Book Review: The Power of Pull

NIIT MBA - 1

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Introduction

Below is the review of the book ‘The Power of Pull’ by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and
Lang Davison published by Basic Books, a member of Perseus Books Group, New York. This
book is having 224 pages segmented into seven chapters.

“On April 13, we drop our new book — The Power of Pull: How Small Moves,
Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. We began writing it more than a
year ago, but the direct research started even further back. In some ways, the
three of us have been working on this book in various permutations since 1996.”
[- by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison]

The book starts with a story about five kids who learned how to surf together in Maui and
reached their twenties dignified to win the World Championship Tour. Maui was not known for
champion surfers. In fact, no Maui-bred wave rider had ever made earlier. Here the book is
answered to the question how this group of kids beat the odds and make it to the top of their
game.

Essentially, the youth supported by parents, applied the principles of “pull,” defined as “the
ability to draw out people and resources as needed to address opportunities and challenges.” In
addition to making expert surfers out of little boys, the power of pull influences success in other
contexts, such as online gaming, open-source software development and apparel manufacturing,
among others. Pull, the authors say, “allows us to harness and unleash the forces of attraction,
influence and serendipity”, the keys to success in our rapidly changing digital world.

Drawing us in with breaking waves and the story of surfer boys, the authors, all leaders with the
Deloitte Center for the Edge, a research arm of the global consulting giant laid the foundation of
their theory of pull as it might play out in work and organizational life.

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From Push to Pull

The authors theorize that “pull” is about being systematic in combining work and life to pursue
our passions, finding others who share our passions but bring different experiences and
perspectives to challenging performance needs, and creating conditions where we’re more likely
to happen upon interesting people resources, and opportunities even as we contribute the same
chances to others.

The book is imposing us to understand that we have been living in the old world of “push”. Push
in a business environment involves forecasting needs and then designing the most efficient
systems to ensure that the right people and resources are available at the right time and the right
place, using a carefully scripted and standardized process, which we way in other words the
‘management’.

Push has dominated every area of our lives, like school, work, media, religion, diet etc. In all
those arenas, somebody else has assessed the needs and prescribed the means of meeting them.
We’ve just gone along for the ride or not. But because of a radical transformation the authors call
the “Big Shift”, a fundamental reordering of the way we live, learn, socialize, play and work
push no longer works. Push-oriented institutions will wither away, and pull-based organizations
will develop and adopt new ways of creating and earning wealth in the digital era.

The Big Shift encompasses three waves, first is the rapidly evolving digital infrastructure
powered by technology that drives ongoing, exponential increases in micro-processing power
and data storage capacity; development of standards for packet-switched communication
networks; and improvements in fiber-optic technology. Contemporaneous public-policy changes
that removed the barriers to the movement of people, products, money and ideas within and
across. Nations have intensified the impact of this trend, allowing more vendors to enter the
marketplace, fueling global competition while increasing economic instability.

These developments, the authors say, have transformed the nature of companies from places that
exist to drive down costs by getting increasingly bigger places that support and organize talented
individuals to get better faster by working with others.

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The second wave of the Big Shift involves the devaluation of “knowledge stocks” and the
emergence of “knowledge flows” that are unhindered by geographical or institutional
boundaries. Estimating that developed economies today are somewhere in the early part of the
second wave of the Big Shift, the authors argue that proprietary technology and specialized
marketing and production techniques are no longer sufficient to guarantee long-term business
success. Product life cycles are shorter, and market share fluctuates at an increasingly rapid rate.
To stay inundated, companies must create and tap into high-value knowledge flows involving the
creation of new knowledge inside and outside their organizations.

During the third wave of the Big Shift which is yet to come, authors say push-oriented
institutions will wither away and pull-based organizations will recreate themselves so as to
develop and adopt new ways of creating and capturing wealth in the digital era.

Pull: Access, Attract, Achieve

Access is the first level of pull. Digital technology has enabled the rapid growth of large-scale
networks of individuals who share common interests. That access, in turn, increases our ability to
pull from that network the resources and people we require to address unexpected needs, the
authors explained.

For example, the authors recount the story of Li & Fung, a China-based apparel company whose
business model involves customizing customers’ supply networks down to the individual item of
clothing. It does so by working with many thousands of business partners in dozens of countries,
applying a deep understanding of the capabilities of each of its partners. Its role is to identify the
appropriate partners, define and sequence their roles in the supply-network process, and perform
quality checks to ensure that each customer is getting exactly what it needs.

The authors characterize the second level of pull, attract, as “techniques for drawing people or
resources to us that we were not even aware existed but that prove to be relevant and valuable”.
To illustrate this concept, they profile Yossi Vardi, an Israeli venture capitalist and one of the
best-connected people in technology. Yossi “shapes serendipity,” they explain, by courting

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unexpected encounters with people by hanging around in the lobby at dozens of conferences per
year. We all can follow this example in various environments by making a diverse group of
potentially relevant parties aware of one’s efforts while simultaneously filtering the actual
encounters so that the probability of a high-quality serendipitous encounter goes way up.

Achieving individual and institutional potential is the highest level of pull. It builds on access
and attractions but goes beyond that by focusing on the techniques required to reach new levels
of performance faster and, therefore, to learn faster by working with others.

On the premise that individuals will increasingly reshape institutions rather than vice versa, the
authors argue that individuals first must transform themselves before institutional changes will
occur.

Three factors are critical to this process:

1. Trajectory, or “the path toward a meaningful destination.”

2. Leverage, meaning “the opportunity to connect with others through the mechanisms of
pull.”
3. Pace, or the capacity “to move quickly when everything around us is changing at an
accelerating speed.”

Trajectory is grounded in the individual’s passion. Passion is the sine qua non of a rewarding
work life, according to the authors. Individuals must infuse their work lives with passion or risk
being marginalized by persons who do. Passion will drive individuals to expand their social
networks beyond geography and, using new modes of communication to identify the people who
have the greatest potential to introduce us to emerging challenges and opportunities on edges that
are relevant to our passions. Shaping one’s “personal ecosystem” creates leverage to explore
one’s passion, they write.

The element of pace involves maximizing one’s “return on attention.” In other words, pay
attention to the people who have the knowledge you need. Accessing knowledge, especially tacit
knowledge as opposed to mere information is both necessary and difficult. By forming
relationships with people via blogs, wikis and other social media platforms, individuals
eventually will come to know whom to trust in the realm of their shared passions.

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Pulling Leadership Along

Once transformed, many perhaps most individuals might find themselves trapped in hierarchical
institutions where information flows from the top down and budgets and operating plans rule the
day. Visionary leaders can harness trajectory, leverage and pace to transform institutions. But not
all institutions have the kind of leadership that questions the very foundations of the institution or
that is able to find and motivate talented individuals to engage in the task of transforming
institutions rather than fleeing them.

Moreover, executives need to widen their gaze and find ways to engage and collaborate with
talented people outside the organization. Once they do that, they inevitably will be drawn toward
growth opportunities on the edge, defined as “geographic, demographic and technological edges
where unmet needs and unexpected capabilities tend to arise and intersect in ways that create
rich seed beds for innovation.”

Beating up the pace in institutions setting depends on two key initiatives, the authors say:

1. Adopting new technology platforms.

2. Changing mind-sets.

Technology investment should converge around social media platforms and web services that
can be used to pull people and data together quickly, as opposed to the core technologies that
foster efficiencies in core operations, note the authors. Improvements in the latter tend to yield
smaller and smaller increments of operational cost-savings as time goes by.

Technology alone is not enough. Institutional mind-set must change, too. Leaders, first, need to
change their own attitudes and assumptions about opportunities for business success, moving
away from a “control mind-set” and toward a “collaborative mind-set.” And, leaders should
create environments that attract and reward those with questing attitudes and mind-sets.

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Conclusion: A Generic Analysis

Overall, this book is very well structured, its themes and concepts are well-defined, clearly
articulated and amply supported with cultural anecdotes and examples from business and
mainstream media, as well as scholarly research, classical and contemporary in business,
economics, anthropology and psychology. The concepts of access, attraction and achievement
are appealing and nicely supplemented with “Bringing It Home” sections that pose cogent
questions for self-examination.

The authors concluded that trust, sharing of information and collaborative work, and long-term
relationships inevitably will emerge as individuals, groups, organizations and even societies
progress through the levels of pull. For that reason, this work is likely to be more inspiring and
useful to individual contributors and to managers and directors in functions that more naturally
look to the edges for their success, such as marketing and product development. For operations
heads and senior leadership who aspire to transform their organizations, it might leave them with
more questions than it answers.

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