Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition

Citation

Abela, A. (2010), "Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition", Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 19 No. 2, pp. 155-155. https://doi.org/10.1108/10610421011033520

It is hard not to love Guy Kawasaki. His fresh, honest, and often amusing perspective on everything he writes about is combined with solid and exceedingly useful insight and guidance. His bestseller The Art of the Start is, to my mind, the single most important guidebook for entrepreneurs, ever. Kawasaki's insight in that book, that entrepreneurs should focus on getting a saleable product out the door quickly, ahead of all else – including raising capital – is the kind of advice that can change the fortunes of startups.

Reality Check is no different. Its 474 pages are filled with practical tips for a wide range of management and marketing challenges. There are a total of 94 chapters, which are brief and therefore easy to digest a piece at a time. The chapters are divided into 12 sections, or “Realities”: the Reality of Starting, Raising Money, Planning and Executing, Innovating, Marketing, Selling and Evangelizing, Communicating, Beguiling, Competing, Hiring and Firing, Working, and finally the Reality of Doing Good.

There are two sources for the content of the various chapters in Reality Check. The first is Kawasaki's own experience, such as for chapter 24: How I Built a Web 2.0, User‐Generated‐Content, Citizen‐Journalism, Long‐Tail, Social‐Media Site for $12,107.09. The second source for the book's content is other good material the author has come across. These chapters are far from just summaries of good books, because the choice of source is filtered by Kawasaki's own experience, and therefore includes only really good, practical stuff, and what he provides, in most cases, is not a summary but an actual interview.

In these interviews Kawasaki can be pretty hard hitting. In Chapter 28: The Sticking Point, he interviews Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the popular Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. After the obligatory “What separates ideas that stick from ones that don't?” (p. 131), Kawasaki goes on the offensive: “Your principles sound pretty basic. If these six principles were all it took to make a sticky idea, why aren't there more sticky ideas in the world?” (p. 131) And then he follows that with “Why has [Microsoft] Windows stuck? It doesn't appear to [fit the principles]” (p. 132). Because of this approach, the reader gets more than just a précis of some interesting thought; you also get to read Kawasaki challenge that thought, and therefore arguably you get something richer than if you just read Made to Stick, for example.

Marketers are likely to turn first to the “Reality of Marketing” section. Chapter 32 lists 13 “Stupid Ways to Hinder Market Adoption,” such as #5: lack of ways to share an experience. Chapter 34: The Art of Branding compresses some very sound advice into a mere 2‐1/2 pages. One I like in particular is “Take the opposite test” (p. 163): If the opposite of each of the characteristics that you use to describe your brand makes no sense, then your description is not going to be very distinctive. Chapter 35 is about marketing to youth: “Q: Are companies deluding themselves if they think they can create trends for young people from the top down? A: Yes, it's rather laughable. Or sad … ” (p. 172). Several other sections in the book are also of immediate relevance to marketers, including the chapters on selling and on innovation.

In the entire book, I only found one area that I disagree with strongly, and that is Kawasaki's take on presentations. In Chapter 9, he describes his “10/20/30 Rule of Pitching: how to pitch a company, an idea, or a product. The rule is that a pitch should contain 10 slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and use no font smaller than 30 points” (p. 36). Kawasaki provides this advice after listening to hundreds of pitches himself, most of which were “crap.”

The reason I don't like this approach is that it is, at best, just damage control. Following the rule will turn terrible presentations into possibly palatable ones – but this is at odds with the rest of the book, which inspires you to aim for greatness in everything you do. The style of presentation that 10/20/30 represents, especially the “30” part (30‐point font) is what I call Ballroom style: a presentation designed to be delivered in a large hotel ballroom, to hundreds or thousands of people at once. This is the style taught in Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen. Reynolds is the subject of an interview in chapter 45, where we get the sense that Kawasaki approves of the method, because absent from this interview are any of the more interesting, challenging types of questions I mentioned above.

Ballroom style presentations are fine in their place, but they are totally inappropriate for pitching anything. That is because if you are trying to persuade someone to give you money – for an investment, purchase, or donation – there is plenty of research evidence that indicates that you have to provide lots of details and have a very interactive discussion. Thirty‐point font is the enemy of any kind of detail, and projectors do not encourage interaction. For any kind of pitch, you are far more effective using what I call a Conference Room style presentation, where you turn off the projector and hand out a small number of printed slides, each with a well‐designed and immediately comprehensible layout and lots of rich detail.

Reality Check is oriented mostly towards people working in technology startups – that is, after all, Kawasaki's background – but his insights are applicable more broadly, it seems to me: to any industry, and to any size company, because all companies are or should be trying to emulate the agility of technology startups.

Kawasaki closes his book with this statement: “I hope, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, that Reality Check is a ‘truly good book’ that helps you change the world.”

I think that it might just be such a book.