Read the Manual - "In the land of the blind, the one eye man is king."

Mark Cuban's "Read the Frickin' Manual."?

Mark Cuban wrote about this in his book How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It:

At 24 years of age, Mark Cuban was far from what many would call a success.

“I was living in a 3-bedroom apartment in Dallas. I didn’t have my own bedroom. I slept on the couch or floor depending on what time I got home.

I had no closet. Instead, I had a pile that everyone knew was mine. My car had the usual hole in the floorboard, a ’77 FIAT X19 that burned a quart of oil that I couldn’t afford every week.”

Until that point, Cuban was working exclusively in the service industry. His prospects were poor, and he was mostly coasting through life, until he landed a job with Your Business Software – the first software retail store in Dallas.

He was excited to start a job that may lead to a good career, but he was also concerned.

“I had never worked with an IBM PC in my life. Not a single time, and I’m going to be selling software for it.”

So Cuban decided to do his homework.?Each night, he would bring home a different software manual and read it – no matter how late it was.

After weeks of reading the manuals, Cuban became the best salesperson on the team. He even knew more than his boss!

“Turns out not a lot of people ever bothered to RTFM (read the fricking manual), so people started thinking I knew my stuff.”

This small detail – reading the manual – turned out to be the defining characteristic that separated Cuban from everyone else; not just in the sales team, but also in the marketplace.

“I knew I would end up owning my own business someday, so I figured my challenge was to learn as much as anyone about all businesses."

I believed that every job I took was me getting paid to learn about a new industry. I spent as much time as I could learning and reading everything about business I could get my hands on.”?

It was not talent, luck, or a genius idea that took Cuban to the top – it was this small detail of reading the frickin' manual.

“Most people think it’s all about the idea. It’s not. Everyone has ideas. The hard part is doing the homework to know if the idea could work in the industry, then doing the preparation to be able to execute on the idea.”

How does this help in your Digital Insurgency?

"In the land of the blind, the one eye man is king."

You don't need a PhD in Computer Science to solve your organization's problems. I was talking to a senior digital insurgent a few weeks ago. Over a year, he spent 30+ hours learning 微软 SharePoint better. Just an hour a week. He didn't become an expert, he just learnt how to build out pages, manage information and automate workflow. Then as a Commanding Officer, he built his own page and taught his leaders how to use it properly. His goal was for every soldier to "find the right information, at the right time, in the right place." His team didn't even need weekly Orders Groups and coordination meetings every week. He knew what they were up to, where everyone was and what their key concerns were for the week. The higher and lower headquarters could find what they needed and didn't bother him. It probably saves his unit 1,000s of hours and they can focus on what an Infantry Unit would prefer to do - training. He just 'Read the Frickin' Manual.'

This could be useful in any aspect of your insurgency.

You might be wondering, I have heard a lot about OpenAI - but what does that mean?!? I would recommend "reading the frinkin' manual" for 30 minutes a day. How would it help you? If you go to Examples - OpenAI API you could map out a "Lesson plan Writer" or "fitness idea generator." You can even build your own API to help out your team. This curiosity is key to show how technology can improve your organization in a cheap and fast way.

A lot of people like to brush this problem off and say "it is IT's problem." But if you read a recent Gartner report, 80% of the technology solutions will be built by the business operations by 2025. Organizations will need to 'Read the Frickin' Manual'. If you want to drive an insurgency - I recommend reading the manual too....