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)

Thunderstruck: The Birth of Wireless and Other Industry Births

I admit, I'm a sucker for history. More times than not, when surfing the TV channels, I end up on the History Channel, to the moans and groans of my pre-teen children. And when a history lesson aligns with my area of expertise, all the better. I think that reading about the birth of an industry is a good task when trying to understand what is going on today. To better understand Metropolitan Broadband and its potential, there are a number of books that I would recommend. And it won't be wasted time either, because these are enjoyable reads - when it comes to history and reading, it's a two-fer. To raise your Network IQ and Feed your Head, I recommend you try one of these books on for size.

First, I most recently read Thunderstruck by Erik Larson, a well-written non-fiction book that nevertheless reads like fiction. I understand that historical treatments are a stock in trade for Larson, and in this novel that I consumed over the holidays, Larson skillfully weaves together two historical events from the turn of the century one hundred years ago, to great dramatic effect.

On the one hand, you have the dandy Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian-born inventor and entrepreneur who took wireless radio from a parlor trick among the English scientific elite to a practical business application, building a company to provide ship-to-shore and ship-to-ship communication, when nobody imagined that such a feat would be possible, and along the way, becoming known as the Father of Wireless.

On the other hand, you have the story of Dr. Hawley Crippen, a brow-beaten milk-toast of a man who murdered his wife in the most sensational murder of the day. The murder was such a sensation that it inspired no less than Alfred Hitchcock to craft his suspense thriller masterpiece Rear Window years later.

After murdering and dismembering his wife, Dr. Crippen flees England with his mistress aboard an ocean liner to the United States. Unbenownst to the couple, their whereabouts are discovered by the ship captain and thanks to the modern miracle of wireless, their progress across the Atlantic, together with their pursuit by a police detective from Scotland Yard, on a trailing ocean liner, are tracked by the press, creating a global sensation.

That drama is juxtaposed by Larkin with the business drama of the invention of wireless, which demonstrates the famous quotation of Thomas Edison regarding the invention of the lightbulb: "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration!" The invention of wireless, like that of the lightbulb, was characterized by numerous failures, challenges from competitors, personal tragedies, and most importantly, dogged determination on the part of its inventor, Marconi.

I'll have to tackle Larkin's other bestseller, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America next. It describes the incredible World's Fair in Chicago, which was lit up by thousands of light bulbs. Imagine. People drove for miles across farm lands, just to look at light bulbs and experience electricity! You may detect a pattern here, as Larkin's tale weaves in visits from such notables as Buffalo Bill Cody, Susan B. Anthony, and Thomas Edison, along with the sinister Dr. Holmes, a serial killer active in the area at the time. Oh, how we love a good murder mystery to spice up our history lessons!

On that note, I also enjoyed reading about the birth of the electric industry last year Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, by Jill Jonnes. It described, more from a business stand point, the competition to win the World's Fair bid, whose volume purchase of light bulbs and electricity would go a long way in providing competitive advantage to competing electric generation models.

We all take for granted the electricity that runs everything we use to enjoy our "modern" lifestyle, but it was no guaranteed outcome from the perspective of these great men. There's no doubt this story helped me to better understand the fascinating intrigue behind the creation of the modern electric industry, and there are remarkable parallels to what we see during this period of transition in the telecom and wireless industry today. For a better treatment than I can give on the parallels between the development of municpal electric utility industry and the rise of municipal wireless, see this interview with Jim Baller from 2003 captured here on Broadband Reports.

As for a background on a more modern industry, to understand the rise of our digital lifestyle, a good bet is David Kaplan's Silicon Boys: And Their Valley of Dreams, which details the rise of the great high tech digital companies that are now household names, but just one or two generations ago did not exist. You might also enjoy Tom Wolfe's turn-of-the-millenium anthology of short articles, Hooking Up, which includes a piece on the origins of Silicon Valley and HP, in a biographical sketch of the father of the silicon chip and Intel, Robert Noyce.

From Publisher's Weekly review on Amazon.com:

Fans of his character sketches will relish "Two Young Men Who Went West," a revelatory profile of Robert Noyce, a key innovator of the microchip who founded Intel in 1968, where the midwestern Congregationalist values he shared with his former mentor, William Shockley (founder of the original Silicon Valley startup, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory), grew into a business philosophy that's now so pervasive it's practically in the ether.

A long time ago, I read Daniel Yergin's The Prize : The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, perhaps the granddaddy of this genre. It's hard to imagine a more fascinating tale than how we went from rendering whale oil to manufacture kerosene for lamps, to soaking up petroleum in rags from surface pools in Pennsylvania as whales began to run in short supply, to adapting water well drilling technology to drill oil wells. Then with the advent of the electric light, which threatened this new industry, along came the automobile and the need for gasoline. On the tale goes, to the creation of Standard Oil, to its division into the "Seven Sisters," to the discovery and exploitation of Middle Eastern oil fields and the creation of Aramco, and all along the way, a biographical sideline of the fascinating individuals who drove the industry and the geopolitical impacts of such a huge industry.

If you seek some historical depth and still harbor doubts on the rationale for the war in Iraq, take a look at this book and the impact of the oil industry on wars throughout our modern history.

To gain perspective on today's events, I have found it helpful and enjoyable to read history books and go deep on a subject. It's amazing how many patterns get repeated and recycled. With every new discovery and invention, there is a challenge to the old guard, and a familiar pattern unfolds, because we are indeed, all human. Sometimes, the eclipse is rapid, sometimes it's a long slow death. But progress based on human ingenuity rolls on.

From my position as a metropolitan broadband consultant in the budding Municipal Wireless industry, all I can say is "Thank goodness for change and innovation, for where would be the need for consultants to chart a path through the fog without such disruptions, eh?"

Posted on February 16, 2007 at 08:39 AM | Comments (0)

New Books added to library

I am adding these three new items into the Books, Books, and More Books entry in the Books and Whitepapers section on this website. I review Richard Florida's books on regional economic development. They're timely and poignant, especially in this municipal wireless field, where increasingly, we see an Eco Dev justification and rationale for Muni Wi Fi projects.

There will be more additions to follow, as I catch up and update my on-line library to reflect growth in my real world library at home. The year 2006 saw lots of new and interesting books added.

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.

Posted on December 19, 2006 at 01:40 PM | Comments (0)