Is love really all you need? Tim Sanders, director of Yahoo's in-house think tank, believes love is the crucial element in the search for personal and professional success. In Love Is the Killer App he explains why. Sander's advice is to be a "lovecat," which despite the cutesy moniker is his sincere and surprisingly practical prescription for advancement both inside and outside the office. It starts with amassing as much usable knowledge as possible, which he explains can be done by religiously carving out time to read and then poring through as many cutting-edge books in your field as possible. It follows with an emphasis on networking to the extreme. Sanders offers concrete suggestions, from compiling a super list of contacts to ensuring all are regularly stored in an always-accessible format. And he concludes by advocating a true mindset of compassion, which he says involves sharing this knowledge with those contacts and ultimately helping anyone who in one way or another may ultimately help you. Through identifiable anecdotes and specific recommendations, the book promotes an undeniably feasible yet decidedly offbeat program that has worked for the author and could prove equally favorable for others who apply it. --Howard Rothman

Are you wondering what the next killer app will be? Do you want to know how you can maintain and add to your value during these rapidly changing times? Are you wondering how the word love can even be used in the context of business?

Instead of wondering, read this book and find out how to become a lovecat—a nice, smart person who succeeds in business and in life.

How do you become a lovecat? By sharing your intangibles. By that I mean:
Your knowledge: everything that comes from all the books that I’ll encourage you to devour.
Your network: the collection of friends and contacts you now have, which I’ll teach you how to grow and nurture.
Your compassion: that human warmth you already possess—in these pages I’ll convince you that you can show it freely at the office.

What happens when you do all this?
* You become a rich source of information to all around you.
* You are seen as a person with valuable insight.
* You are perceived as generous to a fault, producing surprise and delight.
* You double your business intelligence in one year.
* You triple your network of personal relationships in two years.
* You quadruple the number of colleagues in your life who love you like family.

In short, you become one of those amazing, outstanding people to whom everyone turns, who leads rather than follows, who never runs out of ideas, contacts, or friendship.

Here’s the real scoop: Nice guys don’t finish last. They rule!


From the Hardcover edition.

This is a combination business-psychology book or perhaps 'the inter-personal psychology of business'. It focuses more on relationships across firms than with employees and colleagues within the firm. The philosophy seems a mix of Buddhism meets Flowerchild meets Hipster meets Business 2.0. Business people who are old-school (not even Business 1.0) in a profit-focused, corporate world are not going to resonate with this book. Perhaps a subtitle could be: 'how to be super-positive, energetic, and loving fostering a mutual explosion in positive thoughts with other like-minded cheerful lovecats'. This is not to say the book has no merit. But the book is so full of excitement that at points it is syrupy. If everyone had such a compassionate perspective there would be so much less politics, arguing, tension, stress, and lawsuits it would be much more appealing and rewarding, I suspect, for many in business. On the other hand, if the author's suggestions around networking, for example, were widely adopted, then all businesspeople would spend all their time connecting with networked people connected by Lovecats, for no obvious business reason in many cases, and never get any work done.

Parts of the book are trivial and seemingly too basic to put in print (the recommendation, for example, to use a contact management system for recording business contacts); other parts of the book seem to be psychological: "Lovecats revel in the element of delight and surprise they can bring to the table." In my business experience, there are a lot of focused and successful business professionals whose list of what delights them include meeting objectives, closing a deal, enforcing accountability, beating competitors, and the like. As a result, the book is going to be more successful in networking-centric, enlightened?- unrealistic-communities such as bloggers or management consulting gurus who follow Seth Godin and Tom Peters.

Tim Sanders takes a completley different view on what it means to be connected. I read this book on a recommendation from a friend and to be honest, I wasn't sure what it was all about after I read the first chapter, but soon it all began to make sense. Tim as some great ideas about networking and how important "love" is in business relationships. It might sound a little "woo woo" but what he is trying to communicate, is that is that by treating others how you would want to be treated yourself you can actually get along much better in the business world.

He is all for sharing your knowledge which is great and after reading this book I went out and posted some marketing articles on our website that I had been holding back. The result was really good, we got some positive comments and ultimately is generated interest in what we do.

The only small irk about this book, is that if you are really busy it might be difficult to keep up with all the ideas that he recommends. Never the less it is well worth a read if you want to know how networking really works

I first read Love is the Killer App about 3 years ago. I was just starting RockStar Consulting and I stumbled upon it sitting on a friend's bookshelf. It turned out to be a great book back then and I just reread it after picking up my own copy. As I was rereading it, I found myself wondering, "Was I doing these things all along or did I learn them from this book and just integrate them so deeply I feel like I've always been a lovecat?".

Tim and I share a similar outlook on how to become successful in business, so it's easy to love this book. As I've written before, it's always a treat for me when I come across a book that seems to take the abstract principals that I follow, and makes them vividly concrete (and it saves me the time of having to actually write them myself).

The strength of Love is the Killer App stems from a two step process. The first step is that Tim tells you why being a nice guy is actually a useful career path, which is quite contradictory to many of the tough-guy business books. It's refreshing to see someone elucidate the value behind being a good person, not just rest on tired cliches. Not that you should be a good person just to get stuff; but if you got to choose between being kind or a jerk, wouldn't you want to choose being nice.

Tim takes the process a step further, though, and goes through how to be a nice guy. When someone gives you nuts and bolts tools, it's an indication that they have really thought their ideas all the way through. For Tim, showing what he calls "bizlove" rests on sharing three resources with other people:

Knowledge - that you've gleaned from reading voraciously.
Connections - that you've developed through networking constantly.
Compassion - that you've accessed by accepting and sharing your humanity.

Big Thought:

"Nice, Smart People Succeed. To become successful in business, you must share your business love, which is a combination of your knowledge, network, and compassion"


It's great to see someone reinforce what my inner nerd knew already, "...for the student of business, books are the solution...Books give you knowledge, the news gives you awareness. The later is a measurement of today. Knowledge is a measure of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Awareness is finite. Knowledge is forever."(pgs. 69-70) This echoes Nassim Taleb's ideas in Fooled by Randomness about the signal vs. noise problem. What does it mean for the average person? - read more books!

Tim's section on networking challenged me to reevaluate how many introductions I'm making in my network. I think I make a good effort - but I think I can do a great effort. I do a really solid job of collecting nodes in my network, but I need to do a better job of making those connections. What would happen if I set a goal for myself to do x number of introductions a week?

I know that I need to bring more compassion into my business life, or rather, I need to express it more. I think that, even though I feel the love, if I'm not sharing it enthusiastically with other people it is sterile. I've been doing it haphazardly over the past few years; now I need to do it deliberately. I realize that in the past I have gotten stung by some stand-offishness, and it has made me retreat a little. I can't let those past experiences keep me from "showing the love".

Should you Read this Book?

Absolutely. I think this is a fantastic primer on how to operate in the business world as a loving person focused on the success of yourself and others. It gives the practical tools that are needed to stop being an island and connect with big wide world. As Tim concludes:

"Why do we have to wait for these moments? Why is it only during peak experiences that we offer love? Why does it take a championship to show emotion? Why not reach inside ourselves and, whenever we have an appropriate urge, tap in to that love and express it. It can make a wonderful world of difference to you and to everyone around you." (p. 194).

Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R18MNN1JMBP2LC Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends

I highly recommend this book to anyone who desires to grow their personal and business network!

The Big Idea behind Sander's book is very "proverb-esque": You can win business and influence friends by being a lovecat.

So, what is a lovecat? Sanders defines lovecats as those "Nice, Smart People" who cheerfully share their intangibles with others: their knowledge, their network and genuine compassion.

By knowledge, Sanders means any insight or reference which can help another person succeed (or just get ahead) in life and/or business. At the top of the heap is book referrals. Books, he says, should be your diet staple because they are the complete thought-meal. Magazine articles are between meal snacks. The news media are like candy and soda. Books give you knowledge. The news gives you awareness. His advice: Devour as many books as you can and spread the knowledge far and wide.

By network, he refers to your contacts. I couldn't help but wonder as I read this book whether or not "LinkedIn" was inspired by Sanders' book. If you understand LinkedIn (the way it is brilliantly explained by Lee LeFevre of CommonCraft), then you understand the heart of this section in Love is the Killer App. He asserts that the nodes in your network can accomplish almost anything for you. For Sanders, the purpose of collecting contacts is to give them away--to match them with other contacts. Therefore, he says, collect them, connect them and then get out of the way of the new relationship. And do it all with no strings attached.

By compassion, he simply means that you take a genuine interest in others and then show them that you care in whatever manner is appropriate for the particular context. By expressing your compassion, you create an experience that people remember. When people remember you, it's good for your business. The "P.S. I Love You" has a great thought Sanders paraphrased from Dale Carnegie: You can accomplish more in two months by developing a sincere interest in other people than you could ever hope to accomplish in two years trying to get people interested in you.

About a 5-hour read for me. If you haven't read it yet, you should. Broad applicability, whether you are in the 8-5 or not.