It is an interesting experiment for him and his publisher Harvard Business School Press to see if you can give it away and improve sales of a two and a half year old book. Love seeing this kind of experimentation.

Frans wrote a series of posts filling in for us in September 2004 introducing everyone to the book, what sucks about business books, and what he was reading:

9/13/04 -The Medici Effect
9/13/04 -As Summer Fades Away...
9/14/04 -Inside The Medici Effect
9/15/04 -The Style of Writing
9/15/04 -#1: Business Books are often too long
9/16/04 -#2: Example are too well-known
9/17/04 -Unfair Advantage and The Apprentice
9/17/04 -#3: They are often dry
9/17/04 - #4: The Main Point Keeps Getting Repeated
9/19/04 - Some New Books

Basically, The Medici Effect takes you on a fascinating journey to the Intersection: a place where ideas from different fields and cultures meet and collide, ultimately igniting an explosion of extraordinary new discoveries. I calls this proliferation of new ideas “the Medici Effect”—referring to the remarkable burst of creativity enabled by the Medici banking family in Renaissance Italy. The culmination of three critical factors— the movement of people, the convergence of science, and the leap in computation—are increasing the number and types of intersections we can access today. By stepping into these intersections we enable an exponential increase in the number and types of idea combinations that can occur.

This book is not about the Renaissance, nor is it about the Medici family. Instead it is about the effect they created and how we can do the same in our own lives and organizations. It looks at the process behind this explosion of new ideas and the special challenges we face while executing them. May sound like a simple concept – and it is – but if I have done my job the book will not regurgitate the same idea twice and should be surprising you at almost every turn.

A lot of research went into the development of The Medici Effect since theory plays a very big part of it. I devoured thousands of pages, dating back to the origins of creativity and innovation research. Even more interesting were the many interviews I had with people and teams that operated at the Intersection…

You will learn about the origins of the game Magic, about the connection between violence-prevention and health-care, what termites and groundbreaking architecture have in common, and even about Shakira and Shrek. Explore amazing recipes by one of the world’s most innovative chefs and hang out with one of the world’s most prolific inventors (and you will not have heard of this guy, even though he has most definitely affected your life in many ways). Learn how a diverse team managed to read the mind of monkey, about a fashion designer inspired by the mythical creature called the Chimera and understand the true meaning of the “the Medici Effect”!

You can check out more about the book here: www.themedicieffect.com.

More on other books and the process of writing soon.

It is not your typical business book since it sits at the intersection of history, botany and economics. Still it provides a riveting historical context for what happened duirng the boom days of the Internet-craze. I found it particularly interesting that the tulip craze only truly took off when it become OK for tulip traders to pay for tulip bulbs with other tulip bulbs. It was this specific market-acceptance that paved the way for a mind-boggling escalation in prices since it was easy for one bulb to rise in value by 100% in a short period of time if all you had to do was pay for it with another bulb. This is of course reminiscent of the dotcom days when they only way you could really acquire an Internet company was with stock from another Internet company. It allowed for an explosion in asset values. Of course, in the end, someone is always left holding the bag at the end of the ride. In Tuilpomania this “holding the bag event” is specific and traced to a specific night at a pub…

Hello – my name is Frans Johansson. First I want to thank Jack and Todd for the opportunity to share thoughts and ideas over this week. Both of them are on vacation and meanwhile I’ll talk about some interesting books, about the process of writing a business book and, of course, a bit about my new book, published by HBS Press: The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures.

The book’s message is that we have the greatest chance of innovating at the intersection of different disciplines or cultures such as those listed above. It looks at why this is, and outlines the special challenges involved in executing intersectional ideas – and how to overcome them. I will post a longer piece about The Medici Effect tomorrow. Meanwhile you can read more about it out at the site: www.themedicieffect.com.