Review: Not your regular review of 'Free Prize Inside', by Seth Godin

This 'review' falls into three parts, the first of which is what you might expect.

Part 1: The Review

Free Prize Inside is a successor to two of Godin's previous books, Survival is Not Enough and Purple Cow.

Here, in a nutshell, is how it goes.

It's noisy out there in marketing world and regular, decent folk are turning a deaf ear to all that awful noise we throw at them each day.

The result - the old equation of spending more on advertising to generate more in profits just isn't working as it once did. And thank goodness. How much of that noise do we want in our lives?

Also, the cost of R&D is going through the roof and creating breakthrough products is becoming too expensive and too risky. (And please, do you really need an even flatter flat-screen TV?)

So how do you get some attention? By doing something worth talking about.

Godin identifies an area where you can create what he calls 'soft innovations'. No big R&D budget. No big ad spend. Just a good idea that adds genuine value and gets people talking.

To give you an idea of what he means, here are a few examples of soft innovations:

- The creation of zip codes
- Starbucks cards
- Dinosaur-shaped pasta for kids
- Imprinted rubber bands for tracking live lobsters
- Amazon.com cutting its ad spend and offering free shipping with the money saved

And so on.

As Godin says, anyone in a company or organization can have a great idea. You, me, just about anyone. And soft innovations are pretty much free. Well, relatively speaking.

The trouble is, not many of us have the skills to make great ideas actually happen. Few of us have the aptitude and training to champion and shepherd an idea from the moment of inspiration to actual implementation.

That's the core of this book. Yes, it helps you think about how you might come up with some ideas for soft innovations - but more importantly, it shows you how to become a successful champion of that idea. It's a mini-training manual for the successful implementation of soft innovations.

If you have good ideas and feel frustrated by how twenty two levels of bureaucracy and idiocy manage to kill them within five minutes flat, this book is definitely for you.

If you are an old-guard ad person who still believes that more money spent on ads automatically translates into more profits a few months later - this book is also for you.

Buy it. It's a good book. (Buy it here and Amazon will bless me with a few cents for my troubles.)

Part 2: A Depressing Thought

The good news about Free Prize Inside is that it gives you the skills to champion a good idea.

The bad news is that such a book is necessary.

Why is it so hard? Why do you have to get advanced training as an idea-shepherd in order to get your idea accepted?

Think about it. This book was written because companies have cultures that work to suppress and discourage innovation - unless, of course, it's 'their innovation', fresh from their R&D labs and a billion dollar budget.

Companies and organizations employ millions of people with creative minds and then deliberately suppress creativity.

I find that very depressing. It's no wonder, as Godin points out, that many innovations come out of small start-ups led by people who were frustrated by their employers and decided to go it alone.

Why do companies and managers in those companies suppress creative ideas from within their own organization? Fear. Fear of making mistakes, fear of looking bad, fear of losing money.

(Of course, they are completely fearless when it comes to wasting another few hundred million dollars on some trite, self-serving advertising campaign or R&D project.)

Part 3: Beware of 'ideaphins'

We're wandering away from the book review here, and heading more towards some of my own observations about great ideas.

You've heard about endorphins. Yes? Those are the happy chemicals in your brain that come out to play after exercise, sex, chocolate etc. Give me some endorphins and suddenly the cares of the world fall from my shoulders. At least temporarily.

The same thing can happen with ideas.

For sure, a great idea needs defending and championing. But you also have to be careful that the great idea you just had really is great. Or, to be more precise, you have to be sure that your enthusiasm will be shared by your customers and prospective customers. You may think it's great, but will they?

And this is where you need to have a little maturity in the arena of developing ideas.

Maybe you've felt it yourself. You have a great idea. It makes you smile. You can't wait to get started. Hey, it's brilliant...don't delay! You're pumped. You really and truly can't wait. Everything else falls to one side. You sit up late at the kitchen table. You wake up early, your mind buzzing.

It's a beautiful feeling. Very creative. Very exciting.

But before you go for bust and become the ultimate soft innovation champion, pause for a moment. Maybe pause for a few days. Run the idea past a couple of people you truly respect. And listen.

Otherwise your critical judgment can become clouded by all those 'ideaphins'. You can't see beyond that original flood of enthusiasm. You won't hear a word against your idea. And before you know it, you're defending the indefensible.

I'm not saying that all ideas are not so great after all. But some are not nearly as great as you might have first thought.

Tens of thousands of small business start-ups fail each year because of ideaphins. You start out with what you thought was a great idea, and end up with something that isn't a business at all. And never was.

Note to self: Not all great ideas make good business sense.

It's a tough line to tread. On the one hand, you need to keep feeding your passion and enthusiasm. On the other, you have to keep your critical faculties alert. You have to defend your idea against people who will put it down out of fear or ignorance. But you also have to keep an ear tuned to those people who see genuine flaws and problems in the idea.

And sometimes, if you are very lucky, and very brave - you have to defend a vision that even your closest advisors and peers can't recognize.

It isn't easy.

But then again, if it was, it wouldn't be fun.

Concluding thoughts.

Buy the book. And if you don't have them already, buy Purple Cow and Survival is Not Enough as well.

Survival is Not Enough had nothing like the success of Purple Cow, in terms of sales. It's a more complex book, and doesn't have one, simple thread running throughout. It doesn't lend itself to being summed up so easily with a snappy title.

Maybe that's why it didn't sell so well, in spite of the value of its contents.

And yes, if I'm right, that is a pretty sad reflection of what drives us to buy one book and not another.

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