I’ve written about my opinions on the state of basketball here in Australia a number of times on the blog, as I feel there is a lot more that can be done to improve the state, exposure and profitability of sport in this county.

And in an effort to do something, I’m going to continue to share my thoughts, and the thoughts of others.

Today, I’m honored to post a recent conversation with David George Surdam, author of The Rise of the National Basketball Association

David has written a number of books on “the business of sport” including; Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats: How Baseball Outlasted the Great Depression
and The Ball Game Biz: An Introduction to the Economics of Professional Team Sports

So who better to discuss what Basketball Australia and the NBL can do to continue to improve the sport than David …

In this conversation we cover two main topics:

• How did the NBA evolve from an obscure organization facing financial losses to a successful fledgling sports enterprise by 1960?
• What made the NBA the way it is and how it can help the NBL in Australia?

The Rise of the National Basketball Association: A conversation with author David George Surdam is a post from: Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams
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I was recently having a Skype conversation with Oren (for those who don’t know, author of Pitch Anything), and getting his advice on a few things when we dropped some gold!

Luckily, actually it’s not really luck, I have my Skype Call Recorded set to auto-record all conversations, and was able to edit out all the private bits, get some slides created and share the advice he gave me, here with you.

Now don’t skip this saying “I don’t have to pitch or raise capital… this doesn’t apply to me” … You couldn’t be more wrong. There is a very fine line between pitching and selling in general, and everyone sells. So shake that attitude off, and dive into this 10min video and look for how you can apply this in your business.

Enjoy!

Over The Shoulder With Oren Klaff on Pitch Anything is a post from: Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams
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So where do I start with the proper introduction ?

Basically Rich is a freak!

He’s an entertainment attorney, a two-time top finisher at the Ultraman World Championships and in 2010 was the first person (along with colleague Jason Lester) to complete EPIC5 – 5 Ironman-distance triathlons on 5 Hawaiian Islands in under a week.

He was also named one of the 25 fittest men in the world — and does it all on a raw plant-based whole food diet.

We cover almost as much ground as an Ironman Triathlon in the conversation, including:

Whether you are an athlete, parent, artist or business owner there is DEFINITELY some specific takeaways from this conversation… 

Finding Ultra: A conversation with author Rich Roll is a post from: Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams
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… but most people would be very much aware of his work. Ryan has worked behind the scenes with bestselling authors Tucker Max, Robert Greene and Tim Ferriss, and most famously been the marketing director of American Apparel.

He’s now put all his exploits together into a fantastic book,  Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (which both Gawker and GalleyCat reported he got a $500K advance for).

What is a media manipulator? Well, as Ryan explained:

“If you don’t know, you should. Because media manipulation currently shapes everything you read, hear and watch online. Everything.

In the old days, we only had a few threats to fear when it came to media manipulation: the government propagandist and the hustling publicist. They were serious threats, but vigilance worked as a clear and simple defense. They were the exceptions rather than the rule—they exploited the fact that the media was trusted and reliable. Today, with our blog and web driven media cycle, nothing can escape exaggeration, distortion, fabrication and simplification.

I know this because I am a media manipulator. My job was to use the media to make people do or think things they otherwise would not. People like me are there, behind the curtain, pulling the puppet strings. But that is about to get harder: I’m spilling my secrets to you and turned my talents from exploiting media vulnerabilities to exposing them—for your benefit.

When the news is decided not by what is important but by what readers are clicking; when the cycle is so fast that the news cannot be anything else butconsistently and regularly incomplete; when dubious scandals scuttle election bids or knock billions from the market caps of publicly traded companies; when the news frequently covers itself in stories about ‘how the story unfolded’—media manipulation is the status quo.”

I was one of the lucky few to get a pre-release galley version of the book a few weeks back, which I couldn’t put down.

The book is part confessional, part how-to and part exposé on the current state of the media and how “easy + effective” it is to manipulate.

In our conversation, we cover a lot of ground, well beyond what’s inside the book:

- How important marketing is and why “it’s not about the product”

- The creative and writing process itself

- The importance of education and reading (Ryan reads about 3-4 books per week, and I’ve been on his reading list for about 2 or so years), and

- Why he invested time reading 50 Shades of Grey.

Listen live to the interview here, or enter your details below to download the conversation with Ryan, and also get access to the entire back-catalogue of interviews.

Trust Me, I’m Lying: A conversation with author Ryan Holiday is a post from: Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams
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How many of you in here feel that you are the one mistake that the admissions committee made?

… and surprisingly, every year, two-thirds of the class immediately raise their hand.

It’s called the Impostor Syndrome and it hits at all levels of business!

—

THEY also say you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

… so, it’s important to learn as much about charisma and influence as you can.

BUT what about people who feel that faking charisma is incongruent, and they will come across ‘ingenuine’?

Is that another manifestation of this Impostor Syndrome?

—

In this interview with author of The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism, Olivia Fox Cabane talks all about this Impostor Syndrome…

… plus, staring like a lover, standing like a gorilla and why you need to speak like a preacher.

Amen!

The Charisma Myth: A conversation with author Olivia Fox Cabane is a post from: Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams
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It’s such a fantastic book for any entrepreneur building a business, whether you want to exist via a sale or just have a business that can work without you.

As I said in the original post:

In Built to Sell, he tells the story of a hypothetical business owner, Alex Stapleton, owner of the Stapleton Marketing Agency, a graphics design house.

Alex is just like most service-based business, struggling for leverage, passive income (in the corporate sense) and a potential buyer, because the business can’t run without him.

For guidance, Alex turns to an entrepreneur and old family friend, Ted, who through a series of quasi-coaching sessions, lays out an easy-to-follow plan that enables Alex to transform his business.

BUT I owe you all an apology.

See, I recorded a conversation with John about the book and some of the key takeaways he shares through Alex’s journey; but I forgot to post it on the blog.

It wasn’t until a few weeks ago, when I was having a Twitter conversation about it, that I realised it never got posted.

They say good things come to those who wait… and in the 26-minute recording you can download below, John and I chat about:

• What are the 3 core things that make a sellable business

• What’s the secret to really separating yourself from your business

• How you can apply ideas in the book to create recurring revenue

Enjoy!

Pete

Built to Sell: A conversation with author John Warrillow is a post from: Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams
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They came up a lot in my recent conversation with Tony Wagner on Creating Innovators and again in a conversation I had with Ryan Tate, author of the new book, The 20% Doctrine.

Obviously, Google is the pinup boy for this new approach: letting staff take 20 percent of their time to work on ideas that interest them personally, ultimately leading to the creation of both Gmail and Google News.

And with many other companies, especially in ‘the Valley’ embracing this concept and trying to “harvest innovation from the margins,” it must be good for everyone, right?

If you think anything like me, your issue with this is that most companies are not Google, are not making cash at will, or don’t have some VC throwing the stuff at them for stupid valuations (Instapaper, anyone?).

So how does this work in the “real world?”

To find out, I had a conversation with Ryan about the various case studies he did while putting the book together, which you can download below.

We covered a lot of ground in the 52-minute conversation including:

• Is the “20 percent time” policy just a Silicon Valley thing or can it also work for other types of businesses?

• At what point should business owners implement this policy to ensure that it’s going to be productive and profitable?

• How can an organization ensure that the  “20 percent” their staff is investing in these projects are actually kept within the walls of the company?

Enjoy!
Pete

The 20% Doctrine: a conversation with author Ryan Tate is a post from: Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams
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Thanks to the inter-webs, information is now ubiquitous and free, and when basic education and market research is available to billions of people worldwide, like your competitors, only one set of skills (beyond discipline) can really ensure your future success — the capacity for innovation.

What are the skills of innovators? Why is innovation so critical to your future — and to the future of the planet, for that matter? What must parents, teachers, mentors, and employers do to develop the capacities of many more young people to be the innovators that they want to be — and that we need them to become? What do the best schools and colleges do to teach the skills of innovation? What are some of the most forward-looking employers doing to create a culture of innovation?

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Tony Wagner, [which you can download below], who is the first Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology & Entrepreneurship Center for Harvard, and whose new book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change The World, addresses these questions through in-depth profiles of young innovators and the adults who have made a difference in their lives.

The thing I loved about reading an early draft of the book is the engaging depth Tony covers when it comes to identifying how innovators are raised, challenged, supported, and developed — all based on identifying and conducting over 150 interviews with some of the world’s leading innovators, their families and mentors.

One really interesting case study delves into the question: What goes into parenting a future product manager for Apple’s iPhone? What do you teach them? How do you motivate them to ask questions and be curious about their world or “think different”?

The future product manager in question, Kirk Phelps, was interested in soccer. But instead of enrolling him in the neighborhood league like most parents, this soccer mom (and dad) drove him to a blue-collar area where most of the people spoke Spanish. “I didn’t care if he was on a winning team or even a starter,” said his dad. “I just wanted him to develop his interest in sports and to experience other kinds of people.” However, when Dad wanted Kirk to watch soccer on Spanish-language TV, Kirk balked. What is obvious from the interview is how much his parents considered unstructured playtime an essential part of their children’s activities and as a way to build self-confidence.

In an interview directly with Kirk, he says, “The only reason I could do my job as a product manager at Apple was that I could talk to the optical engineers, the mechanical engineers, and the electrical engineers, and the firmware guys, the industrial designers, the packaging engineers. I couldn’t do any of these guys’ jobs, but I knew enough about what they did to have an intelligent conversation and to represent their interests when things were inevitably in conflict.” When you think about that, it is pretty amazing.

It’s this concept of “playtime” that is an underlying theme of Creating Innovators (website).

What do you suppose Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos,  Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales,  author and chef Julia Child,  and rapper Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs, all have in common?

They all went to Montessori schools where they learned through play.

To check out the full conversation I had with Tony Wagner, just enter your name and email address below and you’ll get instant access to the conversation in digital download format.

Enjoy!

Creating Innovators: a conversation with author Tony Wagner of Harvard is a post from: Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams
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