Category: Reviews (Books & DVD)

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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: Silicon Snake Oil–Second Thoughts on the Information Highway

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Information Society, Information Technology, Misinformation & Propaganda

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5.0 out of 5 stars When High Priests Recant, Worshippers Beware,

April 7, 2000
Clifford Stoll
“Our networks are awash in data. A little of it's information. A smidgen of this shows up as knowledge….The Internet, that great digital dumpster, confers not power, not prosperity, not perspicacity…Our networks can be frustrating, expensive, unreliable connections that get in the way of useful work. It is an overpromoted hollow world, devoid of warmth and human kindness. The heavily promoted information infrastructure addresses few social needs or business concerns. At the same time, it directly threatens precious parts of our society, including schools, libraries, and social institutions.”
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Review: Consilience–the Unity of Knowledge

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Information Operations, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Science & Politics of Science, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
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5.0 out of 5 stars Creating World Brain and the Virtual Intelligence Community
April 7, 2000
E. O. Wilson
EDITED 9 July 2007 to add comment and links to other books.

Comment: This is still one of the best books for someone who wants to think deeply about knowledge. Below are links to some others I recommend.

Our answer to Levy, but an order of magnitude more practical and steeped in some of the best endnotes I've ever enjoyed. Consilience is the “jumping together” of knowledge across boundaries, and the greatest enterprise of the mind. He begins with an example, showing how biology, ethics, social science, and environmental policy must all come together to properly resolve a global environmental issue, but actually do not-the learned individuals are fragmented into four separate communities, and within those communities further fragmented into nationalities and cliques and jobs, and it is our greater loss for we cannot arrive at the best policy without being able to integrate the knowledge across all these boundaries. He emphasizes that the public must be educated and have access to this unified knowledge, not just the policymakers. He poses, and then answers across the book, this question: “What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important to human welfare?” In my own mind, Edward O. Wilson has defined both national and global intelligence writ large, and done so in way that suggests the “virtual intelligence community” is a very practical and achievable vision.

The Future of Life
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives
Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century
Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era
The Age of Missing Information
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
Information Productivity: Assessing Information Management Costs of U. S. Corporations

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Review: Information Payoff–The Transformation of Work in the Electronic Age

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology

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5.0 out of 5 stars One of Five “Must Read” Books on Information Age,

April 7, 2000
Paul A. Strassmann
Paul, former Chief Information Officer for Xerox and later Director of Defense Information, used this book to address the basic issues of employee productivity in relation to information technology. This is one of a very few books, including those by Carkhuff, Cleveland, Kelly, and Toffler, that I regard as fundamental-required reading for anyone with any authority over anything.
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Review: The Politics of Information Management–Policy Guidelines

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Catastrophe, Culture, Research, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology

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5.0 out of 5 stars Required Reading for Boards and Stockholders,

April 7, 2000
Paul A. Strassmann

Many of the cartoons published in the Irreverent Dictionary came from this book, and I was among those who suggested to Paul that he should publish the cartoons separately. They were, however, essential to this otherwise intimidating book that is nothing less than an operating manual for the Captain of the Virtual Network. The bottom line that I took from this book is that Kevin Kelly is right, our national and international information systems are “out of control” and our policy leaders have abdicated their responsibilities to technicians who do not have the political, economic, or common sense of two ducks and a chicken. As Paul alludes in one of his footnotes, the Network today is somewhat in relationship to the “horseless carriage” stage of the automobile, and we have a very long way to go before policy helps make computers as user-friendly and reliable and interoperable as the telephone and the automobile are today.

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Review: The Knowledge Executive–Leadership in an Information Society

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Information Society, Leadership

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5.0 out of 5 stars

The Dean of Real Intelligence and Real Education,

April 7, 2000
Harlan Cleveland
This book was a catalyst in changing my own focus from that of reforming the classified intelligence community, to that of creating a “virtual intelligence community” that served as an on-going educational program for government and business leaders. “If there was ever a moment in history when a comprehensive strategic view was needed, not just by a few leaders in high (which is to say visible) office but by a large number of executives and other generalists in and out of government, this is certainly it. Meeting that need is what should be higher about higher education.”
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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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