Review: New Rules for the New Economy

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Resilience, Culture, Research, Economics, Information Society

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5.0 out of 5 stars Toffler on Jolt Cola–Great Tour of the Horizon,

April 7, 2000
Kevin Kelly
Building on a series of article for WIRED Magazine, Kevin explains ten rules for the new Internet-based economy that make more and more sense as time goes on. From “follow the free” to “feed the web first” and on to “from places to spaces” and “relationship technology”, his insights provide an easy to understand map of where the digital economy is going.
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Review: Blown to Bits–How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Economics, Information Society

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5.0 out of 5 stars Navigation, Not Content, Will Rule,

April 7, 2000
Philip Evans
Navigation, not content, will rule. Navigators will compete based on reach, affiliation, and richness. Privacy will be a mandated aspect of every offering. Traditional organizations and bureaucracies are unlikely to survive because there is no one there willing and able to “deconstruct” them down to core functionalities and then rebuild them back up with a focus on customer service as the driving force rather than assembly of whatever it was they used to understand as the primary organizing principle.
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Review: Power/Knowledge–Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977

5 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Information Society, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Tough Read, Worth the Trouble,

April 7, 2000
Michel Foucault
Some serious food for thought here. Not only is the power to define madness, criminality, and sexuality addressed, but also the active use of criminals, and sex, to suppress and subjugate the populace. Somewhat more difficult to wade through but similar to Norman Cousins, it helped provoke my thinking on how top-down unilateral command based on secrets is inevitably going to give way to bottom-up multicultural decision-making by the people based on open sources evenly shared across networks. This is really very heavy stuff, and it helps call into question the “rationality” of both the Washington-based national security policymaking process, and the “rationality” of spending $30 billion a year on secrets in contrast to what that $30 billion a year might buy in terms of openly-available insights and overt information peacekeeping.
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Review: Out of Control–The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Economics, Environment (Solutions), Future, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology

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5.0 out of 5 stars Decade Ahead of His Time–Absolutely Brilliant,

April 7, 2000
Kevin Kelly
Kevin, a WIRED Magazine editor who spoke, with Stewart Brand, at OSS '94, has produced what I regard as one of the top five books of this decade. A very tough read but worth the effort. I had not understood the entire theory of co-evolution developed by Stewart Brand and represented in the Co-Evolution Quarterly and The Whole Earth until I read this book. Kevin introduces the concept of the “hive mind”, addresses how biological systems handle complexity, moves over into industrial ecology and network economics, and concludes with many inspiring reflections on the convergence of biological and technical systems. He was easily a decade if not two ahead of his time.
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Review: Powershift–Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Complexity & Resilience, Culture, Research, Economics, Education (General), Information Operations, Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)

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5.0 out of 5 stars One of Five Really Core Books on Information Age,

April 7, 2000
Alvin Toffler
Alvin augments our vocabulary with terms like “info-warrior”, “eco-spasm”, “super-symbolic economy” and “powershift.” He examines the relationship between violence, wealth, and knowledge and concludes that an entirely new system of wealth creation is emerging, as well as entirely new approach to information dissemination that places most of our command and control, communications, computing, and intelligence (C4I) investment in the dump heap with the Edsels of the past. He anticipates both the emergence of information wars at all levels, and the demise of bureaucracy. He cautions us about the emerging power of the “Global Gladiators”-religions, corporations, and terrorists (nice little mix) and concludes that in order for nations to maintain their strategic edge, an effective intelligence apparatus will be a necessity and will “boom” in the 21st Century, with the privatization of intelligence being its most prominent break from the past.
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Review: Knowledge Without Boundaries–What America’s Research Universities Can Do for the Economy, the Workplace, and the Community

4 Star, Change & Innovation, Culture, Research, Economics, Education (General), Information Operations, Information Society

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4.0 out of 5 stars What Universities Might Do Better for Their Communities,

April 7, 2000
Mary Lindenstein Walshok

An industrial sociologist by training, now Associate Vice Chancellor for Extended Studies and Public Service at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Walshok begins by challenging universities, exploring the social uses of knowledge, assessing the new knowledge needs of diverse populations, and providing a matrix approach to matching university resources to community knowledge needs. In the second half of the book she focuses on special economic, human, and civic benefits, and ends with her bottom line: neither communities, nor universities, can learn in isolation.

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Review: Accidental Empires–How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date

4 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Culture, Research, Economics, Information Society, Information Technology

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4.0 out of 5 stars Big Companies Can Be Really Stupid–Useful Review,

April 7, 2000
Robert X. Cringely
A gift from one of the folks he writes about, this is one of the earliest books about Silicon Valley, and is both enjoyable and useful because of its early focus on the mistakes made by IBM, Xerox Park, 3Com, and other “CIA-like” giants, its discussion of the hit and miss and perserverence nature of the early start-ups, and some really big things to avoid like letting venture capitalists or the marketing staff tell you what to offer the public.
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