Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Taps Don, Anthony D. Williams Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
Book Review: frigthening
Summary: 1 Stars
It is frightening that such shallow pamphlet style writing claims to bring forward innovative ideas just by going on and on with redundant phrases, mixing them with rather rare mention of interesting facts and figures and neglecting simple core questions of economy.
the authors claim that the book is working along the lines of what it claims to be characteristic for what it analysis, i.e. openness, cooperation ... . If the quality of the book is similar to the quality of wikinomics-outcomes in general, a dark future looms up at the horizon: shallow, a rosy air bubble that will leave as many victims as crashing twin-towers.
Book Review: It is really a breakthrough!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
This book can change your life and the traditional way to create richness. You have to read it and take it seriously because this is the present and the future!!!
JUvencio Rold?n
Book Review: Amazing
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is close to "Reengineering the Corporation - Web 2.0". Mass Production and Mass Customization were the mantras for success in the 20th century. The twenty-first century belongs to Mass Collaboration. Organizations need to reinvent themselves to succeed in the new paradigm. The book is the why and how of making this happen.
Starting with a brief story of the Canadian gold mining company Goldcorp Inc. which threw open its vast mining data in a public contest on the web, enabling it to substantially improve success rate in its mining operations based on suggestions from across the globe, in an otherwise highly secretive industry.
Linux, Wikipedia and music are perhaps the most common and pervasive examples of the movement of mass collaboration. Collaboration is a new form of unleashing global talent that is otherwise confined within the limits of organizational hierarchies and bureaucracies. It is not about profitability but a feeling of community and contribution for free. Organizations now need to leverage on this massive force, as an enabler of business success. The four dimensions for making this happen are Openness, Peering, Sharing and Global outlook according tho the authors. This is diametrically opposite to closed, hierarchical, secretive and inward looking organizational structures of the past.
This does not come easily without conflict of interests. What appears to be the biggest challenge to organizations is their ability to protect intellectual property built over several years of research and investments, and the reward for individual talent. The book gives several examples to dispel these fears and narrates win-win-win scenarios for communities, companies and individuals, thereby lifting all boats. IBM's support and success from utilising Linux and Apache codes for its products is a classic example in the software industry. Case studies of several other corporations that are R&D intensive including pharmaceutical, automobile and consumer goods are discussed in the various chapters of the book. Thus, mass collaboration is not about fun on the web, but is serious business.
It is easier said than done to reinvent organizational structures and management practices that have been traditionally built on the command and control model. Imagine the whole world being a part of an organization as opposed to just the employees on its payroll and its business partners. Consumers and producers collaborate. Competitors collaborate. Collaboration knows no national boundaries. The possibilities are limitless and the rewards are high. Those who ignore or resist this may soon be swept away by this great new force of "Creative destruction".
A well deserved five star rating.
Book Review: The Open Content Economy: Consumers as Producers
Summary: 4 Stars
For the uninitiated, a "wiki" is software that allows anyone with access to a computer to create, edit, and link webpages. It has also been called the "open content" movement in which users of the web generate content. The prime example of this is Wikipedia, an ever-growing body of information that receives about 7 billion hits a month. User-generated content has been the modus operandi of many successful and innovative sites such as Amazon, Ebay, Flickr, and YouTube, to name a few. The authors maintain that this phenomenon is going even further: not only is it changing the way traditional companies do business, it is transforming the economy.
Economist Ronald Coase stated in 1937 that companies exist to lower transaction costs. In a wiki-economy, the authors claim, this is no longer the case. They give the example of Goldcorp, a mining company. Goldcorp was a failing company with revenues of about $100 million. They needed new places to drill but found the cost prohibitive. They decided to post a website with their proprietary data in order allow anyone and everyone to locate drilling sites. A prize would be awarded to the lucky ones. The response was enormous and Goldcorp prospered. Their revenues reached $9 billion as a result. Transaction costs can be lowered by opening up the company to mass collaboration.
Government agencies are also taking up mass collaboration. After 9/11, intelligence agencies were faulted for not sharing and corroborating their information. Since then they have created a shared online community known as IntelliPedia, modelled on Wikipedia. This new and apparently successful site, however, is only open to members of the intelligence community. Mass collaboration within government agencies is a very important step in the effectiveness of governance.
The authors tell us that this change is driven by a new generation of computer users who are more active and skilled at creating content. They call this group "prosumers" since they have a proactive relationship with the products they buy. One will notice ads on the Internet by companies such as Pepsi and Frito-Lay soliciting consumers to design the next generation of packaging.
The transition to Wikinomics will not be without its disruptions. (Read also Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture (Unabridged) and Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.) Many professionals are being displaced by hobbyists and amateurs. Wether or not this is a good thing will depend on which side of the equation one is on.
The authors' encountered their own difficulties when they tried to enter the term wikinomics on Wikipedia. The phantom editors determined that the word was not yet widespread enough to merit an entry - meaning it only made a limited appearance when it was googled. Apparently the word wikinomics is not catching on as the authors had hoped.
Book Review: Timely and comprehensive - A must read!
Summary: 5 Stars
While the title of the book focuses on "Mass Collaboration," the contents provide a solid basis - justification & approach - for knowledge management. There is no longer justification for being shy about the KM. All the tools are here - although still somewhat disparate and not fully integrated - to create a practical knowledge system that captures the explicit as well as the tacit intellectual assets of an organization and make it easily available to other users when and where they need the knowledge. The book gives case after case of how successful companies such as DuPont leverage the power of Wiki to create a collaborative environment for solving complex problems in a highly competitive and dynamic marketplace. At a time when the scarcest resource is knowledgable people, particularly in the maufacturing sector, Wikis provide one of the basic elements of a knowledge system that help deal with this issue. Soon, companies will recognize knowledge management as an effective means for dealing with the resource crisis issue; that is in addition to (and as a preferable altrernative to) outsourcing, off-shoring and overloading of employees.