The Power of Onlyness

May 29, 2017
Merchant (11 Rules for Creating in the #SocialEra) encourages her readers to embrace their uniqueness in this self-help guide for would-be innovators. She begins by asserting the importance of identifying one’s purpose, or what she calls “the dent,” and then tells her readers how to find theirs. Her examples of people who found their dent include Kim Bryant, founder of Black Girls Code, and Zach Walls, a former Eagle Scout who helped end the Boy Scouts’ anti-LGBT prohibitions. Next, Merchant encourages her readers to find “co-denters,” those people who can help you amplify your message. Finally, she urges readers to galvanize others to act, using as an example Holocaust survivor Leo Bretholz , who started the movement that resulted in French railway company SNCF paying $60 million in reparations to Holocaust survivors. Elsewhere, Merchant asserts that trust is rewarded, pointing to the management style of PatientsLikeMe. The website solicits input from people with rare diseases and then shares the information they provide with physicians and researchers, maintaining transparency with patients about how their information is used and how the company makes money throughout the process. Merchant delivers an inspiring message about the power of believing in one’s dreams.

July 15, 2017
An exhortation to raise one's freak flag, dust off that notebook full of plans and dreams, and set up shop.Merchant (11 Rules for Creating Value in #SocialEra, 2012, etc.) has built a career as a brand of one. She was an early-ish hire at Apple and Autodesk, was hired (and fired, to her devastation) by a startup that Adobe would acquire, and so on. She was also raised in a tradition-minded immigrant family that valued success--for men, that is. As a business consultant, she has since become an advocate for level playing fields for those outside the system, the target audience for her concept of "onlyness," built on experience, talents, and ideas in possession only of particular individuals, such as the African-American woman engineer who, against the odds, worked her way through Vanderbilt and was instrumental in getting that institution to divest itself of holdings in Apartheid-era South Africa. "If only a few ideas are valued," Merchant writes, "the wealth of many humans is lost." By Merchant's account, social media and the web do much to create that level playing field in which outside-the-box, outside-the-system ideas can get an airing, though the largely unstated problem is not expressing them but driving audiences to find them. Still, after some false starts and the business-book-as-usual laying out of a few wondrous anecdotes to support the rightness and wrongness of approach, the author gets down to some interesting cases, including a grass-roots effort to convince the Boy Scouts to abandon anti-gay policies and a self-styled cougar's campaign against pornography. Unfortunately, there's too much windup, the narrative is scattershot, and the scaffolding is wobbly. The best of Merchant's case studies illustrate the operating principles of cultural difference and the power of persistence in getting things done. A by-the-numbers business book stuffed with case studies of success and failure but also with good material for priming the pump.

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July 1, 2017

Business thinker Merchant (The New How) here introduces the concept of "onlyness," that everyone possesses qualities that make them unique and valuable. Merchant asserts that instead of status or credentials, a person's distinct background and skill can influence or complement a team. Despite its name, "onlyness" does not imply working in isolation. Merchant demonstrates how people can come together (with "co-denters") to navigate the new social economy in the workplace. She provides examples of how to use onlyness to find a voice among the deafening "noise" of the tech age, to stop questioning our qualifications (or lack thereof), and to collaborate to make positive change. Bite-sized anecdotes and stories from the tech world and media provide support for Merchant's ideas. In a time when the word "snowflake" is being used as an insult, it's refreshing to read what is essentially a celebration of our unique selves. VERDICT Readers searching for their career or online "voice" will be inspired by Merchant's advice.--Jennifer Clifton, Indiana State Lib., Indianapolis

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