Best in Class, Very Technical, Saluting and Moving On, May 31, 2008
John H. Miller
Sometime I encounter books that are extremely important, that give me an appreciation for a knowledge domain I do not know enough about, and that I simply cannot read and review.
Howard Bloom, in Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century teaches us that the only way to create a sustainable peace in the Palestine region is to provide absolute security for an entire generation, and raise two whole generations, one on each side, from kindergarten on us, generations that do not consider “the other” to be “pigs and monkeys” by the age of five.
Similarly, the literature on wealth of networks and the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid is growing, and I am convinced that public intelligence (decision support, full disclosure, end of information asymmetries) is going to accomplish two things in the next twenty years:
1) Eradicate corruption and enforce the triple-bottom line
2) Elevate five billion poor by teaching them one cell call at a time so that they can create infinite stabilizing wealth.
So the very best thing I can say about this book is that I am glad I bought it, I am very glad to have a sense, however weak, of this important exploratory area, and now I know that I need a team of generative social scientists that can do complex modeling for peace and prosperity solutions.
I urge one and all to become familiar with World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER), as best I can tell that is the center of gravity for empowering individuals with deep knowledge of the true costs and many human rights abuses and other crimes that we support today for lack of knowledge. I also recommend the pioneering EarthGame work of Medard Gabel, at BigPictureSmallWorld.
It's a pity this work is not more readily available. The best work right now that is available is Marc Pensky's Don't Bother Me Mom–I'm Learning!, whose 2005 article in Educational Review (December 2005/January 2006) on “Listening to the Natives,” first illuminated this huge distinction. As Pensky says, children today are no longer “little versions of us.”
Forthcoming in August 2008 is Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. The key point that I have seen in my broad reading is that the future is not here now–it will be here when the digital natives are digital adults, and overthrow the “command and control” (“do it because I say so”) regimes that are all too prone to corruption and misdirection behind closed doors.
I normally do not buy books coming out of Gartner or Forrester or other similar shops that produce cookie cutter products. I am very glad I was given this book. I was deeply impressed from page one and continually gratified and astonished as the level of detail as the book progressed.
This is a graduate course in New Age Marketing, and the only thing this book does not have is the need to address “true costs” and honor the triple-bottom line (profit, economic and social justice, and zero environmental footprint: memes are cradle to cradle, sustainable design, green to gold).
The book's bottom line: it's about LISTENING to PEOPLE, not about the technologies. The Presidential candidate that dismisses all their advisors and creates a national blog to address the ten high-level threats to mankind, the twelve policies that must be harmonized, and how nothing we do matters unless we give Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Wild Cards like the Congo a model for avoiding our mistakes while achieving our quality of life, should win. Then they can come to Chicago on Lincoln's birthday and participate in the Citizens' SUmmit being organized by Joseph McCormick, a co-founder and guiding light for Reuniting America (110 million strong and growing).
I am very impressed by the examples, and the fact that they are not presented in a cutesy box fashion but woven into the text.
The authors provide numbers that show how an investment in executive blogging and nurturing customers and partners can give back at least 150% if not more (I think it is closer to 5 to 1 RoI), and on the basis of the totality of the book, I take their word for it. I take this to the next level and would point out that the US Government investment of our dollars in “Strategic Communication” will continue to be a failure because no amount of “PR” is going to overcome the reality of our overbearing presence everywhere.
Very interesting to me was the authors' information, including tables, that shows that Republicans and Independents are not as active in the Web 2.0 environment, and this should be cause for concern among those who wish to challenge the shiftless Democrats and their smoke and mirror enthusiasm for Senator Obama, who is NOT transparent at all (see my review of Obama – The Postmodern Coup: Making of a Manchurian Candidate.
Because of this book I have decided to shift all of my online activity to Citizens-Party.org, leaving Earth Intelligence Network as an archive. My intent is to inspire individual public intelligence minutemen (and women) who can disclose the true costs of all products and services, and help us bring to bear the full diversity of public opinion on such controversial matters as the proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street speculators.
See also the images above under the book cover. Peace–and prosperity–in our time.
Elaborative Comment:
For those that send me emails asking for my usual summary, the bottom line on this book is that I cannot do it, do not want to do it, within the Amazon 1000 work limit. However, am adding a short edit to offer a bit more detail. This book cannot receive justice with a summary. It is literally an operating manual for the intersection of legacy industries and Web 3.0.
Re Steve Ballmer, am just blown away that they are willing to spend $40 billion and up for Yahoo, and evidently have no clue how to build Web 3.0 for under $10 billion, faster, better, cheaper than Google (see my review of Stephen E. Arnold's “Google 2.0: The Calculating Predator” not sold on Amazon, online from Infonortics UK. Here is the URL on how he is now at Plan C and evidently has no idea how to build on all that this book suggests:
http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?sto
ry_id=59703
There are no fewer than 10 cash-starved companies that are priceless and can be picked up for pennies. For the rest, see my review of “Bloomberg on Bloomberg” where he makes the case for building from the inside instead of buying. He says “Outsiders give you what you ask for, insiders give you waht you need.” Ballmer is assuredly a smart and talented individual, but in many ways he now strikes me as the Henry Kissinger of the private sector: he's become like a moron, unable to LISTEN (see my review of Daniel Ellsberg for a recounting of the converation Ellsberg has with Kissinger, “SECRETS: A Memoire.”) Ben Gilad says much the same thing in Blindspots: CEO's information is invariably filtered (incomplete), biased, late, and by my own experience: less than 20% of what should be presented to them.
Fascinated by three negatives on what would normally be considered a tipping point book. The point is that the “best and the brightest” very often get trapped in their own delusions–the Microsoft business development process DOES NOT WORK. Their process for screening vendors and consultants relies on lower common denominator minds, and cannot handle break-out visions, especially those that call for abandoning the legacy stuff that is not only untenable of on laptop, but not even marginally viable on a hand-held.
Very sorry to have offended several of you, eager to engage. I can change or add to the review, but only if you use the comments section as intended.
Superb, Well-Presented, Helpful at Multiple Levels, May 10, 2008
Ben Rigby
Edit of 18 May to recommend Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies as a different book, with more practical tips and annecdotal support, but in no way does that reduce my appreciation for this book. Both are excellent, I think of them as truly complementary of one another.
—–
I *like* this book. Although I have years of exposure to advanced information technology and read everything by gurus like Paul Strasssman (cf. Information Productivity: Assessing Information Management Costs of U. S. Corporationsand Stephen E. Arnold (Arnold IT, look for “Google 2.0: The Calculating Predator, not sold on Amazon), I learned stuff from this book, and I found it to be exactly right for getting an old-school CEO or other management skeptic “oriented.”
In 268 well-organized and well-presented pages, the book covers:
+ Blogging
+ Social Networking
+ Video and Photo Sharing
+ Mobile Phones
+ Wikis
+ Maps
+ Virtual Worlds
Each chapter has extremely clear headlines, gray boxes, figures, and endnotes. To get a sense of the book and the online offerings that back it up, visit mobilizingyouth.org, just add the www.
A special value is short essays from top practitioners including Mitch Kapor whose essay, next to last, focuses on the coming convergence of virtual worlds and social networking. Visit BigPictureSmallWorld for a sense of the possibilities there–I have very deep admiration for Medard Gabel, who built the analog World Game with Buckminster Fuller, and I am so very eager to see him create EarthGame(TM) in which we all play ourselves and have access to all information in all languages all the time–at that point, we will end looting of our commonwealth, end corruption, and create invite wealth or as he puts it in the title of his new book, “Seven Billion Billionaires.”
Most useful to me were the following:
+ Use all these tools internally to get a sense of them, before trying to do something with the broader online population
+ One billion people are connected, the rest are not, but what the billion do with their connections could impact on how quickly we get the other 5-6 billion connected and creating wealth
+ 55% of teens are active online, 80% of college students have a Facebook profile
+ Digg is an example of a global intelligence service in which every citizen is an intelligence consumer, collector, and producer
+ Cool examples that I will certainly look into include Care2, Causes, Hi5, and Gather
+ Politicians (including the three running for President now) simply do not get it. They are still using phone banks that call at all hours and spamming (Obama does less of it) instead of asking permission and then building on the relationship
+ I am very impressed by the natural manner in which the book communicates the relationship between having a good story with heroes, villians, and catalysts, and the sequence of fund-raising via text connection and follow-up. This book strikes me as both a very very good elementary text for digital immigrants (us old guys) and also a useful “once over” for the more experienced who may be overlooking a couple of pieces of the overall campaign.
+ The book emphasizes the many uses of the wiki, many of them internal, some external, but the most important being that wikis are a way of crowd sourcing. See the first book from Earth Intelligence Network, Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace (free at oss.net/CIB just add the www, but utterly lovely here at Amazon) and especially the later chapters on large scale collective and collaborative intelligence in action.
+ Tag clouds are vital, as is the selection of unique tags for clusters of informaiton you want to make easily available.
+ Virtual worlds are in their infancy, and when they finally develop, will be extraordinary as nuanced immersive learning environments (low cost low risk environmental, I would add).
The last essay from Katrin Verclas is great, and I selected the following quote with which to end this review–it captures the essence:
“Web 2.0 describes a participatory, bottom-up, decentralized world full of individual expression where people have direct access to one another and enjoy an unprecedented ability to organize, meet, and coordinate without centralized control or traditional hierarchies.”
Focused on Media, Art, Culture, Less So on Social Networks, May 10, 2008
Henry Jenkins
I come late to this book, published in 2006. I do not regret it. It is a bit too focused on media, art, and “culture” for me, but I cannot penalize the author for being a master of arcane tid-bits. This book is a collection of previously published articles reworked into a book–for me, that is a good thing, as I do not cover the sources that originally carried the pieces.
The book comes recommended by Howard Rheingold and Bruce Sterling, two of the originals, so that alone should encourage anyone interested in this area to take this book very seriously.
Although the author focuses on “participatory culture” the emphasis is this book is on the CULTURE part, not the social networks, integral consciousness, appreciative inquiry, co-intelligence, and so on as I have learned from my Eco-Topia colleauges.
The author himself speaks early on about the book speaking to three concepts:
+ Media convergence
+ Participatory culture
+ Collective intelligence
He gets an A for the first, a B for the second, and a C for the third.
I don't consider myself qualified to be critical of this book, so here are the tid-bits that grabbed me:
+ Paradigm shift is not about communications among individuals but rather about their *being* in *being* with one another (from one to many and one to one to many to many)
+ Author credits Ithiel de Sola Pool (1983) with seeing the transitions that were coming
+ Convergence changes relationships and logics
+ The biggest convergence may be the sharp total confrontation between top down attempts to keep control, and bottom up demands to wrest control
+ Media right now is being excessively influenced by the wealthy that can afford the trinkets (look for my 1993 rant to INTERVAL on “God, Man, and Informaiton: Comments to Interval” for the other side of the story)
+ Emotions and feelings of connection matter more–the author writes of an “affective economy”
+ Producers are finding they must agree to co-creation (this media or cultural trend has a counterpart in the business world, see the Business Week cover story of 20 June 2005 on “The Power of Us”)
+ Media industry is split between the prohibitionists and the collaborationists, and I am most fascinated to see mobile telephone companies in the latter category. If I had to place a bet on Nokia versus Google, I would go with Nokia.
+ Citing another author (always with credit) I am engaged by the concept of “adhocracies” as the opposite of bureaucracies.
+ Digital enclaves are becoming counter-productive, allowing nesting rather than engagement (at least among the one billion rich), need to get out and cross those cultural divides.
I am glad I got and read this book. It is clearly very learned in the media convergence and media-mind aspect, but it is not at all as versed as I was expecting in the nuts and bolts of participatory networking, appreciative inquiry, deliberative democracy, integral consciousness, world brain, etcetera, nor is it all oriented toward large scale problem solving with collective intelligence.
This Book Joins my List of Great Books at Wrong Price,March 29, 2008
Fikret Berkes
If the author will get in touch with me I can publish the book for sale at a cost of no morethan $39.95. If a digital copy of the book is available, I would like to post it immediately.
This book is an example of what happens when authors do not demand control over the pricing of their work.
This is an important topic, and no doubt a superb book, but this publisher is “out of control” and should be driven out of business by smart buyers who refuse to spend money foolishly. As a publisher myself, I can tell you that books like this cost no more than a penny a page to print.
Sadly, Amazon has refused my suggestion that they offer authors a direct publishing deal in which digital copies are delivered to Amazon where they can be sold as micro-text for micro-cash, or sold by the chapter, or sold as a digital transfer to the nearest FedExKinko's where they are perfectly capable of printing a hard copy book “one at a time.”
I care deeply about using knowledge to save Humanity and the Planet, and seeing prices like this on worthy books makes my blood boil. Search Amazon for this topic, there are at least ten other books on this topic that are more honorably priced.
I like this book very much, in part because after 20 years of thinking of myself as a reformist beating his head against the idiot secret world, I now realize I am a social entrepreneur who has turned his back on secrets and is focused on creating public intelligence in the public interest.
The authors made me smile with their early explanation that most social entrepreneurs can be so unreasonable as to be called lunatic. This is precisely what happened to me when I published “E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, and Intelligence” in the Fall 1992 edition of the Whole Earth Review–for having the temerity to suggest that we should emphasize open sources of information instead of spying, and sharing instead of hoarding, I was told that Sandra Cruzman, the top woman at CIA at the time, said “this confirms Steele's place on the lunatic fringe.” So forgive me for this sidebar, but this book speaks to me in very personal as well as socially meaningful terms, it resonates with me, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to think about ways of doing good while doing well enough.
I always look for whether authors are respecting those that came before or have made adjacent contributions, and on that score this book is completely satisfactory. It is also blessed by the authors' broad range of examples, carefully selected from what is clearly a universe they know better than anyone else.
Citing George Bernard Shaw, they explain early on that “unreasonable people” are seen so for their seeking to abandon outmoded thoughts, mindsets, or practices. Amen, brother!
This is not a feel-good book in intent, although it achieves that effect. It is a serious book that methodically reviews new business models, leadership styles, and thinking about value creation. It held my total attention over two evenings of reading.
The authors offer esteem to social entrepreneurs with the observation that corporations are noticing and hiring such individuals for three reasons:
1. They see the future sooner than the average cubicle resident
2. They help retain talent by making the business challenging
3. They bring love and fun into the office environment
The authors caution that social entrepreneurs fail more often than not, but they persist and ultimately find means of making a difference while making a living.
They suggest that immature markets are best explored by non-profits while noting that hybrids with blended values are the most interesting forms.
Page 5 is suitable for scaling up and framing for the office. The ten characteristics of social entrepreneurs (severely abbreviated here):
1. Shrug off ideology and discipline
2. Focus on practical solutions
3. Innvoate
4. Do social value creation and SHARE
5. Jump in without waiting for back-up
6. Have unwavering beliefs in innate capacity of others
7. Dogged determination
8. Passion for change
9. Have a great deal to teach change makers in other sectors
0. Healthy impatience (don't do well in bureaucracies)
They tell the reader that confusion is a normal circumstance for social entrepreneurs, whom they define as those that take “direct action that generates a paradigm shift” while attacking an “unsatisfactory equilibrium.”
They see a deep and lasting need for social entrepreneurs because coming decades will require unprecedented levels of system change (I add, and will have unprecedented and often unanticipated disasters, many turning into catastrophes for lack of planning, preparation, or responsiveness)
The authors tell us that the best of the charitable foundations are shifting from plain grant-making to sequential investments and deeper continuing relations with those being funded. At the same time they tell us that corporation and private equity firms are beginning to notice the value options in this space. [I think to myself, this is great, just at a time when corporations are also understanding green to gold, sustainable design, ecology of commerce, and true cost accounting.]
I am totally impressed with one page that describes how China has developed new green accounting methods and now realizes that environmentally-related work loss is no less than 10% of their newly-understood green Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
They provide a fine overview of new measures of merit including the double bottom line, the triple bottom line, the Social Return on Investment (SROI), and the “blended value proposition.”
On page 20 I see a quote worth posting: social entrepreneurs “bring together natural, social, human, intellectual, and cultural forms of capital.”
LEVERAGE is a key concept for these authors, and one I take very serioiusly as they describe how small investments can leverage indigenous capabilities (such as hard work from people who are poor but not stupid), philanthropic and other support, business partnerships, and income from previously untapped markets (at the Base of the Pyramid, like my Seattle friends they are clearly not comfortable with C. K. Prahalad's choice of title in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks).
The middle section of the book discusses three models and examples of each:
1. The leveraged non-profit, which is hard to scale, dependent on hand-outs, focuses on public goods and being a change catalyst
2. The hybrid non-profit that combines non-profit and revenue generating activities, with a focus on outcome generation, empowering the people at the base, community-centric, focused on low cost long term, and on driving the market or pulling more traditional providers into the market.
3. The social business, which focuses on both social and financial returns, scales much more easily because it can assume both debt and equity. We learn that Whole Foods is an example, that it drove the organic market and leverages voluntary cooperation among many networks. Another example combines sustainable organic agriculture, rural employment of the uneducated but willing, price security for farmers, and transparent information.
I want to emphasize the latter: transparent information. I have been persuaded by numerous books on the wealth of knowledge as well as my own 30+ years as an intelligence professional that shared information and transparent decision support is a wealth creation process that scales fast and inexpensively.
The authors go on to discuss ten markets that lend themselves to social entrepreneurship, and I will list them with tiny examples–the book is absolutely a gem that merits buying a reading from end to end.
1. Demographic: condoms, aging, disadvantages
2. Financial: child knowledge of finances, simple technologies, helping poor self-organize for leverage
3. Nutritiional: duck rice, food bank, food waste elevated to tasty and nutritious near zero cost consumables
4. Resources: energy, energy, energy (I would add water, and throw a respectful salute the the George Mason University professor born in Bangladesh who created a virtually free means of removing arsenic from water using a combination of charcoal and steel filings (from the ships torn apart there, see The Outlaw Sea : A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime
5. Environment: educatae, plant trees
6. Health: high volume low cost (or free), cateract cures, telephone centers to help poor remotely
7. Gender (best ROI ever is on educating women, see A Half Penny on the Federal Dollar: The Future of Development Aid)
8. Educational: end rote learning, cross-pollinate, barefoot college that trains doctors and engineers narrowly and without years of credentialing (my own idea is call centers to education “one cell call at a time,” I would love to see India do this sooner than later)
9. Digital: embrace and empower poor as citizens
0. Security: redefine as jobs for everyone rather than high-end military
The last third of the book covers
1. helping those at the base of the pyramid with access (e.g. curing neglected diseases); price (slash to 10%); and quality (e.g. $100 laptops).
2. Democratizing technology (four clusters: basic building blocks, motorcycles and free neutral air in and out of disaster zones; media and media technology; and genetics and biology.
3. Changing the rules of the game (search for my “New Rules for the New Craft of Intelligence” free on the Internet). They emphasize transparency; accountability; certification; land reform; emission trading; and value & valuation.
4. Scaling solutions, with examples covering true costs, clean toilets for tens of millions, and General Electric's commitment to 17 clean technoloogies, sustainability attracting the best and the brightest of the social entrepreneurs.
5. Lessons for leaders (below does not do the section justice–buy the book and read the whole thing):
– Focus on scalable entrepreneurial solutions
– Tackle apparently insolvable problems
– Be prepared to fail–but learn from failures
– Experiment with new business models
– Close the pay gap
– Join forces
– Seed tomorrow's markets
– Fuel growing expectations
– Help democratize technology
– Work to change the system
– Figure out how to scale and replicate
– Within reason, cultivate the art of being unreasonable
I put the book down extremely pleased with the content and the presentation. This is a very serious book for serious people, not just social entrepreneurs, but Second and Third World policy makers, bankers, investors, international and non-governmental leaders, and so on.
As I see it, social networks and collaboration among what I call the “ten tribes” (government, military, law enforcement, academia, business, media, non-governmental, labor, religion, and civil society) are in their very infancy. The Internet has not been matched by easily available information sharing and decision support tools (DARPA STRONG ANGEL and TOOZL is a start), and governments persist is wasting tens of billions waging war and stealing secrets, instead of waging peace and nurturing open sources of information in 183 languages.
This book continued the inspiration that I have been getting from others, and here I list a few others including the first book from Earth Intelligence Network (free at the website):
Best in Class, Very Technical, Saluting and Moving On, May 31, 2008
