Pull of Another Kind
April 15, 2010
Congratulations to John Hagel and John Seely Brown, who have just launched The Power of Pull. Like my book, this one has been in the works for more than ten years. Unlike my book, it’s coming out with the kind of fanfare and marketing push it deserves. John Hagel, author of the excellent Net Gain (which came out a bit before my last book, Futurize Your Enterprise), has been crushing it the last several years with more books, lectures, and thought leadership than most people pack into a lifetime. He and Seely Brown (former director of Xerox Parc) have been hard at work defining new paradigms for institutions and individuals. As they say in the promotional piece for the book:
“Simply put, our institutions are fundamentally broken. They achieved enormous success by harnessing 20th century infrastructures. Only a few institutions are beginning to discover the potential residing in newer infrastructures and technologies like social media. By harnessing new pull practices and developing new institutional arrangements to support these practices, we have an opportunity to turn growing stress into expanding opportunity.”
These three sentences describe both their book and mine, but that’s where the similarity ends. Hagel’s definition of pull is the old socio-economic term that relates to influence and power. He wants people to manage the growth of their influence (leverage) throughout their careers and gives them the tools to do it. As he says, small moves, smartly made, can have a huge impact. I haven’t had a chance to read the book. I have only read the ten-page description they recently released. But I’m sure this book takes management and career advice to a new level, integrating the social web and the power of the web as we know it today into the fabric of our lives and our institutions.
That was my goal with my last book, Futurize. In my book, Pull, I’m trying to show that the social web and the power of the web as we know it today are simply recreations of our old ways of thinking in digital terms. They are push. When I talk about infrastructure, I talk about a new infrastructure that hasn’t been built yet, and that many of my readers are actively building now. So while their book talks about what’s changed the business landscape over the last ten years, my book talks about what the landscape changes coming in the next ten years. Which is why their book will sell 100 times more copies than mine.
I only have two little things to mention about the title of the book. First, if you type in “Pull” to Amazon.com’s book section, you’ll see the following results:
Amazon.com search result on 04/14/2010
So maybe their publishers could have worked a bit harder on the title. In addition, the full title of the book is the name of my domain, which may send me a bit of traffic but probably could have been avoided, since my book was listed in the catalog last spring.
Nevertheless, the book is about passion, learning, and collective advancement, and as such I hope you’ll read it and use it. And be sure to read John’s Blog as well. I wish them the best, and I hope we can help each other. (They certainly have more pull with the business press than I do.) I have offered to put up a link here permanently, so that people looking for their book can find it if they come here by mistake. I’ll honor that offer if they choose to accept it. I’ll do my best to help them sell more copies, and I hope they will do the same for me. In fact, I think the two books probably go very well together, helping us see where we’ve been and where we need to go. What do you think?
