Saturday, January 20, 2007

Get back in the box


I've been reading a really great book called 'Get Back In The Box' by Douglas Rushkoff.

Not finished yet, but the book looks like a post-it note porcupine. Every chapter so far has multiple paper tags with exclaimation points penciled in.

One blurb on the jacket from the President of The Aspen Institute and former CEO of CNN summarizes the book this way, "Most business books try to scare you into adopting lessons from other companies. His book teaches you how to improve your core business from the inside."

Another from Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs, "Rushkoff asks the questions consultants and their clients never dare to ask - and provides hundreds of real-world examples of how people and businesses have answered them creatively, collaboratively, playfully, and successfully."

I thank Mr. Rushkoff for his great ideas and terrific writing.

Here's just one quote to wet your appetite:

"We've been on a pretty straight course toward a mechanized, completely predictable, and repeatable set of business practices since the Industrial Revolution, and maybe even a few centuries before. And though these practices have been responsible for a hell of a lot of progress until now, they appear to have maxed out. We must finally apply our inventiveness not to tinkering with these practices from the outside in, but to reconnecting with what it is we were hoping to accomplish in the first place, and then reinventing them from the inside out."

"To do so we'll have to rediscover what inspires us about our chosen fields, and what makes them applicable to the world around us. That's why this is all actually such good news for those of us left with even an iota of creative capacity and interest in other people."


Now that's a sustainable direction, my friends.


Douglas Rushkoff's web site

Douglas Rushkoff's information on Wikipedia. I had not read anything from Mr. Rushkoff prior. This wiki info makes for a pretty interesting CV.

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