Book Review: Screw It, Let’s Do It
Posted on October 8th, 2009 by Paul McArdle – 1 Comment.
Ironically, I read this book back in September up in the Whitsundays (yes, home to the lucky bugger who’s got the best job in the world – at least for 6 months).
You see - in the book, Richard regales the reader of his prized Necker Island (in the Caribbean) and of the value it has represented to him and the group. Might be a few more years, yet, before we can splurge on our own island!
1) Binary Review
This book was a quick easy read.
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The Book |
What we thought |
 “Screw it, Let’s do it”by Richard Branson |
 .Upbeat,entertaining stories, with some good lessons |
| Full Disclosure – yes, that’s a tracked link to Amazon shown above.We buy quite a large number of books on a wide range of topics, all relevant to our business in some way. If you did happen to purchase the book from Amazon, they’d throw a few shekels our way, which would help us to buy (and hence publish reviews of) even more books. Hence, Karma would return the benefits to you… |
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As you would probably expect (the title’s a bit of a give-away) the book is all about such “simple” concepts as:
1) Don’t plan to the nth degree – just get started and learn as you go (for me, this resonated with what I have been learning about Agile Software Development)
2) Have fun along the way.
2) More Details
A few other points in the book I had underlined when I read it:
3) Our work should inspire and satisfy us – which is as I noted in this post on motivation.
4) What Richard’s mum told him, to help him overcome his fear of public speaking = “Stop thinking of yourself, think of the people you are talking to”
5) Don’t gamble on something you can’t control (i.e. it’s fine to take risks, but be sensible about it).
6) If you can’t keep a promise, don’t make it
7) Whatever your field, you must be passionate about it and create excitement in everything you do. Beat your drum and look beyond the obvious (like being remarkable, I think).
8) You’ve got to stretch to grow (to which I’d add that it’s sometimes painful, and often uncomfortable).
9) Innovation = finding another way to succeed. Don’t give up!
10) Give something back.
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3) Richard’s Top 10
At the start of chapter 14, Richard lists his top-ten tips, as he gave them in a talk to students at a business school:
1) You’ve got to challenge the big ones
2) Keep it casual
3) Haggle – everything is negotiable
4) Have fun working
5) Do the right things for the brand
6) Smile for the cameras!
7) Don’t lead “sheep”, herd “cats”
8) Move like a bullet
9) Small is beautiful
10) be a common, regular person.
4) Virgin, as an Incubator
It’s not really discussed explicitly in the book, but it’s one of the things that I admire about the Virgin machine.
Perhaps by happenstance, it has evolved for the stage whereby it recruits people with passion, trains them up in a “core business” and then (for those who express an interest) Virgin spins them out into ventures that these people partly own (in conjunction with Virgin) to develop ideas these people have developed.
I’d like us to be doing the same thing, in future. More on that one later…
[...] the Richard Branson book, which I read in a couple of hours at the same time, this one is a small book that takes longer - [...]