The summer of Enterprise 2.0 reading list

I’ve been on paternity leave for a few months now and have finally found the time to re-read, dissect and compare some of the books on networks, collaboration, participation and crowdsourcing that I’ve been reading these past five years.

Here’s my reading list for those who want to understand Enterprise 2.0, its foundations and drivers:

The Power of Pull (2010)

John Seely Brown and John Hagel explore how networked informatics (i.e. cheap, pervasive, connected computing power) and economic liberalization are charting a new course for society and are radically changing the way we do business. Which is a good thing, since an extrapolation of their & Deloitte’s Shift Index suggests that most major US corporations will go under by 2020.

What do they mean by pull?

The ability to draw out people and resources as needed to address opportunities and challenges.

Greg Lloyd pointed me to the following author videos, which serve as excellent introductions (or codas) to the book.

John Seely Brown at Standford’s Entrepreneurship Center

John Hagel at the Dean’s Speaker Series at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley

The Future of Work (2004)

Thomas W. Malone’s book would benefit from a refreshed set of examples, but it remains a forerunner. Exploring how a drastic reduction in communication enables easy, decentralized coordination, Malone explores old, new and different ways of organizing work and discusses how they will shape our businesses and lives (yep, there’s a value discussion in there too).

There’s no Kindle version, but check out the preview below from Google Books.

Thomas W. Malone at MIT World in 2004 (prescient!)

Wired for innovation (2010)

In this book, Erik Brynjolfsson and Adam Saunders unpack Solow’s computer paradox – “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”. They look at how the information economy is measured, point out weaknesses in the categorization scheme and discuss how GDP excludes non-market transactions (where no money changes hands).

OK, so that doesn’t sound terribly exciting, but when you realize that there’s no statistic that monitors the gratis utility offered to you by Google, Flickr and others, the IT sector’s reported contribution to the overall economy is likely artificially low.

Additional topics include measuring the information economy, enhancing productivity via practices, organizational capital etc. plus why it’s so hard to transplant best practices across companies and teams.

Erik Brynjolfsson introducing his book.