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May 2007 Archive

La Plus Ca Change, La Plus C'est La Meme

Think change is hard today and that those pesky incumbents just won't face reality? Consider this:

"The Telephone purports to transmit the speaking voice over telegraph wires. We found that the voice is very weak and indistinct, and grows even weaker when long wires are used between the transmitter and receiver. Technically, we do not see that this device will be ever capable of sending recognizable speech over a distance of several miles.

"Messer Hubbard and Bell want to install one of their "telephone devices" in every city. The idea is idiotic on the face of it. Furthermore, why would any person want to use this ungainly and impractical device when he can send a messenger to the telegraph office and have a clear written message sent to any large city in the United States?

"The electricians of our company have developed all the significant improvements in the telegraph art to date, and we see no reason why a group of outsiders, with extravagant and impractical ideas, should be entertained, when they have not the slightest idea of the true problems involved. Mr. G.G. Hubbard's fanciful predictions, while they sound rosy, are based on wild-eyed imagination and lack of understanding of the technical and economic facts of the situation, and a posture of ignoring the obvious limitations of his device, which is hardly more than a toy...

"In view of these facts, we feel that Mr. G.G. Hubbard's request for $100,000 of the sale of this patent is utterly unreasonable, since this device is inherently of no use to us. We do not recommend its purchase."

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and his financial backer, Gardiner G. Hubbard, offered Bell's brand new patent (No. 174,465) to the Telegraph Company - the ancestor of Western Union. The President of the Telegraph Company, Chauncey M. DePew, appointed a committee to investigate the offer. The amusing thing about this letter, in retrospect, is that Bell obtained controlling interest in Western Union by 1882! Bill's 200-Year Condensed History of Telecommunications, May 1998

Oh, the things you can turn up on the Internets! Substitute "Wi Fi" and "WiMAX" for "The Telephone," and you can almost hear the professional telephone and cellular types criticizing these new technologies that run on unlicensed spectrum. Toys!!

Posted on May 31, 2007 at 10:31 PM | Comments (0)

The upcoming 700 MHz Follies Beg a Public Discussion on Mobile Voice and Data (and Spectrum)

In practice, many innovative devices never reach the market. The Big Four tend to approve only established partners whose devices fit their business plans, which is why we have yet to see all those wireless devices that were supposed to be in our future.

The firms already control what phones or devices reach Americans; 95% of cell phones are sold by the wireless carriers themselves. They strictly control phone design, blocking features that might threaten their revenue, like timers that keep track of how many minutes you've used each month. The carriers have also crippled or blocked alternative means of connecting wirelessly, like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, because they want you to burn up minutes on their networks and charge extra fees. Forbes Column on Wireless Innovation

Tim Wu, Professor at Columbia Law School and author, wrote this column for Forbes magazine's May 18 edition. In this essay, as he highlights the upcoming debate over future use of the 700 MHz spectrum and introduces the issue of the "right to attach," he talks about the four major cellular phone companies. Those companies collectively control which applications use their networks and which devices can attach. Clearly, based on a historical review, their decisions are first in the best interests of their own companies and their shareholders, and only a distant second are they in the interest of their customers. If you have any experience with cellular phone companies, you probably have some understanding of what he's talkng about.

He highlights the innovation that unfolded from the Carterfone decision by the FCC in 1968, which allowed the Carterfone and other devices to be connected directly to the AT&T network, as long as they did not cause damage to the system. This decision led ultimately to a standard telephone jack and the introduction of new devices like fax machines and modems, which in time led to the Internet. See, this stuff is all connected when you dig deep enough. Check out this short history of the telephone industry and regulation to see how much telecommunications history drives what we see unfolding today. It's just all happens so sloooooooowly.

In fact, another column talks about a Cellular Carterfone policy, whereby cell carriers should be required to make neutral the decision on which applications and devices attach to their networks. Make it standard, sit back, open the floodgates, and watch the innovation start to happen.

Don't buy into the "dissatisfied customer" storyline? Check out Six Things Customers Hate about Cellphone Service. 1) Disabled features; 2) Phones "locked" to work on only one network. 3) "Walled garden" Internet access. 4) Unreliable service. 5) Incompatible products and services. 6) Cell phones generally can't be used as laptop modems even though it's technically feasible. Put me down for 2, 3, and 4, in particular. I'm switching carriers again this month (2 years finally up!!) and my Sprint-only Treo 650 won't be worth much. How long can this situation hold out? Maybe change is coming sooner than we think?

Yet the iPhone is poised to break through one technical barrier imposed by carriers on most phones--it will be capable of switching from cell mode to Wi-Fi when it detects a network hotspot. Wi-Fi - despite its wide availability and appeal - is impossible to access from most cell phones because carriers have been slow to support any wireless technology that competes with their own. For example, when Nokia released the E61 smartphone in Europe last year, Wi-Fi support came built in. But when Cingular introduced the same phone in the United States last fall, Wi-Fi support was missing.

Voice over IP is another network service cell carriers have been slow to support but IT departments want. Ben Holder, CIO of Unifi, a yarn manufacturer, says his company's BlackBerry users would benefit "a lot" from both Wi-Fi and VoIP if only they could get it. "Business users are now behaving more like consumers," Holder says. "They want more of the same features and functions as consumers."

My favorite part about all of this debate and potential change is to see dual use cellular phones finally break in - imagine your cellphone working like a land-line VOIP phone when you're under a Wi Fi cloud. How many calls do you make from your hometown? How many minutes could you drop from your cell plan if you could leverage the cloud? It's coming, folks.

There are more news items and blogs out there starting to discuss the upcoming 700 MHz decision-making process, which we'll have to cover in the next blog. I'm running out of steam tonight.

Posted on May 31, 2007 at 09:55 PM | Comments (0)

Small, Simple, Cheap, and Fast - OHMMMMMMMM

Want to make a difference when it comes to broadband Internet? Try putting this mantra into practice. Repeat three times when you go to bed and again when you wake up. "Small, Simple, Cheap, and Fast...Ohmmmmmmmm"

Recent comments and essays on the web have challenged and defended Wi Fi Mesh and the nascent Municipal Wireless industry. I commented recently this week on one of those essays, on one of my favorite sites, MuniWireless.com (see MuniWireless - Opinion: What municipalities should be asking in citywide Wi-Fi planning).

I don't so much defend Wi Fi Mesh as challenge those who would throw it out on the junk heap - as a new, compelling technology, it deserves a fair evaluation, and we're in the middle of that process. And I do challenge those who would cite a few "failures" without analyzing the rationale behind such labels - we rush to judgment when we want to draw conclusions - it's just too early to tell. Often a trial can produce unexpected beneficial results - is a trial a "failure" if it produced success, but not the anticipated success? is a project a "failure" if the underlying assumptions are revealed to be flawed? is an individual network a "failure" if the exercise produces valuable knowledge that cities or companies can build on? There are many ways to look at this industry, but much of the current critique is rather single-minded, IMHO. These articles and comments are written with a bias towards current business practice and established technologies (e.g., "if it's not licensed spectrum, it ain't gonna fly").

As an aside, such two-way journalism is one of the fascinating things about blogs and broadband - you can easily talk back to the press, without going through an editor. I've recently debated whether its worth it to formally rebut the AP article that kicked off this recent round of debate, reprinted in my local paper. Should I bother to write a Letter to the Editor? A clue - I haven't. Yet.

Back to my favorite mantra. When it comes to broadband Internet, imagine how most of us get onto the broadband Internet now - we get our Internet access from large companies that don't really buy into the underlying ethos of the Internet - open, free-wheeling communication - we get access from companies that are proud of being "LARGE and COMPLEX." Sure, large Telcos and Cable companies are reliable for what they promise to do, but their strategy of rolling out new markets makes them slow to get to new areas. They sell on value and represent their services as a bargain - they talk about blazing fast speed or the value of the bundled Triple Play of services - video, voice, broadband. They would never admit to being expensive or slow, but the bottom line is that relative to other countries, our current major providers are not aggressively growing their service models or cutting their prices, nor are they rapidly expanding into new geographic areas to ensure universal service.

They're doing just fine by their shareholders by offering their service packages in the current business climate - quite simply, they prefer the status quo.

A fact not often considered is that most residential consumers are paying around $1500/year combined to get broadband, TV content, and voice telephony to their homes. Add in mobile voice telephony, and that number goes up to maybe $2500-3000/year, at least. Wow! That's a lot of money and a big chunk of many household budgets, in after-tax dollars! How did it grow so much, when we used to get radio and TV "free" over the airwaves, and paid about $20/month for telephone service? Sure, we paid a lot more for long distance back then, but we were jealous of our minutes and didn't spend a lot of time on useless gabbing - its now a sign of age to recall your mother shouting to your father "Hurry up, it's LONG DISTANCE!"

But every time I turn on my digital cable TV, I see an ad about bundled voice, and indeed, you'll see innumerable TV ads on just about any channel talking about the value of digital telephone service "as low as $29.95/month." How did telephone service get to be a "bargain" at such rates? Here's a sample bill (not scientifically accurate, but I believe close to reality).

Digital Voice - $29.95
Video Service (cable or satellite) - $45.95
Broadband Service - $42.95
Total Triple Play "Value" - $118.85
Multiply times 12, you get $1,426.20

We've become so used to paying these fees, we rarely stop to wonder about an alternative vision, or if we are getting all that we could be getting. But the future version of these services are out there, in the form of newer technologies.

In contrast to this status quo, imagine a solution that is Small, Simple, Cheap, and Fast. (and keep repeating that mantra). Small, because that keeps costs low and provides lots of choices, allows more focus on niche solutions, and lowers barriers to entry. Simple, because there are fewer moving parts (see above) and that means the solution is more likely to work/less likely to fail. Cheap, because the costs of these new solutions are quite a bit cheaper - going over the air without paying for spectrum rights avoids such massive capital expenditures as trenching and spectrum rights acquisition through auctions. Fast, because its fairly simple to hang up these nodes on light poles or mount them on rooftops.

We're now living in a world that is undergoing near constant change, on a rapid basis. When you have such dramatic change so consistently, doesn't it make sense to approach things differently than you have in the past? Doesn't it make sense to experiment with new models and try on new ways of doing things? Doesn't it make sense to take some risks? That's yet one more benefit of using new business models enabled by these new technologies - they allow rapid feedback cycles, which enable rapid improvement cycles. It's just like Open Source Software. Lots of experiments, lots of innovation, lots of improvements.

That is what I believe is the bottom line on the need for different approaches to broadband provisioning:

A divergence from the status quo is called for, and an opportunity presents itself to model the success of Open Source software development. This is what we will see more and more of in the coming year - more experimentation, more innovation, more change. As consumers, we should open ourselves up to new ways of doing things, exploring what we value and what we can do without. There are multiple lessons to be learned if we will set off on this path.

Posted on May 30, 2007 at 04:42 PM | Comments (0)

Making Change Happen with Broadband II

What a whirlwind weekend!

Yesterday morning, I posted a blog describing all the broadband tools I used to help me sell my car in less than two days. This is the second installment, the other side of the coin, if you will, as I describe how I used Internet tools to buy my car on Friday afternoon and Saturday. The whole process took about 24 hours. Satisfaction. Relatively pain-free. Amazing.

It occurred to me during the middle of the process that the entire structure of new car buying is set up to keep me the buyer from attaining my goal, but that the Internet provides so many tools and so much information that I have a huge advantage I did not used to have. In most complex purchase processes, one of the hardest steps is to find the true market price.

I guess in this case that this purchase process was not unlike other more complicated markets that we participate in, from home buying to major furniture. We have incredible choices in today's economy, and the challenge is to get the task organized and then to execute to a plan. When the buyer takes short cuts and leans on the seller, generally that works to the seller's advantage. It takes discipline and no small amount of skill and patience to make the purchase process work out to the buyer's advantage.

But whether you're an individual looking to buy a car or a city looking at an upcoming metropolitan broadband decision, there are many similarities that a buyer facing a complex purchase decision encounters. Bear with me as I walk through my experience, because I found it revealing for what it showed about using broadband, as well as revealing details about a purchase process in a more general sense and how power has shifted to the buyer in the new digital broadband economy. I would not want to be in the business of selling cars these days.

I've been day dreaming about a car for a while, but my thoughts came quickly into focus after I watched my old car drive away on Friday and I had to hang around and wait for my wife to get a ride - I was car-less-in-Texas, and lacking any serious mass transit options, I knew that this situation could not last beyond the weekend, or I'd be renting a car on Tuesday morning.

So, a sense of urgency was a good first step in the buying process, a good motivator to get busy and make the process work. On Friday afternoon, we were motivated enough to visit two auto showrooms, my wife and daughter accompanying me on the trip. But before I tell you about the results, let me walk through the buying steps that led to our success by Saturday night.

1. Personal Inventory. In any buying process, from a grocery list to a trip to the mall, it's best to start off a purchase with some internal work, in order to determine what problem it is you're trying to solve, what needs you plan to meet by making the purchase - in short, your buying criteria. Edumunds.com has Buying Tips & Advice, a list of Ten Steps in Buying a New Car, which I recommend. My needs started with low emissions - I'm growing more and more green with each passing day, it seems. After that, I'm thinking this may be a car my daughter will drive in three years when she turns 16, so I value low operating costs and high reliability. I don't need a large car, or a particulary powerful car. Finally, some might debate if this is a need, but I want a fair degree of comfort, having grown used to the Lexus style of driving.

My personal inventory showed these buying criteria, in the end:
a. Low emissions/fuel economy - a Hybrid was a likely candidate - that one decision really narrows the options
b. Between $20,000-$25,000 target price, to give me a car mostly paid for in three years
c. Toyota or Honda were my personal biases based on experience and previous research

2. Assessment of Market Options. These first few steps are heavily weighted towards information gathering, making the Internet a key ally. In Step One, I used the Internet to get oriented on the car buying process, because I hadn't done that in a while. Now I had to see what was out there that matched my needs - what product was I looking for? I spent quite a lot of time on the Toyota and Honda websites, researching their product lines. I had soon narrowed the search to the Toyota Prius or Camry Hybrid, or the Honda Civic EX (coupe or sedan) or the Civic Hybrid.

3. Demonstration Trial. At some point in the buying process, you need to get physical, to touch the product and try it on for size. By Friday afternoon, it was time to go to the dealers and do some driving. The wireless laptop at home has become for me the Yellow Pages, among other things, so I Googled Toyota+Austin and Honda+Austin and found the dealers and their operating hours. We visited the closest Honda and Toyota dealer, with dinner sandwiched in between. This part was fun. The Honda dealership visit was revealing in two ways - I found that I didn't prefer the Honda coupe as much as I thought I would - didn't like the 2-door aspect especially. And I really didn't like the particular Civic Hybrid that we drove - and it was the only one on the lot, and the color combination of blue and gray was off-putting. The sales guy explained how popular these cars were and that they weren't being discounted, and that this car would be gone by the weekend. "Good for you," I thought. Oh, and one more thing, I did not like the sales guy at all, and that was enough, along with the low inventory, to turn me away from that particular dealership, convenient though it was to my house.

The Toyota dealership was a different experience altogether. The Prius had less to Wow me after this test drive (I had been out in a Prius twice before). My wife was unimpressed with the bells and whistles, such as the Navigation package, the camera for backing up, the push-button start. In contrast, the Camry Hybrid was a dream car - as close to a Lexus I would come to without actually buying one. On a whim, we test drove the Scion TC, and were surprised to find it fun and cool, if a little stripped down. At this point, I was likely thinking more of my daughter in three years than I was of my own needs. I couldn't picture myself in that car in the end.

I drove home that night confused and perplexed - information overload. Time for a good night's sleep.

4. Information Organization. It's good to stay organized, and Microsoft Excel always helps me to make a data table that I can use to help me sort out my thoughts. With a clear head in the morning, and after writing that blog on the Used Car sale, I spent an hour or so laying out some different scenarios. I divided the purchase into capital and operating expense. Now I had to make assumptions on gas prices in the future, financing costs for the vehicle, and what purchase price I would be able to negotiate.

I ended up grouping the purchase data in the table into two categories: a Hybrid (Prius, Camry, or Civic) and a Low-Cost conventional vehicle (Civic or Scion). The spreadsheet helped me to better understand Total Cost of Ownership (TCO is something every buyer should think about before making a purchase).

5. Vendor Engagement. Having turned the process into a more quantifiable exercise in sorting through commodities, I now went back to the Internet, this time to better understand the dealer situation, because that is how one has to buy a new car, through a dealer. Here broadband Internet proved valuable. I spent an hour sending out emails to dealers asking for quotes. The Honda website made it easy, listing ten dealers within 150 miles that would give me a price quote. I used their quote tool and included a note with each request describing a Request for Proposals for a purchase to be made by the end of the day.

I began getting automated responses in my email box, and yet only three of those responded in timely fashion with good information. I called the dealers with the best emails, and began to get quotes that were based on Invoice Price rather than MSRP. Dealers like to base the discussion on MSRP, because that puts the price discussion to their advantage, where it looks like they are giving up a lot by discounting off that anchor. In fact, the Invoice price is easy to find, and is a better anchor for the purchaser, because it starts off lower. Sellers are still able to make money around invoice pricing through incentive payments, but they will make a lot less, which means a lower price for the buyer.

Here's a decent discussion on Anchoring in a Negotiation, which is where you are when you start to get serious about buying a car.

Negotiators who are aware of the anchor trap in negotiations can reduce the impact by:
* Consciously resisting the tendency to be "imprisoned" by the first line of thought that comes to mind, deliberately trying to find other points of departure.
* Keeping their minds open long enough to admit new information and opinions that can broaden their frame of reference and generate new solutions.
* Spending sufficient time thinking about all the facets of a problem before entering a negotiation where the other party introduces its ideas.
* Always looking for opportunities to use anchors to their own advantage.

6. Narrow the purchase to a limited set of options. I was able to get pricing at just over Invoice on all the Hybrids, which led me to dismiss the conventional options. And it became clear after I found a volume dealer near Houston that the Toyota Hybrids would not come in less than the high 20,000s. they're popular and relatively more expensive - not much competition to help a buyer here. The Civic Hybrid, on the other hand, emerged as the front-runner.

Now that I had narrowed my purchase to identify what I was looking for, it had come down to a commodity purchase, which hinges on price as the deciding factor. The questions I was asking now had to do with how low I could get the price in a short amount of time, because I wanted to complete this sale before the weekend was out. Now I was in negotiation mode. I was not too harsh here, because I didn't have time on my side. I had a dealer in San Antonio offer a price at $400 over invoice, and another in Round Rock (20 miles north) go to about $200 over. Faced with this information, the dealer in S. Austin gave me a Best and Final Offer on a Civic Hybrid, just a little lower than the other price I had, which I had to conclude was a fair and competitive market price - I'd reached my goal in the negotiation, and then heard the magic words telling me it was time to go make the buy: "and we have plenty of Civic Hybrids in stock to choose from." Only when I had a fair price did I start to consider color choice options and if I would have to compromise my choice in this category.

7. Close the sale. The final process at the dealer was quite pleasant, because I had already negotiated the sale using Internet-provided information and finalizing details over the telephone. After finding the right color combination, I ensured that I could get the financing rate I needed through the dealer (another big plus over Toyota) and it was all over in about an hour. I avoided the "nibbles" at the end, the service contract and other "offers" they make right at the point of sale, as they attempt to nudge up the monthly price in increments of 5-20 dollars with high margin options. The individual offers don't seem like much, until you multiply the numbers by 60. With a $20/month bump, for example, you're at $1200 more for the sale price, or > 5% increase in this case. This is where dealers make money back that they gave away during the negotiation to get to the close, so buyer beware - you're not done yet!

So now I have a !NEW CAR! sitting in the driveway. I'd forgotten how satisfying it is, and spending the time to be thorough makes the satisfaction all the more enjoyable. I know I got the right car at the right price. This blog was helpful for me to diagram this process once again, and it proved revealing to show how much I use the Internet as a tool to access information, identify opportunities, and communicate with buyers and/or sellers.

I don't think I'm alone out there, as more and more buyers will discover that they can now begin to shed the intermediaries in any sales process and do a lot more on their own. I estimate I saved $3000 by spending a little time on both the sale and purchase transactions, probably working out to about $200/hour, which is about right. It just wasn't that hard. But DIY is not for everyone, especially in a complex purchase like metropolitan broadband. Many cities will find that the time and resources needed to get prepared prove just too much to do on their own.

I really believe that there is much to learn from thinking in new ways about how new tools change our options and reshuffle the deck, both as consumers and as purchasing organizations. It helps to go back to fundamental process evaluation to ensure that you are doing your best in any purchase decision. I think about the Project Triangle often: Money, Time, Quality. You can have two, but not three. If you want Money (lowest price) and Quality (highest quality), then you better use Time to your advantage, and that means a thorough purchase process, starting as early as possible - don't delay starting - but not necessarily finishing fast. Use Time to your advantage.

And these lessons apply not only to car purchases but also to wireless broadband systems. Whatever your situation or upcoming decision, I recommend you think long and hard about tools and process, because the world of buying and selling has changed, and whichever side you're on, you will be well served to have your eyes open to the new environment and market dynamics.

Posted on May 28, 2007 at 07:30 AM | Comments (0)

Recognizing Change from Using Broadband in our Daily Lives

There's probably not a day goes by that I don't feel fortunate to be where I am. I live in Austin, Texas, with a view from my backyard over the Texas Hill Country. I'm a minute away from the highway out my back door, Loop 360, which while it has grown increasingly congested, still is one of the prettiest highways in Texas, as it winds over the hills and through limestone cliffs blasted out 25 years ago to make way for "progress." They've so far kept the grassy middle and in the spring, the wildflowers bloom there. The spring wildflowers are fading now, transitioning to their summer cousins, and the green grass is starting to show signs of the coming heat of summer, as it begins to turn golden here and there.

The fly in the ointment, the ants at the picnic, the speck in my eye ... pick your metaphor for the little thing that brings my idyllic dreams crashing to the floor, has been my old set of wheels. It hasn't been so bad in retrospect, because it was a very good car, but I've been driving my wife's old Lexus for four years, longer than I expected when I accepted the the hand-me-down as my wife transitioned to a new Expedition - the family truckster that holds all the kids and dogs and ranch gear - four years ago. After 11.5 years, I decided it was time for a change and put the car on the market. Two days later, yesterday afternoon, I found myself out washing the car in the rain. There was a first, in all my days, I've never washed the car in the rain. But I had two buyers coming over to look at the car in less than an hour, and both claimed to have cash in hand. So I finished cleaning out the inside as it began to rain, put away the vacuum cleaner, and recognized that I just had enough time to wash it, rain or no rain. It looked good (and wet) when I was finished.

My neighbors thought I was crazy, I guess. The rain came and went as I washed the car. One shouted from her driveway and told me her horror story of selling a used car years ago. I kept on washing. My next door neighbor pulled up and commented that I looked like an illustration for an Aggie Joke. I finished the body and went on to the wheels and tires. After two rounds of wiping it down with a chamois skin as the rain continued to sprinkle, I called it quits and went inside, changed into dry clothes, and got the car papers in order.

With a doorbell ring, the first buyers had shown up. They passed, I think because I wouldn't negotiate on price - I kept the price firm because I had another buyer on the way - maybe this would be harder than I thought. But the second buyer didn't even bother to take it for a test drive, handing me an envelope of cash. The paperwork was over in less than 10 minutes, the keys and title handed over and I stood on the front porch and watched and waved as the old Lexus and nearly 12 years of memories drove away. The proud new owner was a 20-something young professional. It felt good all around, but it was a strange day, and it all happened so fast.

This used car selling experience was uniquely different certainly than the nightmare my neighbor described from her driveway, and indeed, from any sale I've experienced in my past - I've sold at least 15 cars in the 34 years I've been driving, and always have preferred to sell them myself than to unload them on the dealer at a steep discount. But this was almost too easy. Too easy, and not just because it was a Lexus. It made me wonder if I couldn't have made another $1000. It was that "seller's remorse" one feels, where one is happy, but there's that little nagging doubt that it was priced too low. I decided to hold on to the happy, and let go of the nagging doubt.

I write about this experience because it demonstrates in a neat little package the wide ranging thoughts I shared on this website on Thursday, summarizing the reading on Internet change that I've done over the past couple of months. That post on my website came just 18 hours after I'd made another post, a short notice on Craig's List to sell the car.

It was all pretty simple, really.

1. Set a Market Price. I researched Kelly Blue Book and Edmunds.com to help me not only fix the right price for the car, but also find out how many other cars like my Lexus were for sale in the area.

2. Market My Product. Then I made the post on Craig's List-Austin on Wednesday night (I have Craig's List bookmarked on my Firefox browser window, in the Local Information folder). No fee, no hassle.

3. Qualify the Prospects. Within minutes, I was getting short emails asking for pictures, asking other buyer questions. With short responses, I engaged in dialogue with those who appeared most serious, continuing into Thursday afternoon and evening.

4. Sell on Value. Out of six potential buyers, four had emerged by Thursday as serious. One appeared sincere, but wanted to bargain the price down, with stories of limited budget. Another was ready to buy for his daughter, but wouldn't be able to confirm until after the weekend.

5. Close the Sale. On to Friday morning, the ultimate buyer said he had to get a loan, and when I called back on Friday morning to tell him that another buyer was on the way over, he said he'd be there in an hour with cash. He came through and got the car.

6. Ensure Legal, Appropriate Paperwork. And in the thirty minutes between wiping down the clean car and selling it, I Googled "Selling a Used Car in TExas" and found a site on the Texas DMV, which had links to forms I would need to ensure a hassle-free sales process and protect against potential liability down the road, which I was able to print up and fill out in minutes.

So if it wasn't Gone in Sixty Seconds, it was more like Sold in Under 48 Hours (in six basic steps).

In my past experience, I've had to list the car in the classifieds or put it out on Auto Trader, first the magazine, then the website, both at a fee. I would be reluctant to tweak my ad, because it would cost me more. Or, I would put less information in the ad, because it would cost me more. It was a hassle for buyers to find me. I've had to put up For Sale signs in the car windows and drive the car around, or park the car in a high traffic area so it would be seen by the masses. It was considerable work to sell a car, for most of my life. I enjoyed the challenge because I treated it like a game, but it was still a challenge to find the right buyer and get the best price. But broadband Internet tools are changing this process, and the role of the middleman looks more and more tenuous because of the tools we can use now.

Craig's List leverages the broadband Internet and a changing society to put people together, without a lot of hassle or other stuff that gets in the way. Craig understands that a tool should be a tool, it should do what it says it will do, and so he has kept it simple. I'd say the same for Google Search. What gifts to us all. I'm sure that any of you who has had success with Craig's List understands what I mean, and by now, who doesn't get Google? Maybe my experience this week was a fluke, but I consider it yet one more demonstration of the way things will be when we become a digital broadband society, because that's what we are becoming here in Austin, bit by bit. This economic activity had nothing to do with the cost of broadband, but contributed considerably to both my welfare and that of the buyer. We both walked away happy. A frictionless economy and harmonious society are two goals of metropolitan broadband but most of the press wants to talk about "free Wi Fi" and "laptops in the park." I think this story is far more relevant to my happiness, and should be written about a lot more.

My next post will be on buying a new car, with the aid of technology, which I need to get to now, or else I'll be walking around the day after Memorial Day, wondering why I sold my car!

We have a vast array of new tools at hand, more every day, as the Internet becomes more widely accepted and more tools are invented. And these tools are changing our daily life experience by removing hassles and headaches. Sure, sometimes the tools that are meant to help us bring even more hassle, but yesterday was one of the good days, and it's worth a pause to consider how much has changed, and how much will change in the days to come.

Posted on May 26, 2007 at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)

Three Faces of One Change: Search Engines, Mass Collaboration, and Leaderless Organizations

I wonder if Johanes Gutenberg in 1450 could imagine the first Book-of-the-Month Club launched in 1923, almost 500 years later? Of course not - OK, perhaps that one was too easy. How about ...

Could Henry Ford busy making Model T's for $360 each in 1916 - and inventing the assembly line and modern corporation while he was at it - could Henry imagine a $3 Million Ferrari in 2007, not to mention millions of cars on Interstate Highways, only 90 years later? OK, still a little too easy...

How about Orville and Wilbur Wright? Thrilled at their success in their little dune jumping flights in Kitty Hawk in 1903, would they have ever thought it possible that a man would go to the moon a mere 66 years later in 1969? Or how about a car on the moon, just two years after the first Moon walk by humans?

What about the short trip from transistor radio in 1967, where I heard the Beatles hits as a young boy growing up out in the country, to my son's iPod, only 40 years later? I can tell you I did not imagine that.

But many did read the Dick Tracy comic strip starting in the 1930s and saw a video wrist phone, so we all could imagine that vision - someday - thanks to cartoonist Chester Gould.

Maybe you think these legendary figures could have imagined these things, or even dreamed them, but I doubt it. What they did in and of itself was so astounding, how could they or anyone around them imagine the evolution of their innovations?

So when even the greatest inventors, geniuses, entrepreneurs, and visionaries known to man are somewhat limited by the paradigms of their day, how can we mere mortals expect to be any more visionary? As difficult as it may be, my friends, that is the challenge of our new century, as more and more wonderous things come our way. The Internet is bringing about a lot more than better ways to check emails, search with Google, surf websites (or look at pornography), as normal as all those activities have become. We have to start thinking about Revolution, as opposed to Evolution, because that's now the pace of change that is relevant - when it comes to technology, evolution almost seems a quaint concept, because so many are working so hard with more and better tools to engineer a revolution.

What do I mean by all this? A revolution, like what? Well, that's up to all of us to figure out, but we need to start with a vision and some more imagination - a lot more imagination. Imagine not having to stand in line anymore, I like that one. Imagine having all the TV shows and movies ever made, all the songs ever recorded, available to you for a small micropayment. Good-bye Tivo, so recenlty an innovation, but unless it adapts, maybe soon irrelevant. Imagine cures for society's ills, from millions hooked up to the Internet with access to the world's knowledge and a motivation to put their ingenuity and unique perspectives to work. This is the vision I'm talking about, not getting access to broadband for $10 less per month. That's so boring, when you understand the possibilities and start looking a little farther out.

But having a vision and being able to jump to new paradigms and shed old ones is a learned skill, I think, one that gets better with practice. So if it takes time, shouldn't each of us start practicing now? What do we have to lose? Imagination is free, but we often treat it as if it were frivolous, or an expensive pursuit.

Such are the advances of technology these days, that now it seems that our indivdual and collective traditional paradigms, and the visions they imply, the way we look at things and the way we imagine the future, have become for us the primary impediments to a better world for ourselves and our offspring. We often seem more afraid of change, than we are excited by it, so strong is the hold of the present on us, and the exhaustion of constant change.

In today's world, if you can imagine it, there is likely a way for it to happen, and probably, sooner than you think. We should just get used to it, because its become apparent that rapid innovation is here to stay. And with regard to wireless metropolitan broadband, it is more and more clear to me that it is the conservative visions of city leaders, businesspeople, and residential consumers that keeps us all locked into old ways of thinking about information technology, voice telecommunications, access to media content, and so on and so on.

I'll admit, most of my writings on this website, especially the provocative pieces, are intended to jar the reader into thinking in new ways, to challenge one to shake loose of an old paradigm and try on a new one. The nature of a paradigm shift is radical - can you remember those posters that were popular ten years ago or so, the random dots that looked like a Jackson Pollack modern art piece, but if you screwed up your eyes just so, you could see a ship or an airplane or something else emerge out of the haze. It was all a matter of refocusing your vision. And once you learned to do it, you couldn't look at one of those posters again without seeing the images pop out automatically. That for me is what a paradigm shift is like - it changes the way you perceive the world around you, forever - it's a one-way street.

But when you're well off, well positioned and doing fine, well, I think it's natural to want the world to stay that way - change becomes a threat, because the status quo is so good. When change is not necessarily your friend, you resist it. That's what's happening. For everyone who wants change, there seems to be another who will caution against the dark side of change, the negatives. "Sure, it can get better, but it can always get worse, too." But when the world is rapidly changing, and the competition is ever increasing, you either adapt and stay in the game or fade into the woodwork. In today's world, adaptation means leveraging the Internet for all that it's worth.

As I talk about these three books below, I urge you to be thinking about metropolitan broadband and what these changes imply for the way we each access the Internet, what we end up doing with that tool, and how we could do a lot more, for a lot less cost than we might think, if only we changed our paradigms about how the network works for each of us.

I recently read (and I recommend them all) three books that document the dramatic change being brought about by the spread of the broadband Internet and digital literacy. The three changes coming down the pike are Search Engines, Collaboration, and Leaderless Organizations.

Search Engines have come a long way - they now mean that we no longer have to have "a place for everything and everything in its place," at least when it comes to the digital "everythings" in our lives. When everything is tagged with descriptors, we just need a good search engine and a knack for describing our search problem - that's the scenario outlined in Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger.

Weinberger's thesis is this: historically, we've divided the world into categories, topics, and hierarchies because physical objects need to be in one place or another, they can't be in all the places they might belong. Computers and the Internet turn this on its head: because a computer can "put things" in as many categories as they need to be in, because individuals can classify knowledge, tasks, and objects idiosyncratically, the hierarchy is revealed for what it always was, a convenient expedient masquerading as the True Shape of the Universe.Boing Boing: Everything is Miscellaneous - how the Web destroys categories, disciplines and hierarchies

Collaboration and the changes it brings is well documented in Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams.

Ask the man or woman-on-the-street if they know what a wiki is, and they are still likely to respond "Huh?" but ask them if they've been out on Wikipedia and they will likely nod and then share their opinion with you. I grew up with Encyclopedia Brittanica, now Encyclopedia Brittanica Online, but I increasingly see Wikipedia as a viable substitute. It's better suited to keeping pace with the modern world, because of it's highly flexible and adaptive basis in Wiki technology, drawing from millions of opinions on millions of subjects, instead of hundreds or thousands. Some input is from experts, but much is simply persistent and self-correcting data input, that grows better with each iteration. Most often, its good enough for my purposes, and its rarely my only source. It's fascinating to contemplate how efficient it all is. This collaboration model goes way beyond an on-line encyclopedia, however.

Billions of connected individuals can now actively participate in innovation, wealth creation, and social development in ways we once only dreamed of. And when these masses of people collaborate they can collectively advance the arts, culture, science, education, government, and the economy in surprising but ultimately profitable ways. Companies that engage with these exploding Web-enabled communities are already discovering the true dividends of collective capability and genius.

To succeed, it will not be sufficient to simply intensify existing management strategies. Leaders must think differently about how to compete and be profitable, and embrace a new art and science of collaboration we call wikinomics. This is more than open source, social networking, so-called crowdsourcing, smart mobs, crowd wisdom, or other ideas that touch upon the subject. Rather, we are talking about deep changes in the structure and modus operandi of the corporation and our economy, based on new competitive principles such as openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally. Wikinomics, the Book

Leaderless Organizations are described and analyzed in The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. An organization without a leader? The "spider" is the rigid hierarchy organization, with well-defined leadership roles and responsibilities - think Army. The "starfish" is the more organic, self-controlled, self-directed organization of the twenty-first century, that emerges in response to a shared set of needs and then deals with issues and tasks from the bottom up. This self-organizing organization was hard to imagine before we had a tool like the Internet to help such a movement along.

It sounds like the opening line to a bad joke: What do the Apache Indians, Craigslist, Skype, and Al Qaeda have in common? The answer goes to the heart of a rewardingly simple new book: They're all decentralized organizations that have bedeviled the established hierarchy hell-bent on crushing them.

The Starfish and the Spider is about the open-source revolution, a trend that authors Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom demonstrate is simultaneously dismantling many established industries while harnessing the creativity of the masses to generate new ones. (The title refers to the authors' metaphor that a starfish and a spider appear to be structured similarly, but if you crush a spider's head, it dies. Cut a starfish in half, and you'll end up with two.) Open source has spread far beyond its recent successes with file sharing and software. You can now find cooperatively developed art, literature, even religion. Fast Company Reading List

If you've made it this far, congratulations! My bottom line conclusion from these three books is that the world, whether you like it or not, is very different than it was only ten years ago, and it is on its way to looking far more different than we can probably imagine in a short ten more years. The advent of 1) the instant access to the world's knowledge at your fingertips; 2) the ability to collaborate with thousands of others who share your interests, passions, and needs; and 3) the opportunity to harness these changes and new powers into commercial, political, or social gain - all at tremendously low cost of time or money - that is the change I'm talking about.

Now, where will these trends point your imagination? Will any of this become a revelation for you and lead to a paradigm change? Is a new, more revolutionary vision in store for you?

I encourage you to get these books, fully understand the changes implied by the impact of advancing technology on society, and figure out how this new world will help you get whatever it is you are looking for, be it a rewarding relationship, an opportunity to make the world a better place, a sense of meaning to your life, or a big old whoppin' pile o' cash - its OK to get rich too!

There is hope out there for all of us in the New World being created out of the Old World by these revolutionary technologies and human ingenuity.

Posted on May 24, 2007 at 04:27 PM | Comments (0)

Books, Books, and More ... Books

Books images.jpg

I recommend you start a wireless resource library (or at least, a bookshelf) today. While not as timely as Internet information resources, books and whitepapers provide a way to do a deep dive on a topic. However, selecting books can be a hit or miss proposition, making them an investment in time and money that may prove less useful than you envisioned, so I recommend you start with this list to get a fresh perspective on why metropolitan wireless has the potential to be so disruptive and at the same time, beneficial to the community.


A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson has been a delightful read so far. Bryson walks the reader through engaging tales of how we (all of us human beings) came to know what we know about the world around us. It's amazing to me how much I missed along the way, and I consider myself fairly learned and well read. I paid attention in class, but class was a long time ago. And much has been added to the body of knowledge since I last attended class. I've been reading this on the treadmill at the health club and I easily pass an hour without looking up...I recommend it highly, not only to review much of what you may already know, but also to gain new insights into how the world around you works and why things are the way they are. This kind of comprehensive survey over everything helps, at least it does for me, to put things into context and make better sense of the world. A framework is vital if only to be able to stack new knowledge and insights into their proper context (like say, for instance, regarding RF communication, trends in broadband and popular uses of technology, like we try to do on this website).

The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier, a science writer by trade who takes on the task of putting together the Basics that all should know in order to be scientifically literate. Science Illiteracy is a challenge for our nation, it seems, as the masses blissfully grow less and less aware of more and more, even as the experts learn more and more and in the process realize they know less and less. Phewww! Nevertheless, this book is a great one to have on the shelf; having read through it, you will then have a handy reference because there's no way to keep all of this knowledge at the tip of your tongue. Highly recommended.

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore A modern business classic, considered must-read in tech circles, this book makes what many may consider an obvious point: companies can start with a bang and gain great acceptance among "early adopters," but they must change the way they approach the market if they are going to duplicate that early success with the broader market, which will approach their product or service differently. This amounts to a "chasm" between Stage One and Stage Two, which must be crossed in order to have sustained growth and success. Here's the best review from Amazon.

Moore's primary point in this book is that the early adopters of a technology are not necessarily the same as the mainstream market. Moore points out that early adapters often buy things because they're cool, not for practical reasons. Early adapters deal with pain in the form of bad interfaces, minimal network effects. etc. Following this informal observation, Moore divides the population into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. This is his "Technology Adoption Life Cycle", of which the "underlying thesis is that technology is absorbed into any given community in stages corresponding to the psychological and social profiles of various segments within that market" (p. 15). He illustrates this with a bell curve with a horizontal axis corresponding to time of adoption. There's no explanation for why a Bell curve; I'm guessing it just looks pretty in PowerPoint. Moore continues with "this process can be thought of as a continuum with definite stages, each associated with a definable group" (p. 15), although actual definitions are notable by their absence. So Moore advises us that marketing to the two groups might have to be different. Complex? No. Obvious? Perhaps. In any case, this observation is followed with 185 pages of examples and pep talks which I found perfectly readable, but without much additional content.

The second point, which is really just as important, is that the way to "cross the chasm" is by targeting a single industry or group of users, a so-called "vertical market". The only way customers who are beyond the early adopter phase are going to buy into a new product is if it is easy to adopt or if it truly fills a perceived desperate need. That is, it looks less "disruptive". Usually this means a lot of custom integration with industry-specific infrastructure. It's easier to build something well integrated with existing, for say, just the airline industry and their SABRE database backend, than it is to try to target the entire Fortune 500, each sector of which has adopted different sorts of databases. It worked just the way Moore described for my company, where Moore's book was required reading.

You can get much more insight about sales and marekting (as well as finance and logistics) about disruptive technologies from Clayton Christensen's excellent "The Innovator's Dilemma". You can learn more about marketing segmentation and network effects from Shapiro and Varian's "Information Rules". I might be biased as both a techie and a recovering academic, but I liked the more heavily researched, serious case-study orientation as well as the precise, restrained, academic tone of these two books from business professors. On the other hand, Moore's book gives you an excellent feel for the seat of the pants consulting and hype side of the business world, which itself is a useful education.

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom makes the case for Leaderless Organizations. An organization without a leader? Is that a dream come true, or a nightmare? In this analysis, the "spider" represents the traditional, rigid hierarchy organization, with well-defined leadership roles and responsibilities - think Army or ATT, but, crush a spider's head, and it dies. In contrast, cut a starfish in half, and you'll end up with two. The "starfish" in this analogy represents the more organic, self-controlled, self-directed organization of the twenty-first century, which emerges in response to a shared set of needs and then deals with issues and tasks from the bottom up - MoveOn.org, for instance. Such a self-organizing organization was only a concept before we had a tool like the Internet to help such a movement along, and now we all "get" MySpace, FaceBook, and a growing number of us, LinkedIn.

From a review in Fast Company Reading List, "it sounds like the opening line to a bad joke: What do the Apache Indians, Craigslist, Skype, and Al Qaeda have in common? They're all decentralized organizations that have bedeviled the established hierarchy hell-bent on crushing them. The Starfish and the Spider is about the open-source revolution, a trend that the authors demonstrate is simultaneously dismantling many established industries while harnessing the creativity of the masses to generate new ones. Open source has spread far beyond its recent successes with file sharing and software. You can now find cooperatively developed art, literature, even religion."

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. Collaboration and the changes it brings is well documented in this book, which highlights Wiki software and the new potential it brings for getting work done. Ask the man- or woman-on-the-street if they know what a wiki is, and they are still likely to respond "Huh?" - Wikis remain the territory of the technogeek, in large part - but ask them if they've been out on Wikipedia and they are quite likely to nod and then share their opinion with you about something they read. Iin my opinion, Wikipedia is better suited to keeping pace with the modern world, because of it's highly flexible and adaptive basis in Wiki technology, drawing from millions of opinions on millions of subjects, instead of hundreds or thousands. Some input on Wikipedia articles is from experts, but much is simply persistent and self-correcting data input, that over time grows better with each iteration. Most often, the listings prove good enough for my purposes, and it's rarely my only source, at any rate. It's fascinating to contemplate how efficient such mass collaboration is, and this book captures that in spades. This collaboration model goes way beyond an on-line encyclopedia, however.

According to the Wikinomics book website, "billions of connected individuals can now actively participate in innovation, wealth creation, and social development in ways we once only dreamed of. And when these masses of people collaborate they can collectively advance the arts, culture, science, education, government, and the economy in surprising but ultimately profitable ways. Companies that engage with these exploding Web-enabled communities are already discovering the true dividends of collective capability and genius. To succeed, it will not be sufficient to simply intensify existing management strategies. Leaders must think differently about how to compete and be profitable, and embrace a new art and science of collaboration we call wikinomics. This is more than open source, social networking, so-called crowdsourcing, smart mobs, crowd wisdom, or other ideas that touch upon the subject. Rather, we are talking about deep changes in the structure and modus operandi of the corporation and our economy, based on new competitive principles such as openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally."

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger shows that the way we deal with information has transformed with a maturing Internet. Search Engines mean that we no longer have to have "a place for everything and everything in its place," at least when it comes to the digital "everythings" in our lives. We can leave them in a "big, messy pile," and when everything is tagged with descriptors, we just need a good search engine and a knack for describing our search problem to find what twe are looking for - we don't need to remember where we filed the item. According to a review on Boing Boing, we've traditionally divided the world into categories, topics, and hierarchies because physical objects need to be in one place or another (they can't be in all the places they might belong). But computers and the Internet turn this approach on its head: because a computer can "put things" in as many categories as they need to be in, at little to no cost, and because individuals can classify knowledge, tasks, and objects idiosyncraticall with "tags," the hierarchy has become an outdated mode to organize infomaation.

The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life by Richard Florida. This NY Times Bestseller from 2002 has become what may be called a 21st Century Economic Development bible. If you are involved in city government at the leadership level, or in an Economic Development role, even at the staff level, this is recommended reading. Florida, a PhD in Regional Economic Development, formerly of Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and now at George Mason University outside our nation's capital of Washington, D.C., has demonstrated Pioneer Spirit and Big Thinking by stepping out to create a new vocabulary for a change in society. Often those who get to name something do quite well, and that seems to be Florida's path.

What Florida gave a name to is a shift in working behavior patterns, and the advent of a new class of workers with new ideas about working and living. These young knowledgable workers are representatives of what Florida labels the "Creative Class" a new demographic category. Worklife has evolved over the past 125 years, changing society as the nature of work has changed. Agriculture was the dominant category, but the Industrial Revolution brought more and more workers into the city in search of preferable Industrial jobs, which became the dominant category for much of the 20th Century. But by the second half of that century we began to see the rise of the Service Sector, where workers provided services to society. Florida notes that more and more, there are new Creatives, who do not fit in the previous three categories, and who represent a sea change in their approach to working and living.

They make a living using their brains, and many are highly paid. They choose a place to live first, and a job second. They don't go to job interviews and then go to where their new employer sends them. They identify an area first, and those areas chosen seem to score high on what Florida calls the Three Ts: Talent, Technology, and Tolerance.

First, workers seek a high concentration of talented workers like themselves, reasoning that there will be plentiful jobs in the area, and acknowledging that the average tenure for their types of jobs tends to be measured in a few years rather than in decades like their parents generation. They want to know that they will have choices when its time to move on, so they won't have to move away. Second, workers seek a concentration of technology, the engine of economic growth in this new economy and an employer of choice for Creatives. Third, they seek an Open Society characterized by tolerance for diversity. Florida cites the Bohemia Index and the Gay Index, two ways to measure and compare cities and rank them according to diversity and tolerance. These types who live alternative lifestyles tend to congregate in cities that are open and accepting of diversity, and it's no coincidence that these same cities attract a large proportion of the Creative Class workers.

From my perspective at MetroNetIQ, the bottom line lesson for those interested in Metropolitan Broadband is that there is a connection here between having a citywide wireless network and fitting in with these cities, like Austin (my hometown is highlighted throughout this book, which is fun), San Francisco, Boston, and Seattle. In addition to ranking high on Florida's Creative Class criteria, all of these cties successfully attract creative talent in droves AND are out in front in terms of ensuring ubiquitous and affordable broadband access, both wired and wireless.

Cities and the Creative Class by Richard Florida. Florida came out with this book as a follow up to his widely succesful first effort, providing a raft of statistical analysis to back up his provocative text from The Rise of the Creative Class. I read this one too, but at some point, I figured it was too much detail for an amateur like myself, and my interest began to wane. I recommend this book for your bookshelf, but it really is more of a reference book than a book to cozy up by the fire with.

The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent by Richard Florida. I haven't read this one yet, published in April 2005, so this review is conjecture at this point. If Florida has done his homework and he is one thorough Subject Matter Expert, so I expect he has, then he has expanded the scope of his work to provide global relevance. I'm a firm believer that when it comes to cities and urban life, we are much more alike than we are different, so I'm hopeful that this will be a valuable addition. I'll get it and read it and share my thoughts in the near term.

The Forgotten Half of Change : Achieving Greater Creativity through Changes in Perception by Luc de Brabandere. A partner in the Boston Consulting Group and a leading author on business innovation in Europe, Luc de Brabandere makes the argument in The Other Half of Change that change comes in two parts: the actual, physical change, which requires a following change in perception (a change in the way we see things), in order for the actual change to become permanent. To be aware of the potential for change, de Brabandere suggests that we be on the lookout for five leading indicators of change, early warning signs if you will. He highlights these five "weak signals that indicate a mismatch between our assumptions and the real world." 1) Minor defects that signal disruptions to the status quo; 2) Dissonance, a warning of failure ahead; 3) Serendipity, when things seem to happen as if they were magic, as if they were planned ahead by some unseeing force; 4) Paradox - my favorite paradox to emphasize the change we're in is the rapid replacement of the hundreds-year old instituion Encyclopedia Britannica, the Icon of the Age of Reason, by Microsoft's Encarta, symbolizing the maturity of the Digital Era, only to be supplanted by Wikipedia a few years later - hello, Internet, World Wide Web, and the Network Era; and finally, 5) Boredom, where a new concept becomes commonplace (remember all the fuss about eCommerce just a few years ago, back when Business 2.0 was 300 pages long?). This book is so loaded with good stuff that i can't begin to cover it in this short space. Read it to get a new perception on change, and to open up your mind.

Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Editor's Note: these reviews are borrowed from Amazon.com. Economics is not widely considered to be one of the sexier sciences. The annual Nobel Prize winner in that field never receives as much publicity as his or her compatriots in peace, literature, or physics. But if such slights are based on the notion that economics is dull, or that economists are concerned only with finance itself, Steven D. Levitt will change some minds.

In Freakonomics (written with Stephen J. Dubner), Levitt argues that many apparent mysteries of everyday life don't need to be so mysterious: they could be illuminated and made even more fascinating by asking the right questions and drawing connections. For example, Levitt traces the drop in violent crime rates to a drop in violent criminals and, digging further, to the Roe v. Wade decision that preempted the existence of some people who would be born to poverty and hardship. Elsewhere, by analyzing data gathered from inner-city Chicago drug-dealing gangs, Levitt outlines a corporate structure much like McDonald's, where the top bosses make great money while scores of underlings make something below minimum wage. And in a section that may alarm or relieve worried parents, Levitt argues that parenting methods don't really matter much and that a backyard swimming pool is much more dangerous than a gun. These enlightening chapters are separated by effusive passages from Dubner's 2003 profile of Levitt in The New York Times Magazine, which led to the book being written. In a book filled with bold logic, such back-patting veers Freakonomics, however briefly, away from what Levitt actually has to say. Although maybe there's a good economic reason for that too, and we're just not getting it yet. --John Moe

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Forget your image of an economist as a crusty professor worried about fluctuating interest rates: Levitt focuses his attention on more intimate real-world issues, like whether reading to your baby will make her a better student. Recognition by fellow economists as one of the best young minds in his field led to a profile in the New York Times, written by Dubner, and that original article serves as a broad outline for an expanded look at Levitt's search for the hidden incentives behind all sorts of behavior. There isn't really a grand theory of everything here, except perhaps the suggestion that self-styled experts have a vested interest in promoting conventional wisdom even when it's wrong. Instead, Dubner and Levitt deconstruct everything from the organizational structure of drug-dealing gangs to baby-naming patterns. While some chapters might seem frivolous, others touch on more serious issues, including a detailed look at Levitt's controversial linkage between the legalization of abortion and a reduced crime rate two decades later. Underlying all these research subjects is a belief that complex phenomena can be understood if we find the right perspective. Levitt has a knack for making that principle relevant to our daily lives, which could make this book a hit. Malcolm Gladwell blurbs that Levitt "has the most interesting mind in America," an invitation Gladwell's own substantial fan base will find hard to resist. 50-city radio campaign. (May 1)

Powerful Times: Rising to the Challenge of Our Uncertain World by Eamon Kelly

"Some of our most basic assumptions about the rules of the global economic game will increasingly come under attack in the coming decade." Eamon Kelly

The world has always been uncertain. But, says Eamonn Kelly, not like this. This book is published by the Wharton Business School Press, and Kelly is the founder of the Global Business Network, an interesting array of "big thinkers who take the long view" and use scenario planning to help hundreds of companies and governments manage the future. So, expectations are high for this book.

I was interested enough to pick it up in an airport book store - I'm a sucker for a good book when I'm traveling, and i was pleasantly surprised to find this one a well-written and intriguing work about what lays ahead in the next decade. Lots of disruption and uncertainty, if you buy this analysis.

This is a book for deep thinkers. Technological, financial, social, economic, cultural, and political systems - what makes up our world - are all moving faster and faster, towards greater complexity and interdependence, according to Kelly. Paradox rears it head here - paradox is a common element of our modern world. I wrote about paradox yesterday, where I explained that what we think we know is not necessarily true, and only by practicing an ever vigilant awareness and education program can we stay in the know.

Kelly explains that we humans seek patterns, but our simplifications of complex issues obscure more than they clarify, and our "either/or" mindsets don't really fit well in today's world. Foundational change is underway: Kelly demonstrates that deep, fundamental dynamics may be unraveling much of what we've taken for granted since the Enlightenment dawned some 400 years ago.

From the Amazon book review: Some of Kelly's dynamic tensions are less familiar, but also vitally important. For example, while value will continue to migrate towards the intangible - services, experiences, relationships - improving physical infrastructure will take on ever-greater urgency. The world is growing more transparent, thanks to a deepening web of computers, networks, sensors, and surveillance systems. However, "conspiracy theories and falsehoods will travel the world instantaneously," and the technologies of transparency will also promote more sophisticated theft and fraud.

For some, successfully navigating these tensions may seem unlikely, if not impossible. However, Kelly's reasonably optimistic. He sees especially significant progress in two key areas: "how we relate - the realm of governance - and how we create - the realm of innovation." Top-down, "Taylorist" organizations are being supplanted (or at least supplemented) by structures that are more fluid, self-organizing, decentralized, and collaborative. These new structures may be capable of handling change with far greater suppleness and resiliency. In Kelly's view, the move from organizational "citadels" to "webs" - while not inexorable - is currently moving more rapidly than many decision makers recognize.

Down at "street level," Kelly uncovers some surprising innovations in local governance. In British Columbia, 160 randomly selected citizens have recommended important changes in the province's electoral processes. In Zeguo, China, the local Communist Party secretary offered detailed briefings about several proposed municipal projects to 257 citizens, then polled them on which projects should proceed. In Brazil, Guatemala, and Mexico, enlightened local governments are experimenting with new ways to involve citizens year-round, not just on election day.

If you choose to be more aware, this is a book that would be good to have on your bookshelf. I'd like to read it again in two years, five years, and ten years, and see how things have unfolded. I know that ten years ago, I would not have imagined this future that is our present today.

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman Every five years or so, there comes a book that you just want to tell everyone to go get and read, so you can talk about it. There comes a book that has such a compelling story line that the way you view things will be forever changed. SO GO GET THIS BOOK (AND READ IT)! The rest of these books are very compelling, but this book is at the top of the stack for a reason - it's timely and very signficant. Trust me.

Those are pretty strong words, but then, this is a pretty strong set of ideas. NY Times Foreign Affairs Editorial writer Tom Friedman picks up on the theme he began five years ago with his bestseller The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which described the globalization of the world since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. In this fascinating book, Friedman describes his epiphany regarding the dramatic changes to the world economy since he wrote The Lexus and the Olive Tree in 1999.

I'll try to describe in a few words what took Friedman over 400 pages: The Internet bubble in the late 1990s led to a dramatic build out of telecom networks, which resulted in tremendous amounts of fiber being laid to connect the world, and the companies that built the networks promptly went bust and the lines were purchased out of bankruptcy at pennies on the dollar, resulting in nearly free capacity to connect the world's countries and cities. At the same time, the highly trained and skilled workers in India, China, and Eastern Europe/Russia, all countries big on science and math, began to benefit from more liberal economic policies, so the best and brightest could now stay at home, rather than wait for visas to travel to the US, long the promised land for smart energetic young workers the world around.

Y2K and a maturing technology landscape led coporations to outsource work to this highly qualified set of workers, and now that trend is maturing. No longer do cities and individuals in the US compete primarily within their state, region, nation, or even hemisphere. The global economy effectively doubled in size with the addition of the labor forces in these three regions, and those smart, aggressive workers in India, China, and elsewhere are wearing track shoes. They want your job, for half your wage.

This book is a MUST READ for city planners because metropolitan wireless networks enable and accelerate the technologies that will enable cities worldwide to compete on this new playing field. One executive interviewed says that these changes may well prove as significant to the world as the invention of the printing press. The reason is that never before has so much information been so readily available to so many people. Get the book, read it, and let's talk!

Blog : Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World by Hugh Hewitt Hewitt promised to keep the book short enough to read on a single trip - true to his word, I was able to knock this book out on my flight back from Los Angeles. In this recently published work, Hewitt takes you into the world of blogs and opens up possibilities for anyone who ever had an opinion and needed to find someone to listen to them. This is the third book that I've read recently that draws comparisons between events of the 17th Century Reformation and Guttenberg's movable type printing press and our 21st Century information revolution. Hewitt works it into his title.

In essence, the invention of the printing press allowed Luther's ideas to be widely disseminated, leading to the emancipation of the people from the dominance of the Roman Catholic church. New technology opened up the world for cultural change. Similarly, Hewitt shows how personal blogging software frees readers from reliance on traditional media and editors, who process information for the reading public and choose what we call news. Easy-to-use blog software provides aspiring writers and those with an opinion with a tool so that anyone can publish. Bloggers just have to be good enough to draw an audience - there is nobody stopping them from publishing, or telling them what to write. Increasingly, these blogs are being viewed as more trustworthy than Mainstream Media, according to Hewitt.

Blogs and communities go hand in hand. My vision is for our budding metropolitan wireless community to develop around UnwireMyCity.com. I encourage you to get this book and start a blog to help you manage your wireless effort, to get your whole community involved in the effort, and to let others share in and contribute to your experience. And, to link your blog to mine. It really is too easy and too cheap not to. Come on in, the water's fine!

I recommend, ironically, Movable Type software (and the Movable Type 3.0 Bible Desktop Edition) to get you started down the blogging path. What a deal - find your inner blogger and help to change the world, all with one website!

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi This book is a wonderful, very readable story about the new science of Networks. Before the Internet, Barabasi explains, the science of networks was a sleepy academic backwater. With the Internet, scientists found a tool to study how networks work, and their discoveries are breathtaking. Networks are the best means to organize complexity, and could there be a better word than "complex" to describe our lives today? From the role of hubs, to the Power Curve distribution, to emergence, Barabasi shows how much alike networks are: from the network of the human body to social networks, cities, railroads, airports, the Internet, it becomes clear the impact that networks have on the way we live.

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson This book made a lasting impression on me. Johnson shows how working from the bottom up, with a few simple rules, individuals can create new, complex things that seemingly "emerge" from out of nowhere. How, for instance, do neighborhoods form when they are not planned? What will be the impact of all the Hot Spots, Hot Zones, Metropolitan Networks, and coming WiMax networks, cellular networks, DSL networks, and Cable networks when they all start working together? To understand the complex nature of change in our world, this is a great book!

The City : A Global History by Joel Kotkin This recently published book gives great perspective on the city and its impact on our lives. The city, Kotkin says, is one of man's greatest inventions because it concentrated the learning of people into a dense area and allowed that knowledge to pass down through generations. Civilization really took off when cities became connected, first by ships (Phoenicia), then roads (Rome), then canals, then railroads, then telecommunications. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell This term has entered the popular vernacular - the tipping point is the point when a trend goes mainstream. That may be where we are getting to in the near term with municipal networks. This book will help you to understand popular behavior and give you a vocabulary for some things you already know.

The Wisdom of the Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki Believe it or not, studies show that a roomful of average people, with adequate information, will arrive at better decisions than a handful of experts. This is a compelling study that will change the way you look at things. When the Internet and modern communications technology empower those crowds with the information they need to be smarter than the experts, you can see how much of the change we envision is starting to go on Autopilot. Hold on to your hat!

Leading the Revolution: How to Thrive by Making Innovation a Way of Life by Gary Hamel With all the new tools that buyers have, companies are left with nothing but being good at innovation to provide them with competitive advantage. As technology and the Internet increasingly dominate our economy, it is innovation that becomes our watchword. Hamel argues that organizations, public or private, must make innovation a core competency if they are to have a hope for success.

The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen does a great job of explaining how innovations (and innovators) have to struggle to gain support and mindshare in large organizations. He looks at well-run, etablished companies and examines how they are able to counter the threat from new companies, which enter the market on the low end with lower quality, cheaper products and in time improve the products and take greater market share. Either private or public sector management will benefit from the insights offered herein, as innovation becomes an ever greater presence in our lives.

New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World by Kevin Kelly In Kelly's own words: "Communication is the foundation of society, of our culture, of our humanity, of our own individual identity, and of all economic systems. This is why networks are such a big deal. Communication is so close to culture and society itself that the effects of technologizing it are beyond the scale of a mere industrial-sector cycle. Communication, and its ally computers, is a special case in economic history. Not because it happens to be the fashionable leading business sector of our day, but because its cultural, technological, and conceptual impacts reverberate at the root of our lives." Read this book.

Creating Value in the Network Economy by Don Tapscott This compendium of Harvard Business Review articles from 1999 is a great view of how the impact of the Internet was interpreted during the boom. Prescient in their analyses, I believe many of these guys got it right.

Leading Change by John P. Kotter With change becoming one of the few constants in our lives, this book written at the dawn of the Internet (1995) offers a practical approach to an organized means of leading, not managing, change. Kotter presents an eight-stage process of change with highly useful examples that show how to go about implementing it.

The New Pioneers: The Men and Women Who Are Transforming the Workplace and Marketplace by Thomas Petzinger With intriguing stories of the people behind innovative companies, this book details the personal stories in the new economy. Petzinger sees workers who are entrepreneurial, not corporate; stressing adaptation rather than bureaucratic planning, "teamwork" and "empowerment" rather than rigid command-and-control structures.

The History of Knowledge by Charles Van Doren is a good read to put into context what may be a new revolution in the world's capabilities regarding knowledge and awareness, brought on by technological convergence. Van Doren, the same individual who was caught up in the Quiz Show scandal of the 1950s, came out with this book in 1991, after spending the previous twenty years editing the Encyclopedia Britannica. We've certainly come a long way in our time here on earth, and Van Doren tells a good story of how humans got to be so darn smart.

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful : Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen Covey I find myself quoting from this book so often, I thought I better add it to the list. Published in 1990, this book has sold over 10 million copies and there's a good reason for that. It is well written, and Covey has assembled a system and anthology of the world's greatest personal success lessons, from the Bible to Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, Covey has woven an easy-to-remember set of habits that will make you more effective at whatever it is you choose to do. To become effective, Covey argues, you must first have a Paradigm Shift to see things differently, and then incorporate these habits into your daily life.

For the record, here are the habits with the associated skills in parentheses: A. Personal Independence 1. Be Proactive. (initiative) 2. Begin with the End in Mind. (leadership) 3. First Things First (Management) B. Social Interdependence (4. Seek First to Understand, and Then to be Understood (listening) 5. Go For Win Win Solutions (cooperation) 6. Synergize (creativity) and C. Regeneration 7. Sharpen the Saw (health and balance).

I read this book in the early 90s, read it again, outlined it, and then gave seminars on it at my job. That internalization of these concepts has made a huge difference in my effectiveness, both in my business life and my personal life. This book is worth the time.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie If there is a better, more timeless set of principles on human relationships, please let me know. This book, written in 1937, has sold 15 million copies. I first read it in 1977, when I was a young man going door-to-door selling books in Appalachia, a life-changing experience for me in what is now a dying profession. The principles, such as "People love to hear the sound of their own name" ring true today. This book will make you think twice about how you relate to others, and your friends willl thank you for taking the time. And you will have more of those. Friends, I mean. And what's wrong with that? Spending a few bucks or so for this paperback will be the best few bucks you have spent in a long while.

Posted on May 01, 2007 at 06:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack