This is not a review.

This is an appreciation.

John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison’s new book, The Power of Pull–How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, describes the business environments most of us are living in these days:  fluid, complex, generative, with networks, not machines, as their framework.  The book itself reflects this.  Its structure mirrors the structure of a network.  Its concepts are expressed as a matrix.  This gives the Power of Pull depth and perspective that asks quite a bit of the reader.  I had to go through the book twice to even begin to grasp its concepts and their implications to business.

The reading expands as you’re reading, as if you could stop at almost any page in the book and use it as a lens to zoom in on some aspect of business in the 21st Century.  What will it be like?  How will it change us? How can we change it? Who will prosper? What will hold us back? What’s the relationship between chaos and control? Between core and edge? It’s a lot to ponder.  This is not some fluffy recipe for feeling good about the future.  This is an important assessment of the work to be done.

The Power of Pull labels this evolution ‘The Big Shift.’  Make no mistake, The Big Shift is a life-altering change of game.  It is the tornado to Oz.  It is the jump to hyperspace.  It is the event that turns everyday turtles into Ninjas.  Prepare to be transformed by what you read.

Here’s a small sampling of the many concepts expressed the book that can make the difference between survival and prosperity in the networked era of business.

Push vs. Pull. ‘Push’ business models are (the GameChangers term for it) ‘Industrial Age’ models.  They are machine-like, hierarchical, heavily scripted, and emphasize planning over preparation. As one manager told me recently, “We are supposed to plan for every contingency, but you can’t plan for every contingency.  It’s impossible.”  ‘Pull’ models, by contrast, are dynamic, nimble, and emphasize preparation over planning.  In the Pull model, plans are designed to evolve, and deviations from the norm are seen not as failures but as opportunities to learn and grow.

Stocks vs. Flows. Push models treat knowledge as a scarce commodity.  A stock.  A ‘Push’ manager says, “I know but I can’t tell you.”  Pull models treat knowledge as an abundant resource.  A flow.  A Pull manager says, “Here’s what I know that can help solve the problem.”

Fast Learning. Push models called for standardized institutional learning.  Everyone worked off the same playbook.  In the networked world, there’s no time to transfer knowledge from edge to core, have it interpreted, codified and re-distributed to the edge as institutional dogma.  By the time the core has reacted, the opportunity to put the knowledge to use has been lost.  Because they treat knowledge as abundant and not as a scarce commodity, Pull models are free to direct flows of knowledge not just to the core, but to wherever in the enterprise there is a problem to be solved.  This is a far more efficient way for a company to apply its knowledge than the old Push model.

Small Moves. As improvisers we learn that the little things can make the biggest difference to performance, because the little things that have the ability to expand into big things, and the audience loves this.  Big things, by contrast, can only get so big as to be unmanageable, or be broken down into manageable chunks.  The small moves have manageability built into them. Networks are designed to knit together small moves into significant phenomena.  When communication is significant, markets move.   And when markets move, money gets made.

Serendipity. (I neglected to include this in the original post, and it’s important.)  Serendipity is an unforeseen positive outcome.  Because networks contain infinite potential for serendipity, it is essential to take it into account in the Pull model, as Hagel III et al certainly do.  Improvisation can influence serendipity in two ways:  First, because unforeseen positive outcomes are what improvisers intend in every scene, it invites serendipity; second, it is a process for turning the unforeseen events into positive outcomes.   Push models automatically regard what is unforeseen as negative.  Pull models (and improvisers) greet what is unforeseen as an opportunity to make something positive happen.

What JSB, Hagel III and Davison describe in The Power of Pull is a kind of magnetism.  The cover of the book shows iron filings aligning along magnetic fields.  This is my one quibble, what I’d call a slight disconnect in their narrative:  If The Power of Pull is, in fact, meant to describe magnetism, then the concept of Push can’t be discounted or discredited quite so much as the authors seem to want.  Magnetism involves both Pull and Push, attraction and repulsion.  There is a relationship between the two.  Just because we are divorcing Push to marry Pull doesn’t mean we’ll never deal with Push again.  We had kids with Push.  We built some wealth together.  As the authors themselves point out in the book, without a core there can be no meaningful edge.  Push will never be entirely out of the picture.

There is a whole new language coming into existence to describe business in the networked world.  This language invokes new rules, like the 140 characters rule; and defines new ways of collaborating, like the crowdsourcing game.   The Power of Pull freshens the lexicon by describing how and why business is changing, must change, to prosper in the new realities made possible by networks.  If, as I believe, this is magnetism we’re talking about, the work of realizing the new realities will consist in equal parts of rejecting the negative, attracting the positive, and not messing with the in-betweens.   Push, Pull or Get Out of the Way!