Newly Corporate

‘The greatest role that life can bestow upon you is to be a revolutionary.”

This is the essence of Guy Kawasaki’s book Rules for Revolutionaries expressed through the closing quote. I gave it away as to convince you that revolutionaries are the noblest of creatures, so we can move away from just adding another book review to the pile that are already widely available. Instead, I have decided to run through some of the ideas he put forth in the book and match them up with “tools for revolutionaries”.

Dump Your Idols
“They represent, respectively, the groupthink of a particular community, the qualities of a particular individual, the results of a social interaction , and the drama of showing off one’s intellectual prowess.”

Use these tools too look beyond the usual “Idols” of the technology and business internet (Robert Scoble, Engadget, TechCrunch, Brazen Careerist):
StumbleUpon – Actively stumble through pages to find the newest ideas just looking for a reader.
Technorati – Search for your favorite tags and look beyond just the blogs with the most authority.
Twitter – Follow your favorite new bloggers, not just the big guys. That’s where the new ideas begin.

Harness “latent potential”
“the precursors of wings for flying may have been feathers for thermo regulation. Thus, the precursors of wings for flying may have been feathers for thermoregulation.” you need to be “open to exploiting any unforeseen features of your products and services.” (or those of others).

This idea screams mashups and hacking.
Lifehacker – Whether your a company watching for people using your products different ways or consumer looking to do so, this is a great source.
Yahoo Pipes - An amateur mashup machine.
Also, checkout my financial flow “mashup” and intergenerational communication “hack”.

Churn, Baby, Churn
“To be ready to churn as soon as the market demands it, you need to remember the first lesson of churning: ‘Plan for it.’”
Tools for managing and driving churn:
Basecamp - Great all around project management tool that can manage any phase of a project at low cost in distributed environments.
SourceForge – The definitive way to drive open source development.

Listen and Regurgitate
“If people are at all receptive to your revolution, they will tell you how to evangelize them.”

Feedback is key to product evangelism and ultimate product acceleration, here are a few helpers:
Yelp – Talk about products and ways to make them better (producers, this is a great place to listen).
Google Docs – A classic but, great way to collaboratively and quickly put together “multi-appeal evangelism pitches”

Eat Like a Bird, Poop Like and Elephant
Some birds eat half of their body weight every day and elephants poop 165 pounds a day, moral of the story: “a successful revolutionary relentlessly searches for, consumes, and absorbs knowledge about the industry” and also works to “spread the large amount of information of knowledge that you’ve gained.” “Always search for the cause of something unexpected.”

Google Reader – What other tool is better for “ingesting” thousands of feeds from others and “pooping” or sharing the best of what you ahve learned? Google Reader was built for this!
Wordpress – Share what you have learned and discuss it with the community.
TechMeme – See what others are pooping (literally sometimes).

Put Customers in Control
“let customers decide what they want to do.”
Wikimedia – The embodiment of customer control.
Crowdspirit – A site where customers take a project full cycle from ideation to production.

These sections are only a small sample of the experential knowlegde Guy Kawasaki imparts in Rules for Revolutionaries. This is a great book, motivator and tool for anyone looking to revolutionize the way they do business.

This book recommended as one of the 15 Books for Rogue Professionals and How to Read them Fast at No Cost.