on April 9, 2018
