Best Business Books of 2006: #6 – Get Back in the Box

Continuing with the Best Business Books: Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out by Douglas Rushkoff

This was the first book I finished in 2006, and it was such a great start to the year that I skimmed a bit of it before the year ended.

According to Rushkoff, all a business needs to do is:

•     Stick to what it’s good at
   
•     Have fun doing it
   
•     Do it in a socially responsible manner
   
•     Let its customers and employees participate in future directions of the business
   
•     Learn the code to its business and open up the code
   

Rushkoff is unsparing of beloved companies,
fellow consultants, and monotheistic religions. His idealism is
generally easy to swallow, though some of his anti-marketing tirades
seem self-defeating. Is it so wrong to better target certain customers
and groups instead of throwing marketing out into the wind?

A favorite quote (p. 273): “Just as the
successful business person learns how to provide social currency
through which customers can interact, the successful person – the New
Renaissance Person – defines himself not just by his abilities, worth,
or possessions, but by his connections to others… A person is not the
sum total of the abilities he contains, but the totality of his
connections. A person’s abilities are extended to include those of all
the people he can access… You are your address book.”

Separately, Rushkoff also gets an honorable mention for his interpretation of the story of biblical patriarch Abraham in comic book form with Testament: Akedah, a work that gave me new appreciation for both the comic genre and also the biblical text.