By Toby Guillette
About the Author
Scott Galloway is a marketing professor at the New York University Stern School of Business where he teaches brand strategy and digital marketing to second-year MBA students and is considered one of the top business school professors in the world. He is cohost of the popular Pivot Podcast with Kara Swisher as well as his own podcast called The Prof G Show. He is a serial entrepreneur and founder of 9 firms including L2, Red Envelope, Prophet, and Section4, he is a savvy investor and has written other best-selling books, including:
The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google
The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning
About the Book
I first learned about Scott Galloway in November, 2020 on episode 663 of The James Altucher Show where he talked through his predictions for the world, post-Corona.
The episode is captivating and I recommend listening to it if you don’t plan to read the book. In both the podcast episode and the book, he shares stats that will boggle your mind, like:
“We registered a decade of ecommerce growth in 8 weeks. In 2020 16% of retail was digital and 8 weeks after the pandemic reached the USA, 27% of retail was online.”
Building off stats like these, he calls the pandemic “The Great Acceleration” and presents his 2 main theses of the book:
1. The pandemic’s most enduring impact will be seen as an accelerant for dynamics already present in society.
2. The greater and more disruptive the crisis, the greater the opportunity.
Galloway connects the business story to the larger societal story and manages to critique the pitfalls of the capitalist system while creating a future-oriented dialogue focused on how businesses can survive and thrive post-Corona.
Lessons for Leaders in Manufacturing
A theme throughout the book and a top takeaway for manufacturing business leaders and leaders alike is the universal power of storytelling. The ability to craft a compelling vision of the future, to articulate that vision and to motivate others around you to work together and invest towards that future is your proverbial “vaccine” to the attack on your financial immune system.
Read this book and learn from companies that attract an online customer base, have cash, low or cheap debt, high-valued assets and low fixed costs. These are the businesses that will be positioned to acquire the assets of distressed competitors and consolidate the market.
Grocery, education and healthcare are all ripe for disruption. See what is possible and what can be learned from the commonalities of The Four: Amazon, Apple Google, and Facebook.
Avoid failing to innovate, make a pivot if completely necessary, shed large fixed costs for survival and above all don’t fall into the trap of failing so slowly you think you are succeeding.
About The Reader/Reviewer
Toby Guillette is a social media marketing expert, and his super power is helping clients create a clear and compelling vision of the future for their business. With clarity of purpose, he empowers clients to build a map to success while helping navigate the challenges of the ever-changing digital marketing landscape to discover their full business potential.
After a decade of creating and executing social media solutions for brands and agencies, he founded Mountain Road Creative, LLC. Now he offers his creative solutions-oriented skill set to small businesses and to manufacturers as a contractor for VizBiz Solutions & CMTC
Outside of his home office, he is a husband to a small business owner, father to a toddler, runner of ultra marathons and a climber of mountains.
