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By Posted on Posted in Books, CEO, Influential, Inspiration, Motivational No Comments

hiroshi mikitani

I started few days ago reading Marketplace 3.0: Rewriting the Rules of Borderless Business written by Hiroshi Mikitani the CEO of Rakuten.

I will not discuss the detailed content of his book which is extremely interesting to read for every person involved in daily consumer related business activities not matter the industry, even that his company is mostly focused on online marketplaces but a lot can be learned from this gentleman and the culture he created for Rakuten in Japan and its subsidiaries worldwide.

Mikitani is a visionary and this is very obvious in his book or when you take a look at the global success of Rakuten which means “optimism” in Japanese, he started a very small company and took it big and i am sure his dreams are way beyond what he already achieved.

You can feel how Mikitani is keen about lifting every one around him up to the top and setting his standards very high, his vision of going global and making all the needed efforts to achieve it without losing focus on the core business and the fundamentals.

He easily can be an excellent business mentor for many <failed CEOs who unfortunately think they have what it takes to run a company or create a business culture> thru his book at a very marginal cost, by just buying his book(s).

But the question is if humans are not resistant to change, the positive change!

I am looking forward to finish this book to start his latest one entitled The Power to Compete: An Economist and an Entrepreneur on Revitalizing Japan in the Global Economy.

Rakuten Group is one of the world’s leading Internet service companies, providing a variety of consumer- and business-focused services including e-commerce, eBooks & eReading, travel, banking, securities, credit card, e-money, portal and media, online marketing and professional sports. Rakuten Group is expanding globally and currently has operations throughout Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Oceania.

By Posted on Posted in 2014, Books, Reading Now No Comments

In random order, below are the books I have started and will be reading in 2014. My target is a book monthly but I will do my best to finish these 12 books in 6 months, If my target is achieved, will be posting another 12 new ones.

books 2014

Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup – http://amzn.com/0470929839

What Color Is Your Parachute? 2014: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers – http://amzn.com/1607743620

My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley – http://amzn.com/0787996130

The Reluctant Entrepreneur: Turning Dreams into Profits – http://amzn.com/1118178440

The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months – http://amzn.com/1118509234

The Power of Why: Breaking Out in a Competitive Marketplace – http://amzn.com/0544026888

Paris, My Sweet: A Year in the City of Light (and Dark Chocolate) – http://amzn.com/1402264119

Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters – http://amzn.com/1937077594

Fit to Bust: How Great Companies Fail – http://amzn.com/074946013X

The Business of Venture Capital: Insights from Leading Practitioners on the Art of Raising a Fund, Deal Structuring, Value Creation, and Exit Strategies (Wiley Finance) – http://amzn.com/0470874449

The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup (Kauffman Foundation Series on Innovation and Entrepreneurship) – http://amzn.com/0691158304

Modern Manners: Tools to Take You to the Top – http://amzn.com/0770434088

By Posted on Posted in Amazon, Books No Comments

jeff bezos

I am a big fan of Jeff Bezos, the founder of amazon.com and i never hided that i would like to spend 1 day with him anywhere in the world to get to know him better and maybe take some of his DNA and apply into my ideas.

He surely revolutionized the e-commerce scene in the USA and all over the world, even the biggest brick-and-mortar retailers could not compete with him including the world’s biggest retailer Walmart and i was admiring more and more everyday with every new product he was launching under the amazon brand.

Yesterday I finished reading Brad Stone’s book “The Everything Store“, the latest book in covering Amazon’s amazing journey but while reading it, i started thinking differently about Jeff Bezos, is he a bad boss???

Maybe this is the reason of his success, being harsh to people to make things move forward and his style of managing people and each one of us has his different style in doing so.

A paragraph taken from the book:

Bezos fits comfortably into this mold. His drive and boldness trumps other leadership ideals, such as consensus building and promoting civility. While he can be charming and capable of great humor in public, in private he explodes into what some of his underlings call nutters. A colleague failing to meet Bezos’s exacting standards will set off a nutter. If an employee does not have the right answers or tries to bluff, or takes credit for someone else’s work, or exhibits a whiff of internal politics, uncertainty, or frailty in the heat of battle—a blood vessel in Bezos’s forehead bulges and his filter falls away. He’s capable of hyperbole and harshness in these moments and over the years has delivered some devastating rebukes. Among his greatest hits, collected and relayed by Amazon veterans:

“Do I need to go down and get the certificate that says I’m CEO of the company to get you to stop challenging me on this?”

By Posted on Posted in 2013, Books No Comments

Below is a list of the books I am planning to read in 2013 in no specific order.

1) Amazing Things Will Happen: A Real-World Guide on Achieving Success and Happiness

2) The Startup Owner’s Manual – The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

3) Strategic Retail Management: Text and International Cases

4) Brand Against the Machine – How to Build Your Brand

5) Made to Stick – Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

6) People Buy You – The Real Secret to what Matters Most in Business

7) The Business of Venture Capital – Insights from Leading Practitioners

8) What the Customer Wants You to Know – How Everybody Needs to Think Differently About Sales

9) The End of Work as You Know It

10) The Power of Habit – Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

11) The Art of Non-Conformity – Set Your Own Rules

12) Flying Without a Net – Turn Fear of Change into Fuel for Success

<img src="http://krikor.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/books2013.png" alt="books2013" width="600" height="725" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-8695" /

By Posted on Posted in Books, Brands, Marketing No Comments

I just finished reading Brandwashed, an amazing book by Martin Lindstrom, a worldwide renowned marketeer.

Martin takes you in very deep places on how brands we use are brainwashing us, the consumers, everyday.

On a personal experience, Martin tried hard to get away from his brands, the brands he is using everyday, but could not resist and came back using them. He is also showing how consumers get attached to brands because of fond memories and nostalgia, how brands are creating everyday different techniques to make us want them, to inspire us going into stores and getting them from shelves even sometimes without thinking.

Book foreword by Morgan Spurlock

From the bestselling author of Buyology comes a shocking insider’s look at how today’s global giants conspire to obscure the truth and manipulate our minds, all in service of persuading us to buy.

Marketing visionary Martin Lindstrom has been on the front lines of the branding wars for over twenty years. Here, he turns the spotlight on his own industry, drawing on all he has witnessed behind closed doors, exposing for the first time the full extent of the psychological tricks and traps that companies devise to win our hard-earned dollars.

Picking up from where Vance Packard’s bestselling classic, The Hidden Persuaders, left off more than half-a-century ago, Lindstrom reveals:

  • New findings that reveal how advertisers and marketers intentionally target children at an alarmingly young age – starting when they are still in the womb!
  • Shocking results of an fMRI study which uncovered what heterosexual men really think about when they see sexually provocative advertising (hint: it isn’t their girlfriends).
  • How marketers and retailers stoke the flames of public panic and capitalize on paranoia over global contagions, extreme weather events, and food contamination scares.
  • The first ever neuroscientific evidence proving how addicted we all are to our iPhones and our Blackberry’s (and the shocking reality of cell phone addiction – it can be harder to shake than addictions to drugs and alcohol).
  • How companies of all stripes are secretly mining our digital footprints to uncover some of the most intimate details of our private lives, then using that information to target us with ads and offers ‘perfectly tailored’ to our psychological profiles.
  • How certain companies, like the maker of one popular lip balm, purposely adjust their formulas in order to make their products chemically addictive.
  • What a 3-month long guerilla marketing experiment, conducted specifically for this book, tells us about the most powerful hidden persuader of them all.
  • And much, much more.

    • This searing expose introduces a new class of tricks, techniques, and seductions – the Hidden Persuaders of the 21st century- and shows why they are more insidious and pervasive than ever.

    About Martin

    True story. When he was a kid growing up in Denmark, young Martin had but one thought in his life: Lego. He hand-built and slept on a Lego bed. The family garden became his very own Legoland creation, attracting visitors from near and afar (including the lawyers from Lego).

    Then, still a child, Lego installed Lindstrom onto their advisory board. And then, of all the children in the world – they gave him the very first green brick in the collection.

    You’re guessing this is what got Martin started in the crazy world of branding, marketing and all things advertising. And you’d be right.

    Blame it all on Lego.

    Fast forward some three decades later…

    Consumer Advocate Lindstrom emerges from marketing and branding jungle; he has a fresh perspective. Times have changed and a new, more enlightened, more respectful way of marketing to consumers needs to be addressed. The challenge is clear. Consumers now dictate to brands how they want to be spoken to. The king is dead. Long live the king.

    In particular is the thorny issue of consumer manipulation. Most know it’s going on, this is nothing new. What is new, though, is the voice that is prepared to speak out and challenge this marketing status quo. Brandwashed, his latest bestseller, is a full-frontal exposé of the wanton trickery employed by many conglomerates, iconic brands included, to squeeze dollars out of their loyal customers. Lindstrom, using , t’s not as easy as he thinks. (When is it not.)

    By Posted on Posted in 2012, Books, Inspiration, Retail No Comments

    I finished reading Smart Retail: Practical Winning Ideas and Strategies from the Most Successful Retailers in the World, a book by Richard Hammond.

    From the moment you start the 1st page till you finish, of course if you ever have worked for retail or have passion for it, you will keep saying, I know this, I did that, I have been through this, I always thought of that and so on … Every single detail in the book will take you to a place in the back of your mind. So the good thing about this book is the centralization of the retail information, tricks, tactics and strategies and can be easily used as a general guideline.

    Because retail and no matter what kind of retailer you are (food, fashion, electronics, books, etc…), is a huge universe, so no matter how many years you spent in retail, you will always remain a student, discovering every day something new, so thank you Richard Hammond for writing this book and putting all the common points together as a reference to come back and pick any idea and make it work in our retail world.

    Book Description

    The world’s #1 guide to retail success, complete with crucial, up-to-date insights–including new case studies, ideas, strategies, and tactics from today’s best retailers, like TopShop, IKEA, and Best Buy. Smart Retail incorporates several valuable chapters, including:

    • Opportunities to learn from past retail pioneers: simple yet effective strategies your competitors have forgotten.
    • How to use data to drive profit and growth.
    • How to do more with less, and maximize the value each team member brings to the table.
    • How to use new technology to develop highly productive, innovative “Remote Teams”.

    Covering everything from creating the ultimate retail experience to understanding the customer and the importance of motivated workers, this is the book that will equip managers, team-workers, retail entrepreneurs and indeed anybody who sells direct to customers, with practical winning ideas and strategies.

    About the Author

    Richard Hammond is proud to call himself a retailer: He has more than 25 years of experience and still gets a buzz from it every day.

    He has developed a practical problem-solving approach to creating great retail experiences. His consultancy business put this into practice for clients ranging from convenience stores in Kazakhstan, fashion brands in Sweden, to big stores and brands in the UK.

    By Posted on Posted in 2012, Books, eBooks No Comments

    The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career
    Whatever you may be thinking when you apply for a job today, you can be sure your prospective employer is thinking this: Can this person add value every hour, every day–more than a worker in India, a robot, or a computer could? Can he or she help my company adapt by not only doing the job today but also reinventing the job for tomorrow?

    And can he or she adapt with all the change, so my company can adapt and export more into the fastest-growing global markets? In today’s hyper-connected world, more and more companies cannot and will not hire people who don’t fulfill those criteria. This is precisely why LinkedIn’s founder, Reid Garrett Hoffman, one of the premier starter-uppers in Silicon Valley–besides cofounding LinkedIn, he is on the board of Zynga, was an early investor in Facebook, and sits on the board of Mozilla–has written The Start-up of You, coauthored with Ben Casnocha.
    Amazon.com Link

    By Posted on Posted in 2012, Books, eBooks No Comments

    Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired–and Secretive–Company Really Works
    INSIDE APPLE reveals the secret systems, tactics and leadership strategies that allowed Steve Jobs and his company to churn out hit after hit and inspire a cult-like following for its products.

    If Apple is Silicon Valley’s answer to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, then author Adam Lashinsky provides readers with a golden ticket to step inside. In this primer on leadership and innovation, the author will introduce readers to concepts like the “DRI” (Apple’s practice of assigning a Directly Responsible Individual to every task) and the Top 100 (an annual ritual in which 100 up-and-coming executives are tapped a la Skull & Bones for a secret retreat with company founder Steve Jobs).
    Amazon.com Link

    Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything

    Every week, millions more people sign up for Google+: Suddenly, it’s today’s hottest new social network. Google+ for Business reveals why Google+ offers business opportunities available nowhere else–and helps you grab those opportunities now, before your competitors do. Top social media professional speaker and business advisor Chris Brogan shows how to get great results fast, without wasting time–and without wasting a dime. Brogan guides you through using Google+ for promotion, customer service, community building, referrals, collaboration, and a whole lot more. You won’t just master innovative new tools like Circles and Hangouts: You’ll use them to generate more customers and more cash!
    Amazon.com Link

    Imagine: How Creativity Works

    Did you know that the most creative companies have centralized bathrooms? That brainstorming meetings are a terrible idea? That the color blue can help you double your creative output?

    From the best-selling author of How We Decide comes a sparkling and revelatory look at the new science of creativity. Shattering the myth of muses, higher powers, even creative “types,” Jonah Lehrer demonstrates that creativity is not a single gift possessed by the lucky few. It’s a variety of distinct thought processes that we can all learn to use more effectively.
    Amazon.com Link

    Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance

    Jonathan Fields knows the risks-and potential power-of uncertainty. He gave up a six-figure income as a lawyer to make $12 an hour as a personal trainer. Then, married with a 3-month old baby, he signed a lease to launch a yoga center in the heart of New York City. . . the day before 9/11. But he survived, and along the way he developed a fresh approach to transforming uncertainty, risk of loss, and exposure to judgment into catalysts for innovation, creation, and achievement.

    Properly understood and harnessed, fear and uncertainty can become fuel for creative genius rather than sources of pain, anxiety, and suffering. In business, art, and life, creating on a world-class level demands bold action and leaps of faith in the face of great uncertainty. But that uncertainty can lead to fear, anxiety, paralysis, and destruction. It can gut creativity and stifle innovation. It can keep you from taking the risks necessary to do great work and craft a deeply-rewarding life. And it can bring companies that rely on innovation grinding to a halt.
    Amazon.com Link

    By Posted on Posted in 2012, Books No Comments

    I Was Blind But Now I See
    We’ve been brainwashed. We need to acknowledge this. We need to recognize who has been doing the brainwashing and work towards reversing its effects. Then, building from the core, we can learn who we really are, get success, wealth, and finally happiness. This book lays out the techniques to escape the zombie recruitment machine, expanding our personal frontiers, and finding the tools to build up the wealth of happiness inside.

    James Altucher has written seven books, has written articles for every paper and website in the known universe. Has run several businesses. Has ridden the roller coaster of success and failure many times, in money, love, success, career, etc. Now he shares his experiences on how to get it right, unravel the brainwashing, and ultimately succeed and be happy.
    Amazon Link

    One Click
    Amazon’s business model is deceptively simple: Make online shopping so easy and convenient that customers won’t think twice. It can almost be summed up by the button on every page: “Buy now with one click.”

    Why has Amazon been so successful? Much of it has to do with Jeff Bezos, the CEO and founder, whose unique combination of character traits and business strategy have driven Amazon to the top of the online retail world.
    Amazon Link

    Delivering Happiness
    The visionary CEO of Zappos explains how an emphasis on corporate culture can lead to unprecedented success.

    Pay new employees $2000 to quit. Make customer service the entire company, not just a department. Focus on company culture as the #1 priority. Apply research from the science of happiness to running a business. Help employees grow both personally and professionally. Seek to change the world. Oh, and make money too.

    Sound crazy? It’s all standard operating procedure at Zappos.com, the online retailer that’s doing over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales every year.
    Amazon Link

    Enchantment
    Enchantment, as defined by bestselling business guru Guy Kawasaki, is not about manipulating people. It transforms situations and relationships. It converts hostility into civility and civility into affinity. It changes the skeptics and cynics into the believers and the undecided into the loyal. Enchantment can happen during a retail transaction, a high-level corporate negotiation, or a Facebook update. And when done right, it’s more powerful than traditional persuasion, influence, or marketing techniques.

    Kawasaki argues that in business and personal interactions, your goal is not merely to get what you want but to bring about a voluntary, enduring, and delightful change in other people. By enlisting their own goals and desires, by being likable and trustworthy, and by framing a cause that others can embrace, you can change hearts, minds, and actions.
    Amazon Link

    The New Relationship Marketing
    One of the top social media thought leaders shares her secrets to expanding your business through relationshipsPeople have always done business with people they know, like, and trust. That’s the essence of “relationship marketing.” Today, the popularity of online social networking has caused a paradigm shift in relationship marketing. This book helps businesspeople and marketers master this crucial new skill set. Relationship marketing specialist Mari Smith outlines a step-by-step plan for building a sizable, loyal network comprised of quality relationships that garner leads, publicity, sales, and more.

    If you’re a businessman or businesswoman feeling the pressure to shift your approach to using social media marketing, to better understand the new soft skills required for success on the social web, and to improve your own leadership and relationship skills through emotional and social intelligence, this book is for you.
    Amazon Link

    The Paradox Of Choice
    Whether we’re buying a pair of jeans, ordering a cup of coffee, selecting a long-distance carrier, applying to college, choosing a doctor, or setting up a 401(k), everyday decisions–both big and small–have become increasingly complex due to the overwhelming abundance of choice with which we are presented.

    We assume that more choice means better options and greater satisfaction. But beware of excessive choice: choice overload can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them, it can set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures. In the long run, this can lead to decision-making paralysis, anxiety, and perpetual stress. And, in a culture that tells us that there is no excuse for falling short of perfection when your options are limitless, too much choice can lead to clinical depression.
    Amazon Link

    By Posted on Posted in 2012, Books, eBooks No Comments

    Yesterday I started reading my 1st book in 2012. I am lending it for free from Amazon Prime for Kindle Fire (I will be writing about my Kindle Fire experience tomorrow).

    I Was Blind But Now I See by James Altucher. This is Altucher’s 2nd book i read after How to Be the Luckiest Person Alive!

    I am at 20% of the book, where James is sharing most of his blog posts in a different way. So far the book won’t make you nor a rich person if you are seeking for money, neither a 100% balanced person if you are seeking total happiness (as his blog title is “ideas for a world out of balance”), instead it will let you ask yourself questions, you might find answers to some and forget about the rest.

    We’ve been brainwashed. We need to acknowledge this. We need to recognize who has been doing the brainwashing and work towards reversing its effects. Then, building from the core, we can learn who we really are, get success, wealth, and finally happiness. This book lays out the techniques to escape the zombie recruitment machine, expanding our personal frontiers, and finding the tools to build up the wealth of happiness inside.

    Since I started reading James Altucher blog (which I found thru the Stocktwits network), there is no doubt and definitely the guy is clever, having his low moments, as well his successful ones, but for me and for now, he is still in the gray zone, i am not able to classify him in white or black list because of his controversial and argumentative ideas and writings.