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The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure.

When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success.

When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up, feeling that here, somehow, was the secret of the (business) universe. Similarly I felt Hidalgo was revealing to me a new reality in the way that knowledge impacts economies. The prose is somewhat more academic and restrained, but we get the same mix of personal achievements of the author and real life stories, whether it be the rebel 21-year-old from the Midlands who transported the Industrial Revolution to the US or how a Chinese entrepreneur learned from the knowledge-based synergistic relationships between US universities and businesses.

Unfortunately, as was also the case with those old business books, after the initial euphoria it becomes difficult to see how you can learn any practical lessons to change the way a business (or a government) operates. We are given examples, but they often feel too unique to be useful. Even Hidalgo mentions that every case has to deal with specific circumstances - there are no simple, transferable solutions here. We can all nod and agree that Netflix got it right where Blockbuster didn't, for instance - but I'm not sure how much it prepares us for the next situation where knowledge pushes us in a new direction.

You may have noticed a certain lack of reference to the 'infinite alphabet' of the title. That's because I have very little idea of what it has to do with the content of the book - it seems to be something vague about the many ways that different factors can come together... or something else. It's beyond me.

To some extent, then, I'm saying that I got very little from this book. But I enjoyed doing it, and Hidalgo does produce a similar buzz to the Tom Peters effect. It was a better book than Hidalgo's earlier Why Information Grows (which I also reviewed as interesting but, in classic MIT Media Lab style, not relevant to the real world). There's definitely something absorbing here observationally, I just can't see it being useful practically.

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