The Art of Understanding Women

I’ve taken a liking to startup books lately, and I’ve just started reading my second one – “The Art of The Start“, by Guy Kawasaki. It doesn’t take many pages before Guy introduces the reader to a brand new concept – when it comes to business; women know best.

Here’s an excerpt from the chapter called ‘Define Your Business Model’:

My final tip is that you ask women – and only women. My theory is that deep in the DNA of men is a “killer” gene. This gene expresses itself by making men want to kill people, animals and plants. To a large degree, society has repressed this gene; however, starting an organization whose purpose is to kill another organization is still socially acceptable. Hence, asking a man about a business model is useless because every business model looks good to someone with the Y chromosome. (…) Women, by contrast, don’t have this killer gene. Thus, they are much better judges of the viability of a business model than men are. He then argues that men must be dumber since they recieve more ‘Darwin Awards‘ (given to stupid people).

Then he finishes off the chapter with this excersise:

• Calculate your monthly cost to operate your organization.
• Calculate the gross profit of each unit of your product.
• Divde the results of Step 1 by the results of Step 2
• Ask a few women if they think you have a chance of selling that many units. If they don’t, you don’t have a business model.

Amazing. I never knew it was that simple :)

I don’t know if Mr. Kawazaki is joking, trying to get laid, or both – but I know I do wish WordPress had a Poll plugin so that I could add a poll to this post entitled “Should I read the rest of this book?” :)

Comments

Comment by Guy Kawasaki on 2006-08-29 07:21:13 +0000

Bjorn, For a poll widget, go to majikwidget.com. Guy

Comment by Bjørn on 2006-08-29 21:51:27 +0000

haha, thank you for the tip Guy :-)

(clever way of answering my question btw.)