Review: Gloor & Cooper's Collhunting

Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing
by Peter Gloor & Scott Cooper

The book is about spotting trends, examples of how some trends were spotted, how to apply techniques for better trend spotting, and how to exploit trends. The authors use a wide variety of case studies, and a broad survey of literature throughout the book. The book also offers some brief description of futures and prediction markets. Collaborative Innovation Networks or COINs are discussed throughout the book. Brief domain information is introduced from other well-known business sources to help the reader understand the influence of swarms on the currently-understood business models.

Both authors are associated with the MIT Sloan School of Management.

The target reader is anyone who is interested in trends, human herds/swarms, crowd mentality and tapping into the trend.



The Book Content:

1. Why "Cool" Matters

• Cool things are things that are fun and make the word a better place in some way.
• A component of cool is to act for the benefit of others.
• Finding cool trends is beneficial to business.
• Early adopters influence social opinion the most.
• Social Network Analysis can be used for coolhunting if interactions of large groups become predictable

2. Swarm Creativity Creates Cool Trends

• "COINs are cyberteams of self-motivated people with a collective vision, enabled by technology to collaborate in achieving a common goal - an innovation - by sharing ideas, information, and work.", page 23
• COINs self-organize, select their own leader, swarms split to work in different areas, give power away without becoming powerless, the more knowledgeable share with less knowledgeable (beehive analogy)

3. Swarms can Better Predict the Future

• Prediction Markets use collective intelligence to present probabilities of future events happening
• Prediction markets need enough participants to be meaningful, the collection of results must be statistically useful, and it helps if the participants take them seriously.
• Short Iowa Political Markets, HP Sales Market, Siemens Project Market, Hollywood Stock Exchange, Rite-Solutions' Mutual Fun, case studies
• Peer networks can act like prediction markets to a certain extent

4. About Trendsetters

• Cool people start cool trends.
• Henry Oldenburg, Ben Franklin, Ted Nelson mini-biography.
• "Trendsetters are galaxies not stars"

5. Coolhunters look for Coolfarmers

• Coolhunting and Coolfarming are the two main ways of finding new trends and trendsetters.
• The process of how ideas turn into trends follows invention, creation and selling
• The four principles of Coolfarming are: gain power by giving it away, seed community with idea, mandate intrinsic motivation, recruit trendsetters
• Swarm creativity depends on communication, committment and collaboration

6. When Swarms go Mad

• Quote from Charles Makay's Extraordinary Polular Delusions ...
• Swarms can also be wrong
• Use Coolhunting techniques to find madness: lack of open communication, lack of a culture of collaboration, lack of membership freedom

7. Do-It-Yourself Coolhunting with Technology

• Meme detection services like memeorandum, wesmirch.com, digg and del.ic.us help the coolhunter find trends
• Slashdot.org is a good place for tech trends
• Physical proximity can occasion swarming, while distanced members need tools for good communication and collaboration

8. Coolhunting by Automated Social Network Analysis

• TeCFlow creates dynamic graphics of relationships for semantic interactions from logs, emails, forums
• Analyzing Wikinews, eCoustics, Mobile Phones in High School, Enron, Oceancontrol.

9. Five Steps to Becoming a Coolfarmer

1. Learn about COINs
2. Form a COIN
3. Coolhunt with your COIN in a community
4. Analyze information flow on your team and member roles
5. Optimize your own role in your COIN to become a coolfarmer

10. The Coming World of Swarm Creativity

• Starbucks, IBM, Cisco examples
• Old-World company versus New-World company dichotomy
• Summary: immerse yourself in the swarm, listen to the swarm, trust the swarm, share with the swarm

My Opinion: Great book. Worth reading twice ... carefully! Lot's of good material to build procedures, guides, rules and process out of. Plus there was a lot of information that leads me to begin branching out and learning in some new directions. Lots of good ideas for an entreprenuer and innovator.

The book would have benefitted from a little more hard connections to the outside world and where to begin . They basically suggest Yahoo groups (lol) as a community. It's not that I believe they don't know. I think they do. They just apparently did not want to share, which is a no-no for a COIN member. This book did use Starbucks as a case study which is overused in most of the business books I read, so I can't say it's a perfect book. But it is pletty close. (One other qualm regarding an example .. RADAR was not discovered by the US Naval Laboratory, but demonstrated by Christian Huelsmeyer some 18 years earlier.)

Review: Michael E. Raynor's The Strategy Paradox

The Strategy Paradox: Why committing to success leads to failure (and what to do about it)
by Michael E. Raynor

The basic concept of this book is that companies that commit to a grand business strategy may lock themselves into failure if the business environment changes from their initial assumptions or was never similar to their initial assumptions. In some cases, the author argues, other companies without strategy may stumble into success where a well-though-out plan may lead a 'properly' run company astray.

The target reader is anyone who is interested in the strategic management of business, with emphasis on large corporations with multiple business arms or holding/umbrella companies with a varied corporate portfolio.

The Book Content:
1. What Strategy Paradox?
2. The Best-Laid Plans

• Sony case study on BetaMax and MiniDisc
• Sony's problem: focussed too much on strategic success
• Solution: should have focused on strategic uncertainty

3. Who Dares Wins ... or Loses

• The extremes of the business domain are the place of highest risk and of highest return
• Most firms choose less risk and average return to make it to next year
  

4. The Limits of Adaptability

• Being completely adaptable is not enough

5. The Limits of Forecasting

• Impossible to predicte long-term with accuracy

6. It's About Time

• Hierachical levels in a company should have different planning and decision making responsibilities based on time-lines

7. Making Choices versus Creating Options

• Avoid making commitments when uncertainty exists
• Instead create options
• This option creation needs to be centrally held in a company

8. Strategic Flexibility

• Johnson & Johnson case study on management of strategic uncertainty and strategic options

9. What If ... ?

• Using scenarios to grow strategic options
• Scenaio tools and techniques

10. Preparing for the Unpredictable

• Creating, preserving, exercising, abandoning business options
• Putting value on business options
• Choosing business options based on the management's risk/return profile

11. Reinventing Strategy

• Summary - need to embrace uncertainty

Appendix A: How Diversification can Create Value
Appendix B: Scenarios at Alliant Energy
Appendix C: Real Option Valuation

My Opinion: Basically, the book is longer than I feel the topic merits. It looks like the author tried to stretch it out with footnotes and expounding on case studies, but the topic could have been covered in probably 6 chapters. (When I wrote papers in University, one of my Profs told me that the more citations I used the better the reader's opinion of my research would be. He also mentioned I should cite some of his work as well :)) but the footnotes are asides that will either be unread or will break the flow of the idea.) I feel that some of the author's case studies are not particulary strong in supporting the premise of the book. On the whole, I agree that blindly locking into a strategy is bad, while the idea of creating options at the board and CEO level rather than making decisions was a revelation to me. I came over from the point-of-view of portly cigar-smokers in a locked room making grand strategy to energetic domain-savy investigators creating possible futures.

The author does not give a good encapsulated view of the way the world is and why the book will help. Basically the author mixes some good and bad, risk, randomness and reward stories and tries to apply his theory which is just a statement of the obvious. Had more statistics been presented with quantified technical values for weighing success we could have seen the benefits of a before and after.

I would approach the topic this way:
Problem Definition (with a couple of case studies)
Approaches to Solving the Problem (scenarios, forecasting, adaptability)
Case Studies where the Techniques were used or not used (J&J, Sony, Vivendi, BCE, etc.)

Ideas: A book for building good tools for keeping options open for the small business entrepreneur would be an excellent read.