chieftech’s blog

I'm a big fan of the Charles Handy's 1991 classic, the Age of Unreason and the concept of the Shamrock Organisation that he describes in it. However, I wasn't quite sure what to expect with The Elephant and the Flea. The style is very autobiographical, which some people might see as being quite self-indulgent by the author since the book isn't sold as a biography. However, really it is like sitting down and having a one-on-one interview with Handy where he explains his own story and how his professional and personal life experiences have come to shape his management ideas and theories, as well as his concerns for the future. But there is no hype or guru worshipping here. Handy isn't perfect, but his honesty about his own mistakes along the way and awareness of his own limitations is refreshing.

Despite being published in 2001 and the fact Handy is a little bit of a technology laggard (but not a luddite), I was surprised at how relevant the conversation still is to a world undergoing the influence of the Internet revolution. Handy doesn't predict the rise social media and social networking as we have now experienced it, but the underlying issues of the social and organisational changes taking place that are characterised by the concept of the Elephant and the Flea are part of that trend. However, Handy isn't going to do that thinking for you. Read his story and then make some time to go away and think about it. One of the key challenges I see now is that while social software makes us all 'Fleas', even if we work inside an 'Elephant', do we all want to be 'Fleas' and do we need the 'Elephant'?

There are many more ideas and issues to explore, if you give this book a chance. However, I also have to say that this probably shouldn't be the first Charles Handy book you should read. If you have enjoyed his other work and would like more insight into the mind of this great thinker and teacher, then it makes a pleasurable and satisfying read. It is almost as good as meeting him in person.

This book is an expanded version of a four part BBC Radio 4 series of the same name:

which tells the stories of some of the computer pioneers in Britain, America and the Ukraine. Each is a little cameo of social history of the early post war years half a century ago, from a time when "everything you did was new, no-one had ever done it before".

The radio series only covers some aspect of the early history of computing in the US, UK and what was post-war communist Ukraine. It also includes an episode on an unusual economic simulator that water rather than electronics . However, the book expands on this and manages to also include a chapter about the first digital computer in Australia. This coverage of the history of computing from around the world is probably the most interesting thing about this book, as it gives you an interesting perspective on the process of technology innovation.

I must admit the story from the Ukraine ("So Then we Took The Roof Off") failed to grab me, but maybe I should go and listen to the original radio version as I suspect some of the impact of that story might have been lost in translation to the written word. However, the key message of that story was that the invention of the computer wasn't something based on a sudden flash of inspiration - instead, it was the natural evolution of technology that created the potential for it to happen. In other words someone, somewhere was going to invent the computer at that point in human history.

Of course the commercialisation and mass popularisation of that technology is another story all together, which is touched on in the final chapter with the story of IBM ("It's Not About Being First").

Overall, I enjoyed this book but was also a little disappointed because there is only so much you can fit into a single chapter about each of the periods covered. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more if I had listened to the radio show first, as the book claims to also expand further on the stories in those original broadcast rather than simply being a transcript. On the plus side, it was good to learn something new about the history of computing in places outside of the US and UK.

If you like the idea of this book, I also suggest you have a look at A Computer called LEO (the story of Britain's first business computer - reviewed over on my old blog) and also The Electric Universe (which places computing in the context of the history of electricity).

Free wasn’t what I expected. Its not a manifesto for simply giving everything away. Instead its a broad discussion of the economics of free and the disruptive business models that the Internet has created. As part of this, the book also looks the motivation for people to participate without compensation and behavioural economics, including the inherent conflict this creates for organisations that deal in content and intellectual property (like the media, gaming and music industries).

Free is written by Chris Anderson, editor at Wired Magazine and the author of The Long Tail. Fundamentally, if you accept his arguments, Free comes down to set of business model that depending on your viewpoint either take advantage of the Internet or force you to change how you market your products and services because of it. These are:

1. Direct Cross-subsidies
2. Three-party markets
3. Freemium

On the Internet, the first two models are really an extension of traditional marketing techniques - e.g. advertising on television and radio. However, the popular Freemium model is really one that has come of age in the digital Internet era. The Freemium model is particularly evident in the software industry and can be seen as a distinct variation of the direct cross-subsidy model - instead of a cross-subsidy across products purchased by a customer, a minority of premium customers pay for the majority of free customers. This is not as unfair as it sounds, since the overall scale of the user base actually benefits those premium customers but ensuring a better, well supported and scalable product.

A fourth market is non monetary markets. In a way this is a challenger to all of the above business models, if critical mass is achieved. Wikipedia is the classic example, but Anderson also includes file sharers under this banner. Unfortunately non monetary markets reflect the nature of the beast - Anderson says he doesn’t condone copyright infringement, but that in effect it would appear a non monetary digital market trumps any other kind of digital market. This is very much in the vein of Negroponte’s classic, Being Digital.

The only defence against non monetary markets appears to be related to identifying needs that the market can’t serve, such as convenience. For example, in Anderson’s view paying a small fee for a music track from a site like iTunes is much easier for the vast majority of adult users, who lack both the time and patience to deal with P2P. Alternatively, companies are faced with the choice of adopting this market as part of their business model. For example, make your profit on live events but tap into non monetary markets as a low or no cost way to promote your brand.

In this respect Anderson acknowledges that there is a fundamental different between selling things that are made atoms versus bits in the digital world. This is positioned essentially as the difference between the scarcity of the physical world and the abundance capacity of the digital environment. To be successful we need to reconcile both and the challenge is that we are a point of transition, trying to work what will be free online, what people will pay for online and how to draw a line between that and the physical world where traditional rules still apply.

Personally I thought this was a great book - the ideas above have certainly got me thinking about not only the bigger picture of the impact the Internet is having, but even my business model as a consultant (I’m actually already a participant in the free-based economy). However, I think there are still lots of unanswered questions:

• How will we manage this transition so that society isn’t too badly affected in the process?
• Applying the concept of the Long Tail (Anderson’s earlier book), how will people on the tail make a living or will this just create a new kind of digital economic divide?

These aren’t arguments against change, just a statement of the issues and challenges ahead of us.

Also, on the theme of abundance versus scarcity, I would also like to see someone write about the idea of applying the digital abundance idea inside organisations in relation to Enterprise 2.0 (a kind of “Free Enterprise 2.0” - maybe I’ll talk about this in another post one day).

As part of his own promotion of the book, Anderson did release the whole book online so it could be read gratis. Unfortunately that promotional period has expired so you can’t access the free text version of Free on Scribd anymore, but a free audiobook is still available for download.

This isn't a new book - published in 2005 - but it is an enjoyable read. It covers the history of electricity from the early 1800s to the late twentieth century and tells the stories of its impact on discoveries and inventions including batteries, light bulbs, telegraph, electric motors, and radio to radar, transistors, computers, and neurotransmitters. These are all great stories for anyone trying to bring new information technology ideas to life - it reminds us that its as much about the technology itself as it is the personalities involved and the politics of where these ideas are born.