You have heard the saying ‘you are what you eat.’ But how about you are what you buy? Or the reverse? The latter question is the premise behind a great book Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are by Rob Walker.

In Buying In, Walker explores this relationship, or as he calls it dialogue, between what we buy and who we are. It is packed with examples of brands and consumer goods and the ways they interact with consumers, the very people who are on the selling side with the marketers and others who connect them with consumers. There are also many great terms that come from this book – from Pretty Good Problem describing a plethora of “pretty good” products to choose from, to Desire Code, which comprises all of the factors leading one to buy something to Murketing, a contraction of the words “murky” and “marketing” which are themes throughout the book.

My greatest takeaway from Buying In is the consumer can make – and sometimes demand – an individual connection with a product. Going away are the days of mass-produced and mass-marketed goods. The Internet has broken down the technical barriers between consumers and companies, and now companies need to realize this and converse with their customers. Technology alone won’t do it all, as there needs to be a fundamental realization first that a company wants to do this!

Another takeaway is consumers don’t want to feel like they have been sold something. Call it a win-win situation - or call it consumers don’t want to feel like they are at the bottom of a pipe of products being fed to them. Scion is cited as an example of this, where they took a non-traditional approach to reaching out to the Generation Y-ers, their target audience.

A final takeaway is that it may not be your product or service, rather how it is marketed. American Apparel moved form promoting their Los Angeles-based manufacturing and selling to wholesalers to retail stores selling hip clothing. Timberland created a professional shoe line to reconnect with their traditional market after growing a new base of younger, urban consumers.

Shortly after reading Buying In, I attended the Nokia OpenLab in Helsinki and saw in action a lot of what I read in Buying In. There were those who were Nokia mavens as well as those who have built businesses around Nokia products. Even Nokia has gotten into this by buying all of the Symbian operating system that powers their phones and turning it over to a non-profit foundation, open-sourcing it for all to develop on and extend. Where some may see this as a lack of control, Nokia doesn’t, and has profited well from this.

There are many other studies and examples in Buying In that get you thinking a lot about what you buy and why or what you sell and how. I highly recommend it to entrepreneurs and business people – large and small – as well as to those interested in why they may have the things they have.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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As a new Dad, there is plenty to read out there. A book that is a “must read” is called “What To Expect When You're Expecting” or simply referred to as “the book.” If you saw the movie “Knocked Up” this is the book they were referring to. The idea behind these books is to inform you as much as possible before your baby arrives, and when it does, you will be prepared with information to take on any situation.

Have you seen how many baby books are out there? And what they cover you won’t possibly remember at 3:00 a.m. when your baby is screaming for a bottle. One day I put down “the book” when I got to the chapter of all the deadly diseases a baby can have. Not that I can do anything about any of them, of course.

These information-overload books are screaming for a different approach – a book that covers the basics, but with a sarcastic sense of humor. Ok, that last part is my personal preference. I found such a book in Sippy Cups Are Not For Chardonnay, by Stefanie Wilder Taylor, a comedy writer and Mom. There were many takeaways from this for me, not only as a new parent but for life in general.

My greatest takeaway is that you can study, but nothing beats on the job training. Other than babysitting someone’s kid, there is no internship for being a parent. But there are internships available for just about every career option out there. Experience of some form beats none at all in most cases, providing the people involved have somewhat similar capacity.

Another takeaway is to budget for unplanned changes. In the case of a baby, this hit me most when I was tested with the functionality of some baby clothes, especially at late hours or when the kid wanted to take advantage of being outside of the womb and kick like crazy. An example that occurs for me quite often is with Web site design and development. Even though the delivered solution may be exactly to spec, once it is out there and in use, there may be desired changes to make it that much better, or fix something never originally considered. I would also apply this to home ownership.

A final takeaway on advice – consider yourself an employer and someone gives you a resume; file it as you never know when you need it. As a new parent, I get tons of advice daily. Some of it just does not resonate until you are in the moment when that advice applies. Keeping some of these things in the back of your mind and shuffling through them on occasion helps, whether it’s a screaming baby or screaming client.

Sippy Cups Are Not For Chardonnay is certainly not a reference for everything that could possibly happen to your baby, and as extensive as it is the book "What to Expect" is still a must-read. But "Sippy Cups" is a great story tightly woven with humor and sarcasm and real life that I recommend to any first-time parents, or anyone that knows any first-time parents.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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What is this world coming to? This is a question I occasionally find myself asking myself or others around me. Even though these days most things don’t really surprise me, sometimes you have to wonder about what you are reading and seeing in the news.

But maybe that’s it – it’s what I read and see in the news. If you hear bad news (or even good news) it is a short, sound-byte driven story that has very little depth. On the surface, a news story could be the worst thing to possibly happen in the world. But with more depth and information beyond the brief story, it may reveal a story that could still be bad – or good – but the more you know, the more you know. This is the idea behind the book All The Troubles In The World.

P.J. O’Rourke is a conservative political satirist. Whether you agree with his politics or not, he makes his point with sarcasm and dry humor that would find someone on the polar opposite politically giving an occasional chuckle. This book, written in 1994 (and sitting on my bookshelf since then), is, as stated on the cover, “the lighter side of overpopulation, famine, ecological disaster, ethnic hatred, plague and poverty.” Lighter side? I asked myself that prior to digging into the dusty pages of this book, one which did give me take-aways.

My biggest takeaway is that you really do need depth to a story. We don’t have time to look into every nuance or wrinkle in everything we see in the news, but more information on the people and scenarios that encircle a story help give it context, and help one make their own opinions on it. Many news Web sites have “related links” to other stories pertaining to a certain news story. I often find myself at Wikipedia when I want a start to get depth in a story.

Another takeaway from the book is you need multiple perspectives on a story, or really anything. There is plenty of talk about liberal or conservative biases in the media. While I am well aware when I see something being spun in a certain direction in front of me, I am able to discern the shaft from the wheat, and see what is truly happening and what is not.

A final takeaway is that we need more humor in our lives. As I write this, I admit I have been grumpy throughout this day. If I had a little more humor or something funny happen to me today, I probably wouldn’t be so grumpy. O’Rourke does this funny very well, in a brainy sort of way.

I recommend All The Troubles In The World to anyone who likes P.J. O’Rourke’s work, or anyone who recalls the news and events from the early 1990’s. It was interesting to read this and think back to that time, and see what has changed, and what has not.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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In my takeaways on the book The Venture Cafe I said in business you cannot truly go it alone. But what if you took it to the extreme, where the ideas for what your business does came from other people, namely the same people you are trying to sell to? This is the premise of the book e-Preneur, subtitled “From Wall Street to Wiki: Succeeding as a Crowdpreneur in the New Virtual Marketplace.”

A crowdpreneur, as defined by the author Richard Goossen, is, “an individual or organization that uses the strategy of online crowd empowerment in its various forms (collective intelligence, mass collaboration, crowdsourcing & others) in the pursuit of an entrepreneurial venture.” In other words, your business is solely about the ideas from others. Crowdsourcing, as I have digested it, is making an open call for ideas. An example of a crowdpreneur often cited is Chicago’s Threadless, a t-shirt company where ideas are submitted by the community through their Web site, who vote on what shirt designs will eventually be sold.

To many this is not only a new idea but one they probably would never consider. How can you give control over what your business does to others? However if you have some curiosity on the topic, this may be a read for you. Even though my own business Dunkirk Systems, LLC would be considered traditional in comparison to a crowdpreneurial business, I did have takeaways from this book.

My greatest take away is to keep in close contact with your customers. Business owners of all sizes can easily lose focus of their business and the service they offer to their customers. As a small businessperson, the input and ideas from my partners and clients are critical to the success of my business. On the other extreme is the airline industry, who plainly doesn’t give a damn about their customers. Input can sometimes be a distraction, but managed properly it can be a vital source for ideas and as a result increased business.

Another take away is that there is no shortage of ideas for running a business. Advances in technology, including Internet technologies labeled as “Web 2.0,” have enabled companies to do many great things, including crowdsourcing and being crowdpreneurial. Just think back a few years for many of the services and Web sites (e.g. YouTube) were merely good ideas in someone’s head. By keeping an open mind and being able to adapt and change as needed, companies can either stay ahead of the game, or survive in tough economic times.

E-Preneur takes the reader through 5 steps to create a crowdpreneurial venture, from the original concept to funding it. Throughout the book there are many lists, though if they were broken out more as tabular lists would have been more helpful in organizing your thoughts as you read it. The book closes with some basic business start-up concepts that, if you are already at this point, you may already have down. Where many books have a type or two, a glaring error was in citing name of the chairman of Cisco Systems as John Cisco instead of John Chambers! All things considered, if you are looking for ideas or a different perspective on business, e-Preneur is a good and encouraging read.

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As the saying goes, it takes money to make money. This is something I learned first-hand when I started my own business, Dunkirk Systems, LLC, several years ago. In my case, I bootstrapped my business – used savings as well as revenues to grow and expand my business. It has worked for me as it fits the size and scope of my business. But bootstrapping isn’t for everyone, and not just people who don’t have money to invest in a business. Some business ideas require a large amount of cash for research and manufacturing, and this is where venture capital can come into play.

Venture capital, or VC, is a large part of the story of the book The Venture Cafe by Teresa Esser. It is a non-fiction piece about entrepreneurs and those with business or product ideas and how they go about taking those ideas forward. The notion of a cafe stems from the author’s experience with a pub on the campus of MIT in Cambridge, MA where people with gather to talk thru various business and technology ideas. The book follows the path from idea to established companies, and throughout are interviews with people at various stages themselves, including the author’s own personal stories.

My greatest takeaway from the book is you cannot do it alone. Whether you need financial or human capital or merely cheerleaders on the sidelines, to grow and be a true business you need resources that will surely go beyond yourself. This can be hard for some who are, using a term I commonly use, control-freak entrepreneurs. It is not letting go, it is empowering others. And things may not go exactly as you have planned, especially when using other people’s money.

An equally important takeaway is accountability, to everybody including the investors to employees to you. Investors want to know how and why their money is being spent, and if they will make a profit or not. This may mean making hard, unpopular decisions, but to pursue the goal and move forward, they have to be made.

A final takeaway is that you may fail. Where another saying says failure is not an option, it can happen, and if it does, you need to react to it. One example in the book is about an executive who loses everything, yet in his next opportunity he excels to an extreme. Recovering from this failure, or bouncing back, shows the true mettle of a person.

I enjoyed The Venture Cafe, especially for someone who was living in the Boston area around the time it was written. Many of the people and companies were ones I was familiar with. Though it was published in 2002 and talks much of the dot-com bust of that period, many of the stories and lessons learned from it apply today. And as much as the book is about VC, it does not profess it is the only way to go, and provides takes of those who chose VC and those who did not for their business. I recommend this book for anyone who may want to reminisce about the past, and learn from it to empower the future.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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