You need to save some mental, physical, and emotional resources for enhancing your product after you ship. A revolution is a triathlon, not a hundred-yard dash--it requires long distance stamina and multiple skills such as creating, churning, and evangelizing.

Death Magnet #1: The best product wins

....  Unfortunately, the best products don't necessarily win if another product is, at a minimum, sufficient plus quick to market, well promoted, and revised (churned) accordingly.

Why? Because of the Law of Increasing Returns. The more a product sells, the easier it is to sell. Other products may be better, but people get locked into a product and sales snowball even though it may be inferior.

If someone tells you like you eat like a bird, the implication is that you don't eat much. Yet for their body weight, birds eat a lot. The peripatetic hummingbird, for example, eats the equivalent of 50 percent of its weight every day. (If you're a 200-pound male, imagine eating 100 pounds of food every day!)

Chances are no one will tell you that you poop like an elephant because elephants poop 165 pounds per day. So far you're probably thinking, "Guy is into the weirdest things. No wonder Apple had so many problems." However, there two are messages for revolutionaries in these biological facts.

First, a successful revolutionary relentlessly searches for, consumes, and absorbs knowledge, about the industry , customers, and competition. You do this by pressing the flesh of your customers, attending seminars and trade shows, reading journals, and browsing the internet.

Second, you need to spread the large amount of information knowledge that you've gained--pooping like an elephant. This means sharing information and discoveries with your fellow employees and occasionally even with your competitors.

Catalyze a Virtual Community

Many companies think that building a virtual community is as simple as throwing up a cool Web site that compels people to visit every day. Dream on. These sites are commercials, not communities. If you want to build a virtual community, here are the principles to implement:

Community before commerce. In the words of John Hagel III and Arthur G. Armstrong (authors of Net.Gain), "put community before commerce." That is, the purpose of these efforts is to build a community, not sell more stuff, so cool it on the commercialism. The community exists for its own benefit, not yours.

Communication comes next. Build in the capability for people to communicate with each other via message boards and Internet mail lists. Peer-to-peer communication is more important than being able to communicate with the company. You're hosting the event, but it's a cocktail party, not a lecture.

Place the community's interests above your own. The big picture is that a vibrant community will help you, but getting to this place means sacrificing short-term interests. For example, people should be able to freely discuss and endorse competitive products.

Tolerate criticism. Not only should peple feel free to plug competitive products, they should be able to criticize your own. This freedom produces two desirable results: first, good public relations because tolerating criticism on a company-sponsored site is unheard of; second, free and voluminous customer feedback.

Encourage "personalities." Remember how one of the keys to the success of MTV was veejays with an attitude? The same is true of a Web site, so encourage your employees to develop online personalities to show that corporate thought police don't control your site.

Great leaders are paradoxical. They catalyze, rather control, the work of their teams. They have an overarching vision for the team but are not autocratic in the realization of this vision. Their eyes are open to whatever results occur--not just planned goals, because serendipity is a great innovator.

The two most important things about people on a revolutionary team are their ability and passion. Their educational level or work experience is meaningless--most of the engineers who did ground-breaking work of the Macintosh design didn't even graduate from college.

Great teams are usually small--under fifty in total head count. (There are few examples of a team made up of hundreds of people who created anything revolutionary.) Big teams aren't conducive to revolutionary products because such products require a high degree of single-mindedness, unity, and unreasonable passion.

Think different in order to change the rules. By definition, if you don't change the rules you aren't a revolutionary, and if you don't think different, you won't change the rules.

Eating your own dog food -- using your own products -- is probably the best way to reinforce the urgency of churning. Kelly Johnson, the leader of Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works, once explained why he flew with test pilots in experimental aircraft: "I figured I needed to have hell scared out of me once a year in order to keep a proper balance and viewpoint on designing new aircraft."

The first 90 percent of a revolution is creating the product or service; the second 90 percent is evangelizing it. At the beginning of a revolution, you need evangelists, not sales, because leverage spreads news.