MetroNetIQ Vendor Directory: Information - Books

Pre-MetroNet Service Providers
Getting Ready for a MetroNet

Information Providers
Books

Blog : Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World by Hugh Hewitt 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. 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. 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.

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, reviewed in depth later in this section. I read this book 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 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.

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.

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.

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 Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent by Richard Florida. This review is conjecture at this pointI because I haven't read this book yet, but I did read the two previous works by this author, The Rise of the Creative Clas and Cities and the Creative Class, both reviewed elsewhere in this section. Published in April 2005, thsi book is likely to show that Florida has done his homework - and he is one thorough Subject Matter Expert, so I expect he has. If he has, then, he will have 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 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. Levitt focuses his attention on more intimate real-world issues, like whether reading to your baby will make her a better student. 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. Underlying all these research subjects is a belief that complex phenomena can be understood if we find the right perspective.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Powerful Times: Rising to the Challenge of Our Uncertain World by Eamon Kelly 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. The world has always been uncertain, but 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. Lots of disruption and uncertainty lie just around the corner, 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. Paradox is a common element of our modern world; 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. 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.

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.

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.

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: 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.

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!

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman 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. 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. Those fiber 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.

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 want your job, for half your wage.

This book is a MUST READ for city planners because metropolitan broadband 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.

Posted on February 01, 2006 at 11:16 PM | Comments (0)