‘In 2020, what will the best-selling book about organizations say? What will it look like?

How
might it be written? Who will read it and how? How might it be published? How will it be bought
and what will it cost?’

From Harper’s Index via Technorati

94% of all blogs have not been updated in the last 4 months.

Daily Telegraph offering 50 free music downloads this week.

The Sony PSP Go games console is going to double as a handheld reader for e-books and e-comics.
Source

Late 20th Century discourse focuses on Alienation as a society that has already left behind church,
village and rigid social mores now abandons the First Modernity structures of trade unions, mass
political parties, everyone watching the Forsyte Saga. Those on the periphery face alienation.

Now, as society abandons the Second Modernity certainties of autonomy, individuation, cheap
foreign holidays, we increasingly face fragmentation. This is encouraged by new ways of thinking,
working, relating promulgated by the Internet.

The Third Modernity is hyper-networked with an accelerating churn rate. Friends and group
memberships last for a few weeks not a lifetime. Political parties may become single issue parties.

Towards the Third Modernity

Zuza to launch ‘touch and feel’ books

The Bookseller

Children’s publisher and packager Zuza Books has teamed up with technologists in Cambridge to develop
interactive 'touch and feel' elements to its books using digital devices. Managing director Zuza Vrbova said
the books would be ideal for sharing bedtime stories with young children. "We wanted to create a book that
would encourage parents to sit and read with their children, and where the interaction would be targeted by
the parent rather than the child," she said.

The company and its technologists have developed a book that can be ‘read’ by a pen so that, when the pen is
passed over specific images, an appropriate storyline or sound is delivered via a laptop or PC notebook. This
makes it possible to link media, including audio, animations or video clips, to specific pages on a book. The
technology is being developed so that it can also interface to other electronic devices including mobile
‘phones.

The pen can work with any book printed with a particular black ink, said technologist Chris Bale. He added,
"Creative people in publishing, toys, education and entertainment will be able to use the platform to create
and deliver new products. The web distribution approach means that we can offer access to anyone with a
good idea."

The company plans to make more details available about how the product works by the time of Frankfurt in
October, with a full launch planned for the Technology World show in Coventry in November.

Wharton Business School:

Entrepreneur Farhad Mohit is hardly resting on his laurels, although he could. In 1996, he launched
BizRate, a consumer rating site, and then in 2004, Shopzilla, a shopping search engine. His latest venture is
DotSpots, a service that lets people update the news in real-time with dots, or distributed objects of thought.
These could include mini-blog posts containing text, videos, images, documents, perspectives from the
blogosphere or eye-witness accounts from the scene. Mohit talked with Knowledge@Wharton about
DotSpots, the publishing industry, the wisdom of crowds, what he learned from his previous successes and
the importance of finding the right team, among other topics. An edited transcript follows.

Knowledge@Wharton: Could you start out by telling us a little bit about DotSpots?

Farhad Mohit: Sure. DotSpots is a platform to allow ordinary people, or what we call the "wisdom of
crowds," to bring content that's being created -- "user generated content" we call it -- and apply it to the
mainstream news. So that's its core essence. I can tell you why we're doing that later, but that's what it is.

Knowledge@Wharton: Can you give an example?

Mohit: Yes. The plane that landed in the Hudson River [on January 15, 2009]. I don't know if you call it
landing, but whatever, it landed in the Hudson River. The news was actually broken by Twitter. Flickr had
tons of eyewitness videos. There are a billion and a half people with Internet access and a cell phone. So they
are able to be everywhere and break the news. The problem is that the mainstream news doesn't have a very
good way of integrating that into their systems right now. They have to get reporters out to the scene and
things like that. They don't have the money to do it. They don't have the time to do it. But it's happening. So
our idea is that we should let people just be able to attach their content right into the mainstream news, right
as that story's breaking, because the story kind of frames the issue. "Plane Landed in Hudson River" -- then
photographs can come right from the blogosphere and right from the Flickr and YouTube people loading the
real videos. So you can immediately get multiple perspectives, eye witness videos right into the mainstream
news as it is developing.

Knowledge@Wharton: Is there some way that those are organized?

Mohit: Yes, it's the same way that Wikipedia is organized. That's where the wisdom of crowds comes into
play. You basically have people loading in a bunch of stuff. And then you have consumers of the information
looking at it and saying, "Is this useful? Is it not useful?" This is my background from BizRate, one of these
rating companies, so I'm pretty experienced in building systems that take a bunch of feedback and filter up
what's useful and filter out what's junk, because yes, there will be a lot of junk as well.

Knowledge@Wharton: I understand your website uses something called the semantic annotation system. I
presume that's the system you use to filter out the junk. Could you explain that?
Mohit: Yes, it's not actually the system we use.... The system we use for the junk is people's votes. But the
semantic nature of the business is the following: It's that when the news gets created right now, a copy gets
created. Usually, like I said, it's a framing device. [News organizations] don't do a lot of investigative
reporting anymore. They don't have a lot of live presence because they are running the news as a business
and those are very expensive things to do, right? So they kind of frame it. And usually they frame it from an
institutional point of view. So they say, "According to the White House," and then whatever the White
House has given them, they run that. And not only that, but then other places pick it up. The Associated
Press, [for] example, syndicates to 1,500 outlets. And then other places start talking about that. So copies of
the story get made, and then out of those copies pieces get made.

Reading Dickens Four Ways

How 'Little Dorrit' fares in multiple text formats

By Ann Kirschner

Hardcover or paperback?

Until recently those were our reading options. As with everything else, whether it's ice cream or television,
things are much more complicated now. We are way beyond vanilla and chocolate, way beyond the corner
bookstore and neighborhood library and into a multiplicity of forms and platforms and technologies and
interfaces that could be dispiriting if you are inclined to worry about the death of the book.

Do I love books or do I love reading?

When my book group picked Little Dorrit, I found myself asking that question.

Good old paid-by-the-word Dickens: I figured that it would take me months to finish nearly 1,000 pages. My
reading would take place on the New York City subway, in cars and planes, on business trips and vacation,
and (my all-time favorite) in bed at the end of the day.

I went automatically to my old Penguin paperback, standing ready on the shelf. Never mind its familiar and
friendly orange spine —I hesitated. Maybe it would make sense to read the book on the Kindle that my
husband bought me last year. Then again, for my daily Manhattan life, I love audiobooks, the best choice for
crowded public transportation and a wonderful companion for walking. And now that I use an iPhone, I
have been surprised by the ease of reading its crisp, bright screen.

I decided to read Little Dorrit four ways: paperback, audiobook, Kindle, and iPhone.

It was often maddening to keep finding and losing my place as I switched from format to format. But as an
experiment, it taught me a great deal about my reading habits, and about how a text reveals itself differently
as the reading context changes. Along the way, I also began to make some predictions about winners and
losers in the evolution of books.

…Just a fingertip away from the audiobook controls on my iPhone was the eReader, a free application, and
the option for reading the same Penguin edition of Little Dorrit. The electronic text included the original
illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne, more familiarly known as Phiz; the map of the Marshalsea; and the
explanatory footnotes that were impossible in the audiobook. The controls were intuitive, and I was soon able
to bookmark pages, highlight text, and switch back and forth between novel and notes.

I've been dreading this, but let me get my prediction out now: The iPhone is a Kindle killer.

http://www.authonomy.com/
Harper Collins’ crowd sourcing editorial selection site.

All we offer over lulu.com is our name.

Lulu and www.blurb.com published 700,000 titles in 2008.

People want to be guided by others. They also want paper books for what digitisation is revealing them to be.
Books are not primarily artefacts, nor necessarily vehicles for ideas. Rather, as Seth Godin puts it, they are
"souvenirs of the way we felt" when we read something. That is something that people are likely to go on
buying.

EIU

The future of e-books

John Siracusa

Jane Austen in zombie rampage up the book charts

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Khlestakovian Inscrutability
Gogol’s Government Inspector

Andrew Hargadon

The more capability flows to the periphery, the more effort will go into providing the core with control over
those frighteningly large peripheral capabilities. Conversely, the more coordination and control at the core,
the more the organization creates capability on the periphery. Control without the capacity for action is
wasted, and action, by definition, lives on the periphery.

This Red Queen effect has forced large organizations to simultaneously centralize decision-making and
decentralize raw power. And so with all the running they must do, they are in the same place--no less secure
for all of their centralized control and distributed capabilities.
And so it seems that one of the most important lessons we can be teaching our next generation of leaders is
to understand and manage what will become an increasingly unstable aspect of organizational life. The
illusion of control over resources that can, on any given day, bring the entire organization to its knees.

Bertrand Duperrin

The big issue in the coming years will be to reconcile the essential top down structuring system with the
necessity for people to build temporary ad-hoc systems in order to solve problems.

Flat enterprise describes the way people work, vertical hierarchical enterprise is a mode of decision. Both
have to live together.

Christopher Roper

I think hand-held readers will be the norm for textual and graphic material. I also think user-generated
content will be better organised and more useful. I imagine the crumbling of 20th Century, centralised
organisations (both corporate and state), will continue, and that this will generate stronger, more flexible (?)
geographically disparate communities, based on shared goals, values, interests, will proliferate.

Arie de Geus

Organisations need or be better at fast learning than forward planning

Jemima Gibbons

The six chapters - Creativity, Passion, Knowledge, Transparency, Awareness and Sharing - identify the key
attributes of successful social web technologies and give examples of where these are being applied in
business. These attributes are proposed as a framework through which to create a happier, more functional
and more productive working environment. To conclude, there's a practical section, with a summary of key
ideas or "lessons" from each chapter.

…
ONE: STIMULATE. Do what you can to make your working processes more innovative and collaborative.
Set up creative projects or environments where risk doesn’t matter. Think about how you can introduce
learning by osmosis at every level of the organization. Don’t stress too much about the big idea, big
application, or “doing it all”. When Lloyd Davis set up Tuttle, he made sure his overheads were minimal and
that the space was as welcoming and inclusive as possible. When Steve Moore set up 2gether, he ensured it
had a friendly, relaxed, festival vibe. Most importantly, keep it simple. The BarCampers like to talk about
'just in time travel planning' where you 'just rock up in a country and see what happens' (Emma Persky). If
the complexity of your social media strategy is giving you a headache, there's something wrong.
TWO: ENJOY. The “noise” of social media can be off-putting, but it’s time to start dipping your toes in the
water. Follow your instincts and focus on what interests you. Concentrate on what you enjoy and what’s
good rather than worrying about possible revenue models. Start-ups like Huddle and Mint Digital make
sure that passion drives their work as much as possible, and that the values that underpin their companies
are those that appeal to the new generation.

THREE: ENGAGE. The more networked your business is, the denser the relationships, the better.
Remember network effects? The same applies to business: if you can make your business truly networked,
it's going to experience an exponential increase in value.

FOUR: OPEN UP. Think about how you can make your company’s governance more transparent. At the
same time, make yourself more accessible; open up where you can. If personal blogging doesn’t suit you, then
consider alternatives, eg: regular open sessions.

FIVE: LISTEN. When others speak, pay attention. And then read between the lines. Ensure listening
processes are in place. Try approaches more subtle than simply friending your employees on Facebook.

SIX: TRUST. You’ll give yourself an ulcer if you worry about every little online imperfection. Learn to let
go. Ask yourself what can be shared. If the first four lessons have been taken on board, you should be in a
position where the people you employ feel some warm fuzziness towards you. If the fifth lesson has been
learnt, then you’ll get early alarm bells should anything start to go wrong.

Michael Thompson

There are five ways of organising: the hierarchical, the egalitarian, the individualistic, the fatalistic and the
autonomous. Each approach is a way of disorganising the other four: without the other four, it would have
nothing to organise itself against. In Organising and Disorganising, Michael Thompson gives a detailed
explanation of the dynamics of these five fundamental arrangements that underlie 'Cultural Theory'.

We talked about blogs becoming books and vice versa.

Here’s a blog that we’re soon to publish as a book.

And here’s my (serious) book, which started out in blog form here and then was also published as a
blog here and also published in e-chapters on scribd here and here.

And here’s my book on flower arranging for men that I wrote last Saturday.

Here is the little book “Ten Things to do in a Conceptual Emergency”, from which I quoted ‘Give up
on the myth of control’.
Here is Lesley Kuhn explaining how being on the edge of chaos (if you’re a complex adaptive
system, but not if you’re a boulder) maximises potentiality and creative adaptability.

My talking about philosopher kings and magician empresses was based on this paragraph fromn
the Project Red Stripe book:

This business of story telling as a way of winning over others also reminds me of Georges
Dumézil’s assertion in Mitra-Varuna that sovereignty has two poles: the magician-king, who
uses capture, bonds, knots, webs and nets, and the jurist-priest who governs by treaties, laws,
pacts and contracts. The former, if I understand right, has more to do with feelings and
intuition, the latter has more to do with analysis and logic. Officially, business is done on the
basis of analysis and logic and run by jurist-priests; in practice, it is often run by magician-
kings operating by capture and ensnarement. Story telling is a practice of ensnarement. And
ensnarement and manipulation have managed to get themselves a bad name.

Dumézil was the name of the author I couldn’t remember and his book is here.