One of my favourite authors is Seth Godin.
Seth has written many quirky books, many that even fail to communicate complete ideas, favouring, instead, fragments of thoughts with the onus on the reader to pull it all together.
I particularly enjoy having read Linchpin and Purple Cow because I saw a pattern in Seth’s writing.
As a result, at dinner parties I have a little trick in which I ask my fellow professors and other readers of Business Self Help literature, to ask me about any Seth Godin book.
No matter what they ask me, I simply reply with:
In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.
It works every time with everybody convinced I know their Seth book, cover-to-cover.
Just quietly, I sometimes fancy that I might be onto some kind of Business Mentalism trick, but for now I’ll keep that up my sleeve.
Poke The Box and Barbera wine
In Poke The Box, Seth makes a number of points.
One of them is that in a marketplace that is crowded, it might not work if you try to fit in, in fact, fitting in might be the same as invisibility.
But the other point is that you need to poke the box so you can think outside of it.
The challenge he lays down is to push ourselves to experience new things and commit to action.
This is precisely why Spider Bill Wines’ Barbera is the perfect wine to pair with this book.
Barbera is not very common in Australia, even though it is typically thought of as a warm climate red grape.
So what makes Spider Bill Wines’ take on it so interesting is that in the Adelaide Hills, the grapes are in a cooler area than they often are in Italy, where the variety is popular.
For this drinker, pushing my palate into new territory with a winemaker doing the same, was a real life way of embracing Seth Godin and letting his ideas poke me in ways I’ve never been poked before!
In the meantime, you can taste this style of MBA Thinking for yourself, by signing up today to do A Lunchtime MBA during the 2021 Adelaide Fringe.
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