Book: Get Back In The Box: Innovation From The Inside Out by Douglas Rushkoff
Title:
Author: Douglas Rushkoff
Publisher: Collins
ISBN: 0060758694
List Price: $23.95
Review: Remember when eBay hit it big in the 1990s and shortly after, there was a multitude of sites offering to sell your old moldy toys for you? Name five of those other companies right now. Can’t do it, can you? That’s because most of those other companies weren’t innovating, but adopting and quickly implementing a business model that eBay had spent years developing and perfecting. Those other companies couldn’t swing it because they were jumping into an area of customer service and selling that was not at all familiar to them. Instead of concentrating on hosting web sites or selling their own widgets, they tried to think outside of the box and failed. When they should have reworked their tired business strategy, they just heaped someone else’s on top.
They should have stayed in the box. Reworked the box. Brought excited new customers and employees into the box as innovators. Made the box not such a box after all.
That is the main thesis of media theorist, Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, Get Back In The Box: Innovation from the Inside Out. If you are at all familiar with Rushkoff’s work, then you already know that this thesis is only the beginning. Having spent time as an outside consultant to many major corporations after the success of his previous books on culture and technology (, ), Rushkoff realized that most companies were far more focused on increased profits, quick fixes and hoodwinking customers rather than listening to them or improving their core business at all. It may seem strange that an author known for such proletarian and subversive causes such as consumer awareness would write a book that gets shelved in the business section at your local bookseller. As you read, it just seems right.
The first half of the book spends much of its time diagnosing our business culture, the emerging technologies around us and the desires of any given audience. In chapter three, Social Currency: What People Really Value, And Why, time is spent examining the effects of technology on a culture that seems to be ravaged by a race for commodity. Some of the most successful products and services in history are the products that rely on interpretation, interactivity and a need to be shared. Rushkoff’s diagnosis of people’s needs seems to be spot on:
“In an era like ours, where the ravages of fragmentation and isolation are felt more than ever, consumers and workers alike are looking for forms of social currency that can help them relate to one another and reforge the bonds of community and intimacy.”
In this closing of the gap between consumer and producer, Rushkoff reminds us that we are all important pieces in the symbiotic relationship called business. We may not even be that different at all.
From here, Get Back In The Box argues for a full participation in the new renaissance that is already upon us. This is where the box opens wide and the cycle of innovation begins. Citing examples of companies who have concentrated on their core competence and reworked their strategies from the bottom up, Rushkoff illustrates that some of the most successful businesses are the ones that are the most fun, most participative in modern culture and most receptive to their customers. Instead of following the trends and calling in the latest corporate witch-doctor consultant, successful companies engage in real conversation and interaction with their customers and answer the needs and wants thereof.
In the final, and arguably most controversial, of the chapters, Rushkoff calls for companies to rethink their goals and activities on an even more fundamental level. Is your business helping culture to progress or stay in stasis, he seems to ask as he questions outsourcing strategies, sustainability vs. short term profits and duplicitous charitable donations made on behalf of a company. One of the most respected and charitable companies in America is even taken to task as Rushkoff questions whether all of Ben and Jerry’s social consciousness is worth anything when the company is dedicated to selling sugar and fat to an already obese culture.
Whether you are looking to improve your business, work in a cubicle where their idea of fun is a biannual pizza party, or are simply a consumer who is tired of the barrage of profit-making schemes that seem to do nothing but fill your life with junk, Get Back In The Box is a book you should keep near you at all times.
According to Rushkoff, this new renaissance we find ourselves in “brings us to a place of almost absolute simplicity. Having exhausted the alternatives, we come to realize that the easiest path to both satisfaction and profitability is to do something well, and to do it with and for other people.” You can start by leaving a copy of this book in the office of the nearest CEO. If more companies engaged this new, open-source model that Rushkoff has suggested, perhaps the culture of business wouldn’t be such a menacing place.
Rating: 4.5 / 5
Buy a copy of Get Back In The Box from Amazon.com: .
Buy any and all of Douglas Rushkoff’s other books from Amazon.com: .
Read Douglas Rushkoff’s mind-expanding blog: Rushkoff Blog.
July 24th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
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