Cool Books

Makers

Cory Doctorow’s latest novel is about a future where “technological change has created an economy so efficient … that traditional companies can hardly stay in business,” writes L. Gordon Crovitz in the Wall Street Journal (11/23/09).

The premise of Makers is a world in which inventors “figure out a way to use three-dimensional printers to produce copies of machines and most anything else at close to no cost” and approach a “pure and perfect state … with competition and invention … producing a kind of superabundance.”

The only competitive hope is to “have a really innovative idea, which can’t stay innovative for long, so you need continuous invention and reinvention, too.” Venture capitalists, recognizing that product innovation is passé, decide that “the next big thing in technology is financing litigation over copyright and other intellectual property.”

Cory, meanwhile, makes the book itself a medium for its message, selling it in hardcover but also making chapters “available for free downloads — a reminder that the convenience of the printed book is worth the $24.99 purchase price.” And he comments that “science-fiction writers don’t predict the future (except accidentally) but if they’re very good, they manage to predict the present.”

Think Twice

In Think Twice, Michael J. Mauboussin offers a gentle rebuke to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, reports Susan Berfield in BusinessWeek (12/21/09). Where Malcolm endorsed “decisions made in the blink of an eye,” Michael says this is advisable only if you practice “blinking” in a disciplined way.

He also cautions that making decisions based on intuition works only in “stable environments, where conditions remain largely unchanged, where feedback is clear, and where cause-and-effect relationships are linear.”

Citing psychologist Daniel Kahneman, Michael identifies two kinds of decision-making: One is “fast, automatic and difficult to control,” while the other is “slower, serial and takes effort.” So, while Michael believes it’s possible to “train our gut to produce more reliable results,” he also thinks “it’s better … simply to recognize the limits of intuition.”

He writes: “To make good decisions, you frequently must think twice — and that’s something our minds would rather not do.” He also believes we tend to underestimate the role of the workplace itself in our decision-making, arguing that we often to give too much credit to talent and not enough to circumstances.

As Michael puts it: “We tend to observe financially successful companies and attach attributes … to that success, and recommend that others embrace” the same attributes. But we’re only deluding ourselves.

Start-Up Nation

Through “war, strife and rising animosity from other nations,” Israel has become “the world’s techno-nation,” reports James K. Glassman in a Wall Street Journal review of Start-Up Nation by Dan Senor and Saul Singer (11/24/09).

“Civilian research-and-development expenditures run 4.5 percent of the gross domestic product — half again the level of the U.S., Germany or South Korea — and venture-capital investment per capita is two-and-a-half times that of the U.S. and six times that of the United Kingdom.”

Incredibly, over the half-dozen years after the tech bubble burst in 2000, “Israel suffered one of its worst periods of terrorist attacks and fought a second Lebanese war; and yet, as the authors note, its ‘share of the global venture capital market … doubled, from 15 percent to 31 percent.’”

Some suggest this is because Israel “concentrates the genius of the Jews.” But the book’s authors see a combination of factors that essentially center on Israel’s “unique entrepreneurial culture that combines individualism, egalitarianism … and nurturing.”

It’s a culture, they say, that comes from the Israeli military, writing: “You have minimal guidance from the top … and are expected to improvise, even if this means breaking some rules.”

The authors further note that Israel imposes mandatory military service, and think other countries should consider a similar policy to achieve “something like the leadership, teamwork, and mission-oriented skills and experience Israelis receive.”