Review of
Instaread Summary of The Power of Broke How Empty Pockets, a Tight Budget, and a Hunger for
Success Can Become Your Greatest Competitive Advantage by Daymond John with
Daniel Paisner
Four out of five stars
The premise of
the book being summarized is a simple one and has appeared in many other
publications and forms. Simply stated, it means that early big money in a
startup skews the management into believing that success has been achieved and
is a recipe for eventual failure. If the new company has a lot of money, then
it will be spent and often unnecessarily or even frivolously. It is better for
the company to be forcibly lean in purchases and creative in their spending
habits.
There is
absolutely nothing new about this, the business literature is full of stories
of startups, especially early internet companies, that raised a lot of money
early and spent themselves into oblivion with no real assets to liquidate when
the inevitable occurred. The premise has also appeared in many “poor little
rich kid” scenarios.
The best point
is the title of key takeaway four, “To achieve and maintain success,
entrepreneurs must get hungry and stay hungry.” This usage of the word hungry
is in the overall sense and was the topic of the bestselling book by Intel
executive Andy Grove, where his premise was “Only the paranoid survive.” In the
modern world with change happening so quickly, the belief that “starvation and
danger” are imminent is the best way to approach business, both tactically and
strategically.
Therefore, from
this summary it is clear that there is nothing new in the book. However,
Daymond John is a regular on the popular television show “Shark Tank,” so there
will be many that will want to read it for that reason. The advice in the book
is clearly sound, just old material repackaged. For that reason, I have no
interest in reading it.
This book was made available for free for review
purposes.
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