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On a landscape that seems to be transforming
itself with every new technology, marketing tactic, or investment
strategy, business rush to embrace change by trading in
their competencies or shifting their focus altogether. All
in the name of innovation.
But this endless worrying, wriggling, and
trend watching only alienates companies from whatever it
is they really do best. In the midst of the headlong rush
to think "outside the box," the full engagement
responsible for true innovation is lost. New consultants,
new packaging, new marketing schemes, or even new CEOs are
no substitute for the evolution of our own expertise as
individuals and as businesses.
Indeed, for all their talk about innovation,
most companies today are still scared to death of it.
To Douglas Rushkoff, this disconnect is
not only predictable but welcome. It marks the happy end
of a business cycle that began as long ago as the Renaissance,
and ended with the renaissance in creativity and collaboration
we're going through today.
The age of mass production, mass media,
and mass marketing may be over, but so, too, is the alienation
it engendered between producers and consumers, managers
and employees, executives and shareholders, and, worst of
all, businesses and their own core values and competencies.
American enterprise, in particular, is at
a crossroads. Having for too long replaced innovation with
acquisitions, tactics, efficiencies, and ad campaigns, many
businesses have dangerously lost touch with the process
-- and fun -- of discovery.
"American companies are obsessed with
window dressing," Rushkoff writes, "because they're
reluctant, no, afraid to look at whatever it is they
really do and evaluate it from the inside out. When things
are down, CEOs look to consultants and marketers to rethink,
rebrand, or repackage whatever it is they are selling, when
they should be getting back on the factory floor, into the
stores, or out to the research labs where their product
is actually made, sold, or conceived."
Rushkoff backs up his arguments with a myriad
of intriguing historical examples as well as familiar gut
checks -- from the dumbwaiter and open source to Volkswagen
and The Gap -- in this accessible, thought-provoking, and
immediately applicable set of insights. Here's all the help
innovators of this era need to reconnect with their own
core competencies as well as the passion fueling them.
Douglas Rushkoff has written ten best-selling
books on media, technology, and culture, including Cyberia,
Media Virus!, ScreenAgers, and Coercion,
winner of the Marshall McLuhan Award. He's a regular commentator
for NPR's All Things Considered, CBS Sunday Morning,
Time magazine, and the New York Times; a world-renowned
speaker on society, business, and change; founder of the
Narrative Lab at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications
Program; and the host and writer of PBS Frontline's
"The Merchants of Cool" and "The Persuaders."
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