Skip to main content

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.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...
Post a Comment
Read more