Book Review: Co-Create, by David Nour

You have to disrupt yourself, or else someone else is going to disrupt your business for you. That’s a consistent theme that David Nour, growth strategist and author of the best-seller Relationship Economics, hits again and again in his newest book, Co-Create. And it’s so true!

In my life, I’ve found that it’s whenever I think I have everything figured out, when I get complacent—that’s when something comes along that knocks me back to reality. I always learned more from losing than from winning; in the NFL, whenever we lost, we went back to the film room and studied, practiced harder, and did whatever we could to fix what went wrong. But when we were winning, well, it was easy to go out and celebrate and enjoy that success, not doing the things that would be necessary for winning the next game.

We always had to keep looking for new ways to get better, ways to change and grow, and that has been just as true in business as it ever was in football. So it should be no surprise that David’s book hit me, powerfully, right away.

A big focus in his book is the need to open ourselves up, to not just think about ourselves, but to involve other people. He writes, “If you bring stakeholders into close collaboration in the innovation process, the outcomes will be what those stakeholders are looking for. This represents a fundamental switch from the push economy’s ethos of ‘sell the stuff we develop’ to the Co-Create economy’s ‘develop stuff we can sell with the people we’re going to sell it to.’” That’s exactly right!

In our businesses, it’s not just about getting people to buy something; it’s about adding value to their lives, and offering them something of value. I believe people have to talk to people, and that goes right back to the whole notion of Co-Create. We have to listen—to general trends, to our partners, to our customers, to our employees, to our vendors, to our suppliers, to all the people we’re connected to. When we do that, we have a better chance of finding what we can do that will add real value to the lives of our customers. It’s all the result of smarter, more effective collaboration.

David Nour is a really smart guy, and the things he has to say in this book will give you a better perspective on growing your business and thriving in this fast-moving, dynamic world.

You can find Co-Create on Amazon, and learn more about it in this brief video!

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