(I presented my synopsis of Bold last Friday at the April, 2015 First Friday Book Synopsis).
I am such a pessimist.
I should be much, much more of an optimist.
You can’t read Bold and remain much of a pessimist. Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler is kind of volume two of a one-two punch. Volume one was Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it by Salim Ismail, with Michael S. Malone and Yuri van Geest. Bold is the unofficial companion volume – thus, volume #2.
Both lead authors of these two books are connected to Singularity University (built on Ray Kurzweil’s idea of “the singularity”), and these books are “the future is going to be different, think big and bold, and get to work in specific ways to build this big, bold, amazing kind of future” books.
Notice the subtitle of Bold: “How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World.” The book pretty much argues for this formula:
Identify a great big problem/challenge
Find the best, most workable solution
Make it scale
And, the by-product (note; not the intent, the goal, but the by-product) is, create wealth
From the book:
As we will soon see, the world’s biggest problems are now the world’s biggest business opportunities. This means, for exponential entrepreneurs, finding a significant challenge is a meaningful road to wealth. …the best way to become a billionaire is to solve a billion-person problem.
This book was written as both a manifesto and a manual for today’s exponential entrepreneur, anyone interested in going big, creating wealth, and impacting the world… Bold is a playbook.
Bold is a book filled with lists – lists of innovation principles, including for within established companies, and lists of how to go about becoming a disruptive and creative player in this new exponential world.
Though I can confidently recommend my synopses of these two books for a good overview of the concepts, I think if you really want to grasp the thinking behind this “exponential” revolution, you might want to buy and read these two books slowly and carefully on your own.
Here are my five lessons and takeaways from Bold:
#1 – It just may be that the future is very bright indeed.
#2 – If… you find/identify a problem, and find the solution, motivated by a genuine “Massively Transformative Purpose” (MTP — Goodwill scaled), you might also participate in the creation of wealth. Impact the world!
#3 – Spend a ton of time pondering, until you can grasp, the exponential – (Moore’s Law) – perpetual technologically- fueled leaps rather than baby, incremental steps…
#4 – Go bold; with clear goals in service of the big, bold play.
#5 – And, simply learn and remember the 6Ds – Digitalization, deception, disruption, demonetization, dematerialization, and democratization.
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You might also want to check out this earlier blog post: Exponential Organizations – My Lessons and Takeaways.
And you can purchase my synopses of Exponential Organizations and Bold (Bold will be available
by the end of April) from our companion web site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com. Each synopsis comes with my multi-page, comprehensive handout, plus the audio of my presentation. We have many more business book synopses available at our companion site.
First Friday Book Synopsis 