Both authors have magnificent titles: Eric Schmidt as executive chairman of Google and Jared Cohen as director of Google Ideas, Google’s think tank dedicated to understanding global challenges and applying technological solutions.

Although it’s usually said that never judge a book by its cover, you can’t overlook all the big names who’ve endorsed the book: Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk and Madeleine Albright.

Before digging deeper, let’s have a short look at the chapter titles. The book is arranged in seven chapters each one talking about future of something:

So at first glance, it seems that we are facing with facts from future!  Although the drawbacks of technology in different areas are not forgotten, the overall view of the book is overoptimistic about future of the technology and you can classify it as utopianistic as it is expected from directors of one of the technology giants.

In the rest of this post, I have quoted a few excerpts from every chapter. But before looking at every single chapter, here you can find some central passages of the book:

Blended facts and the missing chapter

There are many other interesting and important points discussed in the book. However, to be honest, it’s much easier to read a review than reading the book itself.

It’s full of facts and reports from many different political stories around the world. You will face with a mosaic of useless news and stories glued together with some insightful and thought-provoking passages like the ones I quoted above.

Anyone with experience of writing an elaborate report can guess that the book is written by a large group of Googlers gathering information and evidence from every source (sure google search is one of them) as the text has not the expected continuity. I’d prefer to call the book as a collected report endorsed by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Although it’s still a valuable source to know the mindset of the google and other similar technical giants.

Sure there’s a chapter missing in the book: The role of global corporations like Google in the future world. Which is not logical to suppose that it’s forgotten or discarded because of the book volume.

The Verge has published a review of the book with the following subheading:

In ‘The New Digital Age’ we learn what happens when Google stops being polite and starts getting real.

I should confess that from my point of view, it’s not far from reality. Not because of all the wills which could be substituted by woulds and coulds. But because of the clear message of the book which could be read between all the lines: The technology looks for a larger pie from the cake of power and politics.

[ Related article – Tribes: after effects of the technology and rise of the micro-media  ]

Our future selves

Reading the chapter title, you might expect a philosophical analysis of the human identity (or self-perception) affected by technology. However, the first chapter is nothing more than an appetizer.

What Schmidt and Cohen call “our future selves” is nothing more than a summary of recent technological achievements and, an optimistic account of the technology landscape in the next few decades.

Although it has some valuable clues inside, still it was more satisfying if the chapter had a more humble title (e.g., technology and our everyday life).

The Future of Revolutions

The fourth chapter of the book is divided into two distinct sections. The first part, about one-third of the content is talking about the future of revolutions in an optimistic sense.

You may even fill that the authors are supporting every single act of rebellion against the established structures. However, rest of the chapter emphasizes a very important point.

Technologies are facilitators of change, but the change is ultimately a human thing. Therefore, as authors conclude in this chapter, future revolutions are easier to start but harder to finish. Or to rephrase it in other form, revolutions are easier to happen, but the revolutionary outcomes will be harder to achieve.

Kissinger and politics of the Facebook era

As I have mentioned above, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have dedicated the fourth chapter of their book ‘The new digital age‘ to the future of revolution.

In the middle of the chapter, authors state their opinion about leading future revolutions considering the unprecedented connectivity tools provided for the rebels and opposition.

Authors believe that the technology can be a lubricating tool for starting revolutions. However, the leadership role is fundamentally different from digital herding facilitated by social networks and other new media.

Here is a passage of the book, quoting Henry Kissinger, about future of leadership in the Facebook era:

The future of states

The future of identity, citizenship, and reporting

The story of the Stuxnet (as Eric Schmidt explains)

Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have dedicated the third chapter of their book, The New Digital Age, to the future of states.

One of the sections of the third chapter talks about digital provocation and cyber war.

Schmidt uses a cyber war definition offered by Richard Clarke:

Actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation’s computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage or disruption.

To illustrate the possibilities and the potential extents of the cyber wars, he refers to Stuxnet virus as one of the most harmful cyber warfare’s ever developed.

Here I have summarized the Schmidt’s account of the story.

The Story of Stuxnet (pp.105 – 107, 2013’s edition)

Stuxnet was discovered in 2010 and was considered the most sophisticated piece of malware ever revealed, until a virus known as Flame, discovered in 2012, claimed that title.

Designed to affect a particular type of industrial control system that ran on the Windows operating system, Stuxnet was discovered to have infiltrated the monitoring systems of Iran’s Natanz nuclear-enrichment facility, causing the centrifuges to abruptly speed up or slow down to the point of self-destruction while simultaneously disabling the alarm systems.

Because the Iranian systems were not linked to the Internet, the worm must have been uploaded directly, perhaps unwittingly introduced by a Natanz employee on a USB flash drive

… Initial efforts to locate the creators of the worm were inconclusive, though most believed that its target and level of sophistication pointed to a state-backed effort.

The resources involved also suggested government production: Experts thought the worm was written by as many as thirty people over several months.

Sure enough, it was revealed in June 2012 that not one but two governments were behind the deployment of the Stuxnet worm.

Unnamed Obama administration officials confirmed to the New York Times journalist David E. Sanger that Stuxnet was a joint U.S. and Israeli project… Initially green-lit under President George W. Bush, the initiative, code-named Olympic Games, was carried into the next administration and in fact accelerated by President Obama, who personally authorized successive deployments of this cyber weapon.

After building the malware and testing it on functioning replicas of the Natanz plant built in the United States – and discovering that it could, in fact, cause the centrifuges to break apart, the U.S. government approved the worm for deployment.

… Less than a month after the public revelation about these cyber weapons, security experts at Kaspersky Lab, a large Russian computer security company with international credibility, concluded that the two teams that developed Flame and Stuxnet did, at an early stage collaborate.

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He starts his argument with describing the context of the curation. The long boom, as he calls it, has brought with itself an inevitable

Michael Bhaskar dedicates the fifth chapter of his book to the principles of the curation. However, you will get disappointed if you’re expecting some clear and straight curation rules.

In fact, for the most part of the chapter, he re-emphasizes (or re-phrases) what he has stated before. The waves of abundance which the new technology has brought with itself and the problem of choosing which gets more complicated every day.

The age of retailers

At the dawn of the industrial era, despite the productivity growth, still, the market was not saturated. So distribution was yet the critical ring if the chain. Retailers popped up everywhere to fill the gap between consumers and the mass producers.

The efficiency and convenience were the most valuable benefits provided by retailers.

The age of curators

The exponential growth of productivity while demand was not increasing fast enough lead to the problem of overchoice, as it is called by the futurist Alvin Toffler.

Here’s where the consumers felt the need for curators to offer them a more restricted choice. The consumers were even ready to pay for their efforts.

Most of the chapter content here is cited from the research of Sheena Iyengar and Barry Schwartz as it’s mentioned in the paradox of choice.

Platforms as curators

Bhaskar notices a third wave in the abundance era: prosumers.

With the rise of social media and digital platforms, it got easier for the consumers to become a producer at the same time. Now with a large number of producers dealing with a large number of consumers in the market, the curation industry has to upgrade itself to the next level: the curation algorithms.

Bhaskar here notes that, although algorithms have reached greats success, still the pure machine curations have not been as successful as expected and it’s better to combine them with human operators to get the best results. At least until they get much better than today.

Related articles:

• Curation: the power of selection in a world of excess
• The context of curation: computation as a GPT
• Curation and the overload problem

The post The principles of curation appeared first on webmindset.

To prove his claim, he has collected a wide variety of data and statistics, some amazing and the others irrelevant, just to take you to the border of impatience when you reach his claim.

Anyway, besides all excessive data provided in the second chapter, the main idea is really important to note: we’re facing a world with so many excessive materials.

Citing James Wallman’s book, ‘Suffocation’,  Bhaskar argues that more than any era in human history, we are eager for getting more without being concerned about having more.

Overload as a good problem

Bhaskar refers to overload as a good problem. By ‘good’ he means that this problem is not a genuine problem, but a problem arisen from our solutions to the scarcity as a more fundamental problem.

However, he emphasizes that having a good problem doesn’t mean that we haven’t any problem. Even good problems can become more fundamental if we leave them unattended:

The acceleration of flows – flows of capital, ideas, data, products, people and media, takes its toll on us as human beings.

The new locus of value

The entire chapter revolves around the new locus of value.

Since the industrial revolution, the largest portion of financial value was generated through increasing the production capacity. But as we have oversupply in many areas now, the locus of value is shifting to curation.

People, companies, and products that help people to filter the world around and pick a few useful items will be the winners of the new era.

Information overload, in Bhaskar’s view, is one of the leading fields with the overload problem. However, the problem is emerged on a global scale and beyond a specific sector.

Related article: The context of the curation

Related article: Curation as the power of selection in a world of excess

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Bhaskar dedicates the second chapter to the context of the curation. He tries to depict the last centuries as a continuous trend of productivity growth in every aspect of the global economy.

He cites various numbers and statistics from the early days of industrial revolution to the present to show the scarcity giving its way to the abundance.

Computation and connectivity as general purpose technologies (GPTs)

The concept of General Purpose Technologies (GPTs) was introduced by Bresnahan and Trajtenberg in 1995-6. They argue that a GPT should have the following characteristics:

• Being pervasive in various sectors
• Being able to improve over time
• Help to foster innovation and making new products and services

Bhaskar believes that technology and connectivity can be considered as a GPT:

Productivity growth has always relied on general purpose technologies like steam and electricity to unlock new waves. There is a good argument that computation and connectivity are  just such a GPT and that we are currently living through its consequences.

Based on the statistics and assumptions he provides, Bhaskar argues that we are not reached to the secular stagnation that was predicted to happen soon.

Data creation and data storage are not the only territories affected by the digital technology

This is on the primary ideas presented in the first chapter of Bhaskar’s book.

Here’s how he emphasizes on this point:

We think of digital technology, among other things, as leading to a huge boost in data storage and data creation.

This is true, but it is far from the only way digital technology has transformed conditions of scarcity into conditions of abundance.

Digital tech has led to vast supply increases and price falls in communications, access to markets, inventory space, content creation and publishing, software, consumer choice, services, and processing power.

In each of these areas the past twenty years have seen the dominant trend switch from scarcity to excess.

This abundance has led to rise of the curation as a field of expertise. And this is the way Bhaskar convinces his readers to follow him thorough his book.

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At first glance, the book may seem rather boring. Michael Bhaskar’s book, ‘Curation’,  starts with reciting trivial facts and statistics on content abundance. He refers to the vast amount of generated data, the number of daily Facebook posts, increased computational capacity, and many other similar well-known points.

But as you go further into the book, it’s a pleasant read.

To be honest, I didn’t experience any wow moment while reading this book. However,  If you are concerned with information abundance and want to think about this topic, your most creative and inspiring times will happen while you are busy reading curation.

I will dedicate a few posts to quoting author’s ideas that are worth mentioning and re-emphasizing.

The Tsunami of data

The tsunami of data is the term Bhaskar uses to describe the current state of the data economy.

In the introduction of his book, he calls the current time as the post-digital era with the following characteristics:

• Information abundance
• Pervasive connectivity
• The blurring of offline and online environments

We are conditioned for creation and growth

This is the second post he emphasizes in the introduction of the book. And the point he refers to many times in his discussions and arguments.

Bhaskar believes that we are evolved and conditioned to create more and more. The age of scarcity and hunger have conditioned us to secure tomorrow by creating more today.

But now, abundance is not a goal anymore. It has become the new challenge. The case is similar to hunger which is now substituted by obesity (at least in many parts of the world).

Here is how he defines curation:

Related articles:

• Curation and its context (the key points of the first chapter of the book)
• Curation and the overload problem
• The principles of curation

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Title: The Lean Startup

Explanatory Title: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

Publisher: Currency (Crown Publishing Group)

First Publication: 2011

ISBN / Pages: 978-0307887894 / 336 pages

Category: Entrepreneurship / Starting a new business / Startups

About the Lean Startup author | Eric Ries

Eric Ries, born in 1978, is a Yale graduate mostly known because of his now classic book “The Lean Startup.” The content of this book is mainly based on online posts he published earlier on his blog, Startup Lessons Learned.

Ries started his career journey as a programmer. After a few failures in various startups, IMVU was the first business that got real traction and received investment. Co-founded in 2004, IMVU remained in the market even till now. However, Ries stepped down from operational positions in 2008 and remained a board member. Most of what Ries has written in his books and preaches today as the lean method has roots in these successes and failures.

Over a decade, with the help of other friends, authors, and like-minded people, he has fine-tuned and furthered his Lean Philosophy or Lean Methodology model. Nowadays, many people worldwide believe that lean thinking, as a flexible and agile process, is a reliable model for leading startups through the path of success and growth.

Ries says that he has decided to devote himself full-time to the Lean Startup movement, the term he frequently uses to show his ideas’ vast, significant, and sustained effect.

The lean mindset

As Ries mentions several times in his book, the idea of The Lean Startup is inspired by lean thinking in Japan’s automotive industry, especially Toyota Manufacturing System. Lean thinking, in his words, means looking for value-creating processes and trying to eliminate waste.

But thinking lean in the startup world is much more complicated than in the automotive and other physical industries. It’s easier to find waste in a factory or most traditional businesses. But when you run a startup, you explore the uncharted waters of uncertainty.

This is the reason that he tries to integrate scientific thinking under the label of validated learning into his lean startup model. It should be noted that scientific thinking is much broader than what he refers to. And what he describes as scientific thinking is just an essential subset of the scientific paradigm: insisting on the importance of experiments.

Lean Startup meaning

Considering the above description, the Lean Startup is a method for developing a business or product using experimentation and iteration (Or, as Eric Ries calls it: The Build-measure-learn feedback loop). It’s based on learning and feedback instead of pre-planning, correction instead of perfection, and data instead of prediction.

Validated learning

In traditional businesses, with a known and stable environment, it’s easy to set a vision and define some milestones on the way. But startups are supposed to be operated in uncertainty. Otherwise, they won’t be called startupDefininging time-based milestones and allocating phase-based budgets are not meaningful and effective in such a situation.

Here’s one of the lean startup principles: Each case of validated learning should be considered as an achieved milestone on the way forward. Validated learning is so essential in the lean mindset that Ries literally equates it to the startup’s raison d’etre:

How the Lean Startup methodology differs from the traditional approach

The traditional approach to founding and developing a startup was akin to the classic entrepreneurship roadmap:

• Writing a detailed business plan (even if you are sure that you can’t stick to it)
• Making financial projections (even if you know that everything is uncertain)
• Designing and creating the perfect product in secret before making a full-force launch

In the traditional approach, in the early stages, the entrepreneur and business know everything about the product, and the market knows nothing about it. But in the so-called lean startup methodology, the business and the market are discovering (or somehow co-creating) the perfect product together in a never-ending path of experimentation and learning.

Selected sentences from the book

This book may not be suitable for you if…

Although Eric Ries believes that the application of lean startup ideas is not limited to startups, his book is heavily oriented towards online and digital businesses or at least businesses with a serious software core.

Therefore, if you are not running such a business, you can find similar or more valuable ideas in the books classified under the design thinking category. Or in other words, if you are already familiar with design thinking principles, The Lean Startup will not have too much to teach you.

The Lean Startup Summary

There are many different summarized versions of The Lean Startup on the web. Kim Hartman’s summary is one the most accurate and useful summaries accessible for free. As this file is about 30 pages long, it’s more than a summary, and it could be called a synopsis of the lean startup.

You can download a PDF version of the summary either from his website or the link below (also available in ePub format):

The Lean Startup Summary (PDF)

The Lean Startup Summary (ePub)

Selected book reviews

10 Years Since ‘The Lean Startup’ (Forbes | Ryan Gray)

Book Review: The Lean Startup (Financial Times | Philip Delves Broughton)

Links for buying the book

The Lean Startup (Paperback) – Amazon

The Lean Startup (Audiobook) – Audible

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Many scientists or university faculties have said many biased or irrelevant opinions about many things they don’t know about and may Noam Chomsky represent this group very well.

However, the case for James Watson is a bit more complicated as he states opinions which are considered as biased, sexist, and racist, and at the same time, all of his statements are directly related to his particular field of study.

The most popular quote from him that put his last years of living in the dark was about the intelligence difference between black people and the other races.

A similar statement about inherent gender differences made him more hated and left him in a situation that he mentions as “an unperson.”

These are not the only controversial ideas stated by James Watson. His statements about women’s choice on gay abortion stirred so many controversies, and even Richard Dawkins was pushed to write a letter to independent defending Wason and telling that Watson’s ideas are misrepresented by the Sunday Telegraph.

Although Dawkins put his name and fame in defending Watson, you feel that he is angry from Watson deep inside (Source):

I also remember being a little taken aback by some of the politically incorrect statements he was making. (I don’t remember specifics.) It wasn’t so bad that I felt compelled to walk out of there; I was just surprised that someone so intelligent would just say whatever came to mind with no filter whatsoever.

Despite all the above facts and controversies, still, his autobiography is one the most inspiring autobiographies you could find in the market.

Avoid boring people, is a collection of really insightful lessons from a life in science, as it is subtitled on the cover.

The name of the book is inspired by the following passage:

Never make dull speeches that easily could be delivered by someone else. Predictable words naturally compel audiences to tune out and lock their pocketbooks. Just as tedious is bringing small groups of busy people together for committee meetings with no opportunity for them to offer real input… Reading the same papers and magazines as everyone else around you is not likely to make you an interesting dinner guest, let alone alter your consciousness.

The most interesting point about the book is its unique structure.

Every single chapter is followed by a list of “remembered lessons” that an impatient reader could enjoy reading them even without the reading the whole biography.

Although the book can be an excellent source of extracting insightful quotations, I do recommend you to read it word by word and sip by sip to enjoy this unusual biography.

There are just a few sentences that I want to quote here. They caught my attention, as I believe they are describing the motivation behind his many controversial statements:

ught my attention, as I believe they are describing the motivation behind his many controversial statements:

Scientists will necessarily exaggerate but are ethically obliged to society to exaggerate responsibly. In writing my textbooks I realized that emphasizing exceptions to simple truths was counterproductive and that use of qualifying terms such as probably or possibly was not the way to get ideas across initially.

Whether you like him or hate him, he is not boring at all, and I’m sure that this makes his life satisfactory from his point of view.

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Most of us now spend a majority of our waking hours watching screens: Mobile screens, Laptop screens or TV screens.

So it’s interesting and critical to study the ways in which people think differently on the screens.

Such studies can help online marketers to influence online behavior while developing a rich body of knowledge on designing more effective choice architectures.

Shlomo Benartzi has done an excellent job in using insights from behavioral economics to explain how people respond to digital information on a screen.

He goes far beyond the shallow popular criticisms of the new technologies and tries to analyze the ways by which these technologies affect our behavior and our economies.

Attention scarcity is the first result of the new digital gadgets. An important concern that Benartzi expresses using a famous quote from Noble-prize winner Herbert Simon:

In the world of screens, the first impression is one of the most powerful shaping forces in managing attention flow, a critical point that should be seriously considered by digital designers as well as authors.

The book is rich in collecting and reporting fascinating research showing how our mind processes information in the new digital world. A world that is full of digital screens and people who are craving for the fastest and easiest way to receive and digest information.

The smarter screen somehow reminds me the theme of Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. The irrational humans of the physical world have found a new place to live and evolve their long-lived irrationality.

The irrational humans of the physical world have found a new place to live and evolve their long-lived irrationality.

As a reader who is interested in content strategy, the core message of the book can be stated as follows:

In the world of endless possibilities for finding the desired content, better curators would have a greater chance of success. In other words:

While the last decade was belonging to search engine specialists, the content curators would reign the next decade.

About the authors

Schlomo Benartzi is a leading behavioral economist and faculty member of UCLA Anderson School of Management.

He serves as Chief Scientist for the California Digital Nudge Initiative and has also worked for many financial institutions.

Although Shlomo Benartzi has addressed Jonah Lehrer as his collaborator, as publisher mentioned the name of Jonah Lehrer with a far smaller type size on the cover, it may look safe to consider Shlomo Benartzi as the main author of the book.

However, in my opinion, after it was revealed that he has fabricated some quotes in his bestselling book Imagine (2012), may publisher has decided to understate his contribution to protect the credibility of the book.

It’s worth mentioning that as a reader of Lehrer’s instructive and inspiring books, I believe that the publishing industry has gone too far in penalizing his misdeed.

Other details about this book

Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC

Publication Date: 06/10/2015

ISBN13: 9780349410395

Number of Pages: 256

Smarter Screen in Amazon

Smarter Screen in Barnes and Noble

P.S.: I have photographed the cover of my version of the book. However, there’s another cover designed for the book by S-T which I believe communicates the message of the book more clearly:

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Up to now, The Automatic Customer and Oversubscribed (written by Daniel Priestly) are the best books I’ve found in the market dedicated to subscription revenue model. However, there’s a significant difference in the approaches of these two books.

The automatic customer is a categorized case study collection showing you various successful businesses using subscription business model. But oversubscribed takes a strategic design approach. So instead of reviewing different success cases, the book emphasizes on the mindset, values and infrastructures that can help you in building and growing a successful subscription based business.

So instead of reviewing different success cases, the book emphasizes on the mindset, values and infrastructures that can help you in building and growing a successful subscription based business.

Here you can find the some of the insightful ideas of the oversubscribed book:

• To become oversubscribed, you have to separate yourself from the market.
• To separate yourself from the market, there are four choices available which are called four drivers of market imbalance by Daniel Priestly:
  • Being innovative
  • Building differentiating relationships
  • being the most convenient option
  • Using price as a differentiative factor
• Building campaigns and promoting your business is not an option. It’s a must.
• A campaign is not a collection of push messages promoting your products. It can be even a unique approach to the product delivery process.

For a person who works in the digital marketplace, most of the points mentioned in the book may seem clear and not-so-new.

However, besides a roadmap for novice marketers, it can be a considered as a comprehensive and practical checklist for professionals.

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Still there are many books and business scholars who consider the subscription as a revenue model and not a business model, although John Warrillow’s book is not one of them.

Considering subscription as a revenue model means you can design your core product and even most of the internal functions of your business without taking the effect of the subscription model to your core idea.

John Warrillow is one of the rare cases who considers the subscription as a core component of the identity of a business. He even coined his own term for the subscription-based business models: Businesses with Automatic Customers!

The first part of his book has an exciting title: Subscribers are better than customers.

The title has an implicit yet clear message: subscribers are not a type of customer; they are something different and even better.

Although most books consider the subscription business model as a pure and non-dividable business model, Warrillow divides the subscription business model into nine distinct categories:

• The Membership Website Model
• The All-You-Can-Eat Library Model
• The Private Club Model
• The Front-of-the-Line Model
• The Consumables Model
• The Surprise Box Model
• The Simplifier Model
• The Network Model
• The Peace-of-Mind Model

It’s not so easy to find any other text visualizing the structure of the subscription economy better than The Automatic Customer.

A highly recommended book for any startup and should be filed under No Excuse for anyone who is thinking about starting an online business.

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