Seth Godin | Human-Centered Change and Innovation

“Figure out how to take risks that keep you in the game even if you fail.”

– Seth Godin

“Over the last couple of decades, companies have increasingly found that employees who pursue what they do with passion will outperform an employee with a gun to their head every time.”

– Braden Kelley

“Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.”

– Albert Einstein

What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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Will the Innovation Dominoes Fall and Disrupt the Book Publishing Industry?

Seth Godin and Amazon - The Domino Project “The enemy is not piracy, the enemy is obscurity.” – Tim O’Reilly

I came across a TechCrunch TV interview with Seth Godin today about his future publishing plans.

I’ve been wondering what Seth meant when he told me last year at the World Innovation Forum that he would never publish another traditional book. Here is the video:

Now, he has made it clear what he meant, and just what his future plans are in the below video from Tech Crunch. His plans have a name, The Domino Project, and it is a publishing house venture he is undertaking with Amazon and it starts with a simple question:

How do you make a book spreadable?

Right now books work very hard against being spreadable, and in Amazon’s continuing quest to evolve the book business beyond just selling ebooks and blogs on Kindle, they apparently approached Seth Godin, gave him a blank sheet of paper to envision a new way of approaching book publishing. He described this collaboration with Amazon – The Domino Project – through a series of questions:

What happens if we allowed you to buy a 5-pack for only slightly more than one book? Wouldn’t you then give four of them away to people who would be interested in reading them?

What happens if we allowed people to share a Kindle book for free for a certain period of time and then try to figure out how to make money from it?

Can you dream big enough?

Can you do something that is worth doing, or will you hold back and play it safe?

Amazon will be working directly with authors – including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Godin’s new book will of course be included (and will be on initiative). He also mentioned that the trend of these new books will be towards the spectrum of manifestos. Traditional book publishers can’t do 96 page books, but The Domino Project can. Godin says that the success of the effort will be measured on whether or not the first 10,000 people who get the book, actually share it.

So, what was the most depressing part of the interview?

“The average American buys one book a year.”

Will The Domino Project successfully disintermediate the traditional publishing houses and transform how authors go about publishing book? Is there anything here that is actually new? What do you think?

Here’s the video interview if you would like to watch it for yourself:

Seth Godin’s new book Poke the Box will be The Domino Project’s first title and it will come as a limited edition, a hardcover, a Kindle ebook, an audiobook, a 5-pack, and a 52-pack.

Oh, and if you don’t have my a copy of my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire already, it’s available on Amazon as a hardcover or a Kindle eBook, or from other great physical and online booksellers: