Get Back in the Box: How Being Great at What You Do Is Great for Business

This is an excellent book about understanding what you do best, how that best makes the world a better place, and a bit about how to reach the public with what you do best. This is a point made on every page of the book. I highly recommend it to folks who want to take what they do very well, what they do better than anyone else, trust it, and devote oneself to doing it even better while bringing one's offering to market. There is, however, one important qualification to my praise. Which is, that while the author contrasts the limitations of the "first" Renaissance, with the virtues of this "second" Renaissance" he also makes a great case for the value, insights gained from, and need for the competency of "pattern recognition," by upper corporate management. He makes the point that each company should have the ability to recognize the patterns associated to its core competencies and offerings, and I assume with how those patterns resonate with their customers. This was the essence and sine-qua-non of the "first" Renaissance; the re-birthing of the eternal patterns first made known in the classical Greek period. There is a great deal to learn about patterns and their recognition from the first Renaissance, much more than Mr. Rushkoff's excellent book has to offer, or gives credit to. Our current obsession with "Brand" and "Branding" and "Brand Management" is not anything more than a less adept striving to create what the Greeks understood about the worship of their gods. How each divinity was a constellation of psychological forces that formed patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that were expressions "from" the culture and not imposed "on" the culture. During the first Renaissance this was recognized and was employed as a way to speak to and create for its own people. In this way, by understanding the first Renaissance a time of "pattern recognition," one can learn to create value for people from their lives and not impose it on their lives. I love this book and at the same time, this significant lapse has me thinking about how much the author has sacrificed of his own considerable and core competency for research in chasing the gods of "compare and contrast" so overly worshiped by those in-the-academic-box. But, let me also say that this is an amazingly useful book for those who want to embrace the patterns of collaboration, generosity, and approaching one's work as play, which are the shinning patterns of this "second" Renaissance, that we live in today and which Hermes, Aphrodite and a sense of Philia can teach us all about as well. Once I began reading this book I could not put it down. Nothing is perfect, however, which is another point he makes in the book.

After reading 'Get Back in the Box' and watching the press run up to Rushkoff's latest, Life Inc., I'm puzzled. Many of the stories that Rushkoff cites as impetus for creating Life Inc are thoroughly covered in 'Get Back in the Box'. And stories they are. While much of the anecdotal evidence is entertaining it remains personal opinion and observation. Rushkoff's message is one, ultimately, of wanting companies to *DO* something. The clarion call is to those companies that have so fragmented and outsourced what they do that there is no real expertise or 'craft' to be had. This is a much needed message in an age of 'Four Hour Work Weeks'. It makes for a compelling read. I just wish his foils weren't such cardboard; something that makes the dispatching easy when presented in such a one-dimensional manner.

Where to start... I rated this 4 stars; 5 stars for being thought provoking and reinforcing my notions of what businesses should be concerned with, and 3 stars for the authors glaring examples of old-renaissance ideas/execution that didn't/don't work, yet providing nothing more than hindsight. I agree with the previous post that the first half of the book was better than the second half. There are so many examples that are counter to the authors examples, but I'll give a few here. First, in the absense of fullfilment opportunity exists. While Wal-Mart may be an evil company for some of its practices it also provides people in developing countries with a job, where none may have existed before. If you have no food and someone gives you a scrap then you at least survive to move onto a larger portion. If those who are employed at Wal-Mart cannot find another job that pays more than minimum wage then I would suggest going to a library and start learning...it has free internet access... Second, many of the arguments made throughout the book are based on a circular reference that is incapable of breaking down, when in fact it would break down. If a=b=c=d...y=z and z=a then for values of a-z that fluctuate so does the continuum. Every example given in the book relating to whatever currency units are give follows the same principle: that at some point, hidden beneath the guise of logic and play, energy will need to be expended that is not optimally or even close to optimally what any person would normally do in search of or in realizing the new renaissance. This breaks the whole model and I suppose it also degrades innovation at the same time. Third, open-source software, though trendy, has limitations. Imagine a world where function a is performed via single open-source project composing of a single developer, then fast-foward t years where function a is now performed by 1000 different projects each with 1000 developers (who share the same egos), in the meantime you have some number of function a demand satisfied by 1000 projects so a/1000. All of the sudden you have function b that people just though of at t+1 days, but only a small portion like 1% of function a projects are compatible...but the developers of function a projects not wanting their egos to be crushed realize this and perhaps migrate over to the small % of function a projects that are compatible...leaving the other 99% of function a projects to be picked up by some developer(s), whos egos aren't as big, to try and work something out with function b compatibility. Now you have function a compatible projects with a huge number of developers wanting to make their mark with function b, but the 99% of the people who utilize function a and now function b must switch to projects that are fully compatible and relearn, etc. The point is that people want recognition, however good or bad that may be, but it's the truth...even authors put their name, photo, etc. Fourth, I agree that understanding your "core competencies" are very important and understanding the "source code" and "patterns" is nice, but what really got me was how high people must be in order to realize that this is the path to eternal bliss or "play." I mean who in their right mind would choose to clean out a septic tank as a way of "playing" or even perform surgery on someone's brain...just for fun, when you know that someone's life depended on whether you were qualified or not. If you aren't qualified then doesn't that introduce a classe system of sorts? Who would regulate this...would this person think that telling someone they are incompetent was "playing?" It's clear that any system which qualifies someone as being able to perform a specific action, no matter how much fun they might have, is clearly old renaissance and the illusion of new renaissance is just that (not in entirety, but practicality). Fifth, while some people prefer to solve challenging problems, others would rather just sit around surfing, etc. What do we do with those people? Where would they get their surfboards, wax, wetsuits, food? I'll tell you who...the people that have enough resources at their disposal to just sit back and ponder how the old renaissance is coming to an end in favor of the new renaissance. Sixth, peoples faith often becomes a paramount influence in the actions they undertake. Some are at extreme ends and radicalize what is otherwise a very moral and just view of how things should be. These radicals often carry out actions against others because their convictions are so strong and so outside of the middle that even if the middle moves it will not be enough so enough will be "encouraged." This artificial skewing leads to others ultimately forgoing "play" in order to build a counter-trend necessary to prevent skewing that is non-organic. In the end you have a reduction in pure innovation (good) and an increase in pure existence. I'm guessing that the author was too busy contemplating whether or not we could he didn't think whether or not we should... Seven, the book discusses how currency became the demise of society as it pertains to interest, greed, etc. However, in the Paypal example he exalts that business for being upstanding and trying this new thing, but it ultimately fails because of the banks...yada, yada, yada. Anyways, Paypal was earning interest on the float vs. charging money for its service. How is that new renaissance? If we take the banks out of the equation so that interest is no longer accrued then who pays for the hosting, data, maybe it's those people who like to play in data centers. But then, who builds the steel racks, elevated floors, servers, ethernet cables, routers, switches, supplies power, constructs the building, stays up all night trying to figure out why no interest is being accrued :) Well, that was more of a rant than anything else. I'm glad this book cemented my ideas about open-source software and about how so many company executives are in such disrepair. Innovation...hmmm...whenever I have a bug in software I usually just open a debugging program that I purchased and print-out the portion of code via a printer, utilizing a driver, written by some person of gets off on that sorta thing...but would they do it for free if there other needs weren't being met...I don't think so. There's a reason why doctors get paid so much money, there's are reason why people do jobs they wouldn't otherwise do, there's a reason why the new renaissance only exists in the imagination of Gene Roddenberry. The have's and the have not's exist today, and perhaps in the 21st century we can combat much of this gap; however, until everyone is content with their existence and opportunity for existence then we will not reach the new renaissance. Indeed, it will only exist where truly innovative ideas take place...our isolated dreams...