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276 pages
ISBN 9780393072228 Published June 2010
W. W. Norton & Company
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Posted July 25, 2011 10:36 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
We were discussing the new Google eReader via email here last week, when Roy replied with the following:
Big Shock: Roy has never used Google anything. I think it's a government conspiracy. Happy Tuesday!
Now, I don't know that Roy thinks it's literally a government conspiracy, but I do know that he is concerned, as many are, about one company having that much knowledge of, access to, and control over our personal information—even if that company's unofficial motto is "don't be evil." I use Google for many things, so they could potentially know a lot about me if they wanted to. And, while I'm somewhat wary of that, and worry about the issue of privacy in general online, I don't think it's a conspiracy to gather information on us. (Though, if it were a government conspiracy to do so, would that better or worse than if it were a corporate conspiracy? And what if it is a government conspiracy, but not of the United States government. What if it's a conspiracy of the city council of Mountain View, California being led by Councilmember John Inks. We're on to you, Inks!)
All that said, if Roy is concerned about Google's effect on our privacy specifically, or culture in general, I think he is right in his decision not to use it. He's just casting his vote. Pre-Internet, we mostly voted with our pocket books for businesses, charities, churches, etc. That was what determined our communities. Yes, there were generational movements in which people voted with their feet and collective voices on specific topics such as civil rights and women's suffrage that were paradigm shifts in our history, and we've always gone to the polls to elect our representatives in government, but our everyday votes for which businesses to support with our hard-earned dollars was the driving force of our everyday lives and communities. With Google and so many other companies on the Internet, we're now voting with our fingertips, with our behavior and usage online, and if one is wary of Google monopolizing our information or our online lives, the only way to vote against it is to not use it—not use their search engine or email, document or picture hosting, reader or calender. Or, if one doesn't like Facebook's privacy or copyright policies, the only way to not condone them is to leave Facebook.
Personally, I am more concerned about how the internet is affecting public knowledge in general, and my brain in particular. Nick Carr tackled these issues in his 2008 Atlantic article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? He addressed it further, quite brilliantly at book length, last year in The Shallows, and he touched upon the topic again recently after the release of a study in Science. From his post about how Google is creating Minds like sieves:
The study, "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips," was conducted by three psychologists: Betsy Sparrow, of Columbia University; Jenny Liu, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison; and Daniel Wegner, of Harvard. They conducted a series of four experiments aimed at answering this question: Does our awareness of our ability to use Google to quickly find any fact or other bit of information influence the way our brains form memories? The answer, they discovered, is yes: "when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it." The findings suggest, the researchers write, "that processes of human memory are adapting to the advent of new computing and communication technology."
I'm not suggesting anyone stop using the great tools that Google provides. I'm not going to stop using Google anytime soon. In fact, even though I'm usually a late adopter of new technology and social networks, I've even been tinkering around with Google+ a bit. But I do think there are a lot of things to to consider when we bring new technologies into our lives—especially addictive technologies like television and social networking sites, and technologies we use as a mental crutch like search engines or Google maps. We should be mindful of what we're adopting into our lives, how we're doing so, and how it's affecting us. Like everything in a democracy, the onus is on us to stay informed of the issues and cast our vote. And there are a great number of books on these topics, covering the nearly miraculous strides being made in information technology and some of the side effects of those advances. Some pertinent to the story of Google include:
- Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta, Penguin Press
- What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis, Collins Business
- The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) by Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of California Press
- In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy, Simon & Schuster
- The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu, Knopf
- The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You by Eli Pariser, Penguin Press
- The Numerati by Stephen Baker, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Just as we monitor the nutritional value of what we eat, we should remain vigilant in monitoring our intellectual intake. And, these books all look at the larger issues of how Google is affecting our lives and society, serving as the "nutritional facts" of our intellectual diets.
The 2011 Pulitzer Prize - Is There No Justice?
Posted April 19, 2011 3:42 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
Also of note, for the first time ever a Pulitzer Prize was awarded to a series that did not appear in print—ProPublica's online series The Wall Street Money Machine by Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein. It was given to them "for their exposure of questionable practices on Wall Street that contributed to the nation’s economic meltdown, using digital tools to help explain the complex subject to lay readers." As The New York Times reported, "Corporate malfeasance was a theme in the awards this year."
And, finally, we'd like to note and congratulate our hometown newspaper, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal, which took home the award for explanatory reporting "for their lucid examination of an epic effort to use genetic technology to save a 4-year-old boy imperiled by a mysterious disease." In fact, congratulations to all the winners! If you'd like to read more or see a list of all the winners, head to The New York Times roundup or visit the Pulitzer Prize website.
Friday Links
Posted March 4, 2011 6:27 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ The latest episode of The Business Beat has been released, and it's an episode against conformity. It includes Publisher Adrian Zackheim discussing non-conformity in business, and the program's new hosts, Brooke Carey and Eric Meyers, who talk about two books that changed their perspective towards editing. It also has Josh Kaufman, author of The Personal MBA, and Hugh MacLeod, who talks about his Evil Plans (more on that book next up in the links). And, as always, our own Jack Covert talks about a business book classic—this time going with First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, explaining "the 12 questions every manager should ask their employees."
➻ I'm a big fan of Matthew May, and as he recently displayed in his Guru Review of Evil Plans, Matthew May is a big fan of Hugh MacLeod. After telling you why he's such a fan and explaining what he calls "the lunatic fringe," May gives one of the more succinct descriptions of Hugh's new book that I've seen:
There are roughly 40 five-page chapters, the content of which is not earth-shatteringly new. What's new, though, and what's so enjoyable and provocative, is the delivery of those messages, and the entertaining stories and cartoons that accompany them. In other words, it's not so much what MacLeod says, it's how how he says it. It's like music: there are about a half dozen recurring themes in songs, but it's the choice of words and style of delivery that makes us listen.
He then goes on to give you a "baker's dozen of [his] favorites for sampling," including "In the Internet era, if people on the other side of the planet aren't loving what you do, you're doing something wrong" and "The biggest problem of the Western world is oversupply. Don't let it be yours."
➻ I don't know if you've heard, but there's a lot of people carrying signs here in Wisconsin lately. I wasn't expecting a business book author to weigh in publicly on what's happening here in Wisconsin, but Samuel A. Culbert, author of Get Rid of the Performance Review! How Companies Can Stop Intimidating, Start Managing—and Focus on What Really Matters jumped into the fray on Tuesday with an op-ed in The New York Times about Why Your Boss Is Wrong About You.
In the raging battle over union rights in Wisconsin, those seeking to curtail collective bargaining for state employees have advanced an argument that seems hard to resist: It will make it easier to reward those workers who perform the best. What could be fairer than that?
If only that were true. As anybody who has ever worked in any institution—private or public—knows, one of the primary ways employee effectiveness is judged is the performance review. And nothing could be less fair than that.
Okay, so what's the solution then. Are there any "fair" options? Culbert believes so:
Is there a way out? I believe there is, and it works for both government and business. It’s something I call the performance preview. Instead of top-down reviews, both boss and subordinate are held responsible for setting goals and achieving results. No longer will only the subordinate be held accountable for the often arbitrary metrics that the boss creates. Instead, bosses are taught how to truly manage, and learn that it’s in their interest to listen to their subordinates to get the results the taxpayer is counting on.
The author went on to note that "the police department in Madison, Wis., has used such a program since the late 1980s with considerable effectiveness." It sounds like a reasonable systemic solution to me, but I'm not sure reasonable solutions are what anybody is after here anymore.
➻ Nicholas Carr, the author of The Shallows, recently reviewed James Gleik's upcoming The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood.
In his formidable new book, The Information, Gleick explains how we’ve progressed from seeing information as the expression of human thought and emotion to looking at it as a commodity that can be processed, like wheat or plutonium. It’s a long, complicated, and important story, beginning with tribal drummers and ending with quantum physics, and in Gleick’s hands it’s also a mesmerizing one.
Carr writes later in the review that "As a celebration of human ingenuity, The Information is a deeply hopeful book" but ultimately comes to the conclusion that when it comes to real understanding, we may Drowning in Beeps
In a previous post about GalleyCat's list of Top 10 Pirated eBooks at The Pirate Bay, Carr explains why his next book will be called The Code of Sex: Ten Secrets for Using Math to Keep Her Satisfied and Hungry for More, and promises that it will be the most pirated book of all time. (You really have to click on the GalleyCat link or Carr's original post for this to make sense.)
➻ Joe Posnanski, author of The Soul of Baseball and The Machine, offered up some random Thoughts In a Bookstore on his Sprots Illustrated blog. Like all of Joe's posts, it's "curiously long," and in some places ventures dangerously close to Andy Rooney territory (especially the part about the check out counter), but if you're a lover of bookstores as Joe is (and we are), I think you'll find it a fun read—even though it's conclusion is a little depressing. Speaking of book placement in stores, which publishers fight madly for, he writes:
One thing I learned after writing my books is that you have no chance to sell any quantity of books in the big bookstores unless those books are placed on a table in front of the store. It’s called placement, I guess, and it’s extremely important. Books that never get on one of those front tables are apparently doomed, and so publishers will do many things to get their books placed in front—on the “New Arrivals” table, on the “Stuff We’re Reading” table, on the “Critically Acclaimed” table, on the “Dean Koontz” table.
I have little doubt that the “front of the store table” theory is based on countless amounts of sound research. And the theory itself seems sound. You would expect that people looking to browse for books are likely to stay near the front of the store and see what new and interesting books have been put out for them.
I bring all this up because once again I’m in the front of the store looking at the books on the tables … and NOBODY ELSE is here. The bookstore is actually pretty jammed. People are milling around the fiction, the diet books, they are wandering through the kids section, there are one or two people in every aisle and a bunch in the history section. But nobody is up here with me browsing through the new books.
It's a crazy business, all right.
➻ One of the great things about the industry is that it contains people like Jack Covert, who sent me the following video earlier this week.
Friday Links (On a Snowy Monday Afternoon)
Posted Jan. 10, 2011 8:50 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
It's been a while since we linked up a Friday afternoon, and since I didn't get the chance to do it last Friday, I thought I'd do so today.
➻ Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus, contributed an article to the current issue of Foreign Affairs about The Political Power of Social Media. You'll need to purchase the full length article ($0.99) if you're not an active subscriber, or you can read about how Shirky squares the circle (and a little about Evgeny Morozovover's new book, The Net Delusion) over at The Economist. From that review:
For wizened cyberpunks, it is a seemingly timeless debate: does the internet inherently promote openness and democracy, or can it just as easily strengthen the hand of authoritarian regimes? A decade ago Andrew Shapiro's book The Control Revolution argued the former, while Shanthi Kalathil's and Taylor Boas's tome Open Networks, Closed Regimes dissented. This week sees the publication of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov, which sides with the pessimists. [...] Between the cyber-utopians and cyber-pessimists, Mr Shirky has articulated an astute framework and found a sensible middle ground.
Head on over to The Economist's review of the argument to read more about Shirky's "three principal contributions to the debate."
➻ Our dear friend and former colleague Daniel Goldin, now the proprieter of Boswell Book Company on Milwaukee's East Side, was featured on NPR's Morning Edition last month with Stusan Stamberg to pick his favorite books of 2010 and answer the question, "Where's the craic?" (You have to actually listen to the story to get the answer to that question, but Daniel is the first bookseller to speak in the story, so you don't have to wait too long.)
➻ 2010 might have been the year of the e-reader, but Alexander Chee focused more on I, Reader is his essay at The Morning News in late November. Talking about his first experience in e-book reading—reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea on the train with the Kindle app on his phone—and it's effect on him, he writes:
Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, made a big splash this year, presenting an elegant argument about the way we’re being disarrayed. The problems are structural, he argues: This is our brain; this is our brain on the internet. One favorite quote: “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” Yes, I thought. Me too.
When his book appeared, I’d more or less accepted that this had also somehow happened to me, my brain remapped by the internet. But now with my phone-sized e-reader that sometimes took calls, now that I was walking and reading again the way I did as a child, reading fiction, not news, I noticed during the Gulf oil spill I no longer cared quite as much about the latest shitty thing happening in American politics that was out of my control (and that also made me feel paralyzed by it). Instead, there I was on the train, reading about a giant glowing non-gasoline-burning submarine and wondering why the scientists who borrowed inspiration from science fiction never thought of using that as a tech model.
It's not an entirely rose-tinted reflection of e-readers, but Chee's essay is a reminder that, as a reader, no matter how you get them, "There is always going to be a book that saves you."
➻ Steve Denning, author of The Leader's Guide to Storytelling and The Leader's Guide to Radical Management, has written a great, lengthy review of Umair Haque's New Capitalist Manifesto. In it, Denning writes:
Haque believes in firms that have a philosophy, particularly “a philosophy that emphasizes the first, fundamental principle of value creation, rather than planning planning a strategy focused on value extraction.” There is thus a shift from an overriding preoccupation with financial value and costs to instilling real values that create the basis for generating thick value that makes a difference in people’s lives.
The New Capitalist Manifesto was released by Harvard Business School Press last week.
➻ It's a bit old now, but just in case you missed it, The New York Times Sunday Book Review picked 100 Notable Books of 2010. The books on the list that I feel could fit in the business category (some loosely) are:
- All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis by Bethany McLean & Joe Nocera, Portfolio
- Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership by Lewis Hyde, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley, Knopf Publishing Group
- Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler , Harper
- Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg, The Penguin Press
- Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent, Scribner Book Company
For those interested, there are many quality titles on the list that are not business books, as well. It's worth a gander.
➻ Bethany McLean, coauthor of All the Devils are Here—the only book in the list above that fits neatly into the business category—wrote an Op-Ed last week asking Who Want a 30-Year Mortgage?
It turns out a lot of people do, but banks aren't particularly keen on them. McLean looks at the promises coming from both sides of the aisle in Washington and tries to square them with reality, writing:
Almost certainly, any 30-year product would be offered on a more limited basis and at a higher price than it is today. How much higher, it’s hard to say. In the pre-crisis days, Fannie used to argue that its guarantee enabled consumers to pay one quarter to one half of a percentage point less in annual interest on their mortgages; today, [William] Gross, [the co-founder and managing director of the investment firm Pimco], says that mortgages without a government guarantee would cost at least several percentage points more. If his numbers are right, then mortgages—and 30-year mortgages in particular—would be far more expensive, and the pool of American homebuyers would shrink.
This may well be the right long-term answer. After all, other countries manage fine without the widespread availability of 30-year fixed-rate mortgages. But is there an American politician alive who would accept responsibility for depressing the housing market further?
I think she's implying that the answer is "no," but that rhetorical question is not the end of her point.
➻ Our next article came to life after Bhob Rainey "was recently asked by a student to submit an op-ed column for the Loyola New Orleans student paper, The Maroon." For such a sanguine-sounding publication, Rainey chose a (seemingly) rather blue topic—boredom. Writing that "A radical boredom could remind us that reality is much more vast and exciting than common sense allows," he sums up his article with a brilliant (and creative?) quote from Kenneth Goldsmith:
Creativity is such a bankrupt concept in our culture… such an over used cliché, and yet something held so highly esteemed, still, that in order to truly be creative and truly find a way out of that we need to employ a strategy of opposites—we need to be uncreative, we need to be boring, we need to be everything that the culture claims creativity isn’t.
How boring.
➻ "Try to ride on waves of activity... in every direction" —Junip (Jose Gonzalez/Elias Araya/Tobias Winterkorn)
Jack Covert Selects – Overconnected
Posted Dec. 10, 2010 10:16 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
As we move from an industrial era mindset that new technologies have made obsolete, our ability to be plugged in and instantly connected has introduced us to unpredicted challenges and dangers. Recent books like The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus, and Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants all look at the way technology affects the way we think or have actually recreated how we think.
The title of this book, Overconnected, could lead you to believe that this is a book about email, iPhones and the other distractions that seem to direct our modern lives. Instead, author William Davidow is more concerned about how strong connections, instead of idyllically solving problems, have worked in the other direction:
Strong connections, it turns out, have only magnified the problems, turning local problems into national ones and national crises into international ones. Now, as all other forms of interconnections have improved, and as those interconnections have grown more robust thanks to the Internet, society is increasingly subject to interdependencies—not always for the better.
Being connected has certainly made us more efficient. But there’s now the risk of reacting so quickly that we don’t give the thought we might have given to our actions and reactions even twenty years ago. Looking at the 2008 financial crisis, Davidow writes:
It is impossible to really understand what went on in the worldwide economic crisis of 2008 without examining the role that the Internet played in supercharging it. Without the Internet, the credit mess would have undoubtedly caused a recession of some magnitude. While we can never measure the Internet’s full effects, we know that it made the current crisis larger, more widespread, and more virulent. It not only carried the information, it helped spread what is known as a “thought contagion.” That is, the rate at which greed and fearmongering took place—via instant access to news and online rumors—was accelerated to unprecedented levels.
This is a book that takes a serious and scholarly look at world-wide technological change. He gives us the history of the Internet and then uses the economic crisis in Iceland as a case study. This is a book that will be talked about for years to come, written by a person who is not lamenting our loss of time but warning us of the larger new threats being overconnected brings into our lives.
