Macrowikinomics

Rebooting Business and the World

By: Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

Narrated by: Alan Sklar

Length: 20 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's Summary

In their 2007 best seller Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams taught the world how mass collaboration was changing the way businesses communicate, compete, and succeed in the new global marketplace. But much has changed in three years, and the principles of wikinomics are now more powerful than ever.

In this new age of networked intelligence, businesses and communities are bypassing crumbling institutions. We are altering the way our financial institutions and governments operate; how we educate our children; and how the health care, newspaper, and energy industries serve their customers.

In every corner of the globe, businesses, organizations, and individuals alike are using mass collaboration to revolutionize not only the way we work but how we live, learn, create, and care for each other. You'll meet such innovators as:

• An Iraq veteran whose start-up car company is "staffed" by over 45,000 competing designers and supplied by microfactories around the country
• A "micro-lending" community where 570,000 individuals help fund new ventures - from Azerbaijan to the Ukraine
• An online community for people with life-altering diseases that's also a large-scale research project

Once again backed by original research, In this new age of networked intelligence, businesses and communities are bypassing crumbling institutions. We are altering the way our financial institutions and governments operate; how we educate our children; and how the health care, newspaper, and energy industries serve their customers. Once again backed by original research, Tapscott and Williams provide vivid, new examples of organizations that are successfully embracing the principles of wikinomics.

©2010 Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (P)2010 Tantor

Critic Reviews

" MacroWikinomics connects the big picture of business, culture and society with what is really going on in the trenches of the new digital world. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams re-affirm their authority by offering facts in the style of demographers and by storytelling in the manner of acute social observers. Leaders of the future must take their lessons on co-creation and authenticity to heart." (Brian Fetherstonhaugh, Chairman and CEO, OgilvyOne)

MacroLeftyNomics

The book's authors have many interesting and valid insights into a changing business world. However, if you are not a fan of Al Gore and the Obama administration, it is a tough pill to swallow.

dynamic, indeed

I got Macrowikinomics to learn about recent trends in social development but I think I fell for the hype. I got a lot of business buzzphrases ("interactive web pages"? How many websites are not interactive?) and fluff around some interesting background information on organizations that I was already familiar with. A decent, but nearly-outdated and overly optimistic assesment of the networked age.

Wikinomics Follow-up

Similar to Wikinomics, this book offers the principles of networked intelligent media (collaboration, openness, sharing, integrity, and interdependence) and speculates about the impact of social networking. Tapscott and Williams apply their thinking to green energy, transportation, education, health care, media and government. They accomplish this through anecdotes and illustrations of how that media is being used in the changng economy. I enjoyed this book, but it isn't a great leap beyond the initial Wikinomics. They also devote a lot of space in chapters on green energy and transportation telling the reader how dire the climate situation has become. I have no real problem with that, but I was hoping for more insight into macrowikinomics, per se. Positively, if you have not read the prior book, this book does provide welcome and helpful illustrations of how social media is dramatically changing our economy and lives. The book is well written, very well read by Alan Sklar, and worth the time for those who are interested.

Should narrators adopt accents?

How did the narrator detract from the book?

He would adopt an accent when reading a quotation. Very distracting because it was poorly done. He is no M.Streep!
Also, very noticeable breathing - sucking in of air before speaking.
As a result, I couldn't finish the book.

Any additional comments?

I would like to hear an executive summary with an accompanying PowerPoint. I have been to presentations by Don Tapscott. He is very interesting as a presenter.
The ideas can be conveyed with fewer words - in part by taking out the anecdotes and story telling.

Well-meaning, but dull.

Having heard a number of eye-opening interviews with Don Tapscott, I was utterly disappointed by this book. The subject matter is interesting and ultimately highly important, but struggles to shine beneath the stodgy language and over-explanations of the book's prose.

Clearly, the audience of this book is the layman, who has been living in the 1950s since, well, the 1950s. For a tech-savvy, future-focused reader like myself, there was hardly anything I hadn't heard before.

Strangely, while the book highlights a number of anecdotes and case studies of companies and individuals who are pushing the accepted norms, I don't feel enough suggestions and action steps were presented. I could do without the broad predictions using phrases like "governments will" and "corporations must". Only in the conclusion are we shown an honest laundry list of how we can (and should change).

I still have faith in this movement, and in the top-line notions discussed in the book. But I can't endorse this sterile, boring, tome. In the realm of pop economics and industry-based non-fiction, I'd suggest Chris Anderson, Alain de Botton, or Malcolm Gladwell.