Books Directors Should Read
from Summer 2000
by Karl Johnson
With the millennium having arrived not with a bang but a whimper, the professional prognosticators are back in full swing. Here`s a roundup of a few who talk sense.
The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press, $25.95), by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, slices away at the excesses of the Information Age. The authors decry the hype of "infopunditry" and urge a balanced take on technology`s potential. "The ends of information, after all, are human ends," they write.
They offer plenty of critical case studies, focusing on technology-happy missteps at Chiat/Day advertising, Amazon.com, and others. And their plea for an "end to endism"-the daily pronouncements on the end of this or that-is refreshing. How many times have we heard that the digital revolution will render paper obsolete? As Brown and Duguid point out, paper production has boomed-from 87 million to 99 million tons per year over the last decade. In 1998, paper companies outperformed the Dow by 40%. The end indeed.
The Visionary`s Handbook: Nine Paradoxes That Will Shape the Future of Your Business (HarperBusiness, $26). Authors Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor (assisted by journalist Howard Means) help harried directors see "the future expressed in the present tense."
One test determines what the authors call "the generational-technological bandwidth": Tally all the folders and programs you recognize on your hard drive. Then ask a "reasonably computer-literate" 15-year-old to do the same. The wider the gap between the two scores, the more problems you`ll have in a technology-dominated future. The solution? Hire the teen as a summer intern and "listen to what he has to say."
The Future of Work: The Promise of the New Digital Work Society (CommerceNet Press, $24.95), by Charles Grantham, is an optimistic view of technology as a force for good. "The whole idea," Grantham writes, "is that the changes being fostered among us are creating an opportunity for us to construct new communities."
To make the most of that opportunity, Grantham argues, businesses should never discount "wetware"-the human brain. In a book crammed with resources and tips, one will surely stand out: Grantham urges everyone to form a "personal board of directors" to provide "counsel or new knowledge to help guide us in our own transitions."
The Cluetrain Manifesto (Perseus Books, $23), by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger, grew out of a list of 95 theses the authors posted on the Web last year. They expand on their digital call to arms with a powerful reminder that no matter how technologically advanced e-commerce gets, business is, first and foremost, a human endeavor. It must be conducted in the human voice. The Web, they argue, has created vast new markets based on what are essentially "networked conversations." Yet most companies, even younger online firms, are not listening: "To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman."
Directors who ignore this powerful message do so at their own peril. These new markets, the Cluetrain quartet writes, "are not waiting" to see if board members can keep up.
The Tipping Point-How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Little, Brown, $24.95), by Malcolm Gladwell, borrows from the language of medical science to demonstrate how products can behave like epidemics. To take off, they must reach the tipping point-the decisive moment in an epidemic when "everything can change at once."
Directors should note that the tipping point can be manipulated. With a little tweaking, a company might bring its product or service to the point where it`s The Next Big Thing.
The Great Crash 1929 (Mariner Books, $14), by John Kenneth Galbraith, was originally published in 1955 and has never gone out of print, mainly because the markets never fail to deliver new jolts. The venerable economist doesn`t provide much comfort to those worried about this year`s skittishness, but he does offer perspective. "The descent," he writes, "is always more sudden than the increase; a balloon that has been punctured does not deflate in an orderly way."
