It is short, sharp, engaging and easy to read. Put down that Scandinavian crime novel, ignore your travel expense application issues and read this book instead. I’m perhaps reading too much into the title,  but I can’t help wondering if it isn’t a hat tip to the rock band Rage Against the Machine.  If it is, deeply nifty sub-editing coolness.   If not,  it is a lovely  unintended consequence.

The book highlights the accelerating disruption that technology brings to the workplace and to the very definition of work. There is dark side to technology, and the authors have done a nuanced job in exploring this.  It makes a worthwhile change from the technology=progress drum beat.

It was especially good to see a section on the growing gap between wage  and productivity growth.  To see disquiet about median wage stagnation from technology focused researchers is a very fine thing.  There is more than a whiff of valorization in their argument.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee make excellent use of statistics, and this work is no exception. They use numbers to illuminate, and they do it well. The Bill Gates in a bar story is a lovely explanation of mean and median. They explain, but don’t condescend.

As with much of US business academia, the book is centred on the US economy, with fleeting mentions of the rest of world.  I didn’t spot the dreaded phrase “Corporate America”, but it may have been lurking there. In particular the solution section was too US focused. Moaning about  H-1B visas etc… However suggestions 17,18, 19 are spot on.

17. Reduce the large implicit and explicit subsidies to financial services. This sector attracts

a disproportionate number of the best and the brightest minds and technologies, in part

because the government effectively guarantees “too big to fail” institutions.

18. Reform the patent system. Not only does it take years to issue good patents due to the

backlog and shortage of qualified examiners, but too many low-quality patents are

issued, clogging our courts. As a result, patent trolls are chilling innovation rather than

encouraging it.

19. Shorten, rather than lengthen, copyright periods and increase the flexibility of fair use.

Copyright covers too much digital content. Rather than encouraging innovation, as

specified in the Constitution, excessive restrictions like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term

Extension Act inhibit mixing and matching of content and using it creatively in new ways.

There are strong echoes of Larry Lessig in the IP section (as an aside I’d like to get the authors’ views of Lessig’s recent work on political corruption).

More broadly though I’d like to see business school academia and IT research engaging more with the rich research tapestry of sociology and political philosophy, how about more Jessop and Harvey, and Herbert Marcusse needs a serious dust off.  I fancy I heard the very faint clang of  Weber’s iron cage in this work. I’d suggest that Maslow and maybe Hayek can take a rest for a while.

This book is excellent,  but would have been seminal if it had built upon the work of that chap from Trier.

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

While I’m somewhat uneasy about the impact of  the iPad and Kindle on books and literature generally  because of the intellectual property control that it gives the device maker, I’m rather impressed with the implications that it has for poetry (thanks Lia for the link).

Watch this video from the Guardian about Elliot’s Wasteland. It is simply delightful.  Congratulations to Faber for doing this.  It is doing things with poems that weren’t possible before.

For the enterprise software vendors reading this, doing the stuff you do on the desktop or the laptop on the iPad doesn’t really impress anyone, it merely illuminates the gap between yesterday and tomorrow. Do something that you couldn’t do before.  Surprise and delight. Innovate rather than replicate.

Looking through my blog archive, I’ve often disagreed with Carr, but rather than just base my view on this latest book via headlines and what others wrote, I decided to buy the book and read it to make up my own mind.

I found it to be an excellent read. Well researched, tight prose, and an eclectic mix of scientific, philosophical and social material.  I was on a cycling holiday when I read it. My blackberry had given up the ghost, and the only computer I had with me was the bike computer.

I began the book expecting  to disagree with Carr. I make my living out of researching technology so I figured that I would join the queue of other tech folks dissing his “dystopian” views.  By about a third of the way through I found myself agreeing with him.  He spends part of a chapter discussing Joe Weizenbaum, who should be more famous and read than he is.  More than any Computer Scientist, Weizenbaum challenges the notion that technological progress is good for humanity. Carr echoes many of Weizenbaum’s concerns, in a more accessible form.

In reading the book, I’m reminded of two other writers, Alain de Botton, who is my favourite modern non-fiction writer.

He says much the same as Carr, but more lyrically. 

I felt keenly the painful psychological adjustments required by life in modernity: the need to juggle a respect for the potential offered by science with an awareness of how perplexingly limited and narrowly framed might be its benefits. I felt the temptation of hoping that all activities would acquire the excitement and rigours of engineering while recognising the absurdity of those who, overly impressed by technological achievement, lose sight of how doggedly we will always be pursed by baser forms of error and absurdity.

quoted from the Sorrows and Pleasures of Work.

 his recent post is also on the money.

One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.

The obsession with current events is relentless. We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties—something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows. We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds. We leave a movie theater vowing to reconsider our lives in the light of a film’s values. Yet by the following evening, our experience is well on the way to dissolution, like so much of what once impressed us: the ruins of Ephesus, the view from Mount Sinai, the feelings after finishing Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich…

The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting.

The second is GM Hopkins. I’ll leave you with a verse from the Habit of Perfection.

Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.

I’m glad I took the time to read Carr’s book without distraction.  I need to find more time to savour the joys of quiet reading and thinking.  As De Botton says “To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine.”

How do you define "innovation"?

Scott Berkun: I strongly recommend people use this word as little as possible. It’s mostly a distraction. Many great ideas and breakthroughs were achieved without people worrying if they were innovative enough or not. They simply chose to try and solve a problem they or their customers cared about. And then later on, after the hard work was done, they were called "innovators." It’s a good word to let other people say about you, rather than use it in reference to yourself.

His book, The Myths of Innovation is a sharp, if short read. This quote encourages me to re-read it.

I have been meaning to write up a book review on this for a while, so here goes. The publisher sent me a review copy of the Design of Design sometime ago.  Many of us have heard of Fred Brooks, the fellow who wrote the Mythical Man Month and was at heart of IBM System /360 development.

This is a book tinged with reminiscences. It discusses building a beach house, writing a book,  and the System /360. Brooks’ decades of experience seep through the book. It is a series of essays, but it hangs together as a whole rather well. It is part text book, part memoir. I reckon this would be a good audio book, read by the author. Brooks seems a remarkable fellow, he writes with an engaging modesty about his own accomplishment. He doesn’t preach or patronize. At times it rambles a bit, but that personalizes the book, rather than undermining and distracting from its key message.

At its heart, the book challenges engineers to think about design, and the process of design.

The book is laced with aphorisms, often surrounded by anecdote. Some examples.

The hardest part of design is deciding what to design. 

This followed up with a couple of paragraphs about a punchcard application that he kept adding features too.

A chief service of the designer is helping clients discover what they want designed.

The waterfall model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.

His advice on teams and collaboration is spot on, again using an anecdote from his experience.

Have one user-interface designer.

No amount of collaboration eliminates the need for the “dreariness of labour and the loneliness of thought”

An articulated guess beats an unspoken assumption.

If a design, particularly a team design, is to have conceptual integrity, one should name the scare resource explicitly, track it publicly, control it firmly.

Constraints are friends. He goes on to define what are real constraints, versus obsolete, misperceived and artificial…

I’m not sure that I agree with his statement about being very leery about assigning graduate students with little real world design experience dissertation topics in the field of collaborative design tools.  You could apply this argument to almost any topic, and then you would have grad schools filled with ancient experienced types. 

The chapter on Telecollaboration is rather quaint in technological terms, but the advice is useful. He makes a telling point in the last paragraph of the chapter. There are too many books about collaboration tools and not enough on using the tools to accomplish a real task.

The book is also peppered with quotes from antiquity. I particularly like the quote from Vitruvius 22 BC, Firmitas, Ulilitas, Venusitas. Firmness, usefulness, delight.  Chapter 12 on Esthetics and Style is one of the more punchy chapters.

As I dealt with JCL in my youth, I thoroughly enjoyed his dissing of JCL. (chapter 14).  Permit me a nostaligic moment and diversion.

In 1992,  straight out of university, I worked as a consultant on a mainframe HR implementation. I wrote a really complex series of reports, basically to produce the contracts for 70,000 insurance brokers. When I tested the reports in the sandbox it was fine and I also ran it in the test system. I filled in a long form for permission to run it against the production system. The rule was that you had to sit with the sys admin guy on the first night the report ran, in case anything went wrong. You then had to be on call for a week…

After a couple of rewrites my JCL was approved by the JCL standards committee.  So, on the appointed evening, I got the special pass that allowed me to enter the data centre, and I sat down next to a long bearded Gent  who hadn’t seen daylight for sometime.  We ran the report, and after about 3 minutes, all hell broke loose.  The final report, instead of printing out contracts for the dozen new brokers, began to print out contracts for all 70.000. eeek, the lights dimmed in Cape Town as we sucked all the available energy up… We shut down the the report, and I thought I was in deep trouble. Actually what happened is that I had been told to set up the program to work with fixed block, and the production system used variable block (or the other way round) This meant that my report was reading field 4 digits out on the selection rule, and this messed up the whole report.

Despite layers of testing and change control, I still managed to break something that was supposed to be unbreakable.

Another hidden gem is on page 234 on working with Germans.. “the engineers had always scrupulously followed IBM’s official corporate product procedure..”  In fact, the whole of chapter 19 is a gem.

Chapter 20 provides good solid advice on hiring and developing designers. This could be a whole book.

The house building chapters didn’t really grab me, I found myself skipping over them. There are better books on house design. However, chapters 24-26 on the System /360 are a must read for those interested in the history of one of the most significant computers and operating systems.

The recommended reading is useful, but I would have liked to have seen some of the more recent work on design thinking referenced. However it reminded me to spend more time with Barry Boehm’s work-

This is not a how to do design textbook. It is not as slick and cool as an IDEO book. It talks honestly and practically about the importance of design in computer science. I will make you think, and note that design is not just for those in black T-shirts and New Balance shoes.

It is a book I will continue to dip into, and I now need to go back and re-read his other work.

Sadagopan has written a thoughtful review of the book here.

In reviewing books, I have a simple test. Would I spend my own money on a copy? This book passes that test.

There are a goodly number of reviews on the web already, so I’ll keep this review relatively short. I found Jon Ingram’s review to be particularly useful.

The book is clearly written, well structured and it is refreshingly devoid of hype (other than the slightly jarring tagline). McAfee writes well, aiming at a management rather than a geeky audience. It is an easy but nutritious read, there is little technical jargon yet it doesn’t over-simplify or seem condescending when explaining technology. More importantly It isn’t just preaching to the enterprise 2.0 choir, nor it is the Iskra for the Enterprise 2.0 revolutionaries, whomever they may be.

In the same way that technologies and new business practices have changed businesses in the past, so to are new technologies and business practices changing things today. McAfee shows through 4 case studies how collaborative technologies are changing the way we work, and will work.

The term emergence is important to Enterprise 2.0, and McAfee explains this thoroughly. I particularly liked this sentence, Emergence is the appearance of global structure as a result of local interactions.

The section on ROI is also very useful, and not just for Enterprise 2.0 projects. He goes through the limitations of ROI models in some depth, even though he uses baseball examples, it makes sense.

It was also good to see that Argyis and Schön’s Model 1 and Model 2 theory of behaviour, Granovetter’s The Strength of Weak ties, and Burt’s Structural holes were referenced in the book. I’m of the view that we need to be applying more organization design and sociology to business and IT thinking. There are many models in the sociology that we could use to better understand organizations and how they change.

McAfee also references von Hippel and John Allen Paulos. Both are essential reading.

I would have liked to have seen a further reading section. The HBR book site  wasn’t available when I looked today. This book would be well served by a supporting web site, emergent or otherwise.

The final 2-3 pages of the book are key. They link the Enterprise 2.0 proposition back to his broader research (with Brynjolfson, Zhu and Sorell) into IT and competitive difference. He briefly makes the case for how Enterprise 2.0 can improve ERP, and I wish he had made more of this argument in the book.

With regards to the relevance and the extent of emergent technologies and social software in an enterprise context, let me take the liberty of pointing to the blogs and / or research of several Gartner colleagues, for instance Anthony Bradley, Jeff Mann  Andrea DiMaio  Carol Rozwell, Nikos Drakos and Adam Sarner.  For Gartner clients have a look at The Business Impact of Socialization: Real-World Measurable Results. This collection of research highlights 16 examples of social computing that were not open-ended, undefined experiments, but rather were purposeful engagements resulting in actual measurable business benefits. (client access needed)

Somewhat selfishly, I would have liked to see more on the HR implications of enterprise 2.0 in the book. I’m doing a lot of work in this area at the moment. I have recently published a collection of short case studies on social software’s impact in HR as part of 2009 Business Impact series and I field a lot of calls from HR and IT who are looking at the HR implications of social software, both behind and beyond the firewall. In 2008 I published a note, The Business Impact of Social Computing on HR Data. (client access needed) but here is an excerpt.

 Social computing’s impact: With social computing, we’re seeing a new set of HR-relevant data: volunteered data. Employees, managers, executives, applicants and customers share HR-relevant data, but only in ways that suit them, rather than in the structured format that is required by traditional HR processes. People are sharing data to get things done and to socialize. Examples include employees maintaining internal blogs, in which they discuss their skills and interests; workgroups and document sharing via wikis; and social networks. In addition, networks such as Facebook and Xing often offer richer, deeper insights into career history, skills, qualifications and business interests than traditional HR skills and career history databases do. Organizational changes often are reflected in LinkedIn before they appear in the transactional HR management system.

I made this strategic planning assumption then.

By 2012, volunteered, HR-related data will exceed mandatory HR data in volume and value. Leading HR organizations will invest more time and effort in managing and exploiting voluntary data than they spend on mandatory data.

This is similar to the points McAfee makes about imposed, emergent and competitive advantage.

I look forward to reading his next book, and continuing to follow his academic research. As a final aside,  McAfee cites JP Rangaswami in the book. I’d suggest reading his blog. JP is high up on my list of people who I’d like to have write a book.

Thanks again, Andrew, for the copy.

It is full of excellent nuggets. Obsess about your customers, not your competitors. Invent. Think long term. Be prepared to be misunderstood.  I wonder how many other CEO’s could present their business principles in this precise yet genuine way?  I believe the presentation was mainly aimed at the employees of Zappos. Amazon recently acquired them.  If I was a Zappos employee this would go a long way to making me feel welcome. 

Last night I was chatting to a colleague of mine in the US about ERP’s future. We then ended up discussing the history of the software industry. At what point do the ERP vendors of today face significant new forms of competition, and how will they react, what will threaten them, who will adapt and who won’t?  History can be a useful guide. We briefly touched on DEC, IBM, Dun&Bradstreet, Cullinet, ADR and so on. I suggested that he read Martin Campbell-Kelly’s excellent "from Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog- A history of the software Industry."  While we were talking he ordered it on his Kindle so that he could read it on the beach. He then proceeded to convince me that the Kindle was "awesome", which in turn then led me to read some Gartner Research on e-paper so that I could figure out how the Kindle could work in bright sunlight when I should have been working on my e-Recruitment Magic Quadrant.

The Kindle has started a bit of a blaze (bad pun I know). I’m following the "1984" incident with interest. Bezos’s apology was rapid, genuine and appropriate, but as Cory Doctorow points out, there are more issues around the Kindle that require resolution.  The Kindle is not only creating issues for Amazon, it is creating challenges for copyright law, publishers, and authors. How this plays out will impact fundamentally how we read. That is a big responsibility.

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