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Hardcover
244 pages
ISBN 9781591843160 Published Jan. 2010
Portfolio
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Posted Oct. 15, 2010 4:12 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
in-its-entirety issue—technology.
Business changes. We don’t do business today in the same way we did it at the turn of the century—either 1900 or 2000. And though it’s not specifically about business, the inevitability of change is why you should pick up Kevin Kelly’s latest book, What Technology Wants.
in-its-entirety issue—technology.
Kevin Kelly has written big idea books before, most notably Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World, which we chose for The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. And like Out of Control, What Technology Wants is vast in scope. It attempts to break down old ways of thinking by clarifying a large, hard-to-grasp-in-its-entirety issue—technology.
This isn’t the first book this year to try to tackle the subject holistically. In Linchpin, Seth Godin challenged us to redefine work, to give up the industrial era mindset that new technologies have made obsolete. The Shallows by Nicholas Carr and Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus both looked at the way technology affects the very way we think. But Kelly takes it a step further, defining technology as part of our thought process, as a natural extension of evolution and a natural, living system. In fact, technology is not a sufficient word for what Kelly is trying to grasp, so he’s coined a new word—the technium.
For the rest of this book I will use the term technium where others might use technology as a plural, and to mean a whole system (as in “technology accelerates”). I reserve the term technology to mean a specific technology, such as radar or plastic polymers. For example, I would say: “The technium accelerates the invention of technologies.” In other words, technologies can be patented, while the technium includes the patent system itself.
He then traces the technium back to our hunter-gatherer past to document how it evolved to its current state.
The technium gains immense power not only from its scale but from its self-amplifying nature. One breakthrough invention, such as the alphabet, the steam-pump, or electricity, can lead to further breakthrough inventions, such as books, coal mines, and telephones. These advances in turn lead to other breakthrough inventions, such as libraries, power generators, and the internet.
The technium is “human extended,” something we’ve been building and evolving since we have been building and evolving. It is the “extended body for ideas.” And to be in business today, to truly innovate, it is important to have a grasp on that “extended body for ideas”—to know that the answer to your business’s troubles isn’t to get on Twitter, but to understand the changing environment that bred it. You won’t find any immediately applicable business solutions in What Technology Wants, but you will find something that could much more important to your business—a new way of looking at the world.
Jack Covert Selects - Linchpin
Posted Jan. 15, 2010 7:08 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
Seth Godin has a high opinion of you. In his last book, Tribes, he told you that “We need you to lead us.” In his new offering, Linchpin, he asks, “Are you indispensable?” and fully expects that you can be.
In the past, it was safe and even profitable to be a “cog” in the machine. Today, to obtain any kind of security, to truly be valuable, you must try to become a “linchpin.” A linchpin is someone you can’t run the machine without. Though becoming indispensible is not easy, Godin explains why it’s necessary. He traces where our indoctrination into mediocrity comes from, and shows us how to break free of it… however uncomfortable that may be. Godin is ultimately trying to help you reverse that indoctrination and discover the artist you inherently are. If we can do that, we can begin “standing out” in our work rather than “sticking it out” at a job.
The business book genre is changing, allowing a space for titles that change not only the way we look at the workplace, but at the world. In Linchpin, Godin writes early on: “This book is about love and art and change and fear.” It’s an odd thing to read in a business book, but it fits. We spend most of our lives at work in some way or another, and accepting the reality Godin sees (full of opportunity as it may be) can be daunting. He’s asking us to abandon a way of thinking about ourselves, and the “factory model” of work that we were raised in.
It seems that some business authors have come to an epiphany that how we all go to work is how we build our society, that the building blocks of business are placed on the foundation of something larger. Here we have Godin telling us we need to abandon the factory model and mindset. Last year Douglas Rushkoff challenged the corporate model we define our very lives with in Life, Inc. The useful “nuts and bolts” business books that helps us focus on a specific problem at work aren’t going away, but there are more books than ever addressing the larger problem of work, and Seth Godin’s Linchpin is an important and delightful one. Oh, and did I mention it is filled with illustrations from Jessica Hagy and Hugh MacLeod? Great stuff.
