The Age of Speed: Learning to Thrive in a More-Faster-Now World [Paperback]

I notice that most of the reviews are positive and am surprised that I have such a different view. Based on the strong reviews, I picked this as my latest airplane read. The book is divided into 36 short essays that are usually about two pages long. A lot of the material is redundant. The author has a fairly anti-blackberry bias, which is fine, I can certainly understand that, though my iPhone has been a real advantage to me in achieving speed.

He creates an easy to memorize taxonomy of people and businesses, Zeppelins that can't achieve speed, balloons that don't have to, bottle rockets, fast, but misguided, and jets which is what we want to be. It was a good start, but should have been developed more.

The book does preach against multi-tasking, something we are starting to see more of and those are valuable thoughts to consider, though I am personally not planning to give it up at this point.

My favorite essay was from the author's personal experience, racing across a tightrope, I would have loved to have seen that.

The bottom line, mildly entertaining, the author has lead an interesting life, but the book will not help you and the time spent reading it is better invested trying a different book.

I was desperate for a read for the flight back from Tampa, and finally found this book at the airport. I can understand why some folks are impatient with it and spontaneously derisive, but as someone with over 1000 non-fiction reviews under his belt, I'm going to come down solidly in favor of this book. The Lord's Prayer is short and simple and not the Bible. Let's keep this in perspective.

Any book capable of getting me to put down five pages of notes on an airplane is a five star book. Either you get it or you don't. This book is not a how to build a company book, it is a how to think about building a company in an age when you either become one with the highway, or you become road kill.

I found the presentation including the mostly dark separation pages attractive. This book is a "just enough" book for reflection, not a tome trying to prove there are ten thousand angels on the head of a pin.

Now here are my notes, don't buy the book if you do not like my notes:

+ Speed trumps privacy, expense, convenience, and fear.

+ Crackberry can drop your IQ by ten points (2.5X smoking marijuana)

+ Speed no longer a luxury, now an expectation

+ Haves and Have Nots now joined by Haves NOW and Haves Later

+ Time is the ultimate irreplacable commodity (it is possible I appreciate this author more because I see the connections--for example, on this point, Colin Gray, author of Modern Strategy, says that time is the one strategic variable that cannot be bought or replaced. This happens to be REALLY IMPORTANT.

+ Transaction speed trumps "too much attention, too much interaction"

+ Learning to save time open more options which opens more trees

+ Herd resists speed--it still has a connotation of "reckless, naughty, impatient." GET OVER IT.

+ Speed is best applied to mundane repetitive tasks, then to the repetive important. At no time does the author suggest that one should not spend TIME on the special, but he does point out that short-cuts can be justified and should not be automatically scorned.

+ 1990's pushed us into constant digital learning, but many have not gotten with the program. See Don't Bother Me Mom--I'm Learning!

+ New game is speed. Will have an impact an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE more than the present infantile Internet (this will include many of the things Google is working on, including the hand-held as THE device, voice to text, text to voice, etc.

+ the TIME VALUE of activities can now be ranked and we must learn to do this.

+ the equation of TIME, QUALITY, COST has changed. LESS TIME is needed, and that opens options for packing more value into the same old time.

+ Stress today is from the sense that being "always on" blurs the lines between work and home,. The author excels at illuminating how liberating it can be if one is "always on" BUT ALSO always free to do work from home or elsewhere. The trick here is to not confuse the OLD ideas of work as being a place and time, with the NEW ideas of work and non-work from anywhere anytime.

+ Organize based on values and passion, not time and place.

+ Those organizations that adopt this philosophy of "Results" are finding a 35% increase in the bottom line and a 100% retention rate. These are the author's numbers, I am not a fact checker, but I believe this.

+ Getting to warp speed requires elimination of drag and fiction

+ Multi-tasking is bad--it splits the brain (divide by number of tasks)

+ Constant interruptions are bad, memory is compromised and destroyed

+ The author presents an excellent quadrant illustration that I will summarize in text here (envision, in relation to speed, Succeed Fail on one axis and Resist Embrace on the other):

- Fail Resist: Zepellins (this is the USG and the US Intelligence Community--without a clue in the brave new world, wasting $60 million a year of the hard-earned taxpayer dollar).

- Fail Embrace: Bottle Rockets. This could be the neo-cons, who decided to take America's power for a test drive, clueless about reality. They broke the bank AND the rest of the world.

- Succeed Resist: Ballons, blowing in the wind.

- Succeed Embrace: These are the Jets, the ones that see that speed is empowering, that in the spirit of aikido, one can go with the flow and be empowered by the flow.

+ Lessons from bats:

- Sense opportunity

- Be flexible

- Adjust rapidly

The above is the epitaph of the US Government. We have 27 secessionist movements in the USA, and a massive public uprising in the making, precisely because our corrupt politians, our inert civil servants, and our oversly obsequious generals and admirals have all come together to betray the public trust.

There are only two points on which I would fail the author, but neither is sufficient to reduce my appreciation for this excellent work.

1) He makes a glib and uninformed reference to Competitive Intelligence, while flogging a product, WebQL from QL2. Two observations: first, competitive intelligence is passe--the new thing is commercial intelligence, which provides a 360 view, and does not focus solely on competitors. Second, Silobreaker.com is *the* commercial intelligence tool, when combined with a global network of runners, observers, indigenous and international experts, analysts, and distributed processing power.

2) The author praises Google without really understanding the company. Google is indeed fleet of foot, but it is earning $1 for every $10 million in fantasy cash given to it by the individual stockholder (Wall Street would never have made such a mistake--Google is over-capitalized and out of control). Google achieves speed with its computational mathematics (good but unregulationed and a potential economy crasher), and its total disdain for privacy, copyright, and all standards of propriety (Google steals everything it touches including your medical records and email). [For more on this , Yahoo for "Google 2.0: The Calculating Predator" -- and the reason to use Yahoo is that Google is manipulating what you see. Google can no longer be trusted.

The author ends with some suggested solutions that include:
+ Filters
+ Trusted Sources
+ Trusted Destination
+ Focus on goal not route
+ Authentic purpose
+ Aligned organization
+ Alighed individual
+ Be true to your star, others will gravitate

+ Speed and simplicity go together.

I am *very* comfortable giving this book five stars. It is what you make of it. I, obviously, found a great deal in this book, and I will leave it at that.

Well done. Righteous.

Olympic-speed skier turned business consultant (and "Speaker Hall of Fame" inductee) Vince Poscente reveals "for everyone feeling trampled by the speed of life and business, how to get ahead of the rush once and for all." He identifies four behavioral profiles: Jets (the best), Bottle Rockets, Zeppelins and Balloons.
Rarely have I seen a book that offers so little content for a $22 hardcover list price. The 232 pages are padded with 44 full-page chapter and section headings and full-page quotes like "We drown ourselves in trivia and excess." It also contains space-filling "Fast Facts" like "Thirty-six people died when the 804-foot Hindenberg exploded and crashed into the ground in 1937. It was filled with more than seven million cubic feet of hydrogen" and "Reverend Run of Run-DMC is Russell's little brother." Page 12 offers a half-page definition of a Mach number.
After reading a few banal observations (for example, Technology has made life busier and more complicated and Blackberries have the potential to erode productivity) I reviewed the index to find anecdotes on a few companies of interest and then returned this book to the library. This material might support a solid oral presentation but has been stretched far too thin for this medium.

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