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Angelo Coppola

Vice President of Marketing, Axosoft; I dabble in: sketching, photoshop as a painting tool, making music  and sound effects with garageband.  Currently writing Tao of Marketing.

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My Last 3 Books
  • Outliers: The Story of Success
    Outliers: The Story of Success
    by Malcolm Gladwell

    Gladwell′s book about how a lot of hard work and good luck makes those who push the edges who they are. Awesomely enjoyable audiobook for the commute.

  • Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
    Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
    by Seth Godin

    Not a formula for creating tribes, but has the potential to motivate readers to look at his world a little differently...and possibly make good things happen.

  • Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart
    Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart
    by Ian Ayres

    The power of analytics and how the world‛s data is helping us to make better decisions. Great as an audiobook.

Angelo Coppola:

  • is Vice President of Marketing at Axosoft, a dynamic and fast-growing software company headquartered in Scottsdale, AZ.  Its flagship product is OnTime, a powerful project management and task tracking application for software development teams.  The company enjoys trying new things, including TransferBigFiles.com and iPhone apps.  
  • is writing The Tao of Marketing, which appears here, at SidewaysKarma.com (originally at blogzoopa.com).
  • enjoys being artistic, whether sketching with pencil and paper, painting with PhotoShop or making music and sound effects with GarageBand.  
  • is a guest blogger on ShipSoftwareOnTime.com and AboutScrum.com.  
  • spends much of his free time with his wife, 3 daughters, and 3 dogs.  
  • is a non-academic philosopher.

The Tao Te Ching

The Tao Te Ching (or Dao De Jing) is a classic Chinese Text, written (according to tradition) by Lao Tzu some time around the 6th century BC.  Its title roughly translates to "The Book of the Way and Virtue."  The style of the text is poetic, and it encourages multiple interpretations.  The ideas it conveys have been applied to everyday life, war, games, love, parenting...and you name it.

My own interpretation of the Tao Te Ching is reality-based, unlike more mystical translations.  And, I consider its poetic style ideally suited for conveying philosophical ideas.  Our minds are very good at creating and maintaining a certain world view, and it excels at detecting (and discarding) ideas that contradict its world view.  This is where good poetry can be so effective -- it provides a method for side-stepping the mind's propensity for guarding its world view.

The Tao of Marketing

I decided to write a marketing version of the Tao Te Ching in around 2005, mainly as a mental exercise.  One that would hopefully help me to challange my own marketing world-view, and keep "marketing" fresh for me.  Marketing is something I've done professionally for over 15 years, and it is easy to think of marketing as the series of tasks I do, design, or direct.

That's dangerous.

When marketing is reduced to a series of steps, it becomes very easy to focus on what "needs to be done" instead of what is really important.  If your work involves anything remotely authentic, you have important things to do. 

By sharing The Tao of Marketing, it's my hope that anyone who reads it will both enjoy it and at the same time side-step their own marketing world view for just a moment -- just long enough to rediscover or discover something new about his/her market and how s/he interacts with it.

This Blog

The Sideways Karma blog is where I will publish new chapters of the Tao of Marketing along with opinion pieces about marketing and business, mostly focused on the tech industry.  You can subscribe using the options at the top of the right sidebar on each page.  Feel free to email me.