Says Who?: The Five-Question Audit That Exposes Your Industry's Imaginary Rules

Every industry runs on a rulebook nobody wrote. Some of those rules are real. Most are not. They are folklore: old solutions to old problems that kept collecting taxes long after the problem changed, obeyed by smart people who never stopped to ask where they came from. And the operators who win in any field are rarely the most talented or the best funded. They are the ones who audited the rulebook before agreeing to play by it. Tesla entered China without the joint venture every other automaker treated as mandatory, because someone finally asked whether the requirement was actually real. A two-person podcast conquered its category by ignoring every rule of its medium, once its hosts realized they were not in the business they thought they were in. A one-person publisher built a thriving catalog by refusing the advertising rule his entire platform calls non-negotiable. None of them needed more talent or capital than the people obeying the rule. They needed one question. Says Who? gives you the five-question audit for telling the difference between the rules worth obeying and the folklore worth deleting. Who made this rule? What problem was it solving? Is that problem still alive for you? What does obeying it cost? And what is the smallest test of life without it? Run them in order and you can question almost anything in your business with almost none of the risk that questioning normally carries. This is not a book about being a contrarian. A whole section is devoted to the rules you must never break, the real ones with real consequences, and to the difference between auditing the rulebook and simply ignoring it. You are obeying rules right now that nobody can defend, that solve problems you do not have, and that you have never once priced. So is your whole industry. This book is about getting that money back. The first rule you break is the one you write down tonight.

Pages: 116, Paperback, Independently published