Just picked up a new book that came highly recommended to me. It titled: What Would Google Do? & authored by Jeff Jarvis. It’s published by Collins Business, a division of HarperCollins, and should be avilable in most major retail bookstores, and online, of course.

The idea: Jeff tries to reverse-engineer the success of the fastest growing company in the history of the world, the one company that truly understands how to succeed in the internet age, and then take those lessons and apply them to a number of industries, companies, and institutions, from carmakers to restaurants to universities to government. 

Wild guess on who that company might be? Anymore? That’s right, Google. 

If you’d like to watch Jeff talking about his book, here is a 20 minute video to check out  -  http://fora.tv/2009/02/18/Jeff_Jarvis_What_Would_Google_Do 

Here’s the blurb from Amazon:
“In a book that’s one part prophecy, one part thought experiment, one part manifesto, and one part survival manual, internet impresario and blogging pioneer Jeff Jarvis reverse-engineers Google—the fastest-growing company in history—to discover forty clear and straightforward rules to manage and live by. At the same time, he illuminates the new worldview of the internet generation: how it challenges and destroys, but also opens up vast new opportunities. His findings are counterintuitive, imaginative, practical, and above all visionary, giving readers a glimpse of how everyone and everything—from corporations to governments, nations to individuals—must evolve in the Google era.

Along the way, he looks under the hood of a car designed by its drivers, ponders a worldwide university where the students design their curriculum, envisions an airline fueled by a social network, imagines the open-source restaurant, and examines a series of industries and institutions that will soon benefit from this book’s central question.

The result is an astonishing, mind-opening book that, in the end, is not about Google. It’s about you. ” 

I should finish it over the next week. I will let you know my thoughts on the book.