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."