Shane SnowSmartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success

As I began to read Smartcuts, I was again reminded of the fact that many (if not most) human limits are self-imposed. For reasons that are assumed but seldom explained, we accept as received wisdom that what "they" say  has always been true. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have been told "We've always done it that way" or "We tried it once and it didn't work." In one of Hans Christian Andersen's most popular tales, "The Ugly Duckling," a bird born in a barnyard is abused because he is an ugly duck. Over time, he matures into a handsome swan. Sacred cows and false assumptions usually go unchallenged.According to Shane Snow, there are significant differences between "rapid, potentially short-term gains, or shortcuts, and success achieved through smarter work, or smartcuts." That is, "an act of lateral thinking with integrity. Working harder [but also smarter] and achieving breakthroughs without creating negative externalities."Edward de Bono is generally credited with popularizing lateral thinking in 1967 with the publication of his eponymous book. In Smartcuts, Snow has "catalogued the patterns through which rapid successes and breakthroughs innovators have achieved the incredible through lateral thinking. The nine principles comprise a framework for breaking conventions that explains how many of the world's most successful people and businesses do so much with less."Here are the principles, each thoroughly explained in the book:1. Hacking the Ladder2. Training with Masters3. Rapid Feedback4. Platforms5. Catching Waves6. Superconnecting7. Momentum8. Simplicity9. 10X ThinkingSmartcut thinking offers dozens of practical benefits:o Reduction (if not elimination) of wasteo Improvement of first-pass yieldo Reduction of cycle timeo Simplification of processo Increase of agility and resilienceo Faster modificationo Strengthened verificationI agree with Shane Snow: "We can do incredible things by rejecting convention and working smarter. What would happen if we looked at problems like pollution and climate change, racism and classism, violence and hunger, and instead of waiting for luck to strike, asked ourselves, 'How can we use smartcuts to fix things faster?' You can make incremental progress by playing by the rules. [That is, complying with someone else's rules.] To create breakthrough change, you have to break the rules. Let's break some rules together."In Leading Change, James O'Toole suggests that the strongest resistance to change is cultural in nature, the result of what he so aptly characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." Never underestimate the difficulty of achieving breakthrough results with lateral thinking. That said, keep in mind this reassurance from Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Snow's more recent book, Dream Teams: Working Together Without Falling Apart (June 2018), as well as Safi Bahcall's Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries (March 2019).

I read about 50 nonfiction books a year, and start many more. Only rarely do I lose sleep reading one, as I did with "Smartcuts."*What's so special about this book that kept me up late and had me sneaking pages here and there between meetings till I finished less than 3 days later? Well, certainly one thing is the engaging format. Author Shane Snow seems to delight in keeping his reader on the edge of his/her seat, giving us a teaser with one tale, then breaking into another, then another, then taking us back to the first, etc until he ties them all up by the end of the chapter. That trick is excruciatingly delightful to me, the type of intellectual striptease you get with a Malcolm Gladwell book or article, for instance. Note to self for my next book: more of that.But that's the surface ploy. Narrative structure alone, no matter how clever, will not keep your busy reader's attention through even the first chapter. I don't think I'm alone in requiring substance, and this is where "Smartcuts" (shortcuts that are ethical and savvy) truly excels.My favorite two chapters come at the end of the book (but please don't skip ahead, as you'll miss too much). Together, Shane makes the case for why it's often easier to improve by a factor of ten than it is by ten percent. "Nice claim," I thought to myself, "And I certainly want this to be true - it's right up this heretic's alley. But how does he back up what I want to hear with substance?" Well, he does, in spades. Take Elon Musk's SpaceX, which is doing... (for more: https://meddle.it/content/8a546f544abc8983014afd90eb291efe/public)

I'm scratching my head trying to figure out what are the actual "Smartcuts".The book argues that successful innovators don't do things the way everybody else does and they certainly don't take the well worn path to success, i.e. "hard work". They figure out the hacks, the short cuts or the "smart cuts" and get to the top faster than anyone could have imagined. Great premise. However, the examples given don't really support these "smart cuts'' other than don't take the accepted path, especially the one of working hard & following the well-tread ladder of success because that one takes longer. The Techniques/ "Smartcuts" presented are either incredibly obvious and contradict themselves.The book features "momentum" as a smartcut. Momentum being get a lot of publicity and notoriety and use that to catapult yourself to the next level of success. I don't think anyone needs to read a book to understand this principle. Yet, the author warns that in this event you are better served having worked very hard and having body of work to draw from. He compares the make up artist Michelle Phan (who had worked very hard to create an extensive) was prepared to leverage the burst of fame to someone else who just got lucky and had no depth and thus their 15 min of fame was wasted. Ok, this seems to contradict the "work less, go farther" "Shorten" that is presented in the beginning of the book.Some of the reviews thought it was too "Malcolm Gladwell-esque". I like Malcolm Gladwell and was hoping this book would be in that vein. Unfortunately it is not. While the author is a good writer; he's not a good storyteller. The ideas are clearly articulated but they are not told in such a fashion to make me feel there is something original and groundbreaking here.And the conclusions I'm left with after reading the book are: If you want to succeed then work very, very hard, learn from the best (even if it means watching that individual on TV, old movies or videos), keep at it and once you get some success figure out how to ride that success so it builds on itself. Sounds like pretty tried & true advice which is fine except that is author is claiming he is giving your something better, something smarter.

Bundle together known concepts well documented elsewhere and packed under the concept of "Lateral Thinking".Mentioned the name of Ed de Bono a single time throughout the book.If you want to learn on how to improve your lateral thinking, read the original sources by Ed de Bono.As for this book... if you take more than a day to read it, you are wasting your time!

A good book in places but overall a tad disappointing. Book could have been a third the size; a lot of points rehashed.

The book has fresh perspectives on how to grow yourself and your ideas fast and smart. Based on real life examples - high achievers who skipped conventional steps - the book focuses on the importance of observation and seizing the momentum. Great read for anyone who knows there has to be a way of doing things smart and faster than the ones before.

Clever book, well worth a read

In my honest opinion, this book is marvelous, not so much for the smarcuts, although they were really good and what drove me to buy it at first place, but I ended up loving it because of the inspiration the stories in it bring to me: stories of how people hacked the ladder, how they got to be the best they could, and Michelle Phan's one, which is quite touching, and at the same time, very instrutiveThis book is a message, not to the lazy, but to the smart.