Yea, yea. I know.
As people who have been following my blog probably knows, I’ve been trying to finish Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams since the last summer in the Southern Hemisphere and I’ve yet to even complete half of it. Right now I’m page 151 of 313 – close to half way that is. Usually a boring book will take a me a long time to hit halfway and then I’ll speed through the rest of it, knowing roughly what the author as to say and at the end I’ll say something good about it. But this Wikinomics simply looked too promising for me to be warned.
As the Wikipedia entry for the book quoted from Harvard Business Review, “like its title, the book’s prose can fall into breathless hype.” Indeed, the hype over mass collaboration seems a little overwhelming and when one is more of the skeptic the book becomes quite a disaster, especially when the book was first published in 2006 and 3 years on, you don’t quite see how the subtitle ‘How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything’ manifest itself in the real world at all. Yes I know mass collaboration did help people and changed things but then it wasn’t that breathtaking and mostly, life just went on as usual. Perhaps more important was the fact that this Subprime Financial Crisis seemed to be the working of a ‘mass collaboration’ of stupid people. In other words, Tapscott and Williams thought nothing of the risk of Groupthink in mass collaboration.
The prose is rather academic, starting with their ‘hypothesis’, which is the subtitle of the book somewhat and then the authors goes on to show how mass collaboration is being played out in different sectors, industries, different markets and such. To be fair, Wikinomics is a business sort of book, it focuses on the methods to harness the benefits of mass collaboration, possibly the mechanics of motivation that drives this phenomenon and discuss the success of these various means. The problem is that Wikinomics does this over and over again on different case studies as if they’re saying something new each time. It’s the business sort of academic compared to what I generally prefer, the intellectual sort of academic. I believe students of A Levels would be way more intrigued by Wisdom of the Crowds by James Surowiecki, which I gladly finished almost a year ago.
I rarely write bad reviews of books but when you spent $27.85 on a book that is hardly intellectually stimulating; rambling on about the same product like an advertisement; and better off in the bookshelf of traditional business schools rather than bookstores around the world, you can’t help but warn people even if it’s a little too late. Unless of course, you’re interested in extracting their case studies for your use in business studies; but even then, don’t spend money on it.
