Jonathan Mohr

Giving the business world a Reality Check

Review of Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition (Portfolio, 2008) by Guy Kawasaki

There are plenty of boring, irrelevant business books espousing a Pollyannish view of the world. Reality Check, the latest offering from Guy Kawasaki, is not one of those books.

Actually, Reality Check is a business book that’s worth reading even if you’re not in business. It’s a humorous, highly readable guide to starting your own business that also features lots of insights into the business of life.

Kawasaki is the managing director of the venture capital firm Garage Technology Ventures, a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine, and the author of nine books. He has worked at Apple Computer, founded several businesses and created How to Change the World, a blog Technorati ranks as the 64th most popular in the world.

How to Change the World is primarily advice for entrepreneurs and businesspeople: in writing Reality Check, Kawasaki took many of his best posts and compiled and expanded them into a 462 page tome. The book is broken down into 12 sections, each covering “The Reality of” a certain aspect of business, from soliciting investors (“The Reality of Raising Money”) to surviving a catastrophe (chapter 93 in the section “The Reality of Doing Good”). Reality Check focuses mostly on entrepreneurs in the tech industry, but there’s plenty of good stuff for those who aren’t computer geeks.

Kawasaki covers my particular niche in “The Reality of Marketing” and “The Reality of Selling and Evangelizing.” But, in my opinion, he’s at his candid best in “The Reality of Communicating,” in which he covers sending e-mails, giving speeches and presentations, demonstrating products, serving on and moderating a panel, and writing a blog.

If you send a lot of e-mails, do the world a favor and read the chapter titled “The Effective E-mailer.” I’d like to PDF that section and send it to everyone in my address book, particularly Kawasaki’s advice about not using ALL CAPS because it’s the same as yelling. My other favorite Kawasaki rebuke was aimed at those who use lots of HTML attachments. (I received a message the other day that nearly crashed my mail program.) As Kawasaki says, “All those pretty colors and fancy typefaces and styles make me want to puke.” Amen.

There’s lots more great advice in this book, including how to schmooze and suck-up, as well as a chapter titled “Career Guidance for This Century” featuring an interview with Boston Globe Columnist and author Penelope Trunk. It’s good stuff if you’re looking to take your career to the next level.

Great interviews with interesting authors are one of the strengths of Reality Check. Perhaps the most outstanding examples are an interview with Psychology Professor Robert Cialdini, the author of Influence: Science and Practice (Allyn & Bacon, 2000), and an interview with Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Random House, 2007). These chapters are especially thought provoking if you are a Christian committed to sharing your faith with others.

If you’re not an entrepreneur or businessperson, you might skim through the first few sections such as the aforementioned “Reality of Raising Money.” I don’t know many people who are trying to raise venture capital, so you could probably skip topics like “The Inside Scoop on Venture Capital Law” completely.

On the other hand, you could read the entire book for a fresh perspective on exactly how difficult it is to start a business from scratch. The chapters on raising capital, crafting a business plan and making financial projections gave me a newfound respect for my own employer, a couple who started a small business in the basement of their home 20 plus years ago. We’re no Fortune 500 company today, but the job does put food on my table.

If you don’t read anything else, though, read the quotes Kawasaki inserts at the beginning of each chapter. There are 96 quotations in all (one each for the introduction, the conclusion, and the 94 chapters in between). They range from the humorous to the thought provoking. Perhaps my favorite is from Kawasaki himself, included at the beginning of Chapter 52, “The Art of Blogging:”

Blogger n. Someone with nothing to say writing for people with nothing to do.

Hopefully that doesn’t articulate how you feel about this blog. But if it does, I suggest you stop reading my stuff, head for the nearest bookstore and purchase a copy of Reality Check.