Summer Reading – The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion

I'll be taking a bit of vacation over the next two weeks, so I thought I would take the opportunity of highlighting a few books on my Summer reading list.

One of the good things about using a Kindle or Kindle on an iPad for reading is the ability to use highlights to create a running summary of a book's highlights. Even better is that these highlights are aggregated across ALL readers. So in effect, any book can have a built-in summary, generated by the wisdom of the crowds - pretty cool stuff.

So in my vacation posts, I'll highlight a few books I've enjoyed recently and some Kindle-generated excerpts to give you a snapshot of the contents.

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion

For people who read a lot of stuff about the semantic web and E20, this book will likely seem a bit too much of an overview. But probably worth reading just for the subtitle, which I like a lot -- How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. I particularly liked the authors' constructs relative to stocks vs. flows of information and the need to tap the edges of our organizations.

A few highlights, courtesy of the wisdom of the Kindle crowds...

"Pull is about expanding our awareness of what is possible and evolving new dispositions, mastering new practices, and taking new actions to realize those possibilities. It’s about figuring out how to be systematic in how we combine work and life to pursue our passions, how to find others who share our passion but bring different experiences and perspectives to challenging performance needs, and how to create conditions where we’re more likely to happen upon interesting people, resources, and opportunities—even as we contribute the same chances to others."

"Pull starts by exploring three increasingly powerful levels of pull—access, attract, and achieve."

"Several crucial “elements of the journey” must be systematically created and put into place: the right trajectory (the direction in which you’re headed); sufficient leverage (the ability to mobilize the passions and efforts of other people); and the best pace (the speed at which you progress) to make it all come together in a world that’s moving ever more quickly and unpredictably."

"Refreshing the stocks of what we know by participating in flows of new knowledge is fundamental to performance improvement, no matter the endeavor, both for individuals and, more broadly, for institutions."

"Edges are places that become fertile ground for innovation because they spawn significant new unmet needs and unexploited capabilities and attract people who are risk-takers. Edges, therefore, become significant drivers of knowledge creation and economic growth, challenging and ultimately transforming traditional arrangements and approaches."