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: A book that is stating the obvious
Summary: 2 Stars
This book is a written from the prespective of a 'consultant'--by that, I mean in a good way whereby the obvious benefits of collaboration are compiled and presented in straight forward manner. However, information presented in this book is not new and could be researched from the net (with a little bit of efforts). Having said that, the authors had done a great job in convincing me that wikinomics is the future, and ALL businesses should be awared of its implications and be ready for it fast!Book Review: Exciting material, dull presentation
Summary: 4 Stars
Thematically, Wikinomics is very close to The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual. Both books implore big business to embrace new collaborative methods of communication before it's too late. But whereas Cluetrain goes rhetorically off the rails, Wikinomics is so laden with jargon and corporate speak it barely gets on track. The authors are fond of expressions such as "permeable corporate boundaries", "egalatarian ecosystems", and "metabolic processes". At times it was difficult to tell whether I was reading a book on the future of business or a science textbook. On the other hand, the authors can be quite pithy when the mood strikes -
"At the same time, the nature of work itself is changing. Work has become more cognitively complex, more team-based and collaborative, more dependent on social skills, more time pressured, more reliant on technological comptetence, more mobile, and less dependent on geography." (p. 246)
The message is a good one. The internet has forever changed the online and offline business environments. Despite the stylistic shortcomings, the authors do indeed present exceptionally relevant case studies of companies that are successfully adapting, including Amazon, Boeing, P&G, Best Buy, BMW, and a little-known and struggling mining company called Goldcorp Inc., that turned the rules of the game upside down by open sharing of their secret data and mushroomed into a multi-billion dollar enterprise.
In addition the book is very balanced in its presentation, acknowledging the potential pitfalls and unresolved problems of collaboration. How are external collaborators to be compensated? How many secrets can a company afford to give away? What is the definition of intellectual property in the context of a collaborative business culture?
Business leaders in any large organization need to have a grasp of Wikinomics. Paradigms are indeed shifting - probably a lot faster than people realize. Also, collaborative operations are not restricted to information-based businesses and software companies. I was surprised to learn how rapidly and how completely Boeing has shifted its entire manufacturing strategy.
The bottom line for me - whether you're selling software or soft drinks, you can't afford not to keep tabs on this rapidly evolving collaborative phenomenon.
Book Review: A Good Place to Start
Summary: 5 Stars
Amidst all of the admittedly "nit-picky" reviews by folks much more informed on the topics covered in Don Tapscott's book, I find it necessary to take a moment to add my observations. Being only peripherally aware of many of the topics in this book, I found it extremely informative and helpful in trying to understand mass collaboration vehicles on the web and their potential for creating incredible opportunities for individuals and businesses. If you're new to the topics covered, you'll enjoy this book.Book Review: The Mass Collaboration Gold Mine
Summary: 4 Stars
This book hammers home a 21st century no-brainer. "It's all based on a principle the new generation of Web start-ups learned from the open source software community: There are always more smart people outside your enterprise boundaries than there are inside."
While it has mixed reviews ("made me feel alternately like Christopher Columbus and Grandpa Simpson"), it's an important addition to your organization's resource library.
Tapscot and Williams deliver fascinating case studies of companies that have opened up their internal secrets/data to the world so "mass collaboration" can help them solve big problems. Procter & Gamble did it and so did a failing Toronto-based gold-mining firm. In 2000, Goldcorp, Inc. ran a contest, the "Goldcorp Challenge," with $575,000 in prize money--and posted all of the mine's proprietary data on the web. The request: help us find more gold. The result: "More than 1,000 virtual prospectors from 50 countries got busy crunching the data."
Mass collaboration from the most unlikely sources and disciplines targeted new mother lodes on their 55,000-acre property. It worked: $100 invested in the company in 1993 was worth more than $3,000 in 2006.
There's a core value here (a biblical one) for faith-based organizations and churches: it's all kingdom work. It's time to open up and work together versus holding your ministry close to the vest. (It's not your ministry anyway!)
Read this book and then ask your team these questions: 1) What's our biggest challenge in the next 12 months? 2) Would mass collaboration help us solve it? 3) Do we operate as if the smartest people are INSIDE our organization or OUTSIDE our organization? Why?
Book Review: Future Shock 2.0
Summary: 3 Stars
Reading this 2006 book made me feel alternately like Christopher Columbus and Grandpa Simpson. Co-authors Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams define a near-term future of breathtaking wonder and innovation, yet I came away finding their best-case scenario hard to swallow.
"Wikinomics" describes existing business models in various industries, from which it extrapolates their ongoing development as part of a larger revolution of revolutionary openness, "on par with the Italian renaissance or the rise of Athenian democracy," the authors write. "Mass collaboration across borders, disciplines, and cultures is at once economical and enjoyable."
Like a lot of other posted reviewers here, I found "Wikinomics" too gushy and jargony, throwing up random-sounding words like "ideagoras" and "prosumers" as if their very existence connoted concreteness of often-fuzzy notions. The book's airy dismissal of copyright law and the protection of intellectual property rights as old thinking annoyed me immensely. And the notion of a future of non-hierarchal business enterprises strikes me as a terribly naive misreading of the most important aspect of the equation: the human element.
But give Tapscott and Williams points for presenting their case for futurism in a way that often feels quite compelling. They start with perhaps the best such example, by presenting the case of a Canadian mining company that, stymied in their search for gold, opened their records up to the outside world through online file sharing, soliciting ideas about where in their vast mine network they should dig for rich veins. The resulting influx of new thinking catapulted Goldcorp from a $100 million company to one worth $9 billion.
Tapscott and Williams take the success of Goldcorp and look for other industries where similar ideas have been practiced with similar results. With some, like this website, the fruits of innovation are immediate and obvious. With others, like old-guard conglomerate Procter & Gamble, success has been nearly as profound in more subtle ways.
The authors score some points, but also spout a lot of obvious Panglossian hyperbole. Wikipedia is as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica (better check that with John Seigenthaler). The youth-oriented website TakingITGlobal is like a new United Nations in embryonic form.
But their viewpoint has obvious value, too, and applicability in the world around us, even beyond the net world from which "Wikinomics" springs. Looking at the reinvention of BestBuy through its acquisition of Geek Squad, or how the workplace itself is changing shape to adapt to faster-moving, less-centralized structuring, is "Wikinomics" at its most challenging, and best reading.
I didn't put down this book convinced I saw the future, let alone a good future. But I did feel myself thinking differently about life and work than when I first picked "Wikinomics" up. Maybe that's the point.