Book review: Wikinomics
by Jeff Mackanic
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
Author: Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
Publication date: December 28, 2006
http://wikinomics.com/
I feel like I should have enjoyed this book more. After all, it has gotten lots of press and is very popular.
In fact, it made many bestseller lists:
- #170 on the Amazon Bestseller list
- #11 The New York Times Business Bestseller list
- #26 The New York Times Hardcover NonFiction Bestseller list
- #3 The Globe and Mail Hardcover Nonfiction Bestseller list
Readers of Red Hat Magazine will be very familiar with the content and examples in this book: Linux, Napster, MySpace, wikis. All ideas I’m familiar with—and have been for several years. Am I living in a little technology bubble? Is it just now gaining attention in the mass media? I guess this is the normal progression.
My advice? Save $25 and an afternoon of your time. Here are a few highlights.
Wikinomics is full of marketing talk–terms like b-web, peering, hiving. For example, here is the jargon-filled table of contents:
- Wikinomics
- The Perfect Storm
- The Peer Pioneers
- Ideagoras
- The Prosumer
- The New Alexandrian
- Platforms of Participation
- The Global Plant Floor
- The Wiki Workplace
- Collaborative Minds
- The Wikinomics Playbook
Early on, I understood the target audience:
“Phenomena like MySpace, Facebook, flickr, 43 Things, Technorati, and del.ico.us are not just Web sites, they’re dynamic online communities where sprawling and vibrant webs of interaction are forming.”
I thought the phenom stage ended a few years ago. Guess I am not the target audience (which is ok).
Key definition:
“We call it the world of “wikinomics” - in which the perfect storm of technology, demographics, and global economics is an unrelenting force on change and innovation.”
In chapter 9 (The Wiki Workplace), Tapscot and Williams claim that a company wiki had “decreased e-mail volume by 75 percent and cut company meeting times in half.” I need a wiki like that.
Later in the same chapter there is a fascinating section on Best Buy’s Geek Squad. Geek Squad has grown from 60 to 12,000 employees in the last three years. Wow. It seems that there is a very lively collaborative culture inside the squad that helps retain employees and maintain morale. Geek squad members are involved in everything from product development to corporate strategy. The leader of the Geek Squad developed a wiki to help keep the agents up to date. Only one problem: the agents did not use it. What the manager found out is that the agents were already collaborating using an online video game, Battlefield 2. A wiki was not the solution for increasing communication between agents. The solution was the multiplayer game that was already being used. A great quote about this experience: “When it comes to orchestrating employee collaboration, Stephens has a new rule: first observe, and then implement. ‘I’m deathly afraid of wasting time and energy trying to get people to do something they don’t want to do.’”
In chapter 9 (The Global Plant Floor) they write:
“Automakers like BMW will restrict their investments to a limited subset of components that are crucial to the success of their brands. This means more focus on the conceptual and design stages, and on the customer experience and related downstream services. Everything in the middle will be outsourced or managed through one form of collaboration or another.”
I think the authors followed this philosophy in writing the book. The topic, Wikinomics, is extremely popular. Several strangers who saw the title asked me about the book. The content is good. The marketing is fantastic. Great focus by the publishers on downstream activities. I was pleased to see the authors addressing one of the key facets (and products) of this new approach—intellectual property. But sad to see how they felt it should be quantified. A few excerpts from the intellectual property (IP) section (chapter 10, Collaborative Minds) illustrate this:
“Remember: just as good personal-investment strategies diversify assets across a range of low- and high-risk opportunities, good innovation strategies diversify IP holdings across a range of open and closed offerings.”
“Companies need to defend their assets and work hard to create proprietary advantages.”
“There is something truly inspiring about a world where the clash of world views between Microsoft and IBM can play itself out in the marketplace.”
I did not know that Microsoft and IBM had different world views. IP is a huge issue in the world of wikinomics. I wish the authors would have been more definitive on this topic.
It is wonderful that the mass media is entering into the discussion of openness and collaboration. Wikinomics falls short in some areas but it does a good job continuing the conversation and bringing this topic to the general business reading public. This would be a good book to give to a manager who is trying to understand how social networking is transforming business around the world. But it won’t be of much use to anyone who has been actively involved with the internet over the past several years.
April 5th, 2007 at 4:32 am
My sentiments exactly. Spot on.
May 6th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Jeff: I was invited to give a “book review” presentation on
Wikinomics to corporate trainers, Knowledge Managers and eLearning folks who were interested in learning about how they could apply the principles of Wikinomics in their own practices.
Wikinomics is a consultant’s book, designed to provide a platform for further consulting, workbooks, etc. to organizations who are in real need of transformation. Tapscott even put in an appeal for reader feedback by asking them to “edit my book” - in the Wikinomics Playbook, which will doubtless lead to a sequel written mostly based on the reader’s contributions enabling a Tapscott to apply the Tom Sawyer approach to getting his fence painted, process being used by wily authors and publishers who get good content for future sequels or versions of their books, but who provide no compensation to their contributing readers.
I am completing post-production on my presentation on wikinomics which was delivered at Stanford Research Institute on April 20 sponsored by the eLearning Forum and if you are interested, you can take a look at what I got out of Wikinomics at the eLearningForum archives.
I deconstructed Wikinomics and drew a diagram of the 4 key themes of the book to use as template for discussion following my presentation. In my opinion the diagram was far more useful to my audience in understanding wiikinomics than reading it would ever be.
Thanks for your very apt constructive criticism. Wikinomics is a marketing success, and will inspire a ton of consulting hours in learning to apply it
September 11th, 2007 at 2:36 am
On Chap-9, where wiki reduced the e-mail traffic and meeting times, I can’t speak for the numbers; BUT..
Having wiki does reduce email traffic and nicely written wiki pages also reduces meeting times. It allows people to get the answers to various questions without asking someone through an email and also people come prepared to meeting after getting a heads-on from wiki content.
Ofcourse, it is all possible if wiki is regularly updated. In my company, all the technology development ideas and work were updated on wiki. People working on projects take pride in telling others what they are working on and soliciting comments for improvements. In short, no tool on it’s own improves productivity, but wiki with it’s easy editing and good search capability is indeed extremely useful.