I was eagerly awaiting the arrival of the book “Love is the Killer App” at the local book store. My first touch point with the book’s content came from one of the article in Inc where there was an interview with the author of the book – Tim Sanders, who emphasized the importance of love in the context of business. Little off beat, to come to think of – These days where competition, price-cutting, sharks, etc are the terms used by authors and corporate people, this is a refreshing title to begin with

The main idea of the book is that for nice, smart people lead a contended life. They make their lives as well as lives of people around them a more meaningful one. They are called Love cats. They indulge in the act of intelligently and sensibly sharing their intangibles with others. These intangibles are summarized as 3 essential traits of Lovecats. They are knowledge, network and their compassion towards others. The fast paced book goes on to elaborate more on the three traits and the way in which one can gain those traits. Most of the arguments posed are anecdotal; however author seems to make some sweeping statements at a few places.

Being a Lovecat, the benefits are the following:

  • You build an outstanding brand as a person
  • You create an experience
  • You have access to people’s attention
  • Harness the power of presumption
  • Scope for Exceptional Feedback
  • Personal Satisfaction by keeping in touch with the network

Each of the traits are packaged in a way that it becomes easier to appreciate them

Knowledge: Equivalent to Aggregation + Encoding + Processing + Application Aggregation is to know what books to read, actively observing book recommendations, discussing about various books with in the circle of friends, finally culminating in the collection of books

Encoding is pretty much self evident in meaning. However, personally, the greatest lesson that I have learnt from this book is at this section of the book. Tim sanders introduces to the art of cliffing and tagging for every book so as to fully digest the content of the book. To begin with, I did undergo this exercise for the same book, and noticed that my encoding levels have gone up. Tim says that one has to always tag and cliff the content in the book, and write the main idea of the book at the front page of the page.

Processing knowledge is mainly from discussing the book with others, participating in book clubs, writing summaries about it other places which enhances one’s understanding of the book.

Finally Application of the content in the book involves, getting the big idea, visualizing a discussion where you could use the knowledge, look for insert points in a conversation and sometimes play doctor , which means understand other’s problems , situations and refer concepts in few books, etc.

Network: This trait is also a process which involves Collecting contacts, Connecting nodes and Disappearing. The elegant analysis of this trait is culminated with a beautiful quote “Our Network is Our Net Worth”.

Compassion: The author talks about compassion being a 2 part process which is sensing and expressing. Though these tasks seem to be logical, we sometimes do not consciously observe these aspects and try to improve in our day to day dealings with others.

All said, Business education with out execution is an entertainment, so, it all depends on how much one can take the practices out of the book and experiment and find out whether living the lovecat way is worth it! .

But for me, the biggest gain from this book has been the cliffing and tagging approach which I am going to follow in all the books I read from now on