Frictionless: Why the Future of Everything Will Be Fast, Fluid, and Made Just for You by Christiane Lemieux

Frictionless: Why the Future of Everything Will Be Fast, Fluid, and Made Just for You Reviews

• 
  Alex Shrugged

  This book is a series of interviews with various successful business people who are examples of building a frictionless business... including the author herself. It is quite inspirational, but I caution you that it is not a one-size-fits-all business plan. It is promoting general business principles in this new online business world. I think she does an excellent job of it, but nothing guaranteed.
  
  Note on the definition of "Frictionless", the author means making the items being sold as easy as possible to select, purchase and deliver to the customer as quickly as possible. This means more than having an online presence for your business, but also making decisions easy for the customer by already understanding what your customer is looking for, and once they click on the "Buy Me Now" button to include shipping in the price. It also involves streamlining the manufacturing process so that the customer gets your product in their hands as quickly as possible. You don't hold inventory. You have the manufacturer deliver the product direct, and so forth.
  
  Any problems with this book? I'm not sure if the author understands why it is true that businesses today must keep track of how the business will affect the environment, and the customer's community sensitivities. She simply says that it is true which is good enough to go on with from my point of view.
  
  She also criticizes Milton Friedman's idea that a business's responsibility is to the business (or shareholders) which she interprets as not considering the business's global responsibilities. In fact, in order for a business to survive today it must consider it's global responsibilities. Thus, Milton Friedman was correct, but WHY was he correct?
  
  In today's cultural environment, people will not do business with a business that does NOT consider its global/community responsibilities. What has changed since Friedman's time is that this extends beyond one's local responsibility to sponsor the PTA luncheon or buy ads in the local church newsletter. A business must shoulder its responsibilities sincerely and be able to prove that the business owners/leadership have felt this way from birth... or drop dead. It is that serious... like it or not.
  
  In other words, in Friedman's time you had to actually like kid sports, really support education and actually believe in the religion you were supporting. Otherwise, your customers would shun you for being a hypocrite and a detriment to the community. Nowadays, that community has expanded to a global framework. The things you must sincerely care about has changed and expanded, but it is the same old shuffle. People want to feel that you care about them... whether you do or not.
  
  FYI, from a religious standpoint (that is, Jewish) the Talmud says that when we stand before G-d in judgement the first question G-d will ask is "How did you treat people in business?" That means, "Did you care about the people who were not close to you? Did you treat them fairly and respectfully?"
  
  Any modesty issues in this book? Yes. The F-word was used. The author was quoting someone else, but that someone had started a business selling sex toys for women. They mentioned advertising on porn sites and they were upset that the local transit authority refused ads for women's sex toys while accepting ads for men's erectile dysfunction medicine. Personally, I wish they would accept neither, but fair is fair. If you accept one, you must accept the other. Luckily, this was only a small part of the entire book.
  
  Note that I was listening to the audiobook version. The narrator, Jean Ann Douglass, was a good fit.
  
  I will probably listen to this book again.
  
• 
  Maya Hamid

  Enjoyable for the founder's story but redundant to comprehensively answer the title/background problems.
  
  The book is solid three stars in my review.
  What Makes It 1 Star:*
  - The answer to the frictionless concept is only in chapter 1
  The book tries to show the frictionless world that we are currently in and will be living in with the background question: “Why the future of everything will be fast and fluid and made just for you?" However, what the book tries to answer is already in chapter 1 and lacks collaboration in the following chapters.
  
  - Lack of context
  Some of the stories from the founders in this book don't relate to the frictionless concept. Hardly, only about their personal experience with building a business and trying to solve the challenge. However, the challenge they attempted to solve lacked the context of the frictionless concept.
  
  - A collection of stories to fill in the pages
  The book is more like a collection of stories instead of trying to answer the underlying background. After chapter 2 is only the stories of founders from various companies. In each chapter, the authors explain the frictionless concept from the systems, experience, etc. However, it mostly appears to show only the summary of each founder's stories, with a few explaining the frictionless concept related to that founder.
  
  What Makes It An Additional 2 Stars:**
  - Positive messages
  There are explicit and implicit positive messages for aspiring entrepreneurs or business career pursuits.
  
  - Neat words structures and deliveries
  I like how the authors structure the words and how some feel like a conversation between the readers and the authors.
  
  - Enjoyable to read the founders’ stories from diverse backgrounds
  Although the book is redundant in contents, the stories of the founders are the key that makes the book enjoyable. Especially the founders are from various backgrounds and challenges. These opened my horizon about things like sustainable farming, etc. Despite it only covering the surface.
• 
  John

  First thing to understand is that "frictionless" is a framework for understanding business, but is only one of many lenses you can use to analyze a business idea.
  
  This book looks at many different startups and new businesses using the framework of friction and reducing friction. In some cases, it was a great analysis. In others, it seems like they found a good business story and then had to figure out a way to make it fit the "frictionless" concept.
  
  Then there was the end of the book, which felt like a philosophy of why businesses need to have some sort of social cause, which really didn't seem to relate to the concept of friction at all.
  
  Then the book is peppered with the author referencing how she's applying the concept of reducing friction in her startup. That's fine, but it did feel a lot more like her elevator pitch (and justification of her elevator pitch) than I typically like in a book that's not specifically about a company.
  
  Overall, I'll use the concept of "reducing friction" to analyze my own business progress, and I do enjoy the business stories as individual cases, so the book was worth the read, but like most business books, the main concept could be stated in 10 pages or less, including application examples, without any degradation.
• 
  Amogh Navada

  Frictionless is a concept which is easy to describe. I felt that the book took too long to get to the point and circled around the topic. I also didn’t like the promoting of THE INSIDE in this book. It felt as if the first few chapters where just based on the company and felt like a long painful advertisement. One thing good were the stories and analysis on the topic and it’s impact on society. Would only recommend to people who are really into the topic of frictionless businesses, and people patient enough to read the first few chapters.