The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion

This is one of two books I have now placed at the top of the heap of all the books I've read and read about. I've read this incidentally by "listening" to it on my Kindle while commuting. A Kindle will read with a digitized voice some of the Kindle books. It's like getting the audio and the printed version with one purchase. I've read reviews about this book that are written by inexperienced business people and frankly they should stick to reviewing simpler books. This book illuminates the road ahead for business. It destroys the asset-heavy business building practices of the past, both physical and intellectual assets. It offers a deep look into future business models which include collaboration with competitors and customers alike. The book cites current businesses actually doing this (in China, BTW) and American businesses that are considering operating like this (Wal-Mart) in the very near future. It discusses the fact that the time of full empowerment of the consumer is HERE. Ignore it at your own peril. I would say that any serious business strategist or executive level business person should read this book soon. The other book that complements this book is Create Marketplace Disruption by Adam Hartung.

John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Land Davison (HSBD) have written a good book with strong views on the future nature of enterprises and their relationship to individuals. The Power of Pull is one of the most comprehensively thought out books on the subject of social media and the future of the enterprise to have come out. It goes way beyond the buzzword or branding driven works that concentrate more on staking out territory than investigating the future of companies, individuals and technology. This is not a technology book, in fact it is more about the theory of the individual, their value and the impact of that value on companies. Hagel and Seely Brown's central premise is that "institutions will be shaped to provide platforms to help individual achieve their full potential by connecting with others and better addressing challenging performance needs" page 8. This is a distinctively different view form others who see the future of social computing as one of communities or collectives taking action. Hagel, Seely Brown and Davison then go on to discuss such an environment as one of "pull" with three basic principles * Finding and accessing people and resources we need * Having the ability to attach people and resources to yourself that are relevant and valuable * Pull from within ourselves the indicate and performance required to achieve our potential Now you can combine the quote and the points above and think this is a book at the cross roads between an academic researcher and Tony Robbins. This book is anything but. I have tremendous respect for this duo and they along with Davison have delivered a comprehensive and thoughtful book on a complex subject. Hagel, Seely Brown and Davison see pull concentrating on the innovation and new ideas that come from the people on the edge, those who are experimenting and pushing the envelope. They use the example of large wave surfing to illustrate that people working on the edge of their profession deploy sophisticated tools and communications patterns to make breakthroughs. Creating breakthroughs is an integral part of competing in the future and therefore something that companies need to get better at. That is where the individual fits into their argument, they can engage the edge, learn more, build the relationships that bring the best of the edge into their creation spaces that allows them to leverage themselves in the corporation. It is an interesting premise and one that the authors illustrate through several `mavens' I recommend this book in general and particularly the introduction and first chapter to business leaders who want a different view on the future and social media. Lately there are few books that I have highlighted or taken notes in the margins as much as I have with this one. There are a few strong ideas, well presented and discussed. Strengths. * The introduction - among the best and clearest I have ever read. It lays out the issues and scope of the book in a w

I like business books. I enjoy reading about the science and theory of how to lead complex organizations and how to make them successful in a hyper-competitive world, but I've often had difficulty. I am not a CEO of a major company. The decisions I make on a daily basis do not shape the lives of thousands of people. Thus I have felt forced to hypothesize about that time when I am finally *that* leader. That is, until I read The Power of Pull. The principles and techniques herein apply to all of us, no matter who you are or what you do. The main tenant of the Power of Pull is that in order to thrive now and in the future, companies and individuals need to develop pull "the ability to draw out people and resources as needed to address opportunities and challenges." In their latest book, Authors John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, join forces to evaluate the power of pull over multiple decades across all aspects of business, people and industry. The authors ascertain that the "success of institutions will depend on their ability to amplify the efforts of individuals so that small moves, smartly made, can become catalysts for broad impact." Using concrete examples from big enterprise, the authors tell stories of pull: SAP reaches out across corporate boundaries to build a creation space that is driving change back into the company; Visa implements back-office credit-card processing services allowing other banks to jointly own the venture, reducing the investment required to enter the credit card business; Li & Fung works with thousands of business partners in more than 40 countries to deliver capabilities that support a bevy of consumer goods, even recently (Jan. 2010) entering into an agreement with Wal-Mart that may generate an additional $2B in sales. While those examples are certainly credible and to the point, the authors firmly state that we must first understand how individuals will harness the power of pull before we can understand how institutions will change. So perhaps even more powerfully, the authors share examples of how people like you and I use pull. Surfers in Maui, dubbed grommets, connect and collaborate within small groups and across the Internet to learn how to ride sixty foot waves and World of Warcraft aficionados get better faster using social media and innovative teamwork. Ultimately, the best test for me personally, of the quality of a book, is how inspired I am after I read it. That is something that cannot be forced or faked. I either feel that way, or I don't. After reading the Power of Pull, I am inspired to try harder than ever before to more effectively achieve my potential, to collaborate with others, and to pull an institution along the way.

I have long been a fan of John Hagel (The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization) and John Seely Brown (TOSE and The Social Life of Information). I find that their latest collaboration with Lang Davison, The Power of Pull, continues to exceed my expectations. This book reminds me of reading Grove's Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company (Remember when we all started looking for strategic inflections and 10x changes?). The Power of Pull is a compelling case for business leaders and individuals to take note of the need for fundamentally different thinking driven by The Big Shift. Thomas Friedman summed-up this idea in the New York Times: "We are shifting from a world where the key source of strategic advantage was in protecting and extracting value from a given set of knowledge stocks -- the sum total of what we know at any point in time, which is now depreciating at an accelerating pace -- into a world in which the focus of value creation is effective participation in knowledge flows, which are constantly being renewed." As a result, Hagel, Brown, and Davison call for institutions to pull resources, embrace edges, and utilize the relationship economy and for individuals to build expertise around our passions and participate in social/creation networks. Further, the authors provide the first quantifiable evidence as to how far the shift has progressed in the form of The Shift Index. As a young person in the midst of a job change, I was able to incorporate the authors' concepts into my recent interview with a leading internet company. For businesses that operate at hyper-speed and lean relative to their volume of activity (e.g., Facebook, Google, Twitter), their ability to pull resources is critical. The book's thinking resonated with the executives who I spoke to as they were quick to build on the ideas that I discussed. In addition, traditional businesses must find a way to harness the power of pull as illustrated by cases in the book including Li & Fung, SAP, and Visa. Hagel, Brown, and Davison engagingly approach the subjects of passion, shaping serendipity, and creation spaces with stories and frameworks that help readers apply these themes both in and outside the office. I would not typecast this book as a "business book" for corporate VPs and CXOs. Rather, the concepts in the stories speak to - and are accessible to - individuals from big wave surfers to engineers to educators. I recommend that you read the book, share it with colleagues or with young people that are entering this rapidly changing business environment, and consider how "The Power of Pull" is changing the world.

When I picked up my review copy of this book, it was with the eye of a cynic, but before I knew it, I was eagerly reading and reflecting, not in the least because "The Power of Pull" begins with a story of up-and-coming Maui surfers. In fact the book is full of engaging stories, many about individuals--both in and out of the business world--who have tapped into their own passions and the passions of the people around them (and even people they've never met) to improve their performance, to develop innovative solutions, to shape industries and even to change the world. One of the strengths of this book is the way it engages the individual and then makes a compelling case for why and how the individual can move the institution. Organizations are comprised of individuals, after all. Perhaps most relevant is the chapter that proposes techniques for managers to cultivate and harness the power and passions of their employees, for mutual benefit of individual and corporation. This is not a "how-to" book in the sense that it is not prescriptive and doesn't oversimplify by proposing three simple steps for corporate nirvana. That's part of what makes the authors' analysis so credible. "The Power of Pull" forces the reader to think, presenting seemingly simple concepts such as the value of networking and extending them past the individual level to the institution and beyond. Although this book makes a case for how digital and communication technologies have removed barriers and opened the door to new opportunities for conducting business, the book's message is fundamentally about building relationships, as individuals and as organizations, with or without technology. The Power of Pull ultimately reaffirms the power of the individual as the central force and rationale behind the work we do and offers an inspiring vision for moving beyond obsolete practices of command and control.