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Book Review
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New
Rules for the New Economy — 10
Radical Strategies for a Connected World
Kevin
Kelly, $12.95
Swarms
of “jelly bean chips” will soon be the order of the day, according to
a current book making the rounds of the businessperson’s “must read”
list. The informative book is titled New
Rules for the New Economy—10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World.
If talk of jelly bean swarms sounds foreign, or if as a business
professional you don’t yet see the value of chip technology versus
transistors, or of network connections, then reading this book is a must
for you.
Built from a series of articles that first appeared in Wired
magazine, New
Rules for the New Economy
illustrates the benefits of being “connected” by current technology,
and developing intricate networks throughout your business and world.
Forget supply and demand, and forget computers. Communication, not
computation, is the force behind success and change today. The book maps
out ten essential rules for staying afloat and becoming a part of this new
business climate.
The author is Wired editor-at-large Kevin Kelly. New
Rules for the New Economy
examines the world of the soft—the principles governing the world of
intangibles such as media, software, and services and how they affect
business and the world we live in. Using descriptive narrative, Kelly
illustrates the trend away from companies who once worked in the solitary
world of the hard, meaning steel and beams, oil and atoms, sweat from the
brow, to a world connected by networks using both smart and dumb
microchips. “Iron and lumber will obey the laws of software, automobiles
will follow the rules of computer networks, smokestacks will comply with a
degree of knowledge,” Kelly states. “If
you want to envision where the future of your industry will be, imagine it
as a business built entirely around the soft, even if at this point it is
built in the hard,” forecasts Kelly. Kelly
connects the past, the present, and the future with examples from previous
“revolutions” that have shaped the business world in the past. Kelly
demonstrates that featured in the 1918 Sears Roebuck catalog was a “Home
Motor” that was guaranteed to lighten the burden of the home. The motor
was to provide for the needs of the American family, and had optional
plug-ins such as an egg beating device, a fan, a mixer, a grinder, and a
buffer. The book points out that the electric motor succeeded so well that
it became invisible. Eighty years later, nobody owns a Home Motor, having
instead dozens of micro motors everywhere. That will be the trend of the
future, Kelly says, with various “dumb jellybean chips” performing
specific tasks, seamlessly, in conjunction with smarter chips that will
orchestrate various functions. Kelly urges us to “embrace the swarm”
in order to become a part of this new economy. As Kelly states, “Dumb,
cheap jelly bean chips are invading the world faster than PCs did.” Kelly
asserts that the history of the American economy can be viewed as a parade
of “heroic” industries that appear on the scene as unknowns and
heroically save the economy. He points out that General Motors was at one
time regarded as the business model for the United States, the same
position that some have assigned to Microsoft today. Kelly says that
betting on Microsoft—or any other of today’s companies—being in that
position 40 years from now would not be a safe bet. Many
lessons can be learned from the 10 rules outlined in New
Rules for the New Economy.
The book gives a clear guide to the fundamentals of living and prospering
in a connected world. It urges us to give in to technology using it to our
advantage—now, before it’s too late. It tells us: 1) It’s okay to give away something for nearly free
in order to make more money. 2) An opportunity exists to become highly effective by
simply embracing the idea of being connected to multiple networks. 3) The more networked we are, the more we will feel
the benefit in our wallets and pocket books. New
Rules for the New Economy has
been a Business
Week best-seller
and is available at most bookstores. It is also available on the Internet
at www.amazon.com.
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