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October 30, 2007
My Pick for Most Important B-Book of The Year
If you saw me speak in 2006, chances are you heard me mention Friedman's The Earth is Flat. While perhaps not the most insightful book ever written--and though suffering from a number of intellectual shortcuts taken to make a larger point--two things seem to me to make Friedman worth reading:
--if you're in the HR space and he's even half right, Friedman outlines changes to the workforce that will challenge just about every assumption you have, and;
--thanks to an incredibly successful airport marketing campaign (not to mention Friedman's own day job at the NY Times), virtually everyone else was reading him--so you'd probably be wise to read him as well.
Recently, I came across another book that I think will become the "must read" business book of late 2007, 2008, and perhaps beyond. Before I introduce it, let me say upfront that even though it makes a really, really important point, I hate the title. You've known since grade school that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover...but we all do anyway, right? So I'll be the first to admit that I passed Wikinomics several times before I finally picked it up for a look. But please don't make my mistake.
Buy this book and read it.
Why? Because Wikinomics describes and gives shape to something we've been trying to get our arms around for the last few years and gives it form. Because it provides great examples of a completely transformational business model that's emerging right under our noses. But most importantly, if you're in a line of business related to intellectual property or intellectual capital (and who isn't?) these changes will profoundly affect the landscape of intellectual activity in years to come.
Interestingly, both Friedman and Tapscott and Williams (Wikinomics' authors) seem to be reporting on opposite sides of the same "flat earth," to borrow Friedman's analogy.
While Friedman's focus is primarily on how the entry of millions upon millions of new players onto the global stage affects the talent market, Tapscott and Williams look at the role that distributed structures of information architecture can have on solving incredibly narrow intellectual problems--like how to get more gold yield out of a particular patch of Canadian soil, or what to do, if you're P&G, with the 90% of patents you hold that have never seen the light of day.
No time to read? Well, if you just want to take a quick drive-by, check out the wiki. You'll miss a lot, but you'll still come away with many worthwhile questions.
Time for a personal disclosure. I don't know the authors, have no relationship with the publisher, and receive no business or personal benefit from this endorsement.
Posted by davidkippen at October 30, 2007 03:46 PM