Book Review : The Facebook Effect - David Kirkpatrick

Mark Zuckerberg celebrates his 27th birthday on May 14th; and what an achievement for this 27-year-old!, founding (and holding 24% stake)  one of the most remarkable companies in our times, valued anywhere between $50-65 billion. 

Perhaps the most significant event in modern history has been the birth of social media networks. David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect is an excellent description of Zuck’s genius, an inside story of how Facebook came about and the events and ideas that have shaped its development.

I found the early days of Facebook very inspirational. As it turns out, the story is fascinating and somewhat complicated. 

First impression: Wow!, I would love to work at Facebook. After reading this book, I am more impressed with its CEO Mark Zuckerberg. 

Many of us use Facebook nearly every day, some of us multiple times a day, without giving much thought to how the world's most popular social network came to be. This book takes us right inside Mark Zuckerberg's head to understand the ‘potential of Facebook. 

The book is divided into two parts, the first part is a fascinating corporate history revolving around reticent founder and Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg; the second is a thoughtful, analysis of the ‘Future of Facebook’.

Fault Lines- Raghuram G Rajan

Yesterday, I attended a Global Leadership Series Lecture by Professor Raghuram G Rajan, where he discussed in detail some of the factors outside the financial sector that led to the financial crisis. 
While most of the news stories and public discussions over last two years have focussed on the 'greed of banking community', his observations on how the hidden fractures still threaten the world economy were quite insightful. He also shares these insights in his latest book 'Fault Lines'.

Well, the immediate suspects for this crisis seem to be – bankers, rating agencies, the Fed, Fannie, and Freddie, etc.; but if we dig deeper and analyze, What went wrong? It becomes abundantly clear that it was a crisis where not only the private sector was to blame, but also the government. It was a crisis caused by the faulty interface between the two.

Fault lines such as~Growing 'inequality' and Thin( or entirely absent) Social Security net create tremendous pressure on the political community to find the easy route. i.e., make cheaper credit available if they can't create that many jobs(as witnessed in the push for universal home ownership in the United States extensive lending by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and others,  low-interest rates, targeted and relaxed lending to the sub-prime borrower, etc.).

It is also apparent that the real reasons for the crisis are still not addressed; the fiscal stimulus is only a temporary 'band-aid' solution. The world today needs to make hard choices to ensure greater stability and lasting prosperity.

The fundamental idea of this book (and his talk) is to focus on slow-moving tectonic plates in the global economy: Consumption by borrowing in countries with fiscal deficits, Excess savings in exporting countries that are fiscally in surplus, and growing sophistication of the financial sector. 


None of these movements might seem dangerous in itself, but when these plates come together and collide, the global economy can get badly shaken. To most players focused narrowly on their positions, leave alone the movements of the plate they stand on, the earthquake - like this crisis - may seem an unfortunate happenstance.

In the analytical framework of Fault Lines, it is apparent, that the current crisis was not a pure accident and that more severe crises could arise in future unless the root causes are addressed sufficiently soon.

Please also check Paul Krugman and Robin Wells review of Rajan's book, and Rajan's response to it.

Do Schools kill creativity?

Sir Ken Robinson in his Out of our minds asks the same question.

"Throughout the world, companies and organizations are trying to compete in a world of economic and technological change that is moving faster than ever. They urgently need people who are creative, innovative and flexible. Too often they can't find them. Why not, and what should be done about it? Why is it essential to promote creativity? Organizations everywhere are concerned as never before with promoting creativity and innovation. Why is this so important? What's the problem? Why do so many adults think they're not very creative (and not very intelligent)? How do we lose the confidence to be creative? What should be done? Is everyone creative or just a select few? Can creativity be developed? If so, how? "

I remember an old quote by Picasso “All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” Children often have extraordinary capacity when they are young, the problem is they start squandering it when they grow up.

Hence the question : Do schools kill creativity ? As we grow-Do we educate out of creativity? Many a times people change careers(stream) in schools, because the thing that they were good at was stigmatized.

Do we in our ecosystem( schools, communities, organisations) do the same?

Have we created an environment wherein it is uncomfortable to be different; not okay to fail or make a mistake.This straight jacket approach of living is depriving us of the immense possibilities (many a Picasso, DaVinci,Beethoven are getting lost in this one way traffic ).

Think about it....

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

I have just started reading this new book by Thomas Friedman ...an eye opening account of current global environmental crisis. Friedman explains how global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the astonishing expansion of the world's middle class through globalization has produced a planet that is 'hot, flat,and crowded'. In just a few years it will be too late to fix things-unless there is a worldwide effort to replace our wasteful, inefficient energy practices with a strategy for clean energy.

He calls for Code Green . The world is getting crowded and hot. More people tapping computers and on the road means more competition for resources, more emissions. It's all "intensifying the extinction of plants and animals, and strengthening of petro-dictatorship." 

Please note that there were just 1 billion people on this planet in the year 1850. The population has gone up by 6.5 times ( to current 6.5 billion) in the year 2008. No other species has seen this kind of growth in numbers. This number is likely to go up further to 9 billion by 2050. This raises the most important question:

Making Innovation everyone's Job

I am reading "The Future of Management," by Gary Hamel and Bill Breen; a wonderful book with great insights.

An excerpt....

Collapsing entry barriers, hyperefficient competitors, customer power—these forces will be squeezing margins for years to come. In this harsh new world, every company will be faced with a stark choice: either set the fires of innovation ablaze, or be ready to scrape out a mean existence in a world where seabed labor costs (Chinese prisoners, anyone?) are the only difference between making money and going bust.

The Wisdom of Crowds

James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations makes a good read.

The book talks about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group.
However , Not all crowds (groups) are wise. Consider, for example, mobs or crazed investors in a stock market bubble. Etc.According to Surowiecki, these key four elements are required to form a ‘wise crowd’.

Diversity of opinion -Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.
Independence -People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.
Decentralization -People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.
Aggregation –Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision

A must read....

Crowdsourcing- The Long Tail

The word was first coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article.

Wiki : Crowd sourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine an algorithm or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science).

The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals.

Recently read "The Long Tail " by Chris Anderson . It is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the future of business. The book gives a very interesting perspective on : what happens when there is almost unlimited choice? It also shows why online models Amazon, Ebay etc are so successful by adhering to the 'rules' of long tail.

The future of business does not lies in 'hits' but in 'misses' ( the endless long tail). He refers to the concept of 'crowd-sourcing' quite liberally. Some examples of crowdsourcing that come to my mind...Wikipedia , InnoCentive, Threadless , Amazon , Netflix etc