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Books : General Management Issues

Bruce Donnelly   bruce@gdi-solutions.com    (Biography)

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ISBN 1-890586-11-0

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Marcel was the founder of Plant Location International in Brussels, and has assisted many leading corporations with their expansion plans around the world.

Whether one agrees with all his analysis and conclusions or not, it is an important contribution to the need for a more informed debate on not only the public policy and long-term social and economic impacts of outsourcing and globalization in general, but also the role of corporate leaders and their business and social responsibilities.

The basic premise is that outsourcing jobs to other countries will ultimately be harmful to American interests despite any short-term business cost savings.

See our detailed comments about this book

Whatever the show ratings were, this special feature resonated with many viewers as a very hot topic during the US election in particular.

This book also attracted many very thoughtful Amazon.com reviewer comments.

It's interesting that the ones which agreed with Dobbs' basic premise and analysis seemed to give more thoughtful reviews, while some of his critics just bashed his position or the book without much substance.  That is, frankly, consistent with what he already reported from viewer and business editor reactions to his programs.

Suggestions are welcome

0735515476

0471221449

0471418307
 

Original version from 1974 is fairly rare

0893470023

Copies were readily available through campus bookstores at the University of Illinois in the mid 1970's, both in Chicago and Urbana, but as a privately published book the distribution was very limited.

Curious?  Check out "The Curse of Xanadu" from Wired: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html or other sources about the Xanadu project.  It doesn't matter that it was "vaporware".  Other leaders took the basic vision of people like Ted and changed our world.

Think about what Autodesk did for design, engineering, and technical document or design specification sharing. Consider what Sun Microsystems is still ambitiously trying to do to develop a new way to network the world, or how Microsoft or Adobe continue to transform how we collaborate.  Apple developed around the same idea of making computers more accessible and very easy for ordinary people to use (and children and educators in particular), rather than just as a tool for professionals.  They may actually deliver viable, profitable software products, but that was never Nelson's forte.  It was all very inspired vaporware, changing views of what was possible, even if he could never figure out how to deliver his own specific ideas as real, viable products.  It was more of a vision for society than for specific products.

The fact that you can even find and read a 1995 story about Xanadu in a few seconds today is a tribute to his vision of a more "democratic" approach to information technology and knowledge sharing than the computer programmers and engineers who dominated the field back in 1974, or the IT consultants and specialists who still try to "manage" and share knowledge today for competitive advantage.  Ted foresaw the idea that value could be added through the exchange of information, even if his Xanadu franchise idea may not quite match the model of WiFi at Starbucks, or Internet cafes, or ports at trade shows to download exhibitor information into handheld personal organizers.  The pay by the byte model for content may seem absurd today, but who was even thinking about that sort of issue in 1974, or new business models such as those of Amazon.com?  We take for granted now what was unthinkable by most.

Think about it.  Why should exchanging knowledge worldwide be more complicated than driving a car, or flipping channels on a TV?  The challenge is to make the complexity of the enabling technology transparent to the end user, like plugging in a phone or an electronic product and using it without worrying about the complex telecoms infrastructure or energy utilities behind it.  Preschool children easily learn to use phones, TV remote controls, and electronic games.  Imagine if we could make a world of knowledge as easy to use as a GPS map.  The current Internet still just scratches the surface of the concept of rapid and easy access to knowledge by the end user seeking such knowledge, almost thirty years after this book was published.

How many self-published books which sold very few copies at the time have helped to radically transform our entire world?  Think about it for a minute.  You can follow links in this website to easily find relevant content all over the world, and then go on from there to pursue whatever further path your interests suggest.  That still isn't the ideal vision by any means, but it's still pretty amazing how much can be done to share knowledge.  The constraints have become less technical, and more political (willingness to share), economic (value derived by sharing), and competitive (value of not sharing).

Ted wasn't the only person with ideas such as these, but his almost evangelistic fervor for a different vision of the future benefits of open access to computer-based knowledge delivery helped to define a future which few people could imagine back then, when programmers still carried boxes of hollerith cards around and waited hours for IBM mainframes to process our batch Fortran, COBOL, or PL/1 jobs late into the night, assuming we got the JCL right.  Little wonder that the ACM ignored his presentation in 1965.  He wasn't a programmer.  He foresaw what people could do with computers, not all the complex technical details of how to actually do it.

Sadly, many of the hackers who disrupt our lives today through destructive behavior lack the vision of people like Ted Nelson about trying to create a better future out of the many possible scenarios for the use of computer technology, instead of just attacking what exists now to prove how clever they are for their "15 minutes of fame".

There is a difference between showing the limitations of our current technology and promoting a positive vision of the future of technology, and how to get there, even if we can't implement all those clever new ideas yet.

Ted didn't attack what existed, other than verbally, and that reflected his impatience to get to a better future, which could be envisioned but not easily achieved with the limited technology available in the 1960's and 70's.

No, my original copy from 1974 is not for sale at any price.  It is from my brief 1973-74 period studying computer engineering at the University of Illinois.

Ted was at the U of I Chicago campus at the time, and also well aware of PLATO as an example of how even very young children could dominate very complex technology to find what they want, just as kids often learn to use the Internet more easily than their parents today.

Indeed, recent research in slums in India have shown that even illiterate children with no prior computer exposure can quickly learn how to find what they are seeking, even without English, using only basic browser technology and their usual interaction with other children to share what they have discovered.

In 1975, one of the PLATO system programmers who did very clever, advanced work was only 13 or 14 years old, as I recall.  He wasn't a genius.  He had the opportunity to learn far beyond what many others thought was achievable by following his own interests.

I enjoyed author use of the PLATO Computer Aided Instruction project at their CDC supercomputer network center, for which I also thank the brilliant developers behind PLATO. Their digital, graphical plasma panel interface for early multimedia use also changed the vision of what was possible, particularly for sharing knowledge very rapidly across a large, wide area network built on ordinary phone lines.

I dedicate this website to the vision Ted inspired  of how a single person could transform our world through the rapid, open exchange of knowledge beyond traditional data categories, hierarchical data structures, or private networks which may still try to "manage" knowledge in very restrictive ways.

He might not like what I have created here, which is limited by what I can achieve alone today with my available resources and technology, but like Computer Lib, Dream Machines, this isn't just about what I can already implement alone today.  By the nature of things, this venture will always face unforeseen scenarios and attract skeptics at first, but it can still make a difference not because of what I can do, but because of what I hope to inspire and enable through others.

What really matters is the cumulative impact of the ability of each person to improve the world in their own area of knowledge and skills, starting with what we can achieve today. 

I hope this website will contribute to that cause.  My only regret is that it took 30 years to get here, and may still take a bit longer to transform this important global market.

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