I go on holiday to the sea and I take with me:

books.

More particularly, I have high expectations from:
"De zee, Een fascinerende ontdekkingsreis door verleden, heden en toekomst van onze planeet" written by Frank Schätzing. The dutch version of the book "Nachrichten aus einem unbekannten Universum". I think reading this is a excellent preparation to the upcoming game Spore. The game is inspired on the movie "The power of ten". I saw that movie on the dutch television in "Zomergasten" in 2005. The guest was Robbert Dijkgraaf, one of the founding fathers of the string theory. Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, has created Spore partly inspired on the power of ten. Spore is an epic journey that takes you from the origin and evolution of life through the development of civilization and technology and eventually all the way into the deepest reaches of outer space.

The other books are:

• The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe written by Roger Penrose
• De Eekhoorn from Primo Levi, a work of fiction
• The world is flat by Thomas L. Friedman. Many people urged me to read it but somehow I didn't until now. I think the world is spikylike Richard Florida and Sophie Vandebroek, the Belgian chief technology officer of the American multinational Xerox ('Mijn vrije tijd beheer ik zoals mijn werk' by Tom Vandyck in De Morgen op 4/8/07)
• The paradox of choice by Barry Schwartz (see his lecture on Google Video or read the review in the New Yorker). I guess to learn some thoughts that counters the ideas of the long tail.
• De clan van de wilde honing van Ad Borsboom, I hope to gain some insight in the tribal functioning of the Aboriginals.I already explained my interest in authentizotic organistation

Nice to see that all books come from the local library except the book from Penrose.

Public broadcaster : Starbucks for media?

From the moment I read on his blog that Dries Buytaert (the Drupal guy) was reading a book about tribal wisdom from Starbucks, I intended to examine the book and eventually buy it to read. The book subject triggered me because two people pointed in the direction of tribal mechanisms. The first one is Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, professor at Insead and author of very good books on leadership. Recently he studied organisations by traveling to countries where pure tribal societies are living (read “High Performance Teams: Lessons from the Pygmies”, Organizational Dynamics, 27 (3), 66-77. Kets de Vries, Manfred F.R. (1999)). I think his experiences with those tribes leads up to the arguments for the authentizotic organistation (dutch link). The second pointer in the direction of tribes comes from the social scientist Ilka Tuomi (the author of the book Networks of Innovation). In his presentation titled "Social Forces and the Broadcasting Revolution" he forecasts the rise of groups, clans, tribes , typically based on gift economies, in the next generations of internet-based societies. So I was wandering if the success of Starbucks had something to do with gift economies like in open source or commons-based peer production.

In the beginning of March '07, during a transit in the Heathrow airport on my way to the Game Developers Conference in San Franciso, I walked into a bookstore and found a book about Starbucks. Because we were in a hurry, I bought it without much further ado and started to explain to my colleagues what I tought Starbucks is about and why I tought it could learn us something about the future of broadcasting. During the flight I discussed what I read in the Starbucks book with them. Visiting a Starbucks rose high on the list "things to do when arriving in San Francisco". So this was the first Starbucks we visited in our life:

Of course, our high expectation where not met at all. We had to cue up in a long line. Since we where new we acted to slowly and felt as obstructions. No personal treatment by the baristas who could hardly understand why we had such a difficulty in formulating our order. And in contradiction with mental picture build by the book, the place was not clean. To sum it up, far from amarvelous experience at all. Luckily, the lathe was indeed very good! (So it is a good strategy to be really good at one thing, see Principle 2 of BBC's 15 web2.0 principles)

Later I found out that the book I bought was the wrong one. In a nutshell, the book goes as follows: it states that Starbucks is a successful company, it presents a list of principles of the company that boils down to "if you know your costumers you can give them a great experience". (That the service industrie would develop to experience industry is also long predicted). If you apply this principle to your business, your business will also become successful. A bit to simple for my mind.

To me, the Starbucks principle resembles a lot to the style of Flemish pubs we (used to) have. Just substitute coffee with beer and there you go. So nothing very insightful or revolutionary. Hence, I still intend to buy "Tribal Knowledge: Business Wisdom Brewed from the Grounds of Starbucks Corporate Culture". Luckily I understand now that I can study it by having a good beer in a Belgian pub (even beter would be Café Tabor in Heverlee) Cheers!