Play to your strengths

Jeff Jarvis' book, "What Would Google Do?" is out. Here's a brief description by the author.

I've been getting my feet wet with some of the social technology out there, and the launch of a new business book made me think of some old business books. It also made me think of book-length treatises on simple ideas. "The E Myth" is a good example. Its basic advice - "play to your strengths."

I read "What to Eat" by Marion Nestle awhile back - and I love her candor. In the preface, she says she can sum up the book in a sentence (which she does): eat less, move more, avoid junk food. I read the rest of the book because I wanted the details, and it was worth it.

Jim Collins comes to mind. A Wharton School review of Jim Collins' "Good to Great" sums up the book as follows:

Collins asks an interesting question. Unhappily, the methodology he used to formulate an answer is questionable and the answer is almost disappointing in its simplicity: Great companies become great by staying focused: focused on their products, their customers and their businesses. They aspire to higher levels of excellence, are never content to become complacent and are passionate about their products. They have leadership that is not ego-driven, and have organizational cultures that embrace constant change. That's the book.

In "The Black Swan," Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes an operating model that's almost the opposite of Collins'. Collins uses a very Aristotelian logic to do a regression on model businesses ("great") and then prescribes it to your business. By assembling the pieces and following the plan, your business too can achieve greatness.

Taleb counters, since we can barely read the pattern, why pretend? He advocates "bottom up tinkering and undirected trial and error." At least he takes into account our strengths as a species.

Maybe that's what Google does.