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May 17, 2011 04:22 am PDT

MacroWikinomics: nonthreatening web theory primer for business

Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams's Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World is a funny kind of chimera. It's a business book -- a book to help enterprises reform themselves around collaborative principles made possible by the Internet (it also talks about how education, government and NGOs can use the same principles). The business world surely needs that kind of book, as can be seen by the never-ending litany of lawsuits, threats, legislation, and back-room maneuvering aimed at shutting down, censoring, or controlling the net. So Macrowikinomics is a book to shake up the complacent and give them a combination of fear of the future rushing past them and hope that they can catch up with it if they put them minds to it. This is a delicate balancing act. It calls for a message that is at once iconoclastic and compromising, delivering hard truths without sugar coating; but it must be comforting at the same time, and assure the reader that change is both possible and desirable. As much as I applaud the effort, I found that Macrowikinomics often erred on the side of comfort, overstating its case, omitting disturbing details, and shying away from politics and technical realities in order to reassure its audience. Which is not to say that there's not a lot to recommend here. Tapscott and Williams cite several inspiring instances of successful, Internet-driven, bottom-up collaboration, and offer some surprising insights into the larger meaning of them. For example, the authors talk about the design process at Local Motors, which a combination of collaborative space and competition that calls on designers around the world to help figure out how to use reconfigured off-the-shelf parts to create new, hyperlocal car designs. More importantly, the authors stress founder Jay Rogers' insight that the world's top design schools are graduated legions of talented students who have virtually no hope of working in industry, and speaks of his determination to find a model that serves them. Likewise, the authors' version for a "Wikiversity" that expands on the vision of the MIT Open Courseware project and others like it and imagines a university experience that treats all tertiary institutions as peers that collaborate with students, teachers and researchers to deliver the best possible education and scholarship for all concerned. The discussion of open health is also an eye-opening look at the way that patients can be "experts" on their own health, and how their collaboration with one another and with the medical establishment has (and will continue to) produce real improvements to healthcare. Finally, the sections on NGOs like CorpWatch (which crowdsources intelligence gathering on corporate misdeeds) and on successful open government initiatives like the EPA's crowdsourced plan for Puget Sound are sterling examples of intelligent use of networked collaboration to make good things happen. But as good as these examples are, Macrowikinomics is shot through with sketches masquerading as plans, optimism masquerading as a theory of change, and superficial looks masquerading as thorough analysis....


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