Brian On Software

After reading The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) from best-seller author, marketing guru and prolific blogger Seth Godin, I couldn’t wait but to read another one of his writings.  This time I settled for The Big Moo, a collection of over thirty essays focused on showing you how and why you and your organization should thrive to be remarkable.  In Seth Godin’s words: "Stop trying to be perfect and start being remarkable".  At first, I was hit by the book’s title, but after reading a few pages, it all made sense.  Here’s what the front cover has to say about what the big moo is all about:

As Seth Godin said in his widely quoted best-seller Purple Cow, first you need to stop being a brown cow - in a field of hundreds of other brown cows - and dare to be purple.  But after a while, that’s not enough.  You need a big moo, an extreme purple cow, an innovation that completely changes the game.

With the collaboration of "33 of the world’s smartest business thinkers", including Malcolm Gladwell, Tom Peters, Guy Kawasaki, Marc Benioff, etc., this book is truly a collection of 21st-century wisdom for any organization that’s looking for a way or a purpose to reach a higher plateau in the way business is done with people.  As stated in the back cover:

The Big Moo tells their stories.  Stories that will stick to your ribs, light your fire, and give you flashes of inspiration.  Stories about memorable customer service, amazing dedication, daring design standards, and legendary leadership.  The Big Moo will help you drive growth and change in your organization, from the mail room to the boardroom to the front lines.

No doubt that being remarkable (in the eye of the customer) will give you an edge over your competition that’s simply doing business.  But The Big Moo is not just for growing and differentiating organizations.  It’s also a valuable asset to help YOU grow both on a personal and professional level too!  In case you haven’t noticed, you are also in competition with other people when it comes to signing a contract for a job, a music record, a part in the school’s play, etc. 

I don’t want to say too much about this 177-pages book because I rather let you discover its fruits on your own.  While reading it daily on my way to work and back home, I realized that each single essay had something inspiring and concrete that could easily apply to my personal and professional life.  Speaking of essays, you never know which collaborator wrote an essay because each one of them is anonymous…neat, huh?  Also, we are recommended to share some of these essays publicly without any legal constraints.  Therefore, I will share with you three essays that struck me profoundly in further posts so that you can get a better taste of what the book has to offer.  So stay tuned! 

Meanwhile, I highly recommend anyone in your organization that has a role of leadership to get a copy of The Big Moo and share the stories with the rest of the organization.  Even better…Get some people in your organization to participate in writing their own remarkable stories and publish them either on your intranet or on the Web.  Let the "purple cow" in you run free from any boundary!