Small Is the New Big and 183 Other Riffs Rants and Remarkable Business Ideas

More provocative business thinking from the bestselling author of Purple Cow and All Marketers Are Liars

As one of today’s most influential business thinkers, Seth Godin helps his army of fans stay focused, stay connected, and stay dissatisfied with the status quo, the ordinary, the boring. His books, blog posts, magazine articles, and speeches have inspired countless entrepreneurs, marketing people, innovators, and managers around the world.

Now, for the first time, Godin has collected the most provocative short pieces from his pioneering blog—ranked #70 by Feedster (out of millions published) in worldwide readership. This book also includes his most popular columns from Fast Company magazine, and several of the short e-books he has written in the last few years.

A sample:
• Bon Jovi And The Pirates
• Christmas Card Spam
• Clinging To Your Job Title?
• How Much Would You Pay to Be on Oprah’s Show?
• The Persistence of Really Bad Ideas
• The Seduction of “Good Enough”
• What Happens When It’s All on Tape?
• Would You Buy Life Insurance at a Rock Concert?

Small is the New Big is a huge bowl of inspiration that you can gobble in one sitting or dip into at any time. As Godin writes in his introduction: “I guarantee that you’ll find some ideas that don’t work for you. But I’m certain that you’re smart enough to see the stuff you’ve always wanted to do, buried deep inside one of these riffs. And I’m betting that once inspired, you’ll actually make something happen.”

User Ratings and Reviews

2 Stars a collection of loosely related opinionated shallow babbles
Check out the section about no-no’s on making criticism. This book is full of it.

Other than that, there are some repetitive assertions. Not much analytic or data. Basically someone wrote pieces of stuff once in a while and put them into a book.

I am glad that I didn’t pay for reading it. If you like reading blogs, this is probably for you. But wait.. why not reading them (or better ones) online?

2 Stars Motivational platitudes
At the end of the day, this is a bunch of fluffy blog posts. I did not read the whole book, maybe 1/3 of it based on random sampling of entries. Frankly, as someone deeply involved in technology & marketing, most of this was obvious to me, and it is not very well formatted for print either because it comes from a blog.

5 Stars Short and sweet nuggets of inspiration
I love the “short and sweet” format - this is the perfect opportunity to browse someone else’s brain for ideas!

I read this over about 6 months, picking it up and reading one or two “rants” at a time. I found these thought-provoking, with sufficient detail for me to know what he was going on enough, but without boring me with detail and examples. Several topics triggered great ideas which I’ve thought through, developed, and run with in the days after reading.

Highly recommended.

2 Stars Aren’t Blogs the New Books?
Blogger Seth Godin presents 184 “riffs” and “rants,” with little statistical analysis to back up any of his assertions. “Small is the New Big” is a collection of odds and ends from Godin’s blog (and Fast Company columns). While opinions without statistical basis may be enough to fill up the daily content requirements of the blogging world, an entire book filled with the same opinions is in desperate need of research and analysis. I’ll have to read some of his other book-length works, but this volume will probably be of interest to diehard Godin fans only.

5 Stars wow thats a lot of info
Not that Seth needs another glowing review…This book is great. Read the introduction and follow the isntructions for how to read the book. Every segment is something worth taking to the copier and distributing to coworkers. Here is an idea: start your own company and experiment with all the cool nuggets in the book, you might fail but it will be fun.

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