SXSW 2013 Sampler

xxx Introduction: Likeability, Rogue Economists, and the Lovable Fool
and the importance of making great products that market themselves.
I dug backward through history, looking at whether the importance of
likeability was different during the Great Depression or the golden age
of Sweden.
What I learned is that success has much less to do with what we
create and much more to do with who believes in it.
This is not about creating an awful product and trying to use
likeability to sell it. It is also not about trying to fake likeability to
support some sort of sinister ulterior motive. I will speak about how to
handle both of these situations later in the book.
Instead, my aim is to look at the intersection of likeability and the
global economy and offer a vision of how any one of us can build the
kinds of relationships that lead to all kinds of personal success—from
launching a business to getting a new job.
The Nonboring Economics of Likeonomics
The unlikeliest place to start a discussion about the impact of likeability
on the economy would be in the field of economics itself. One of the
first things I did in my research, in fact, was to look at what leading
economists might have already published about the main idea of this
book. An economist, as writer Laurence J. Peter once wrote, ‘‘is an
expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday
didn’t happen today.’’
Luckily, this is not really an economics book and Likeonomics is
not an economic theory in a strict sense. Rather, it is an attempt to
describe the world that we live in today and what people and business
professionals alike need to do in order to survive and thrive in it. Unlike
many traditional economists, I tend to avoid academic thinking and
language, preferring instead to think about the world in terms of human
interactions rather than numbers in a spreadsheet. It turns out these are
not the opposing factors that they once were, as the world of economics
would learn the day the surprising results of the voting for the winners
of the 2002 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences were announced.