Tonight I read (or rather skimmed) the book Cracking the Millionaire Code by Mark Victor Hansen and Robert G. Allen (authors of The One Minute Millionaire) at Barnes and Noble (strangely enough they have the book out 3 days before it’s supposed to hit the shelves). It’s an interesting book.
The entire book is scattered with word and number puzzles and codes and things you’re supposed to figure out. I’ll admit I didn’t try to do any of them–to me they seemed too gimmicky. The authors also have a penchant for creating new words and use them often in the book. Among them, “loverage.” I found both the puzzles and new words to be a distraction from the content of the book, which was, from what I gathered, pretty good.
The goal of the authors is to create what they refer to as “enlightened millionaires”–millionaires who give back to society. One of the key tenants of their strategies is to look to a Higher Power for inspiration and to find a noble and virtuous reason for obtaining wealth. Once you’ve found this, essentially the rest of the job of making a million dollars should fall into place, provided you follow some other advice.
Some of the notes I took are on not breakthrough ideas, but on things that are meant to get you thinking seriously about your product and company.
They outline the five major areas or types of products and use the acronym PRISM to describe them.
- Primary Products (e.g. a car)
- Related products (radar detectors, spare parts)
- Information Products (signage, consulting, manuals etc.)
- Services (manufacturing, protection, sales, repair)
- Media (advertising, entertainment, racing, collectors).
It’s an organized way of determining what market you’re in, and what your target market could be.
Later they give ideas to help you think about how you might change your business or product, asking you to ask yourself questions such as:
- How would a Higher Power change this?
- How would a billionaire redesign it?
- What will this look like 100 years from now?
- How could this be multi-sensitized (sight, taste, touch, sound)?
- How would the worlds leading scientists improve this?
- Where in the world could we take this? What in the world could we bring here?
- How would a 5 year old improve this?
- What if we could see like the blind and hear like the deaf?
- What if we could bring back the past? (nostalgia)
In addition, they suggest considering doing one or some of the following to increase profit potential from an idea;
- Enlighten it
- Residualize it (make it work for you)
- Create multiple streams of wealth
- Combine it
- Add to it
- Subtract from it
- Multiply it
- Make it grow exponentially
- Divide it
- Maximize it
- Focus it
- Make it faster
- Slow it down
- Undo/Reverse it partly
- Connect it to something else
- Appeal to the sender
- Attract its opposite
- Make it “planet friendly”
Again, nothing revolutionary, but very good starting points for thinking about how to change. Overall, I don’t think there’s a code that’s broken by the book, but it is definitely a strong motivator, inspiring people to do seek to create wealth for noble causes and giving many good ideas on how to begin.
Technorati Tags: book reviews, finance, money
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