When you
read a book, sometimes you get the feeling of dejavu – a feeling that we have already seen or gone through it
before. But how about reading a book that gives a feeling that is orthogonal to
it – I mean vujade? That is, we have never seen this familiar thing in that light
feeling.
This is my
first book by Doug albeit he seems to be a prolific writer and has been writing
for quite some time and I am impressed.
Doug is a worried man like many of us
about the direction in which the world is moving. He discusses the unequal
distribution of wealth, and technologies like robots, AI, and algorithms moving
rapidly to replace millions of jobs without much societal deliberation about
the resulting consequences. He presents his thoughts on how they can be
optimized to help the society as a whole instead of blindly running with the
changes to wherever they take us. He might not give solutions for everything,
but he does point out many potential pitfalls.
Key ideas
that got my attention (by no means exhaustive).
1. Concentration of wealth is not
self-correcting.
2. One has design for the velocity of
business instead of focusing on growth - to quote him, Money is a verb not a
noun. Don’t hoard keep it circulation.
3. Growth cannot be an end by itself. He
gives “twitter” as an example.
4. Technology does take away jobs and
the next generation jobs are less than previous one in terms of number and
usually involves less skill and prone to commoditization.
5. Most of us are in “extractive”
business rather than generative and circulatory business which alone is
sustainable over long run. This may sound forbiddingly abstract but will be
clear when you read the book.
6. Alternatives to charted business corporations
models like Benefit corporations, Flexible purpose corporations are well
explained with examples.
7. Corporations did not emerge – they
were invented and hence there is a scope for re-inventing them in order to
restore the power of middle class. His focus is on distributed prosperity.
8. His views on social media is very
refreshing. (He gives examples in music and host of other industries.)
9. He has brilliantly applied Marshall
McLuhan classic litmus test questions on media
a. What does the medium enhance or
amplify?
b. What does the medium make obsolete?
c. What does the medium flip into when
pushed to extreme?
He takes Automotive and
Cellphone as examples – and I am convinced by his explanations.
10. He highlights the benefits of local
currencies and importance of thriving local economies.
Now coming back to his Twitter: It
was successful, but it is not successful
enough to justify the money investors have pumped in. Already it had good
revenues, happy employees, users were well served, but it may never grow enough
to win back 100 times the initial $20Billion bet. To do that, it has to grow
bigger and faster than the economy of many nations! Isn’t that a bit too much
to ask of an app that sends out messages of 140 characters or less?
He says that there is a disproportionate
relationship between capital and value.
He points out that for some of the
products prices may be low – but
costs (he means social to a large extent) are high. Receptionist being replaced by answering machines, managers
getting replaced by algorithms, workers being replaced by robots etc. His
examples are really striking and poignant.
In any case, I am going to read more
of his works.
Thanks for reading this far.
Regards,
Madhu
