Capitalists of the World, Innovate!

As Apple Computer's evangelist for the Macintosh, Guy Kawasaki was one of the driving forces behind a revolutionary product. As a high-tech marketing pioneer, he has been advising companies about another revolution: the rise of the Internet. Now comes "Rules for Revolutionaries" -- a book based on the proposition that to take on the establishment, you have to play by different rules.

This "capitalist manifesto" is packed with colorful examples and with earthy advice from break-the-rules players in various industries and disciplines. Kawasaki borrows from a diverse group of visionaries, including sculptor Constantin Brancusi and "one-to-one marketing" guru Don Peppers, and fills his text with lively, open-ended exercises. The result is a must-read manual for change-minded businesspeople.

Create Like a God

Kawasaki's first rule doesn't fall far from Apple's tree. If you want to make a revolution, he argues, you have to start by unleashing revolutionary products. You have to "create like a God" -- and that requires you to "think different." According to Kawasaki, such breakthrough thinking is less serious than deep contemplation and less silly than "sitting in a beanbag chair squirting colleagues with water pistols." "The key," he writes, "is how you are thinking about a problem for a long time."

Only a revolutionary thought process could have produced the concept behind MCA's Universal Studios Florida. MCA combined theme (movies) and thrill (rides) to create "Come ride the movies." It also broke with what Kawasaki describes as Disney's de facto code for how to run a theme park: "Be nice, gentle, and politically correct."

But thinking different is just the first step. Business revolutionaries also have to keep rethinking -- and just as important, they have to keep doing. Which points to the driving concern of Kawasaki's book: How do you turn radical ideas into profitable companies?

Command Like a King

The essence of turning big ideas into real companies is recognizing that leadership is as much about staying power as it is about starting lines. For Apple's Macintosh division, that was a hard lesson to learn. After building a machine that changed the industry, the Mac team realized that "revising the revolution wouldn't be nearly as fun as creating it." By contrast, Microsoft has always excelled at "churning" -- at responding to market demand in order to outperform and outsell its competitors. Case in point: the company's relentless upgrading of Windows.

Churning derives inspiration from the mantra "Fail quickly, but last long." It means admitting that your product is less than perfect, it means banishing arrogance, and it means attending to mundane details -- each of which is counterintuitive behavior at most companies. But perhaps the biggest barrier to positive churning is the propensity of most companies to stick with what's working.

"Any (living) soldier will tell you, 'The easy way is mined,' " writes Kawasaki. "The easy way is a death magnet too. . . . Death magnets in business [are] the traditional habits and patterns of thinking that continue to seduce companies." The land mines inside companies include these familiar sentiments: "Budget is king." "Our product sucks less." "Our brand is a hunting license."

In other words, one of the most dangerous enemies of revolution can be your own company. The best way to defeat that enemy, Kawasaki argues, is to ignore it. The history of innovation is riddled with smug assessments and dire predictions: In 1943, IBM Chairman Thomas Watson declared, "I think there is a world market for about five computers." Fred Smith received a C on the economics term paper in which he introduced the hub-and-spoke concept that he later used to create Federal Express. And even Kawasaki had his own nay-saying moment. When asked if he had any interest in interviewing for the job of CEO at Yahoo!, he responded, "It's too far a commute. And how can you make a business out of a search engine?"

Work Like a Slave

Revolutions can be thrilling, inspiring, and exhausting. If they are to become enduring, though, they also have to be disciplined. Kawasaki draws on two seemingly silly facts from the animal kingdom to illustrate the kind of discipline that supports innovation: Hummingbirds, he says, eat the equivalent of 50% of their weight every day; and elephants poop at the rate of 165 pounds per day. The "avarian principles of eating" illustrate one aspect of revolutionary behavior: a relentless search for knowledge about your industry, your customers, and your competitors. That search requires unconventional information-gathering habits. For example, revolutionaries always "leave the important stuff to amateurs." Marketing professionals tend to miss subtle cues about human behavior (such as the tendency of women to shop for cars with their kids in tow, or to make cup holders the first thing they look for in a car) that lead to breakthrough products and cutting-edge services. The "principles of pooping," meanwhile, point to another aspect of revolutionary behavior: a dedication to spreading knowledge and to sharing discoveries.