Tom Friedman’s book will be one of the hot reads this fall.
Order yours today: Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America
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Category: Reading
There are interesting lessons in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Learn to look for trends, events and all the gems in life that seem hidden, out of place, under the table and around corners?
At 400 pages its no quick read but Taleb has presented his research by sharing stories and analysis about randomness in his own life. Taleb has suggested that technology and history is primarily driven by Black Swans.
There are many lessons for IT leaders when it comes to Black Swans. The BBC wrote an interesting article about how black swans in the area of information technology enterprise systems. One in six big IT projects go over-budget by an average of 200% Why? Once you see his point of view it will be much easier to notice black swans within your organization. His book’s takeaway? Unexpected and rare events and even novel ideas have a huge impact on the world.
Rod Beckstrom’s The Starfish and the Spider reminded me of his very insightful presentation at the 2007 The Next Web Conference about organizations. Two types will define or break you in a Web2.0 world.
An enjoyable, easy read that further suggests leaderless organizations can fuel dramatic change within organization large and small.
Beckstrom, who just spoke at the 2008 TED conference presents content supporting how organizations can flourish when tightly controlled groups embrace the starfish effect.
He notes how Al-qaeda has embraced this type of leaderless organization and it becomes very obvious to any reader the last five years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This book actually complimented my previous read, The Wisdom of Crowds (review here).
The Starfish and the Spider follows the successful work of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything because both draw upon the power in today’s globalized world to share knowledge — via OpenSource to engage Web2.0 enterprise solutions and corporate blogs to think and more importantly, act independently.
Book website Link
James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds proves useful in understanding the impact (both positive and negative) regarding knowledge of isolated individuals vs. collective intelligence that shapes business, economies, societies and nations.
Surowiecki opens the book with a great example of the surprising “wisdom” possessed by groups of people. The book is a easy, enjoyable read.
As much as I enjoyed the learning I was somewhat more interested in learning the faults of crowds…specifically his analysis of NASA and the Columbia tragedy. To some extent the exact same lessons can be lifted from NASA and applied to Watergate, the highly intelligent crowd in the White House of Nixon’s inner circle.
The NASA “crowd” knew the danger yet did not as a group act to save the lives of their astronauts. In this lesson, I’m not convinced of the blanket approach to the wisdom of crowds. But Surowiecki is able to relay a number of cases in which this applies in business and societies.
The ability of crowds to outsmart a individual experts on any given topic ultimately supports the strength of communities, but as noted above even groups of specialists with graduate degrees have the ability to ignore their collective wisdom.
I watched a TED video of Barry Schwartz and was interested to learn more about his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less and learn the downside (and unhappiness) of abundance. Have you noticed as of late that almost everything is available…in too many overwhelming choices?
As Schwartz points out consider the types of choice in your local grocery store: 285 cookie options, 85 types of crackers, 95 types of chips, 75 iced teas, 29 chicken soups, 175 salad dressings and 275 boxes of cereal. Welcome to The Paradox of Choice. Try shopping for a new pair of jeans as he described in his TED presentation and the introduction to this book.
In my childhood things seemed simple. There were just three television channels…plus a PBS station. When the new school started I would receive two or three pairs of stiff denim jeans. Every kid in my school would wear the same dark blue demin and would not feel comfortable until the third week of school. By then our clothes were finally broken in via the wash cycle.
Don’t consider this book the opposite of Chris Anderson‘s The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. It would be more accurate to describe the book as what happens to individuals overwhelmed by choice.