The thrashing my book and I just received from Evgeny Morozov was as preordained as the last election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Months ago, he bragged that he had me in his crosshairs, assigned to review Public Parts — even before I had finished writing the book. The New Republic assigned him with the sure expectation he would do this, for Morozov reliably dislikes me, just as he dislikes people I quote, whom he lists: Clay Shirky, Don Tapscott, Jay Rosen, Arianna Huffington, John Perry Barlow, Steven Johnson, Robert Scoble, Seth Godin, Nick Denton, Umair Haque, Doc Searls. We are, in his view, “comrades in the Cyber-Uptopian International.” Good company in my view.
I wish Morozov had tackled issues and ideas to show how it’s done. He wants an intellectual examination of the topic — accusing me of not providing it — but then he doesn’t offer one himself. Instead, he only writes a personal attack. It has the air of history’s longest troll’s comment. I could choose to feed him and reply to his complaints — his mischaracterizations (I imagine no “privacy police”) and his hysterics (he finds Streetview to be a case of Germans “tyrannized by an American company”) and his amusing overreaches (he complains about the names Habermas and Oprah appearing in the same book). And I could point out that he omits my agreement with and praise of him (putting him in bad company, to be sure) . But in the end, such a discussion would end up looking like this… Me: “You don’t like me.” Him: “No, I don’t.” So what? One price of publicness is haters. He fulfills that role for the people listed above and more.
Of course, I am linking to Morozov’s piece. I worship at the altar of the link, remember. “Geek religion,” he calls my faith. I trust that you’ll make your own judgments — because, you see, I am a utopian and a populist and fool enough to trust a public empowered by these new tools, which I hope to see us all protect. But then, that’s what my book is really about. You wouldn’t know it on the other side of this link.
(By the way, you’ll find you’ll have to read this very, very long screed in very small type on a printer-only page — the link Morozov provided — because that gets around his publication’s pay wall.)
First, what does stopping the test do for a man? It makes him ignorant of what is happening in his own body. It makes him incapable of making a decision about his own health and fate. Since when and how is a lack of information better than information?
Second, prostate and testicular cancer are curable when caught early. Why the hell would we not continue to try to detect these men’s diseases?
Third, the panel treats men as a statistical pool, not as individuals. It says that overall, the test does not reduce deaths. Whether or not that’s so is of no concern to me. I’m not member of a pool or a data point in it. I’m not random. I’m one man with one prostate. It was cancerous.
The problem here is that medicine cannot yet detect the difference between fast-spreading — and often fatal — prostate cancer and slow-spreading tumors that take so long to grow that oftentimes something else kills their hosts first. So, yes, some tumors are taken out that would not have killed a man. But there is no way to know that.
So who wants to take that gamble? Not me. I had prostate cancer. I was told I could react with “watchful waiting.” But I chose not to. Of course, I did. Informed I had cancer in my body, I had to get it out. I have a responsibility to my family to stay alive so I can provide for them (among other things, I hope). I also have a responsibility as a member of an insurance pool to get a disease treated earlier and for less, if possible. If I let the disease progress, it could involve extremely expensive treatment — radiation, chemotherapy, hormone therapy, hospitalization — for a cancer that spreads from the prostate to the bones to the rest of the body. I know. That’s how my grandfather died.
Does the surgery have side-effects? Oh, let me tell you, it does. I’ve made no secret of them — quite to the contrary, my publicness about them inspired me to write Public Parts.
It has been two years since my surgery and I owe you an update. I am still impotent. I have tried Viagra and Cialis to no effect other than indigestion. I went through the ordeal of shopping for and buying a penis pump (once again being nice to my insurance pool by not buying the one that’s overpriced for those bringing prescriptions; I bought the exact same thing for much less with my own money). It did nothing but mangle and misform my already abused penis and cause pain. I am getting ready to get trained in the art of sticking a needle in my dick to make it engorge, if it still can.
Oh, yes, there are side-effects. The government wants to protect me from them while not protecting me from cancer, a cancer that could or could not kill me, no one knows.
That is my choice. It is a choice I can make only with information, information about my body the government now wants to keep from me.
Here is a snippet from What Would Google Do?
about Apple as the grand exception to every rule I put forth there:
How does Apple do it? How does it get away with operating this way even as every other company and industry is forced to redefine itself? It’s just that good. Its vision is that strong and its products even better. I left Apple once, in the 1990s, before Steve Jobs returned to the company, when I suffered through a string of bad laptops. But when I’d had it with Dell, I returned to Apple and now everyone in my family has a Mac (plus one new Dell); we have three iPhones; we have lots of iPods; I lobbied successfully to make Macs the standard in the journalism school where I teach. I’m a believer, a glassy-eyed cultist. But I didn’t write this book about Apple because I believe it is the grand exception. Frank Sinatra was allowed to violate every rule about phrasing because he was Sinatra. Apple can violate the rules of business in the next millennium because it is Apple (and more important, because Jobs is Jobs).
So then Apple is the ultimate unGoogle. Right?
Not so fast. When I put that notion to Rishad Tobaccowala, he disagreed and said that Apple and Google, at their cores, are quite alike.
“They have a very good idea of what people want,” he said. Jobs’ “taste engine” makes sure of that. Both companies create platforms that others can build upon—whether they are start-ups making iPod cases and iPhone apps or entertainment companies finding new strategies and networks for distribution in iTunes.
Apple, like Google, also knows how to attract, retain, and energize talent. “Apple people believe they are even better than Google people,” he said. “They’re cooler.”
Apple’s products, like Google’s, are designed simply, but Tobaccowala said Apple does Google one better: “They define beauty as sex,” he said.
Apple understands the power of networks. Its successful products are all about connecting. Apple, like Google, keeps its focus unrelentingly on the user, the customer—us—and not on itself and its industry. And I’ll add that, of course, both companies make the best products. They are fanatical about quality.
But Tobaccowala said that what makes these two companies most alike is that—like any great brand—they answer one strong desire: “People want to be like God.” Google search grants omniscience and Google Earth, with its heavenly perch, gives us God’s worldview. Apple packages the world inside objects of Zen beauty. Both, Tobaccowala said, “give me Godlike power.” WWGD? indeed.
#OccupyWallStreet has been drawing complaints that it doesn’t have a demand and a goal. But I say that is precisely its significance.
#OccupyWallStreet is a hashtag revolt. As I learned with my own little #FuckYouWashington uprising, a hashtag has no owner, no heirarchy, no canon or credo. It is a blank slate onto which anyone may impose his or her frustrations, complaints, demands, wishes, or principles.
So I will impose mine. #OccupyWallStreet, to me, is about institutional failure. And so it is appropriate that #OccupyWallStreet itself is not run as an institution.
We don’t trust institutions anymore. Name a bank or financial institution you can trust today. That industry was built entirely on trust — we entrusted our money to their cloud — and they failed us. Government? The other day, I heard a cabinet member from a prior administration call Washington “paralyzed and poisonous” — and he’s an insider. Media? Pew released a study last week saying that three-quarters of Americans don’t believe journalists get their facts straight (which is their only job). Education? Built for a prior, institutional era. Religion? Various of its outlets are abusing children or espousing bigotry or encouraging violence. The #OccupyWallStreet troops are demonizing practically all of corporate America and with it, capitalism. What institutions are left? I can’t name one.
In a Foreign Affairs essay in 2008, Richard Haass argued that the world is moving from bi- and unipolarity (that is, the Cold War and its aftermath) to nonpolarity (i.e., no one’s in charge). “We now operate in an open marketplace of influence,” I wrote in my last book. “One need no longer control institutions to control agendas.”
Now one needs a network. #OccupyWallStreet is that network, the headless tail. Even it’s not sure what it is. Indeed, I think it would have been better off not issuing a manifesto written by a committee of the whole park, going after even animal rights and ending with its own Ninth Amendment: “*These grievances are not all-inclusive.” Henry Blodget mocks many of their demands. Feminisnt says they aren’t specific enough. They can’t win.
But I think they are already winning. #OccupyWallStreet is a start and it is growing, as Micah Sifry wrote: “There’s something happening here, Mr. Jones.”
What’s happening is an attempt to define a new public, now that we can. Iceland, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya are all countries being reimagined and remade: start-up nations. Hear Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir talk about building a new constitution, using Facebook, on the principles of “equality, transparency, accountability, and honesty” — liberté, égalité, fraternité, updated for the networked age.
In the end, this is why I wrote Public Parts, because we have the tools and thus the opportunity to rethink and reorganize our publics and decide what they stand for. The power and freedom that Gutenberg’s press brought to the early modern era, our networked tools now bring everyone in this, the early digital age. “They empower us. They grant us the ability to create, to connect, to organize, and to aggregate our knowledge…. They lower borders, even challenging our notion of nations.” That’s what the youth of these countries are doing.
Media have mocked the denizens of #OccupyWallStreet as scruffy, young hippies. But you should have seen me — and more of media’s bosses than you can imagine — in ‘68. Scruffy, simplistic, bombastic, angry, determined, self-righteous, right, and high — that was us. Media dismissed us just as they dismiss the denizens of Zuccotti Park. Authorities thought they could round up all the ‘68ers in Grant Park, just as they do now on the Brooklyn Bridge.
When I visited #OccupyWallStreet’s park Friday, I wore a sport coat. I had to because earlier that day, I had a meeting at a place where they wear them. But I’m glad I brought it, for it’s time to show that #OccupyWallStreet represents more than scruffy young leftists. I don’t say that for a moment to denigrate them and their spirit. They built #OccupyWallStreet. No, I say it’s time for more of us to follow their leadership and join them, to show that what they represent — the anger, the determination, and the inherent hope — speaks for more of us, even people in suits.
What #OccupyWallStreet has done with considerable success — as the best hashtags and publics do — is open a conversation, one we must have, about the shape of our nation and society and future. If you don’t like their manifesto and demands, fine: What are yours?
At the end of Public Parts, I present mine, knowing they aren’t the right ones but urging people to enter a conversation not about complaints or demands but instead about the principles of our new and open society.
I don’t think #OccupyWallStreet is or should be about just venting anger or demonizing business or complaining or demanding. Indeed, of whom are we making these demands? The failed institutions? The ones our networks will disrupt if not displace? I say the message of #OccupyWallStreet should be more hopeful than that: building a new and open public based on the principles of a society that will replace the dying institutions and their ways.
“I’m delighted that Gordon Crovitz reviews Public Parts in the Wall Street Journal. Snippets:
“For many years, privacy has been evolving to become a right as fundamental as equal protection or free speech. But what if it comes at too high a cost? What if we have too much privacy when technology now makes sharing information so much easier and the value of shared information so much greater? …
“Mr. Jarvis argues it should be up to each person where to balance the risks and rewards of being more public. ‘When new technologies cause change and fear, government’s reflex is to regulate them to protect the past,” he says. “But in doing so, they also can cut off the opportunities for the future.’
“Congress is considering several privacy bills. But Mr. Jarvis calls it a ‘dire mistake to regulate and limit this new technology before we even know what it can do.’
“Privacy is notoriously difficult to define legally. Mr. Jarvis says we should think about privacy as a matter of ethics instead. We should respect what others intend to keep private, but publicness reflects the choices ‘made by the creator of one’s own information.’ The balance between privacy and publicness will differ from person to person in ways that laws applying to all can’t capture.”
I wasn’t sure I could watch 50/50, but I’m glad I did … just as I wasn’t sure I could watch The Big C, but I’m glad I get to see that, too.
I’ve merely had cancer lite (twice: prostate and thyroid). Not having had to go through the horrors most cancer patients endure — chemo and radiation and clocks with 30-minute hours — all I can really speak to is the realized fear of it. I’ve long dreaded cancer, then I met my dread. Even though I tell my own jokes about it (want a limp dick joke? or a throat-slitting gag? I gotta ton of them), I didn’t know that I’d find others’ humor in it.
But I did. Each in its own way, the movie and the show take the muffler off of cancer: the hushed tones, the embarrassed awkwardness, the unmentionableness of it. They don’t exploit their tumors for cheap laughs. They don’t find nobility in metastasis. They don’t jerk tears. They simply have the courage to treat cancer for what it is: just another fucking disease.
50/50 is just a bromance with not only bad girlfriends and crazy mothers but also tumors and rude doctors getting in the way of getting drunk and laid. The Big C is darker. Laura Linney’s family is a sitcom family bizarre enough for cable. If these were shitty shows, cancer wouldn’t rescue them. But they’re each good. Yes, all the characters end up learning more about the meaning of life. But they did that, too, on Leave it to Beaver. That’s the point. It’s just life. And death.
I was so busy researching and writing Public Parts that I didn’t have time to give attention to some wonderful books written by friends. That’s such a sin because it’s such a privilege to have friends who write books, smart people who are so generous with their knowledge. So now that I’ve come up for air — just a gulp — from mine, here are books from folks I admire, some of which I’ve read, some I’ve dipped into, and some I’ll finally have the time to read.
* Micah Sifry’s WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency was invaluable for my writing of Public Parts. It is a brief but comprehensive survey of the importance of Wikileaks and the state of openness and transparency in government and society. Micah — with Andrew Rasiej, a leader of the Personal Democracy Forum — is tough on the current administration and its promises and delivery regarding openness. Highly readable, very authoritative, highly recommended.
* I love that Brooke Gladstone chose to tell the story of media’s influence as a work of graphic nonfiction. Figures she’s blaze trails. The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media is a creative, clever, clear, and concise (the alliteration is accidental, I assure you) guide to how media reached its place in society. She told me after finishing it that it was terribly hard work and she hopes not to do it again. But I hope she lies.
* Gary Vaynerchuk’s The Thank You Economy is his best so far because I think it captures his voice and is authenticity. I’m reminded of him at South by Southwest when he stood on stage and did nothing but converse with his public. That’s what he does here, giving his best and most direct and honest advice.
* I treasure arguing — not fighting, arguing — with some people. Siva Vaidhyanathan is atop that list. He challenges me and his book The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) is indeed a challenge to the ideas in my last book. We look at Google and the consequences of its size and success through different ends of the telescope. I wish we’d had the chance to debate the topic more often and I can’t wait to see what he turns to next.
* I wish I could be Steven Johnson when I grow up. He’s my idea of the great New York author even if — fink — he deserted Brooklyn for California. I love hearing him talk about his books almost as much as I love reading them. Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (just coming out in paperback) is a wonderful account of creativity. I particularly enjoyed his contribution to the discussion of serendipity and its modern fate.
* It’s a crime of publishing that Heather Brooke’s The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches from the Information War is not yet released in the U.S. Pssst–editors: go buy it. Heather is the brillliant journalist in the U.K. who caused the MP’s expense scandals to come out and who was on the forefront of the Wikileaks story. She is my patron saint of transparency. I’ve just begin to dig in — terribly regretful that it wasn’t out before I had to finish my book — after having it shipped over from London. I can’t wait to dig in.
* At a talk in Ottawa, I got to meet Canadian journalist Andrew Potter and then got a copy of his book, The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves. He examines an interesting angle on our current debates on real names and real identities: when are we authentic?
* While I was working on my book, Seth Godin didn’t just write a book, he started a new publishing imprint that is disrupting the publishing model: The Domino Project. They’re putting out a bunch of neat, small books — two by Seth already — and rethinking what drives books. More on this later.
* It would be impossibly brash of me to call Elizabeth Eisenstein a friend by including her in this list of friends’ books, but I’ll use this moment to recommend her latest, Divine Art, Infernal Machine. Eiseinstein is the premier Gutenberg scholar, author of The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Volumes 1 and 2 in One), which was utterly invaluable in my research and in shaping my thinking about the parallels between Gutenberg’s disruption and the internet’s. I wish I’d received her new book earlier but even as I edited the final drafts of my book, I was devouring her latest and inserting bits I learned. If you’re a Gutenberg geek, as I now am, you must read it.
* I don’t know Marc Levinson, author of The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, but since I’m recommending books and since I just finished and was wowed by this one, I might as well throw a recommendation his way. As we look at the Senate going after Google for the nebulous sin of being too big, it’s so terribly instructive to look back at the demonization of success and size that hit A&P as America’s first chain store. Fascinating book.
To all these literary and literate friends, I apologize for the delay in linking to your good works and great generosity.
: Oops. Went to the bookstore today and found two more:
* Paulo Coelho’s Name Your Link is his latest novel. Paulo is amazingly generous with his readers — as he was with me, allowing him to interview him for my last book. A delightful gentleman.
That’s the provocative question at the core of Jeff Jarvis’ new book, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live. While he ultimately concludes it isn’t, Jarvis makes a powerful case for re-framing the way we think about privacy, and for better appreciating the benefits of “publicness” in the information age. . . .
Certainly, everyone values their privacy to some extent. But who will stand up for the value of “publicness,” or the benefits that come “from being open and making the connections that technology now affords?” Jarvis makes that his mission in Public Parts. . . .
He explains how publicness improves interpersonal relationships, empowers communities, strengthens social ties, enables greater collaboration, promotes transparency and truth-seeking, and helps enliven deliberative democracy, among many other things. Innovations in information technology—the printing press, cameras, microphones, and now search engines and social networking—have always spawned new privacy tensions, he correctly notes. Ultimately, though, they also bring tremendous benefits. The Internet revolution and all the angst that it entails is just the latest in this reoccurring cycle. We’re going through the same growing pains our ancestors did with previous technologies and it’s important not to overreact. . . .
What Jarvis has done in Public Parts is to force us to have a serious conversation about these trade-offs. Some will bristle at the notion that privacy “rights” should be balanced against any other right or value. If we desire the benefits of a more open and transparent society, however, it is a conversation we need to have.
How do we define what is public and what is private? What are the benefits and dangers of living a life in which everything is shared? Jarvis explores these questions and more in his immensely readable, chatty style. . . .
From revolutions in the Middle East to how some businesses are slowly coming to embrace “publicness”, technology is enabling the sharing of information, the digital conversation, like never before in history. No one knows what’s going to happen next. But people like Jarvis are having fun making sense of these confusing early years.
And friend Stephen Baker, author of The Numerati and Final Jeopardy, says he wanted to write a book like Public Parts himself. He examines the value of secrets.
I’ve been reading Jeff Jarvis’ new manifesto, Public Parts. It’s a very welcome rebuttal to the concerns of privacy advocates. Jarvis, while making it clear that some of their concerns are warranted, focuses on the other side of our relationships online: sharing with others, and connecting with them.
I wish I had this book when I went on my Numerati book tours, in ‘08 and ‘09. I would talk about the future of the data economy, and everywhere I went, people would ask me about privacy. My stock response back then was that in the industrial age, we were regarded as identical dots, or perhaps as vast herds, and now companies were learning to look at us as individuals. Was that necessarily a bad thing?
But Jarvis focuses on the advantages of being public.
Here’s another free excerpt from Public Parts — a day before its formal release in print, e-book, and audio tomorrow. This audio excerpt comes after the earlier piece about the Germans and privacy and it’s about my own publicness and privacy. Warning: penis ahead.
One more free excerpt — the introduction — is here.
After almost three years, What Would Google Do? is out in paperback. Oh, no, now I have two things to hawk. It comes with a new afterword. A snippet from that (with rules from the book highlighted):
* * *
The best part of writing What Would Google Do? came after it was published, when people from a surprising range of sectors shared with me how they had tested the rules you’ve just read in their own endeavors.
I spoke with a convention of truck-stop owners who realized that their way stations could act as nodes to build networks among drivers who have information to share with each other. Join a network. Be a platform. Think distributed.
At the other end of the demographic spectrum, I heard from executives at two of the largest luxury-goods companies in the world, who saw value in opening up even their exclusive design processes so they could build direct relationships with new tastemakers and new talent and become curators of quality and luxury. Elegant organization.
At another extreme, I heard foundations speculate about how different their work would be if they opened up their structures to identify new needs, new grantees to meet those needs, new ways to measure their success, and new ways to leverage their assets by encouraging others to help in their work. Join the open-source, gift economy.
At a meeting of librarians, we faced their worst case—closing libraries—and then catalogued the value they will still add when information and search are digital but human expertise and guidance aren’t. Atoms are a drag.
A group of postal executives wondered what Google would do if it ran the Post Office. One official speculated that it would give every American a computer and printer, replacing mail and slashing cost. This discussion led to a conference in Washington called PostalVision 2020, where I pushed the industry not to try to fix the Postal Service a cutback at a time but to bravely consider what the market would and could do on its own. Beware the cash cow in the coal mine. Do what you do best and link to the rest. Get out of the way.
At the height of the financial crisis, I moderated a session at Davos in which entrepreneurs speculated about how to fix the broken banking industry. They imagined creating the bank that is open about all its data, from investments to salaries. Be honest. Be transparent. Don’t be evil.
Lufthansa ran a brainstorming session with a score of social-media practitioners at the DLD Conference in Munich, wondering how even an airline could be Googley. The bottom line: Customers want airlines to share information with them (why is the plane late?) and then they will be willing to share information back if airlines make good use of it (for example, assigning me the exact seat I like best). There is an inverse relationship between control and trust.
Best Buy’s tweeting chief marketing officer, Barry Judge (@BestBuyCMO), had me come to the company’s headquarters to try out some of the ideas here. I learned more from them than they did from me as I witnessed a smart company that is trying to move past just selling things in boxes to providing service and expertise. Best Buy opened up its infrastructure to allow others to build stores atop it. It has 3,000 sales people answering customers’ questions through a single Twitter account (@Twelpforce), turning them into the “human search engine.” It also is becoming a media company, selling promotional opportunities in stores. Decide what business you’re in.
Sales guru and author Jeffrey Gitomer invited me visit his staff to help them decide how they could be Googlier. I suggested they start by gathering the best sales tips from their own readers, who are out there selling and succeeding every day. Gitomer himself blogs and tweets and that inspired his new book, Social BOOM!, about this new way to do business together. Trust the people. Your customers are your ad agency.
In my next book, Public Parts, I also tell the story of a very Googley car company Local Motors, which designs cars openly. Collaborate. I also report on visionaries who are rethinking retail from the ground up, now that Google and the net make pricing transparent. Google commodifies everything. Welcome to the Google economy.
Most fun of all, I have heard of church pastors who aspire to be Googley, leaving their brick walls behind to go to where the parishioners live, using the web as a tool. Church Magazine suggests a “move from giving answers to asking questions.” Listen. Trust the people. Everybody needs Googlejuice.
These church folks did not fall for the joke in the title of this book. Google isn’t God and these laws here are not immutable. “We don’t consider Jarvis’s rules to be sacred or unchanging,” Leisa Anslinger and Daniel S. Mulhall wrote in the magazine, “but they do provide a valuable tool to help us rethink how we are to be a church in the twenty-first century.”
It is with some considerable relief that I read What Would Google Do? today and find that its gospel still stands. But then, as I said at the beginning, this is not really a book about Google but about the changes overtaking our world. Those changes only prove to be more disruptive—and more important to understand—by the day.
. 
was invaluable for my writing of Public Parts. It is a brief but comprehensive survey of the importance of Wikileaks and the state of openness and transparency in government and society. Micah — with Andrew Rasiej, a leader of the Personal Democracy Forum — is tough on the current administration and its promises and delivery regarding openness. Highly readable, very authoritative, highly recommended. 
is a creative, clever, clear, and concise (the alliteration is accidental, I assure you) guide to how media reached its place in society. She told me after finishing it that it was terribly hard work and she hopes not to do it again. But I hope she lies. 
is his best so far because I think it captures his voice and is authenticity. I’m reminded of him at South by Southwest when he stood on stage and did nothing but converse with his public. That’s what he does here, giving his best and most direct and honest advice. 
is indeed a challenge to the ideas in my last book. We look at Google and the consequences of its size and success through different ends of the telescope. I wish we’d had the chance to debate the topic more often and I can’t wait to see what he turns to next. 
(just coming out in paperback) is a wonderful account of creativity. I particularly enjoyed his contribution to the discussion of serendipity and its modern fate. 
. He examines an interesting angle on our current debates on real names and real identities: when are we authentic? 
. Eiseinstein is the premier Gutenberg scholar, author of 
, which was utterly invaluable in my research and in shaping my thinking about the parallels between Gutenberg’s disruption and the internet’s. I wish I’d received her new book earlier but even as I edited the final drafts of my book, I was devouring her latest and inserting bits I learned. If you’re a Gutenberg geek, as I now am, you must read it. 
, is right up the alley of the next project I want to work on and so I’m about to dive in. 
. Now he has a new (and thinner) book, 
, which I downloaded to my Kindle just today. Eager to dive into this, too. 
, but since I’m recommending books and since I just finished and was wowed by this one, I might as well throw a recommendation his way. As we look at the Senate going after Google for the nebulous sin of being too big, it’s so terribly instructive to look back at the demonization of success and size that hit A&P as America’s first chain store. Fascinating book. 
. It’s not out of galleys yet but I’ve been privileged to start tasting it and it’s — as I would expect — wonderful. More on that later. 
. We bonded over social media and its opportunities for business. He had me down to visit his staff and I included that in the new afterword for 
