The Power of Pull by Hagel, Brown and Davidson

Imagine if someone took all of your vague and random notions about today's global connectivity and communications capabilities, and how they work to your advantage while at the same time challenging you to keep up, and gave you a vocabulary to speak coherently about it. That's essentially what The Power of Pull does. It explains why job hunting today is so much more complicated now than it was a decade ago, but also why you're able to broaden your job search geographically and otherwise without much physical effort. It explains your friend's success in the business of message board technology, and your other friend's success at promoting games like WoW and Starcraft II.

The phenomenon began all around me over a decade ago, and everyone I know, myself included, has been living it ever since. We just never formed it into a theory, with a special vocabulary. Well, now we have it. It's "push" (old institutional infrastructure) versus "pull" (flexible networks allowing individuals to find, create and share in ways and magnitudes never before envisioned). And tapping into the "knowledge flows" on the "edge," which penetrate the "core" more quickly than ever due to people that use "pull" to advantage.

The intro and first chapter of the book are slightly difficult to wade through because the jargon is new, even if the concepts are not. I had to mentally build a dictionary as I went along. But after the first chapter, I was rolling along easily.

The underlying message throughout is that change and innovation is happening at an exponentially more rapid rate that even a decade ago. Like most people, I'm resistant to change, but The Power of Pull inspires me to be excited about this rapid progress and how I can be a productive participant in it by teaching, or at least starting to teach, how harnessing "pull" is key to succeeding in today's and tomorrow's world.

The first stage of their method is termed "access," something we're all familiar with, even if we don't use it in the targeted, strategic manner suggested in the book. Using networks and putting out feelers, whether through technological means or not, to identify people useful to you to make a greater impact than you could alone or in a closed community (i.e., a company or firm). They include examples such as the tweeting campaign during the recent Iran elections that gave voice to Green protesters, and the community of big wave surfers that share videos of their latest innovative techniques online.

The second stage of their method, "attract," I think is more difficult for most of us. I find the hardest part of attracting is giving enough, providing enough value, to those I'd like to, and potentially can, attract, so as to maintain the relationship long enough to create value. The book warns that the successful use of pull requires that there is mutual benefit to be had, and that otherwise the connections you make are not bound to last.

The last stage, "achieve," is where the method starts to fall apart for me. Maybe this should not have been a "stage" so much as a goal of accessing and attracting. The book at this point begins to rehash the age old endeavor to maximize individual performance, in part by marrying your passion with your profession. It's not entirely clear how this stage naturally follows the first two.

While the concept of "pull" can be superimposed on a wide range of applications, the authors' prescribed methods of accessing, attracting and achieving, and the diagrams littered throughout the book (essentially a single diagram with slight revisions) has limited applicability. Business leaders (i.e., executives, principals, division heads) are the target audience, business leaders are their prime examples of successful case studies (with a few exceptions), and although the authors make a small effort to broaden the application of their theory, business leaders are ultimately the ones that will benefit most from implementing the strategies suggested by this book.

The last few chapters of the book are little more than a strung-together list of platitudes, such as "what is, is only a precursor of what could be" and "For the first time ever, we have the real opportunity to become who we are, and more importantly, who we were meant to be." Really? As with many books of this genre - how-to management, leadership, self-improvement - the conclusion is a bit of a let down.

However, despite a disappointing, and somewhat painful to read, ending, I still think the examples discussed in the first half of the book were interesting and helpful.