This is not a book that calls for underlining and highlighting, but it definitely has value as a basis for reflecting on various aspects of collaboration, and the failure of collaboration, within enterprises.
The book is written strictly from the perspective of people and perceptions. It does not have a technical or a financial side and this was disappointing. It would have been more useful to have a book that fully integrated human, technical, and financial success stories and failure stories to present an integrated picture of collaborative work principles in a global economy using the Internet as the backbone for collaborative work.
The book is well-written, the figures are useful, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to sit quietly on an airplane and think about the authors' subtitle: why links between business units often fail, and how to make them work.
I bought this book because Vint Cerf says the Internet will go from 3.5M users today to 3.5B users in 10-15 years, and that means that businesses involved in Internet infrastructure–and especially multi-media multi-lingual narrowcasting–have a growth (or implosion) prospect on the order of 1000X.
The book tells a helpful story about CISCO's growth in 12 years, and I for one found it both well-written and fascinating. I am especially impressed by the CISCO rules for successful acquisitions, by the CISCO distinctions between core competencies and outsourced manufacturing, and by the CISCO implementation of its enterprise information system and related web sales and service sites.
As for the future, I agree with John Chambers that telephone calls will be free in the future. Arthur Clarke said this 20 years ago. Chambers' vision for a global multi-service (voice and data) offering that easily integrates wireless, fiber-optic, and other forms of transmission is inevitable, but CISCO is not necessarily pre-ordained as the dominant enterprise.
Corporate and national information strategies must have four components: connectivity, content, coordination of standards and investments, and communications/computing security. CISCO, as described by the book, has a superficial interest in encryption but does not really understand the urgency of establishing “deep encryption” that is embedded in all data (including data in storage) and unencumbered by the retarded US and European policies seeking to give their spies an easy back door to use.
CISCO also appears to be overlooking two major opportunities for future expansion: first, in leading a much broader coordination of standards such as transparent and stable Application Program Interfaces (API) that would permit the remote integration of applications and multi-media data; and second, in exploring all aspects of data classification, indexing, and visualization, both in terms of data access and automated filtering, and in terms of pattern analysis across the network.
There are so many over-hyped books on the Internet Revolution that I found this book to be a real pleasure. Whether for entertainment or for business lessons or for insights into the future, it is a solid 5.
One of a few books I bought in an airport bookstore rather than on amazon, my first thought is that the amazon process really does help–this book is flashy enough to get one to buy it on the fly, but probably would not survive in open competition when alternatives are easily visible in an electronic bookstore.
The author notes that the book was written in 60 days. It shows, and the reader is the one that suffers. I have no doubt that the author, an attractive person by the photo, is a wonderful speaker with many insights to offer. The book, however, is not well laid-out and one has the feeling that 100 different briefings have been sorted into chapter files and dumped into the book. What couldn't be fit into the text was turned into sidebar or text figure.
The book includes a CD-ROM I will never use, as well as a URL for a web address I will never visit. I would rather they had put the money into better editing, more white space, and a much better structure for the book.
My bottom line: the book should not be ignored, but I would recommend that the executive interested in these concepts have a strong younger manager of promise read this as one of 3-4 other similar books, and distill all of them into a ten page memo.
Tragedy of Scientific Myopia, Portal to the Future Paradigm,
February 11, 2001
Willis Harman
This is a wonderful indictment of the Western scientific tradition, less comprehensive than Voltaire's Bastards but more readable and more focused as a result. The author shows a clear connection between existing global problems (ethnic violence, water scarcity, pollution, poverty, criminalization of society) and the earlier Western decisions to adopt scientific objectivity (with all of its inherent bias and ignorance) as well as the primacy of economic institutions such as have given rise to the consumerist society, regardless of the external diseconomies, the concentrations of ill-gotten wealth, and the cost to the earth resource commons. The author is especially strong on the need to restore sprituality, consciousness, and values to the decision-making and information-sharing architecture of the world–only in this way could community be achieved across national and ethnic and class lines, and only in this way could environmental sustainability and justice (economic, social, and cultural) be made possible. This is not a “tree hugger” book as much as it is a “master's class” for those who would be master's of the universe. It is a very fine portal into the growing body of people who wish to be cultural creatives, and easily one of the guideposts toward the next major paradigm shift, away from scientific materialism and toward a new communitas in which people really matter.
First off, this book made the cut above another ten or so options on the fringes (the amazon reviews helped). It was a good choice. The author captures the essence of many other books as well as real-world experience with two fundamental points that every manager and every employee–including fast-food employees and others in “drone” jobs–needs to absorb: first, that the existing bureaucratization of the economy at every level is costing so much as to place those companies in jeopardy during the forthcoming economic shake-out, and second, that the sooner every individual begins the process of inventorying their personal capabilities and creating the networks for offering their personal services and knowledge via the Internet to all comers, the sooner they will be able to share in the profits associated with their direct individual contributions to the new economy.
The Department of Defense acquisition and contracting examples are especially shocking because they show, so credibly and in detail, how we have institutionalized multi-billion dollar waste.
This is a special book. It is by a practical man who has drawn very personal and transformative lessons from the school of hard knocks, and whose recounting of those lessons have value for anyone who expects to work for a living today and in the future. This is not a “get rich quick” book as much as it is a “get rich together or get left behind” book.
This was not the book I was looking for, but it is still worthy of buying if you have any interest at all in charting knowledge terrain and “knowing who knows”. In honor of Eugene Garfield, arguably the most influential man in the sociology of knowledge in this century or any other, the book provides a wonderful collection of *methodological* articles about the bibliometrics and indicators associated with charting who quotes whom and what does it mean in terms of influence within and among nations, organizations, schools of thought, and individual cabals.
I was intrigued to find that the book, perhaps because it is so original and represents the first book-length collection of its kind, did not include an article on a topic near and dear to my heart, that is, developing algorithms to identify anomalies in citation such that one can weed out those who are citing one another simply to “beat the game.” As citation analysis becomes a more mainstream means of measuring intellectual contributions (it is still not mainstream–too many otherwise talented intelligence community managers of analysts have no clue it exists), some form of citation validation and policing will be needed.
There are three other areas where I would say that this book is a vital and valuable foundation, and desperately in need of three distinct sequel publications:
First, we need to migrate the value of citation analysis to the Internet, not only to electronic journals but to citations of self-published papers on web sites as well as to informed observations in expert forums. Neither the classification schema nor the industry standards for making this possible exist today. I would go so far as to suggest that a new Internet standards committee dedicated to this specific issue should be created, immediately.
Second, an analagous situation exists with those experts who are not permitted to publish in the open literature, but who are very well known by virtue of their title, organizational affiliation, participation in conferences, or classified work revealed to a very few. As the core competency of government becomes the nurturing of national knowledge–not only in science and technology but also in all international as well as domestic matters–some form of citation analysis process must be developed that makes these experts (or if not expert, then influentials by virtue of their position at the international, national, state/provincial, or local levels) and their counterparts in non-governmental organizations (e.g. Red Cross, World Bank, elements of the United Nations) readily identifiable. The Internet, and the public availability of email communication pattern analysis information that does not intrude on the substantive privacy of electronic communications, may possible be helpful here.
Third, and finally, we come to the area of interest that originally led to my purchasing this book, which is that of actually identifying centers of excellence and “portals” into the entire range of published and unpublished knowledge on any given topic. Such a sequel publication must not only document, in an evolutionary or “living” way, who the top 100 people are across every social science and science topic, but also the top 25 institutions with deliberate distinctions between Asian, Americas, European, and African centers of excellence. The Institute of Scientic Information (ISI) has been unwilling to do this as an internal investment, and has not heard from enough governments and corporations to warrant its moving aggressively to create what I would regard as an extraordinarily valuable and relevant guide for all manner of investments and improvements in international, national, and state-based research and education. I would go so far as to say that such a guide, such a service of common concern, would go a very long way toward making possible extraordinary new means of leveraging distributed intellectual resources, lowering the cost of seminal research, and introducing new forms of transnational collaborative work.
Garfield, and citation analysis and all those who have built on Garfield's work, together represent the first mile in a hundred mile journey toward creating the “World Brain” that H.G. Wells, among a select few, has envisioned. There is much yet to be done.
The Ultimate Graduate/Policy Text on Intelligence,
January 10, 2001
Michael Herman
This is the textbook for the best and the brightest of both the academic world and the policy world. It is not an easy read, between the British language form and the deep thinking, but it is, as Christopher Andrew says, “the best overview” and “surely destined to become a standard work”. I especially liked its attention to components and boundaries, effects, accuracy, and evaluation. Perhaps most usefully within the book is the distinction between long-term intelligence endeavors that rely primarily on open sources and serve to improve state understanding and state behavior, and short-term espionage that tends to be intrusive and heighten the target state's feelings of vulnerability and hostility. No intelligence library is complete without this book–it provides a rock-solid foundation for serious thinking about the intelligence in the 21st Century.
