Book review: 33 Ways not to screw up your business podcast – By Alastair Mc Dermott.
RV Friday 7th July 2023 20:23
10Km E
Warm n Windy. A perfect Irish Day,
While researching the ever evolving,”HTC How to company XYZ core story”, from concept stage into a more specialized reality, my research surfaced an old friend.
Alastair McDermott Author of the book “33 ways not to screw up your business podcast”, which this review concerns. Alastair kept popping up on my ‘feed’ … and as a guy who intentionally doesn’t have a feed, I was perceptive enough to pay attention to what was getting through.
Roll back 2003….
I worked with Alastair about 20 years ago in the might Sun Microsystems. Our job involved the automation of Kernel code testing in Sun’s Unix distribution, Solaris. Sexy? Definitely.
I arranged a call / meeting through his meeting booking system on his website. 1hr 35m call later, we had caught up on our past career, pool hustling, coffee drinking, ‘Work’… or lack of it, Alastair agrees we were not at the races in Sun. Not terrible workers, we loved engineering, shell, scripts, Perl, Kerberos – crypto before it was cool… But the work and us were just incompatible and that’s nobody’s fault, not even the Romans.
eject
I loved every job I ever worked at and Sun is no exception. I’ve a lot to be grateful for. We both left Sun within a month of each other and never did a days work since. I’m joking of course, I mean we both created our own destinies from then and made our own way through, always trying to find what it is that fulfils us and hopefully paying the bills++ along the way. There were many days on that journey I yearned for the safety of the Sun paycheck and the lack of responsibility but 15+ years later, on reflection, ejecting was the only path destined for me in life. I tend to go off track. I’ve probably hit the review character limit for a Book, So I’ll wrap up shortly.
The Book
Alastair asked me if I had reviewed his book, I said that I hadn’t, because I hadn’t read it. But I would after I read it. I’m normally not a reviewer, I guess you could easily count up my reviews online. The evening after our catchup/coaching call, I was glad to have reconnected with Alastair.
I bought the book on Kindle that evening, I’m a kindle user but the hardback would look great on your shelf if you’re a serious podcaster…. Maybe he will send me a free signed copy for mine, who knows?
That night I began reading this book, foreword, introduction and all. As I read through steps 1-5 I could hear Alastairs voice in my head reading through these very familiar steps 1-33 steps…. how? AH! I realised I had read the book already!!
Sort of.. The 1 – 33 steps are familiar because I’ve listened to an audio book version during my research. (Once Alastair surfaced I ended up listening to 4/5 of his most recent podcasts, ((Mainly to check if he was actually any good at this :0))) I quickly realized that while he’s not as polised as Joe or Tim YET… he’s pretty good…. someone…. I know… making it…. doing what he likes doing… Still 15 years later… impressive.
I digress.
again. sorry.
Authority
Alastair has done a great job with his own weekly podcast ‘The Recognized Authority’ Available where-ever you get your podcasts, he has also developed his own system that packages all this up and spits out a podcast production system.
This is where you Jaw drop. That’s genius… a podcast which literally produces a podcast production system, while talking to potential clients, experts et al, as content on it’s own podcast…. Brilliant?
A fundamental element of what I preach about in Systems is sustainability, and this, the niche Alastair the Recognized Authority, has carved out for himself is a great example of sustainability. Tim Ferriss could have this guy on and nod approvingly at his ‘optimizations’.
The Review
I promised to shut up ages ago so here’s the wrap.
Alastair has always been a stand up guy in the time I’ve known him. He knows his stuff, is very smart, knows about expensive bicycles too, and is Authentic. The Authentic Authority – I bet he’s kicking himself he didn’t call it that. But as he highlights in bold in point 5 of “33 ways not to screw up your business podcast”. “You can change the name later”
Authentic is a hard thing to be in Business. On my list of aspirations for HTC is ‘Always endeavoring to strive for authenticity’ that’s as close I can get to commitment to the cause.
In past business ventures, I didn’t fully grasp ‘values’ outside the popular understanding that “it is a good idea to write values for your business”. But this time I’ve different choices to make and being Authentic is a big hard one of them.
So…
Whether you’re a newbie like Me, exploring the new modern “Self Propulsion” method of living and financing your life or whether you are already up and walking and need a way of diligently checking all the bases of your existing Podcast/Vlog/Blog/Social Channels, then I’m happy to say, of my own free opinion, that I think that You could do WAY worse than adding this book to your shelf.
If you want to find a good book then research the Author… that’s served me well for 100’s of books.
I’m sure you will be buying many books for your business so add this one to your shelf it will be useful, and when you have an existential crisis and need a hardback checklist to turn to, having a copy will help you keep doing what your doing. Good luck.
