Rule of Thumb…

The very first book I ever created was a joint venture with Chip Conley. Now it’s a wiki moderated by Ben Casnocha. Business Rules of Thumb – A wiki to add business rules of thumb….

When Chip and wrote the book (twenty years ago this week, I’m guessing), we had two goals: First, to point out that many rules of thumb are dated anachronisms, crutches used by slow-moving people in a fast moving world. Second, to teach newbies what the rules were, because you can’t change things without knowing the status quo.

The base of rules we collected is now woefully out of date at the same time it remains heavily used. Ben is hoping you might want to add some of your own.

[Trivia: Andrew Tobias declined to write the foreword for the book. His reason? Because in my note to him asking him to contribute one, I spelled it "forward." Lesson learned. Trivia #2: the book got almost no promotion because the week it came out, Vanna White’s autobiography from the same editor was published. Guess who got Jim’s attention? Biggest lesson of all for authors: you’re in charge of your own destiny.]

Rule of thumb: a well-written blog post will get a 5% clickthrough rate. The landing page the post points to will get a 3% sign up rate.