Customer Reviews

Mesh Collaboration

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This book is the followup to an early work by the authors, which I have not yet read. Both follow the conventions of a business narrative, where the topics are introduced in the context of a fictional story. This is an engaging format, and it allows the authors to revisit concepts several times, probing deeper with each pass. Unfortunately, it's a format that doesn't allow the deep exploration that many of these topics deserve.

In the previous book, one of the protagonists, a young marketer named Hugo Wunderkind, had developed the concept of consumer products customized for particular affinity groups (the initial one being a popcorn popper with sports team logos) as a skunk works project in his corporation and successfully brought it to market. In this book, problems are discovered with the approach. Sales and individual item margins are increasing, but general support costs such as IT, customer service, etc. are increasing faster. The book follows the adventures of Wunderkind, his CEO, and her support staff as they get those costs under control, reinvent the working style of her company, and then apply their lessons across another, larger company within the Jabberwocky family of companies.

On the positive side, the book does a great job of illustrating that concepts like web2.0, enterprise2.0, social networking, collaboartion, and other buzzwords of 2007 and 2008 are primarily about people and process changes, not technology changes. Our heroes have to contend with a very realistic cast of characters ranging from those who see the potential but have justified concerns about governance and compliance, to those who embrace the concepts without thinking about how they will impact the operation as a whole, to those who are stuck in previously successful modes of operation and have no desire to change even when those modes have ceased working.

However, I have a lot of quibbles. First, the authors refer to Wunderkind's marketing strategy as a long tail strategy. It's not. Rather than offering truly niche products, Wunderkind has invented processes for customizing a mass market product to a niche. Recent evidence suggests that true long tail strategies may not be delivering on their promist (see Anita Elberse's article in the July-Aug 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review), but I suspect that Wunderkind's customization strategy might. Also, the authors seem to have implicitly accepted the digital native/digital immigrant hypothesis, which also is faring poorly in the face of research. There's an assumption here that older employees have a lot to learn from younger employees. While true, that needs to be tempered with an understanding that the younger employees have more to learn from their mature colleagues (I say this as one who sits right on the line between Generation X and Generation Y).

Perhaps my biggest beef is that the story is unrealistic in that the CEO is driving the change. In my own experience, these sorts of ideas are typically being embraced and championed a level or two below the C-suite, and the bold, take-charge approach with which the protagonists proceed isn't going to work for readers in that situation. A lot more education and consensus building is going to be required.

While there is a fair bit of hype peddling in this book, I think it's worth a read for those not already familiar with these concepts. Just make sure you pick up some deeper and more nuanced treatments of the subject afterward.

This was an exciting book to read. Some people get enamored with cool new technologies and terms like Web 2.0, web services, mashups, social network, etc. Companies, however, worry about the business issues that these technologies can enable. Andy and Nick use a fun vehicle - a fictional case study - to illustrate how companies can wrestle with these issues and even rethink their business models. It's a fun read, and I'd like everybody in my company to get it!

Enjoyed this book a lot. It was fun to read and has some very good ideas. Certainly something anyone who is trying to understand the shift into the modern business world.