Chasing Cool , Needs to Chase Some More

After being sent the book "Chasing Cool" by its publicists months ago, I have been reading its content at an attention-starved 2-3 pages at a time and finally pushed through to the end today. Certainly, it's got a passionate following. Over 1,600 people have now joined its supporting Facebook group.

With interviews from over seventy of the world's leading innovators, the subject matter and apparent credibility behind it made me interested. I've even exchanged messages with at least two of the authors and they seem like likable guys.

Why then do I find the insights so few and the overall lessons to be unusable, inconclusive and ankle deep? 
To be clear, there are some great snippets of content and quotes:
"Don't complain when they copy, complain when they don't"
"Maintaining the integrity of your brand is the only way to transcend trend"
"Assign too many chefs to cook up a vision, and the product will taste like it's overheated"
"Good advertising makes a bad product fail faster"
"It's extremely difficult to take a person on a journey into a real subculture unless you have in some way taken that journey itself"
'I've got two rules at Quiksilver "whatever we do, can't suck" and "it's got to be better than the alternatives"
"No one thrives in one way dialogue. Anytime a big company wants a foray into an uncharted culture, it's an opportunity for the culture that's being targeted to grow and spread its wings too"
"It's possible to be both mainstream and edgy. You can be Goliath but you always have to think and behave like the David"

Although I agree with most of the broad motherhood narratives (i.e. spend more time with your audience, come up with truly creative stuff, build a great product), my biggest problem with the book is that it's riddled with paradoxes, arrogant statements of creative visionaries who struck it rich once (why is there so much Barney's New York which ran aground from chasing cool too fast) and as definitive as it likes to be with how to obtain cool, it's not too conclusive on exactly how.

General theses in the book I just can't agree with:

I) Looking into someone else's backyard is a replacement to thinking for yourself - some of the most potent examples of innovation and coolness is building on a related business's success - one of them Starbucks, profiled in the book,  is a derivative of Italian barista cafes noticed by founder Howard Schultz on his tour through Italy - the most innovative experts I find always have a great handle on what's going on inside and outside their industry and apply it differently . It's the guys that lose perspective and only hang out with the society set, that launch the big market bombs.

II) "I love looking at trend reports,I know exactly what I shouldn't be doing" - Trendspotting gets a rough ride with most of the commentary in the book. The truth is, there is an arbitrage of cool or spotting trends, some people are just better at it and some people spend a lot more time at it. And the  elapse of time between being a swift-footed revolutionary and  lagging evolutionary can be agonizingly short.  Why not mine the best people in culture or your marketplace or better yet, your potential customers to be a sounding broad and stimulus for figuring some of this stuff out?

III) The bottom line is you need to take substantial risk in order to open yourself up to true success. Risk is a residue of innovation, substantial risk is oftentimes  lunacy. That's when a little accountability and responsibility should set in. Whatever happened to fail small, learn lots and reapply? In a Long Tail universe,  taking substantial risk is like playing a lottery and a sure way to lose money. 

IV) Cool is the ultimate point of difference. And that is something that moves product like nothing else. In today's marketplace, cool is so transient and subjective, that if it's not accompanied by a good dose of customer experience, customer service, true innovation and authentic product performance and a community of supporters (who may be motivated by other things than cool), it will likely become very flammable roadkill.

Overall, the book was a nice, quick albeit episodic  read. I just wish it had mined its creative revolutionaries for deeper insight, established a more concrete consensus and be a little bit more prescriptive and priority-driven on how an organization/person should go about doing it. I'd also suggest for a book about cool that they take a page out of Seth Godin's book and make the book look cooler (a standard black and white hardcover is hardly pulse raising).

Pronouncement: If this book was a retailer, it certainly wouldn't be the coolest store in town but perhaps worthy of some window shopping.