Thoughts Pad

This book features some in depth study of real world industry changes, and how they happened, explained from a point of view that most of us have never thought before.

I found it very usefull in several subjects of study. Seemingly “Crossing the Chasm”, Geoffrey A. Moore, it’s first chapter explains some qualities of consumers, and how to feed them with what they need. Actually, it takes a different approach when compared to Crossing the Chasm, because it preaches that some business have their own niches of consumers, and that every nich has it’s own quality when it comes to a given product, while Geoffrey preaches how to scale through consumers to reach mainstream.
Nevertheless, if you want to understand more about your consumers, both books are a must read anyway and both concepts works together.
The most important thing about all this is that you not always need to overshot your customers. Some customers are just doing fine with what you provide currently, and maybe trying to overshot them with fancy additives can drop your profit range or even incentivate them to go for another undershot product that fits their needs. Basically, that’s the point of view from which most part of the cases studied in this book are seem, and I believe that should be the point of view from which you should analyse your business. Good reading, I recommend.

This book was in my wishlist for almost a year before I had the opportunity to acquire and read it. As I couldn’t find it here in Brazil I had to wait for an opportunity to acquire it abroad or buy it from a foreign website. I did the first, and bought this book while travelling to USA for the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2007. Unfortunately, even with the book in my hands, I wasn’t able to read it by that time and had to wait a little bit to delight myself reading it.

As a scientist, I’m a big fan and enthusiastic of breakhroughs, and the processes, environments and stimulus that leads to innovation and disruptive technologies. Today, it is very hard to imagine a world without cars, computers or telephones. Each one of these inventions are pretty young compared to the time we’ve being dwelling in this Earth since we’ve been created.

Also, it is not hard to conclude that in some years, we’re going to have more disruptive innovations that will make part of our lives, and that we neigther our ancestors have never thought about, and it will certainly be very hard to imagine a world without those innovations at that time in the future. We are doing the future now, and seeding the stimulus, environments and processes that are willing to trigger disruptive innovations that will certainly change our lives in such a way that we will not imagine ourselves in the future without them.

As the ones in charge of creating the steps to inspire future innovations, and provide our shoulders to stand other giants we have to share knowledge and experiences without the biased behaviors that we’re used to witness. The overall welfare is provided by the efforts of each human being towards the progress of humanity, “being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous and in doing good to all men”[0].

The book itself doesn’t preach any of those thoughts I have shared, but if you read it and read my thoughts you’re going to see how one complement the other. The book does tackle subjects like how breakthrough happen, how can we feed ourselfs with the right stimulus to increase the chances of having ground breaking ideas, how to see differently and keep innovating after the years. That mainly depends on process, environment and stimulus. Continually seeking for the behaviors cited[0], and not being biased, is the main step towards overall welfare and continuous improvement of human beings. That welfare and improvements, leads to better process, environments and stimulus. Then, here it comes the bits I found in Stefik’s book. After achieving that behavior, we are ready to start innovating.

The book is mainly based of interviews made with the brightests minds that are innovating today. All of that is about sharing knowledge, and not being biased. When you hide and protect the knowledge from being spread, you’re probably doing that with one thing in mind: creating a monopoly. That is a biased behavior, and that doesn’t lead to innovation, but to the stalling of it.

The book is a good reading, and shows us the backstages of disruptive breakthroughs and how to provide the meanings to better the processes, environments and increase stimulus in your place to have innovations likely to happen. Also, keep in mind that sharing knowledge is good and that the knowledge you share might come back to you improved. Good reading

[0] – SMITH, Joseph. The Articles of Faith. History of the Church, Vol. 4, pp. 535-541.

Although it might not look like a must read book in a social network focused world, it was an interesting read for because of it’s deep relation with my undergraduation monography and the effort I’ve put studying that matter.

Some may think that today, P2P is old fashioned while they relate the acronym with P2P networks of old days like Napster, Edonkey and Gnutella. Don’t feel like that. P2P is not a acronym for file sharing. P2P is a acronym for new ways of making networks, sharing spare resources and communicating.

Fortunatelly, this is not yet another book about Napster, Gnutella or any other file sharing P2P network that ever existed, but a book about P2P potentials and how to use it to archieve real world companies goals and needs.

I’ve been studying deeply the matter for about 2,5 years, and still found some useful information in this book. Though, I warn that it is not the kind of book that a technician is ansious to read, but the kind of book that a manager would like to read in order to figure ways of using P2P to improve it’s company business capabilities and enhance revenues.

It is a pretty straigh forward and quick reading book, and tells some interesting cases of business that used P2P and archieved good and bad results from it. Hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

A few weeks ago I have read the book “The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time” (Portuguese version) and later I decided to share my thoughts about that reading experience.

The first bit about this book is that it has an easy language, and thus the book fits non-high tech readers. The second bit is that although it is a more interesting book for those of us interested on Google and high tech, it might be a good reading for those interested on getting inspired.

In the first chapters you’ll find some details about Google’s founders and it’s very beginning as well as some detailed informations about that epoch that you’re not willing to find easily googling

As you keep reading, you’re driven to a tour explaining how Google works, and how they make decisions. Before reading this book, I have never realised how unique was the Google’s IPO and how they changed some paradigms at that time.

You’ll also find some cool details about 1st April, Google doodles, the no name restaurant and even find an easter egg in the middle of the book (a famous cook recipe).

Summarizing, this book is a nice reading for both tech and non-tech people interested on getting inspired by the Google’s history.