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Posted Jan. 8, 2010 5:36 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
I wrote the following article for our first issue of In the Books, released two short years ago, but it seems unbelievably quaint now. Though it has mostly died down, the rise of Web 2.0 and the effects it would have on our culture and the creative economy was a huge debate two years ago. I tried to capture some of those discussions by looking at the books published on the issue in 2007.
We the Internet BY DYLAN SCHLEICHER
It has been quite a few years since Al Gore invented the Internet in the hope of creating a more involved, engaged, and responsive democracy. And while his political dreams for the world wide web have yet to be realized, I think we can agree it has changed how we interact and do business.
The advent of what tech-guru Tim O’Reilly has dubbed Web 2.0 is now changing the rules and very nature of the Web itself. Web 2.0 is the new Internet of web blogs, open source technology and “wikis,” social networking and user-generated content. It is something other than the “publish and browse” Internet where people act as passive spectators of company brochures and magazine articles. It is something we interact with, a community that anyone who has access to a computer can be a part of. One thing this new Internet can’t yet capture and contain, however, is an extended and nuanced conversation about its own existence, and so in an ironic twist, books—a six hundred-year-old technology—are being written about it.
Web 2.0 is many things to many people. It has been described most famously in business literature as The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowieki, and by Chris Anderson as The Long Tail of commerce. This year, David Weinberger has written that it is where Everything is Miscellaneous, and Andrew Keen has called it The Cult of the Amateur.
In Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger discusses how this new incarnation of the Internet is scattering information into miscellaneous networks, where items are “jumbled digitally and sorted out only when and how a user wants to look for them.” He sees the rise of this digital (dis)organization as the liberation of information from its confinement in the physical space of books and libraries. This web of information is as scattered as it is in the natural world, and we must gather and interpret it for ourselves, and with each other, accordingly:
Deciding what to believe is now our burden. It always was, but in the paper-order world where publishing was so expensive that we needed people to be filterers, it was easier to think our passivity was an inevitable part of learning; we thought knowledge just worked that way (143).
For 2,500 years, we’ve been told that knowledge is our species’ destiny and calling. Now we can see for ourselves that knowledge isn’t in our heads: It is between us. It emerges from public and social thought and it stays there, because social knowing, like the global conversations that give rise to it, is never finished (147).
Andrew Keen has a different take on the subject. In The Cult of the Amateur, he counters what he sees as the irrational exuberance of Web 2.0 utopians with a warning about the economic viability of the new Web and the destructive effect it may have on our culture as a whole. He has seen the Web’s decimation of the traditional music industry, and doesn’t foresee much better for other traditional media outlets. Despite his possibly overly disparaging view of bloggers as “infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters,” he does raise valid concerns about the Internet as it presently exists. He laments the poor quality of most amateur-created content currently available on
the Internet, and wonders how and where credentialed, vetted and substantiated reporting has a place in the brave new world of Web 2.0:
Before Web 2.0, our collective intellectual history has been one driven by the careful aggregation of truth—through professionally edited books and reference materials, newspapers, in radio and television. But as all information becomes digitalized and democratized, and is made universally and permanently available, the media of record becomes the Internet on which misinformation never goes away. As a result, our bank of collected information becomes infected by mistakes and fraud (74).
Wikipedia exemplifies these layers of debate inherent in Web 2.0 products. Now the largest encyclopedia in the world, Wikipedia is, as most proponents of Web 2.0 technology say all information wants to be, free. Andrew Keen has many criticisms of the site—and even
its inventor—in his book, but the crux of his argument is as follows:
By empowering the amateur, we are undermining the authority of the experts who contribute to a traditional resource like the Encyclopedia Britannica—experts who over the years have included the likes of Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and George Bernard Shaw. Indeed, what defines “the very best minds” available, whether they are cultural critics or scientific experts, is their ability to go beyond the “wisdom” of the crowd and mainstream public opinion and bestow us with the benefits of their hard-earned knowledge(The Cult of the Amateur, 43).
Weinberger would counter by saying, “At Wikipedia, credibility isn’t about an author’s credentials; it’s about an author’s contributions.” In Wikinomics, authors Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams speak to the issue of accuracy and credibility:
Nature magazine’s comparative analysis of forty-two science entries in both showed a surprisingly small difference [in accuracy]: Wikipedia contained four inaccuracies per entry to Britannica’s three.
Britannica has disputed the finding, saying that the errors in Wikipedia were more serious than Britannica errors, and that the source documents for the study include the junior version of the encyclopedia as well as the Britannica yearbooks.
Unfortunately for Britannica, its complaints really miss the point—errors cited on Wikipedia have long since been fixed, while the Britannica errors remain. In the same way that open source programmers swarm together to identify and fix bugs, Wikipedians can easily catch errors and set the record straight. According to an MIT study, an obscenity randomly inserted on Wikipedia is removed in an average of 1.7 minutes (75).
Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams approach the issues of Web 2.0 from a perspective different from Weinberger and Keen’s. The culmination of five years and $9 million of research, Wikinomics looks at the Web through an economic lens. They see a world and economy constantly connected in mass collaboration. They share Keen’s belief that Web 2.0 is changing the very nature of how we do business, but they see this as a step in the right direction. They focus on how peer-to-peer networks and mass collaboration are opening companies to the world and advancing not only their bottom line, but human development as well. They point to examples of companies sharing what used to be closely guarded intellectual property in open source communities. It’s collaborative capitalism, and there are many examples of it working effectively in the real world. One of the best examples is IBM and its collaboration with the open source community of Linux developers.
Open source has enabled IBM to speed innovation and off-load tremendous costs. From a strategic perspective, this approach to peer production is a form of collaborative outsourcing [...] IBM provides a surprising example of how a large, mature company with an ingrained propriety culture can embrace openness and self-organization as strategic weapons. (Wikinomics, 83)
IBM, out of competitive necessity, turned to the open source community and in return contributed its own expertise to improve hardware that had previously been developed by individuals. “Linux-related hardware and services produce billions of dollars of revenue annually, and now IBM, Motorola, Nokia, Philips, Sony, and dozens of other companies are dedicating serious resources to its development” (Wikinomics, 65). But what do the unpaid contributors to the hardware get for doing this work, and why do they do it?
People who work on Linux during their spare time are usually employed in some other facet of the industry. Participating in Linux gets them experience, exposure, and connections, and if they’re good, they can earn status within the community that could prove to be highly valuable to their careers. What’s more, a growing number of people are paid to participate in Linux by the companies they work for. In fact, IBM and Intel are two of the largest contributors to Linux in terms of manpower. (Wikinomics, 70)
Tapscott and Williams believe that if companies open up some of their propriety information and share it, it can be a major benefit to both themselves and others, creating innovation where there had been privacy. They also see economic possibilities in open source technology for new and smaller companies that haven’t been able to afford sophisticated software.
Open source application vendors could be the force that brings affordable enterprise solutions to the masses of business that could never afford an Oracle database or an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from SAP. And who knows, they just might empower a whole new revolution in business productivity, and perhaps even kick-start a renaissance for the small and medium sized business. (Wikinomics, 84)
Because it is miscellaneous, sometimes misleading, and mired in anonymity, the new Internet is one where personal responsibility and individual discernment are paramount. We cannot accept every word published as fact or every line of code as precise. We have to find sources we trust, whether it’s the Wall Street Journal, a programmer from Long Island or a blog about business books from a small company in Milwaukee. If we search intelligently, we may even begin to get at some truths. (We might learn that Al Gore didn’t really invent the Internet.) What we have gained is the ability to interact and join the conversation—however banal it may become—whether it’s on Wikipedia or in a Linux chat room. More than ever, the Internet does reflect who we are as a society, with all our blights and blemishes, all our wit and wisdom. As Wikinomics shows, it can also reflect the innovative, entrepreneurial spirit our economy was built upon.
International Best Sellers for November
Posted Dec. 10, 2009 5:10 a.m. by the-roy
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog
It's that time again - to reflect and note what others across the globe are taking time to read - Here are 800CEOREAD's international best selling business books for November 2009:
1 - Made to Stick (Latvia)
2 - IT Savvy (Australia)
3 - Kellogg on Branding (Turkey)
4 - Power of a Positive No (Mexico)
5 - Behavior Change (Spain)
6 - Peripheral Vision (France)
7 - Your Brain at Work (South Africa)
8 - Change Monster (Indonesia)
9 - Outrageous Advertising (Australia)
10 - Wikinomics (Greece)
Stay tuned later this month for our Best International Books for the whole of 2009!
strategy + business Best Books of 2008
Posted Dec. 4, 2008 5:07 a.m. by dylan
In Uncategorized - 800 CEO Read Blog
Always anticipated, strategy + business has published their Best Business Books 2008. What makes this list special is that they assign each category to an expert in that field for review, and each reviewer delivers a lengthy and in depth essay on the books chosen. I've linked each category to it's reviewer's essay at the top of each section. The books starred are those selected as the category's best, what is referred to as s+b's top shelf.
Strategy: Fast Competition and Flat Denial by Phil Rosenzweig
- *The Red Queen among Organizations: How Competitiveness Evolves by William P. Barnett, Princeton University Press
- Sony vs. Samsung: The Inside Story of the Electronics Giants' Battle for Global Supremacy by Sea-Jin Chang, Wile
- Redefining Global Strategy: Crossing Borders in a World Where Differences Still Matter by Pankaj Ghemawat, Harvard Business School Press
- Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller by Steve Weinberg, W.W. Norton
- *Basic Brown: My Life and Our Times by Willie Brown, Simon & Schuster
- The Bush Tragedy by Jacob Weisberg, Random House
- Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History by Ted Sorensen, HarperCollins
- *Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Harvard Business Press
- Always On: Advertising, Marketing, and Media in an Era of Consumer Control by Christopher Vollmer, with Geoffrey Precourt, McGraw-Hill
- Obsessive Branding Disorder: The Illusion of Business and the Business of Illusion by Lucas Conley, PublicAffairs
- *White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters` by Robert Schlesinger, Simon & Schuster
- Jacked Up: The Inside Story of How Jack Welch Talked GE into Becoming the World's Greatest Company by Bill Lane, McGraw-Hill
- Grabbing Lightning: Building a Capability for Breakthrough Innovation by Gina C. O'Connor, Richard Leifer, Albert S. Paulson & Lois S. Peters, Jossey-Bass
- Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Updated & Expanded) by Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams, Portfolio
- Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk by James Bessen & Michael J. Meurer, Princeton University Press
- *Innovation Nation: How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters, and What We Can Do to Get It Back by John Kao, Free Press
- *The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East by Kishore Mahbubani, PublicAffairs
- Operation China: From Strategy to Execution by Jimmy Hexter & Jonathan Woetzel, Harvard Business School Press
- The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage by Alexandra Harney, Penguin Press (Jack Covert Selects)
- A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein, Atlantic Monthly Press
- Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty by Peter Cappelli, Harvard Business Press
- Talent: Making People Your Competitive Advantage by Edward E. Lawler III, Jossey-Bass
- *Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton M. Christensen, McGraw-Hill
- Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-line Employee by Alex Frankel, HarperCollins
- The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World by John Elkington & Pamela Hartigan, Harvard Business Press
- The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community by Stephen A. Marglin, Harvard University Press
- *Creating a World without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism by Muhammad Yunus, PublicAffairs (Jack Covert Selects)
- Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block, Berrett-Koehler
- Big Brown: The Untold Story of UPS by Greg Niemann, Wiley
- The Turnaround Kid: What I Learned Rescuing America's Most Troubled Companies by Steve Miller, Collins
- Doing What Matters: How to Get Results That Make a Difference--The Revolutionary Old-school Approach by James M. Kilts, with John F. Manfredi & Robert L. Lorber, Crown Business
- *Family Wars: Classic Conflicts in Family Business and How to Deal with Them by Grant Gordon and Nigel Nicholson, Kogan Page
- *Myself and Other More Important Matters by Charles Handy, AMACOM (Jack Covert Selects)
- The Craftsman by Richard Sennett, Yale University Press
- From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession by Rakesh Khurana, Princeton University Press
- Minding the Store: Great Writing about Business from Tolstoy to Now edited by Robert Coles & Albert LaFarge, The New Press
We've been following this list since 2003. The previous years' lists are below.
2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007
