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This is a book about technology, and about rules. It is about
what happens when technology moves faster than governments, creating markets that
-- for some time at least -- have no rules. It is a book about the pioneers who
thrive in a world of chaos and the governments that eventually rein them in.
Beginning with the development of the compass in the early Middle
Ages, Debora Spar, a Harvard Business School professor, takes the reader back
in time, looking at a series of technological revolutions that promised, in their
time, to transform the worlds of politics and business. She tells tales of the
printing press and maps; of telegraph, radio, and satellite television; of software,
encryption, and the advent of digital music. At each of these junctures, she suggests,
technological innovation leads to both a wave of commerce and of chaos. Entrepreneurs
such as Samuel Morse and Rupert Murdoch carve new markets from the emerging technology
and proclaim that the old rules no longer apply. And
for a while they are right. Pioneers plow into the world that technology has wrought,
leaving governments gasping in their wake. But eventually -- and inevitably --
even cowboys realize they need rules: rules of property, rules of coordination,
rules of competition. The erstwhile pioneers thus turn to government, lobbying
for order and setting the stage for the next wave of innovation. Spar
is a gifted storyteller, so each chapter of Ruling the Waves reads like
an adventure tale. But the real excitement of the book comes from the underlying
patterns she articulates, and the parallels she draws between historical events
and our own tumultous times. Deborah L. Spar is a
professor at the Harvard Business School. A political scientist by training, she
specializes in the politics of international business and speaks frequently before
corporate and policy-making groups. Professor Spar is the author of two previous
books and lives in Boston with her architect husband and two young sons.
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