so let me share a few thoughts on the book "The Power of Pull" by John Hagel III (@jhagel), John Seely Brown (@jseelybrown) and Lang Davison (@LangDavison)
The Book
First things first: The books is great and I really recommend reading it! While I would never attempt to write a satisfactory summary of this book, I'll try to elaborate on a few core ideas of the book, add my personal thoughts and share some related links.
"The Power of Pull" deals with the changing world of business and how a new environment is evolving that is dominated by "Pull" instead of "Push". Push is the old world of demand forecasting and providing the customer with what a company thinks he needs. In a "Pull"-world however, demand forecasting gets increasingly difficult and exception handling becomes "The New Normal". Because a pull-world is changing rapidly and old knowledge gets obsolete increasingly fast, companies are well advised to stop protecting their stocks of knowledge and instead to start participating in flows of knowledge to constantly be on top of the game.
The Power of Serendipity
Because you can find everything you look for on Google, the authors argue that it's increasingly important to be able to find what you don't look for, but what you still need. Serendipity helps you to find what you don't even know exists. To provide you with an example that you won't find in the book, just consider how tech evangelist Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) follows more than 30'000 people on Twitter. He explained it recently on Quora. Another way to benefit from the power of serendipity is attending conferences and building relationships with people you meet there. I recently attended a conference where I met an experienced researcher yielding a fruitful cooperation for the Swiss NGO "Vimentis" with large benefits on both sides.
The Surfer Thing!
There is some kind of mysterious relationship between management researchers and surfers. Arguably one of the first influential research papers on communities of innovation or open source development in a non-software context was by Sonali K. Shah and the paper dealt with windsurfing. The work was later cited in Eric von Hippel's influential book Democratizing Innovation. Now turning to "The Power of Pull" again, one of the most important examples of a so-called "creation space" is... big wave surfing! The ideas are actually quite similar: In a creation space the participants constantly challenge each other, develop new techniques and finally get better at what they want to do - surfing for example. A creation space is great for participating in flows of knowledge because ideas and knowledge flow freely and the benefits for those participating increase exponentially with every new-joiner.
Institutionalizing
Serendipity and creation spaces not only work for individuals, they also work for institutions. Institutions should try to participate in flows of knowledge and set up internal as well as external creation spaces. "The Power of Pull" explains the benefits associated with creation spaces and gives useful examples, the corresponding hands-on how-to-guide on the use of social software for business performance was recently published by Deloitte (@Deloitte) - another very good read!
Start with yourself
While "Open Innovation" and "Crowdsourcing" all seem to give control from traditional institutions to the masses, they in fact just substitute traditional control with a more subtle form of control. This was recently put forth by "The Power of Pull" - co-author Lang Davison (@LangDavison) at Design Mind together with Andrew and Kate Markell. Control - they argue - is hard-wired into our brains. If we really want to let go of control we have to start with ourselves and first re-wire our nervous system "to tolerate the anxiety and discomfort that comes with letting go of control, to be able to let go of old ways and learn new ones". This may be the premium way of benefiting from serendipity, flows of knowledge and creation spaces!
I hope these lines gave you a little impression on "The Power of Pull" and some related ideas. My next book will be "The New Capitalist Manifesto" by Umair Haque (@umairh). Is it worth writing another review?
