Co-Create: How Your Business Will Profit from Innovative and Strategic Collaboration

by David Nour

What if your customers had a vested interest in guiding your company toward greater success? What if your employees had a personal as well as professional commitment to elevating your organization? Imagine how different your results would be if investors, vendors, and even analysts treasured the relationship they have built with you?
Most important . . . is your company capable of setting aside a bit of its own self-interest to become part of dramatically more rewarding collaborative effort? That’s the provocative and ultimately earthshaking question David Nour poses. He argues that co-creation is a transformational journey that naturally leads to growth and evolution . . . because it gives birth to shared interests that dwarf anything that existed previously.

In Co-Create, David Nour makes the case that co-creation leads to Market Gravity™, a force that attracts stakeholders to your business because they recognize that many others have also united their interests with yours. It’s the sense―backed by tangible metrics―that this is bigger than any of us imagined . . . except that you imagined precisely such an outcome. That’s the power of co-creation.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

Published May 9, 2017

Reviews

[Ngeo Nguyen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good read. What I liked the best is his idea about “Listening louder”. As a new immigrant, I did not realize the importance of “reading between the lines” and how to do it. This book shed light on this topic.

I also liked his message about how to be nimble and agile when creating a new product. “When you’re 80 percent ready, move. The last 20 percent doesn’t matter”. His book helped me to realize that perfect is enemy of good and change my approach. I cannot overestimate how much that helped me achieve much better results in my career.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won this book through Goodreads. Very exciting and new ideas. Great book.

[Mary Anne Shew · Rating 3 out of 5]

The leaders of any business—small or large—bewildered by how to succeed in the post-industrial world needs to read this book. It does a great job of breaking down how it’s changing and what needs to be done to get on board. His ideas are not easy and will rip away all your assumptions and plans of the past 40 years. But if you do the transition well, your company has an excellent chance of not just surviving but thriving for the foreseeable future. The book is written for large companies, but much of the activities can be scaled down to fit smaller businesses.

My one huge complaint (and the reason for only 3 stars) is that Nour has redone his website since publishing this book. Not a surprise, but the workbook PDF download to which he refers throughout the book is no longer available as referenced. The old URL goes to the home page of this site, leaving the viewer frustrated and unimpressed. He does seem to offer the PDF as part of a “bundle” available only with purchasing a copy of the book from his site. But if you already bought the book elsewhere, you wouldn’t know that until you seek it out as instructed and then can’t find it. Badly done.

And frankly, the new website belies so many of the principles he espouses in his book. It has an annoying pop-up for quizzes that appears every time you go to any page, even if you’ve been on that page before. The impression his site leaves is it’s all about him now. For someone who’s built his reputation on teaching others to be customer centric, his site is just the opposite.

Very disappointing, Mr. Nour.

[Abhi Yerra · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is a bit all over the place but covers most things that the Lean Startup and the lean movement have brought. The one insight that I thought was valuable was the idea of the Hollywood Model of running a company being the norm in the future instead of the traditional top down hierarchy.

It no longer makes sense for companies to build large teams with many people not really having anything to do most of the time. Instead, the model should be to have a small core team for the company and hire freelances and outsiders to come in and build a project and dissolve after completion. This is a property of people no longer working at a company for life and the increase of people working for themselves as freelancers.

[Kathy Heare Watts · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won a copy of this book during a Goodreads giveaway. I am under no obligation to leave a review or rating and do so voluntarily. I am paying it forward by passing this book along to a business organization that offers business skills, hope, and dreams to be used in their ministry.

[Stef Garvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great content on how to invest wisely into strategic relationships.