Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out [Hardcover]

This is a thoughtful and easy to read book. The short editorial comments above do not do it justice.

Drawing largely on his own experiences as a cyber-world observer, the author comes to conclusions that are solidly supported by many other works that he does not cite (out of his primary area of interest) but that strongly support his independently derived conclusions. I refer to the various works on collective intelligence (Atlee, Bloom, Levy, Steele, Wells), additional works on the power of knowledge driven organizations (Buckman, Wheatley), and on the sources of innovation through intrapreneurship (Pinchot, Christensen, Raynor), and finally, the wealth of knowledge (Stewart) and infinite wealth (Carter).

What I found most helpful in this book was its preamble, in which the author systematically pointed out that the war metaphors of business, the survival of the fittest, the assumption that we are all in competition with one another, and the centralization and manipulation of money, have all led to pathological behavior and distorted priorities that actually diminish what can be shared and created. In this the author is consistent with Tiger (The Manufacture of Evil) and various works today on immoral capitalism (Greider, Prestowitz, Perkins).

He carries the argument further by suggesting that big is bad and that most giant enterprises have lost sight of their core competencies. They are so busy making money and outsourcing to cut costs that they literally "lose it." At the same time, they struggle desperately to "brand" to manipulate customers, to reinvent old products, etc. At the same time, the constant focus by merchants on short term profits reduces trust--as the author says, no long-term focus reduces trust. This is an important point. He writes at length about Wal-Mart as the poster child for abusing communities that lose three jobs for every two lower-paying jobs that Wal-Mart brings in, with fewer benefits, longer hours. The number of Wal-Mart employees that are below the poverty line is quite shocking. Wal-Mart is exporting good jobs to China and importing menial badly-paying jobs to the USA.

In the middle of the book he addresses social currency, and suggests that most activities are not really about achieving specific goals or buying specific things, but rather about out-reach and networking--the primary human motivator is communion, and the fragmentation of the marketplace and the commoditization of the employee have blocked that.

The book concludes with what could be said to be a very worthwhile mantra: businesses should answer real needs, everyone should collaborate rather than compete, and the over-all objective is to form communities by integrating the views and needs of employees, clients, stockholders, host communities, etc. He makes reference to addressing the needs of the bottom four billion people (per C. K. Prahalad's pioneering work), and has some very exciting references to a new business that allows cell phones to dial in to databases that offer Internet-like access for very narrow needs (e.g. crop prices or new cases of a specific disease.

A central thesis of the book is that open source software reflects the needed attributes of the current and future networking environments. Larger groups of people collaborating openly are consistently more effective than smaller groups working in secrecy. As a side note, the author buries the current obsession of the U.S. Intelligence Community with anonymous access to the Internet (not directly but as a former intelligence officer I see this in what he says). He points out that social currency--being visible, being valued, sharing what you are interested in, seeing what others are interested in, is a *fundamental* aspect of the global networked brain. In other words, the U.S. Intelligence Community, by insisting on anonymous access to the Internet, is isolating itself and seeing the world through blurred lenses.

The title of this book, while cute, might better have been "look under the hood." The author is compelling and interesting as he names specific consultants and specific companies all floundering to find new ways of getting money from customers, without ever actually looking under the hood of the car they are driving, and getting back to the fundamentals of their core competency. I am reminded of the U.S. Intelligence Community again--Ambassador Negroponte, a diplomat and a neo-conservative, is essentially in the same position as the ill-fated Dutch financier that took over Shell oil and had no idea how to run an energy company. His financial metrics were simply irrelevant, and over time Shell lost the ability to grow truly inspired geologists and engineers who had "the feeling in the fingertips" that the Germans stress so much.

The author makes specific reference to large mergers being the death rattle of an industry--one can easily see this in the U.S. Defense industry, with L-3 buying Titan, General Dynamics buying Anteon, Lockheed lusting after this and that---the dinosaurs are in-breeding (and cashing out), and have completely lost the ability to meet real needs at a fair price with a decent amount of on the fly innovation. They will be beaten by small, fast, and often foreign providers.

Over-all, I found this book inspirational, reasonable, and very very worthwhile.

I'm not the typical audience for a "business" book. A number of business books have been given to me over the years, such as "Who Moved My Cheese" and "First, Break All The Rules." I mostly found that those tended to remind me of bad self-help or get rich quick type pitches. The guru comes down and tells us proles how it is. My interest in *this* book however sprang from Rushkoff's fascinating blog.

Douglas Rushkoff writes from the perspective of a netizen, a cyber enthusiast, and above all, a member of the silly, fascinating, innovative and always moving culture that has been made possible by the Internet. Get Back In The Box captures that sense of play and optimism that I've always found online but never in a standard "business" text.

Although he does occassionally cross over into almost over-hyping the change in thinking, the illustrations of what makes innovation possible are fascinating and inspiring. His example of satellite radio, of how Sirius has spent $$ on marketing and big names all the while losing money while XM has focused on solid ground-building support with the music coming first, was one of my favorite sections.

I wish the higher-ups at my company would read this book. I work in IT, as server support for a large company (very large). When I started, we used to do support of one business unit, with a great deal of in-depth knowledge of how our systems worked to support that unit. As years have gone by, we've taken on more and more systems to the point where now most of us don't really have any idea what these systems actually do. And now, as we're slowly being segmented by function into more "efficient" units, any unique value that we used to be able to bring to help our clients, is basically lost. And at that point, there really is no difference between any of us and someone with the same general tech skills in India, who's willing to work for a lot less $$.

I found Rushkoff's optimism at times a little over the top but the general premise was so right on. I did a lot of "hell yeah" and "amen" while reading it. Made me want to run to the window and yell out, I'm madder than hell and I'm not going to take it any more. ;-)

Rushkoff gets outside the box by getting back in, and by taking us along for the ride, and using grounded, real world examples, he illustrates how important this is. As companies race to outsource and offshore work, I wish more business leaders would read this book. And remember.... you get what you pay for. This book is $$ well-spent.

Doug Rushkoff manages to capture the essence of the next wave of innovation just as it is peaking. We are on the cusp of a new renaissance, and Rushkoff lays out the landscape clearly (to listen to a preview, google: Rushkoff "Renaissance Prospects" podcast from ITConversations). His main thesis is that we are in the midst of a new renaissance in which you and I, the average Joes and Janes, are no longer content to be passengers in our experience, but increasingly demand to be given the wheel so that we can author our own future.

This is illustrated by his example of BMW motorcycle owners, who have formed a fiercely loyal community of peers. When BMW offered to help with the coordination of riders, the community politely but firmly declined; they can manage credibility and coordination just fine without official corporate mojo, thank you very much. And BMW got the message.

The point isn't to stop being innovative, but to keep faith with one's core in the midst of innovating. In the wild ride of the late nineties, too many caught whiff of a new craze and mistook it as a call to be different for different's sake. Rushkoff's advice to us as a culture is the recognition that both supplier and consumer are collaborating in bringing this experience to fruition. The challenge for consumers is to pony up to the responsibilities of taking the reins. For corporations, the charge is a bit more challenging: how to entrust your customers with your core competencies as they take hold and do with it as they will. The surprise to all may be just how much the line has blurred between these two roles, as we attempt to discover who really is in the driver's seat.