Weekend Reading

Nov 22, 2024

Marketing Myopia by Theodore Levitt
- “The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because that need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones) but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry incorrectly was that they were railroad oriented instead of transportation oriented; they were product oriented instead of customer oriented …”
How to Avoid Strategy Myopia by Seth Godin
- “However, new projects solving future problems are always less efficient than the status quo. Consider Amazon: During its early years, the company lost money on almost every book they shipped — because they were planting the seeds for the efficient industry, they were betting would follow …”

The Running Novelist by Haruki Murakami
- “By that fall, I’d finished a two-hundred-page handwritten work. I had no idea what to do with it, so I just let the momentum carry me and submitted it to the literary magazine Genzō’s new writers’ contest. I shipped it off without making a copy, so it seems I didn’t much care if it wasn’t selected and vanished forever. I was more interested in having finished the book than in whether or not it would ever see the light of day …”

Upcoming party with many more than 9others