Love is The Killer App

I just read Love is The Killer App, subtitled “How to Win Business and Influence Friends” by Tim Sanders.

This is a book by a Geek (just check out his picture on the back page!) that is particularly useful to other Geeks, although the intended audience includes both geeks and bizpeople.

Geeks, or perhaps we should say IT personnel, are not known for their soft skills, because their soft skills tend to be underdeveloped. Geeks get along well with other Geeks, or at least communicate well, but rarely can truly communicate effectively with others in their organization. This singular fact is a major contributor to both massive IT project failure and lack of quick adoption.

The key point of the book is that “Nice Smart People Succeed.”

“It's really just the concept of karma applied in a business context. If you do good stuff, good stuff will come right back to you. It's a concept that is thousands of years old”
-James D. Foster

Tim advice falls into three categories:

1) Be smart – and work on being smart. He recommends reading everything in your field, with a big emphasis on books. Take extensive notes – mark up the books. Hard covers rule because you’ll save them and hopefully treasure them.

2) Your network holds amazing power. Keep your contacts well organized (in true Geek fashion, Tim recommends a Palm Pilot. He’s convinced me. I’m getting one – goodbye random scraps of paper!). Freely share your contacts with your other contacts for their benefit.

3) Tim calls #3 compassion. As a Geek, I have some difficultly with this of course. Expressing emotion in the business world, or anywhere else, is not my forte. But he makes a strong case, with I won’t even attempt to summarize in a few words. Tell people you like that you like them! You’re happy to see them. You look forward to talking to them. It works – if it’s true!

This is not the type of book I’d normally pickup and read, but it was recommend by a close friend, and I strongly recommend it as well (Tim recommends recommending books you like as well). The extensive use of terms like “lovecats” (something we should all be) would become cloyingly annoying very quickly if this book was not extremely well done AND written. But Tim Sanders pulls it off, and this fairly quick read is well worth reviewing after finishing as well.
Yesterday I met with someone I had only exchanged email with before, although I had done a quick project with him in the past. The meeting went very well, and we left with mutual promises of very specific future business. We will be making each other money in the next few months. As a true testament to the value of Love is The Killer App, I noticed after our meeting that I was using several of Tim’s suggestions and they were working. We connected, and I mean more than “I will do X for you and you will pay me Y.” We shared our contacts, and I think I’ll recommend this book to him. Maybe I'll have Amazon send him a copy.