Power of Pull


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Hardcover
277 pages
ISBN 9780465019359 Published April 2010
Basic Books (AZ)
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Power of Pull
How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
By John Hagel, Lang Davison, John Seely Brown 

Related Blog Posts
Friday Links on a Monday Afternoon
Posted May 2, 2011 12:13 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

ChangeThis preparations and office birthday celebrations kept me from posting links on Friday, so I thought I'd remedy that by rustling some up for y'all this afternoon.

➻ "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." So begins Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." I was reminded of those words last week while reading Ashlee Vance's feature in Bloomberg Businessweek on why This Tech Bubble Is Different. She interviewed Jeff Hammerbacher, a math genius from Harvard who ended up at Facebook one year out of college.

Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google , and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks."

You might even say it's madness. To be fair, though, a lot of the best minds of our generation are quants on Wall Street—something Hammerbacher also did for a time.

So, why is This Tech Bubble ... Different? Let's look at the extremes: It may cure cancer, and it has produced the fastest growing company of all time—a company whose "legacy is cute e-mail." (It will make more sense once you've read the article.)

➻ Beside curing cancer and perfecting the art of the cute email, "Silicon Valley execs, entrepreneurs, and activists are helping advance America's overseas goals through technology." E.B. Boyn and Rachel Z. Arndt interviewed a number of these folks about "techplomacy" for Fast Company's May issue. They include:

Jason Liebman, telling the story of his organization's beginnings, talks about an unlikely inspiration: "In 2007, coalition forces found an Al Qaeda manual on how to be a terrorist. We said, 'Hey, let's create an alternate manual to use tools to promote nonviolent social change.'"

➻ Michael Totty asked three experts for help Making Sense of It All: Getting Knowledge From Information. They each gave him a recommended reading list on "how businesses can harness technology to make the most of information." Amit Basu, the Carr P. Collins chair in management information systems at the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University, chose The Adventures of an IT Leader by Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan and Shannon O'Donnell, and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Thomas H. Davenport, the president's distinguished professor of IT and management at Babson College, recommended some very distinguished and cerebral texts in The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, and Making the Invisible Visible: How Companies Win with the Right Information, People and IT by Donald Marchand, William Kettinger and John Rollins. All good books to my knowledge—meaning I haven't read any of them, excepting Taleb's tome. Nilofer Merchant, the author of The New How, chose books that I know well and would definitely second for recommendation:

I've been trying to tell people how important Lisa Gansky's book is since it was published, and it seems Ms. Merchant agress. She writes:

This is an important book, in that Ms. Gansky helps us name an important trend that will shape our culture—and therefore our technology products—over the next several decades. She argues that the companies that will win will be the ones that enable sharing, via community participation and trust.

To get the summaries of the other recommendations, head over to Michael Toddy's piece in the Wall Street Journal. (Tip of the hat to Portfolio Javelin for the story.)

➻ Between the Lines' Peter Cox and Jamie Mollart interviewed Seth Godin in April about The New Face of Publishing (and, of course, about his new publishing venture, The Domino Project). Comparing how the Internet and mp3 files changed the music industry to what may be around the corner for publishing, he says:

I am certain that a similar fate lies in the future of the book industry. We are re not going to necessarily read less. I think we are probably going to chop down fewer trees. But one thing I'm sure of is that the nature of publishing—which is based on scarcity and based on ... a top-down, corporate risk-taking mindset—is going to be replaced, as the Internet replaces everything, with one that's based on connection and abundance. And what we are trying to do with the Domino Project is experiment and fail and demonstrate some lessons. So, hopefully, people will copy our ideas because I firmly love books and I hope that they thrive for another 500 years.

I agree with that last sentiment. I plan on living until I'm 547 years old (so far, so good) so I can catch up with everything on my current reading list, but hope I'm still able to pick up a few new releases and new ideas in 2483.

➻ And how do we filter all of the information that continues to be published? Well, it turns out that what Eli Pariser has termed The Filter Bubble is doing some of that work for us already, and it may be doing a poor job of it. Speaking of the Internet (and how it's being tailored to our preferences) at this year's TED conference, he said:

I was sure that it was going to be great for democracy and for our society. But, there's this kind of shift in how information is flowing online, and it's invisible, and if we don't pay attention to it, it could be a real problem. I first noticed this in a place I spend a lot of time—my Facebook page. I'm progressive politically (big surprise), but I've always gone out of my way to meet conservatives. I like hearing what they're thinking about, I like seeing what they link to, I like learning a thing or two. And so I was kind of surprised when I noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed. And what it turned out was going on was that Facebook was looking at which links I was clicked on, and it was noticing that, actually, I was clicking more on my liberal friends links than on my conservative friends links. And, without consulting me about it, it had edited them out—they disappeared. Facebook isn't the only place that is doing this invisible, algorithmic editing of the web. Google is doing it to. If I search for something and you search for something—even right now, at the very same time—we may get very different search results. Even if you're logged out, one engineer told me, there are 57 signals that Google looks at—everything from what kind of computer you're on, to what kind of browser you're using, to where you're located—that it uses to personally tailor your query results.

The problem with this, as Pariser sees it, is that "you don't actually see what gets edited out" or get a "balanced information diet." He goes on to explain how we've gone from human gatekeepers of information to algorithmic ones, and how we need the new gatekeepers to encode in their algorithms "a sense of the public life" and "a sense of civic responsibility."

The Filter Bubble is due out next week.

➻ It's like the echo of an echo.



The Best Business Books of 2010 from strategy + business
Posted Nov. 24, 2010 10:28 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

strategy + business's "best of" list is always a special treat—in large part because it's never just a list, but a series of essays. The magazine gathers together a different team of experts each year, and each takes the task of writing on their chosen category and the books in it. I've listed their picks below, linking to the essays at the head of each category.

On the Economy, The Fog of Panic by David Warsh

On Leadership, Highlights in a Low Year by Walter Kiechel III

On Innovation, Innovation as a Social Act by Krisztina “Z” Holly

On China, Probing China’s Infrastructure by Sheridan Prasso

On Human Capital, Talent Redefined by Sally Helgesen

On the Human Mind, You Are What You Think by Judith E. Glaser

On Management, The Chorus Takes a Bow by David K. Hurst

On Biography & History, True Tales of Fortune by James O’Toole

The covers below represent s + b's Top Shelf—the best books of each category.

As Theodore Kinni writes in his introduction to the essays:

Two years after the financial collapse, the idea of hunkering down and waiting for a return to business as usual—as people did in previous recessions—seems a less and less viable strategy. But what should you do instead?

In this edition of our annual review of the year’s best business books, you will find a reading list that offers intriguing and compelling answers to this question.

We've been following this list since 2003, and you can peruse past year's lists with the links below.

2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009



Friday Links
Posted Oct. 2010 8:44 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

➻ Chris Trimble, author of The Other Side of Innovation, wrote On the Differences Between Innovation and Cooking Chili yesterday at the Harvard Business Review. He sums it all up at the end:

... I'm comfortable with my casual approach to experimentation with chili. I always get unambiguous, same-day feedback, such as bowls returned to the kitchen still full of chili.

Business experiments aren't like that. Results are usually delayed and incomplete, and you simply can't expect to learn under such conditions without discipline.

Also at the Harvard Business Review, Umair Haque picked up a topic from the authors of The Power of Pull—institutional innovation—and developed his own Institutional Innovation Manifesto. Eight institutions he cites as "musty, moldy, and stale, remnant of the industrial age ... failing to nourish the economy" are the mall, the bank, the stock market, the IPO, the job, the bottom line, the corporation, and the board. Those are all pretty solid institutions that define much of our economy at the moment, so the question about what replaces them are rather enormous. As Haque writes:

Perhaps because those questions are so big, they feel more than a little bit daunting. But the time to be dauntless is now. Because whether we like it or not, a Great Stagnation is choking us in the belching, noxious fumes of an industrial age, and it won't go away just because we want it to.

We certainly do need to experiment, add some new ingredients in, cut back on others. But, as Trimble says, While "Innovation is experimentation," experimentation does not always lead to innovation. The latter requires discipline.

➻ It also requires a good saleman, lots of them, to sell the ideas, products, and services of the new economy. Unfortunately, as James Ledbetter reported is Slate recently, there's been a Death of a Salesman. Of Lots of Them, Actually. Ledbetter discusses how, in the past, "Getting people to spend their money became a kind of secular religion that was necessary to overthrow an older Puritan order" and the more recent trend of cutting salespeople out of transactions—the most obvious being online sales—and how that may affect society.

We might be better off without that extravagance. But it's still the case that for much of recent American history, sales jobs functioned as a pillar of the middle class. Over the last few decades, the American economy has generated a large number of high-skill, high-paying jobs, and a large number of low-skilled, low-paying jobs. The middle, however, is being "hollowed out," in the phrase David Autor used in an economic paper published in April, and sales is a major component of that shrinking middle. The strength of sales jobs is that they can be reasonably high-paying but typically don't require technical training or other specialized skills. When those jobs disappear, the people who hold them will often be pushed down the wage ladder or even out of the workforce. Sixty years after Willy Loman, that is our tragedy.

As Willy Loman himself said "You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit."

➻ And it's not just salesman that may be on their way out. As many others do, Michael Drew believes the traditional publishing model is doomed, and that 2012 [will be] The End of the Publishing Industry as We Know It.

➻ Christopher Mims isn't convinced, writing at The Technology Review that The Death of the Book has Been Greatly Exaggerated.

"The backlash against e-books by those who aren't so in love with technology for its own sake has yet to begin, but it's coming. [...]

And as for the death-by-2015 predictions of [Nicholas] Negroponte, it's just as likely that as the ranks of the early adopters get saturated, adoption of e-books will slow. The reason is simple: unlike the move from CDs to MP3s, there is no easy way to convert our existing stock of books to e-readers. And unlike the move from records and tapes to CDs, it's not immediately clear that an e-book is in all respects better than what it succeeds.

Hat tip to Shelf Awareness.

➻ Regardless of what happens in publishing, the Great Recession is changing consumer buying habits. Inc. magazine's Leigh Buchanan sat down in August with John Gerzema of Young and Rubicam, author of the soon-to-be-released Spend Shift to try to get a better Understanding [of] the Consumer of the Future. Gerzema counsels that:

It's a mistake to assume that our country is composed of big blocs of people who hold wildly varying values. You could make quite a long list of values held in common across all social and economic groups. Transparency, honesty, kindness, good stewardship, even humor, work in businesses at all times.

He also says that "Irony isn't dead. ... Cynicism is dead." God, I hope so.

➻ The Atlantic's John Hudson asked this week, Is Malcolm Gladwell Wrong About Twitter? (And, if you're wondering, Gladwell thinks Twitter is Small Change.)

I don't really have anything to say about or add to the discussion.

➻ 800-CEO-READ went on a field trip to see Ride, Rise, Roar last night.



Pulling
Posted April 15, 2010 9:52 a.m. by jon
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

With developments in technology, and the effects they are having on our lives; how we think, research, question, and seek, there's a lot to be said about how we're changing how we work and interact. Two recent books address that through the definition of 'Pull,' David Siegel's Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business and John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison's The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion.

Siegel's book talks about how the web is changing, and how it will infiltrate more and more into our lives though our interaction with it (working in the cloud) and physical material (ex. buildings ordering their own supplies). It's important to understand these changes in order to adapt our businesses to them. Because, as Siegel states, "It isn't going to be easy, and you don't have any choice." As unpleasant as that sounds, our jobs will change drastically, and the effort of change will reveal many rewards with how we interact with customers, provide better services, and survive in the world going forward.

The lack of choice that Siegel mentions is reflected in Hagel, Brown, and Davison's focus on how the concept of pull requires personal commitment, ambition, and voluntary action. The author's state:

"Pull is a very different approach, one that works at three primary levels, each of which builds on the others. At the most basic level, pull helps us to find and access people and resources when we need them. At a second level, pull is the ability to attract people and resources to you that are relevand and valuable, even if you wer not even aware before that they existed. Think here of serendipity rather than search. Finally, in a world of mounting pressure and unforeseen opportunities, we need to cultivate a third level of pull-the ability to pull from within ourselves the insight and performance required to more effectively achieve our potential."

The lesson here is that push programs tell you what to do, and pull programs give you the opportunity to coordinate your own knowledge and experience. Both books provide great insight into the quickly changing world of information. On the surface, they are books about technology and business, but on a deeper level, reveal much more about the future of communication, culture, and people.




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