Summary

Serial entrepreneur and journalist Shane Snow delves into the reasons why some people and some organizations are able to achieve incredible things in implausibly short time frames, showing how each of us can use these "smartcuts" to rethink convention and accelerate success.

Why do some companies attract millions of customers in mere months while others flop How did Alexander the Great, YouTube phenom Michelle Phan, and Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon dash to the top in less time than it takes most of us to get a midlevel promotion How do high-growth businesses, world-class heart surgeons, and underdog marketers beat the norm

Like computer hackers, a handful of innovators in every era use lateral thinking to find better routes to stunning accomplishments. Throughout history, the world's biggest successes have been achieved by those who refuse to follow the expected course and buck the norm.

Smartcuts is about bucking the norm.

In it, Snow shatters common wisdom about success, revealing how conventions like "paying dues" prevent progress, why kids shouldn't learn multiplication tables, and how, paradoxically, it's easier to build a huge business than a small one.

Smartcuts tells the stories of innovators who dared to work differently and lays out practical takeaways for the rest of us. It's about applying entrepreneurial and technological concepts to success, and how, by emulation, we too can leapfrog competitors, grow businesses, and fix society's problems faster than we think.

Publisher's Weekly Review

Journalist and Contently cofounder Snow is chomping at the bit to see even more radical changes in an already fast-moving world: By the end of this book, Id like to convince you that serendipity can be engineered, that luck can be manufactured, convention can be defied, and that the best paths to success-no matter how you define it-are different today from what they were yesterday. Snow's big idea is that we need to break away from traditional business practices, which allowed decades for big changes to come to fruition. The key, according to Snow, is learning to think like a hacker. He traces the books genesis to an article he worked on for Fast Company during the tech boom, and subsequent research into the behavior patterns of successful tech companies. Here, he discusses the ways in which rapid success has happened throughout history, with examples ranging from U.S. presidents to Jimmy Fallon. Snow also stresses the importance of masters (read: mentors) and the kind of iterative innovation computer programmers learn to do as a matter of course. Getting rapid feedback is essential-and is how Upworthy learned the most infuriatingly effective ways to get readers to click. Snows points are interesting, and his writing both earnest and engaging; readers are sure to find this book both inspiring and helpful. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.