Over on Big Think, which now sucks up almost all my blogging time, I’ve posted Do Markets Have Morals? on a note that the Templeton Foundation sent out on some recent books it helped fund research for, all of which seem to argue that there are elements of morality in markets.
Over on BNet’s Big Think, I posted my review of “Billions of Entrepreneurs,” Tarun Khanna’s informative look at the rise of China and India. I called it China and India Don’t Need Us.
Over on Big Think I’ve reviewed Silicon Dragon, a book about China’s wave of high-tech entrepreneurs (see Mitt Romney’s Afraid of China. Should You Be?). It’s written by my old colleague Rebecca Fannin, who has spent much of the last decade looking at private equity in the Far East.
There is a “Huns are coming” school of thought about China and India and Asia’s other fast-emerging economies. Reading about China in particular makes one think that the hordes are once again sweeping across the plains and soon will sack our economy (Clyde Prestowitz’s Three Billion Capitalists is a recent example). We seem faced with an amorphous seething mass of ‘them.’
Rebecca’s book Silicon Dragon: How China Is Winning the Tech Race, shows us who ‘them’ are. She takes us inside 11 different Chinese high-tech firms and introduces us to the entrepreneurs in all their brilliance – and bumbling. There’s at least as much bumbling as brilliance amongst the entrepreneurs we meet.
For more on her book and for some links to other views of it, see my review on Big Think.
On Big Think I’ve been reviewing “Creating A World Without Poverty,” Muhammad Yunus’ visionary book about a new kind of capitalism.
I reviewed it in three parts, as follows:
Muhammad Yunus: Capitalism Is Half-Baked
How Muhammad Yunus Created an Impossible Business
Muhammad Yunus On How to End Poverty
Businesspeople of all persuasions should read this book, or at the least the first two chapters. Interest in social business has grown dramatically, and companies like Google are garnering huge amounts of attention for their efforts to establish operations that aren’t just focused on profits. Yunus is an economist and a CEO, and his vision comes out of his practical experience.
Bernd H. Schmitt’s book Big Think Strategy claims to have a systematic way for companies to come up with big ideas. In effect, he says he has at least a partial answer to Clay Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma.
I examined his system for producing big ideas in two posts on the Big Think:
Over on Big Think, I posted on two seemingly different perspective on U.S. power in Asia. In fact, the pieces, from Foreign Affairs, agree on strategy, policy and the rapidly changing picture in South Korea, Japan and China.
For more, see my post China Rising — But Is the U.S. Falling?
Over on Big Think, I’ve finished my look at Gary Hamel’s “Future of Management.”
I broke it into four parts. The book evokes The Purpose-Driven Life for businesses, in part because you’ll have to believe him that the model for business management is as outdated as the early 20th century industries it was created to run.
Seeing Into Gary Hamel’s Future
I went to see Palm and Treo creator Jeff Hawkins speak today at RPI. Hawkins is both smart and humble and would be worth listening to just to hear him talk about starting a company. (In fact, check out this terrific 2002 entrepreneurship lecture he gave at Stanford).
Today, he talked about his idea of Hierarchical Temporal Memory, which he spelled out in the 2004 book On Intelligence. A thumbnail description of HTM is that human intelligence is built around the neocortex’s ability to recognize patterns and make predictions about them, which he argues is an algorithm that can be used to create intelligent machines. For more on what smarter machines — or computers — would mean in business, see my Big Think post Making Computers Smarter
.
I condensed a series of thoughtful articles on competition in American life from the Wilson Quarterly in my latest Big Think post, looking in particular at what kind of hires companies should seek (anxiety-prone chokers like me, for one).
Here’s the full post of A New View on Competition.
I posted recently on a series of excellent profiles on young innovators, published in Smithsonian magazine. In particular I cited its brilliant brief profile of managing Ramon Gonzalez, who four years ago started the Laboratory School of Finance and Technology, a public middle school in New York’s South Bronx neighborhood. I also cited several of the unusual lessons one could learn from these innovators. See A Little Innovation Inspiration.