Is it any wonder, some people ask, that Sweden's productivity stats are so poor given that the entire country shuts down for over a month every summer? Well, I'll reply, given that there's nothing to do but work from October to April (when Californians will still take early afternoons off at the beach), we're worth it. Here's what I spent my off-time reading and what I thought of the works.
Chris Anderson's Free (subtitle: The Future of a Radical Prize) has gotten a lot of hype in the past year mainly because his last book, 2006's The Long Tail, managed to pinpoint a quirky phenomenon of online consumption and became an oft-used phrase for wannabe-internet guru's (yes, guilty as charged). His new book - should you have missed the hype or failed to grasp the straight-forward title - deals with the fact that more and more things online, and sometimes offline, are given away for free. And...that's really all there is to it. Where The Long Tail made quite an effort to analyze online purchasing and consumption dynamics, Free seems like an idea in search of content. Sure, there are some great chapters (the one dealing with abundance comes to mind) but the overall impression becomes scattered - like a series of blog posts or magazine articles under a common headline (Anderson is, after all, a magazine editor). The Long Tail wasn't riveting but managed to stay interesting and enjoyable for all its 200+ pages. This one will test your patience after half of that.
A lot more enjoyable was (Economist US correspondent) Adrian Wooldridge and (Economist editor) John Micklethwait's God is Back. Having previously scrutinized the management industry (The Witch Doctors), globalization (A Future Perfect), the limited-liability company (The Company) and US conservatism (The Right Nation), they now turn their sharp analytical lens to that great big elephant in the room, the "return" of religion in society. True it never really went away but where most European thinkers (Swedish in particular) used to think that the world is on a one-way track to secularism as nations became more affluent, reality has proved them wrong. Religion is on the rise. From Pentecostals in Korea to Christians in China to Muslims around Europe, God - in many different shapes and forms - is back. The book deals with the Americanified version of religion and its success as an export to many emerging countries around the world. Its main competitor, and the book's other focal point, is Islam and there are some really excellent chapters on the challenges of having Islam co-exist peacefully with other religions (apostasy is punishable by death in, for example, Saudi Arabia). The style is energetic with a dry, analytical wit and not a trace of the sarcastic ramblings of the many atheist manifestos that have been published recently.
Finally, the best of the crop, is Joshua Cooper Ramo's The Age of the Unthinkable. Any title beginning with "The Age of..." is bound to elicit a few sighs of frustration and the opening chapters of the book are indeed as cliché-laden as you would come to expect ("We live in a unique era....", blah, blah, blah). But then something happen. Ramo used to be a senior editor of TIME Magazine and it's when he starts using his skills as a journalist that the book really gets going. It can best be described as a roller-coaster ride through the early years of the 21st century with some lessonspicked up along the way. The inventor of Nintendo Wii shares the stage with Hizbollah. Israeli intelligence agents are juxtaposed with Silicon Valley's finest venture capitalist. And so on. Ramo is on a quest to understand the new drivers of the world we live in - whether it's in foreign policy or business strategy - and the reader has come along for the ride. And what a thoroughly enjoyable ride it is. Ramo's prose is straightforward - as you'd expect from a TIME writer - and inquisitive. The pages burn with curiosity and Ramo never succumbs to a know-it-all, something he could easily have done being "youngest Managing Director in the history of Kissinger Associates". If you want to understand a little bit of the complex, unpredictable world we currently live in, read this book!
And don't forget to book your copy of my forthcoming Everything We Know Is Wrong - The Trendspotter's Handbook
