Book Review: FREE: the Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson

Alright, although a lot sooner than I planned to do this but this book is a very good read and I would like to share it with you. Here goes another one of my Book Review bits. This on is on a book called FREE: the Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson.

The main idea of the book is making profit by giving things away – for FREE. And true to his ideas of giving things away for free, Anderson gave away free downloads of his book while at the same time offers to sell it to those who want hard copy of the book. He showed an example of giving things for FREE and still makes money out of it.

Anderson presented different business models that thrived on giving away their products but at the same time make money in the process. His first example was about the 19th century saloons that offered free lunches to anybody who bought a drink. It became very popular because people enjoyed getting things for free but without realizing that there is no such thing as free lunch as the cost of the drink covered also that of the “free” lunch. Anderson’s idea is for companies to use the right business model to make money by offering consumers many things that sell for less, or even nothing.
Read more

Book Review: The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss

This is a new bit I’d like to do to add to my other posts, a book review of some excellent books that I’ve read and think my readers will benefit from. The first one is titled “The 4-Hour Work Week” by Timothy Ferriss. So here we go.

Published in April 2007 by Random House,  The 4-Hour Workweek, made Timothy famous as it hit number one on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal best seller list. This transformed Ferriss, an unknown Princeton graduate, into a sort of celebrity.  The success of his book is attributed to his heavy marketing through his blogs, a marketing technique that has since been adopted by many in the trade.

The 4-Hour Workweek has attracted a lot of attention, mainly because of the intriguing title, and has received different kinds of reactions ranging from adulation to scorn. While some considers his ideas too outlandish, others regard them as very practical and timely.  Of course, Ferriss wants people to take notice of his book, hence the title, although he does not actually mean to really reduce the workweek to only 4 hours.  The main idea of Ferris is to cut down one’s workweek dramatically to give oneself much time for other life’s activities. As he claimed in his book, Ferriss spent more than 50 hours a week working with software and nutritional supplement business.  Realizing that he might end up forever in front of his computer, he felt that he has to change his life and the way he works, coming up with the ideas for The 4-Hour Workweek.

Ferriss is a believer and ardent follower of the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80-20 rule, or the principle of factor sparsity, which states that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.  The principle was an offshoot of the idea of Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto  who observed at the turn of the 20th century that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by only 20% of the population. In business, it is observed that 80% of the sales come from 20% of the clients.  While 80% – 20% sharing is not absolute, many real systems have percentages somewhere around this region in their imbalance of distribution.
Read more