Guy-ology–The Wit and Wisdom of Guy Kawasaki

A Reality Check from Guy Kawasaki

We’re celebrating 50 Top Marketing Bloggers this year at Step Into The Spotlight! and this Guy is certainly one of them. When my review copy of Reality Check
arrived, I was surprised by how heavy it was. This from a man who says that the ideal length of an email is 5 sentences. But I knew I was gonna love the book, ’cause Guy is a guy who tells it like it is and doesn’t suffer “bull-shiitake” (his word) lightly.

It’s not a “How To” book and yet, my copy is covered with yellow (and white) stickies (ripped ’cause I ran out and had to start shredding them) to mark not stuff I want to do, but “I told ya so” points to substantiate the unconventional counter-intuitive stuff I preach to my coaching clients. And yet, I guess it is a “how to” book, a textbook in Guy-ology. Guy’s goal is to show us how to change the world.

On page 12 of my book, Step Into The Spotlight!–a mere whisp of a book weighing in at only 288 pages–(thinly veiled self-promotion comment #2 if you’re counting…), I quote Guy from The Art of the Start wherein he says “You can’t brand crap!” This book could be viewed as an elaboration of this theme.

I jumped ahead to the sections on The Reality of Marketing, The Reality of Beguiling, The Reality of Communicating, The Reality of Selling and Evangelizing, but what made this book particularly scrumptious was that when I went back to the beginning and read all 461 pages, I enjoyed reading even stuff that had nothing to do with me, the venture capital stuff, the hiring and firing stuff–I could easily cut up this book and send each mini chapter to a client or colleague who would be thrilled to receive it ‘cause it deals with an issue each is facing right now. The book includes everything you ever wanted to know about Steve Jobs (and much much more…)–not sure who I’d send those bits to–but Guy had 2 Apple Jobs, so who can blame him for being fascinated?

My plan was to quote the “best bits” as the Brits would say, but it’d pretty much take me 461 pages to quote the best bits and this is a mere blog post. So I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it and pick up your own copy.

Check out the Top Seventeen Lies of CEOS, Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs and others in the “Top Lies of” series. (In fact, Guy, why don’t you make those a book series, like the Chicken Soup empire? You could add Top Nineteen Lies of Presidents—“I did not have sex with that woman!”, “I am not a crook”, etc…, Top Ten Lies of … well you get it ). I’m torn about the interviews with industry experts—love Robert Cialdini, the Made to Stick brothers etc, nice to have other perspectives but it kinda changed the voice of the Encyclopedia Guy-annica a bit for me. And that’s my favorite thing about Guy’s writing whether in his book or in an email, his voice. He’s bold. He’s irreverent. He’s authentic. He’s real. He’s got a great sense of humor. And despite his “tough love” take on stuff, it’s obvious that he’s a really nice Guy.

Tsufit