My Life Blog

I read Kevin Kelly’s book New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World practically when it came out in October of 1998. It was an inspiring read back then in a world that was immigrating to the Internet.

And now 7 years later, I thought it might be interesting to see how Kelly’s strategies have withstood the test of time. So consider this an introduction to a 10-part series (11 if you count this intro) where I look at each strategy in detail.

To those familiar with the proposed rules permit me to recount them here. To those unfamiliar with these rules, allow me to introduce you.

But first, realize that these were first written about in September of 1997 in Wired Magazine (it was actually 12 rules in the article) and then later refined and published in October a year later. Try to take yourself back to a time where the web was new to most people and most people were using dial-up as broadband was nowhere in sight. Cell phones existed, but they were bigger and were good for, well, making phone calls.

Here they are:

1. Embrace the Swarm. As power flows away from the center, the competitive advantage belongs to those who learn how to embrace decentralized points of control.
2. Increasing Returns. As the number of connections between people and things add up, the consequences of those connections multiply out even faster, so that initial successes aren’t self-limiting, but self-feeding.
3. Plentitude, Not Scarcity. As manufacturing techniques perfect the art of making copies plentiful, value is carried by abundance, rather than scarcity, inverting traditional business propositions.
4. Follow the Free. As resource scarcity gives way to abundance, generosity begets wealth. Following the free, rehearses the inevitable fall of prices, and takes advantage of the only true scarcity: human attention.
5. Feed the Web First. As networks entangle all commerce, a firm’s primary focus shifts from maximizing the firm’s value to maximizing the network’s value. Unless the network survives, the firm perishes.
6. Let Go at the Top. As innovation accelerates, abandoning the highly successful in order to escape from its eventual obsolescence becomes the most difficult and yet most essential task.
7. From Places to Spaces. As physical proximity (place) is replaced by multiple interactions with anything, anytime, anywhere (space), the opportunities for intermediaries, middle-men, and mid-size niches expand greatly.
8. No Harmony, All Flux. As turbulence and instability become the norm in business, the most effective survival stance is a constant, but highly selective disruption that we call innovation.
9. Relationship Tech. As the soft trumps the hard, the most powerful technologies are those that enhance, amplify, extend, augment, distill, recall, expand, and develop soft relationships of all types.
10. Opportunities Before Efficiencies. As fortunes are made by training machines, to be ever more efficient, there is yet far greater wealth to be had by unleashing the inefficient discovery and creation of new opportunities.

I know that’s a mouthful and I will volunteer that Kevin writes wonderfully, but his words are not accessible to some people. I consider myself one of those, by the way, so you aren’t alone if you didn’t get much out of reading the list.

But if the thought of reading the series bores you, then cut your losses now, but take away the important theme — there is incredible power in the network and as such you should embrace and support any network that intersects with your life, be it your circle of friends, your family, your supply chain, or your set of gadgets.

Think eBay, Amazon, the Tsunami Relief Fund, cell phones, blog rolls, etc.