Al Ries on Left Brainers and Right Brainers
I'm honored to have a guest post at Sources of Insight from author Al Ries on Left Brainers and Right Brainers. I first read Al's The 21 Immutable Laws of Branding some time ago. What I liked about the book was it gave me a new lens for looking at business, brands, and product design. It even gave me insight into personal brands as well as team, product, and organization brands. His principles are timeless and better yet, time tested. My favorite lesson was that to win, you narrow the focus. It's about specialization and standing for something. It's about really knowing which category you're in and what distinctions matter. For example, in patterns & practices, we create prescriptive guidance. Prescriptive guidance took the category of "documentation" and specialized. We effectively became a scenario-based, engineering team that produces code and content-based guidance. This differentiation became our strength.