In thier paper on pull as a new model for mobilzing resources “From Push to Pull – Emerging Models for Mobilizing Resources” John Brown and John Hagel quote William Gibson saying “the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.” Quite true. In terms of pull models the movie business has done it for decades since the old studio system fell apart. Professional sports teams (at least in North America) also loosely follow a pull model for assembling winning teams.

For decades now most movies have been produced as individual projects centered on a script that temporarily pulls various independent talents together for a time and then releases them back into the pool. In terms of product development this is a highly efficient and successful model. But please don’t forget that the old studio system did give us films like Metropolis, Double Indeminity and Casablanca.

While I have always agreed that a pull approach can harness creativity and sheer brain power in ways that more command-and-control push approaches cannot, I simply couldn’t get passed page 14 of Brown and Hagel’s paper. They exhibit exactly the kind of vague, intellectually vacuous, pompom-waving fluffiness that just plain makes me angry. Perhaps you can see what I mean in some of the examples they offer to help readers understand the power of pull.

• Li & Fung: This is a Chinese textile manufacturer and distributor. They demonstrate the power of pull by having 7500 business partners that help them satisfy their customers. Okay… they have lots of partners…
• Then there is ODM, a Taiwanese… uh… manufacture? (I think) of… uh… well I really don’t know. Clarity is irrelevant—all you need to know is that Brown and Hagel say they are another “compelling example of the application of pull models in distributed product innovation and commercialization processes.” Be sure to put that in your PowerPoints. Apparently ODM “creatively pull[s] together highly specialized component and sub-system suppliers to generate ideas for delivering higher performance at lower costs” Whatever that means. I’ll bet they help leverage synergies across the enterprise to reveal win-win scenarios for all stakeholders too.
• Cisco offers yet another compelling story of pull’s power. They “[pull] together appropriate capabilities from thousands of specialized channel partners to address individual customer needs.” You know, like pretty much every other business in existence. Perhaps Manhattan Pizza down the road is another example of the power of pull. Doesn’t Manhattan pull together the appropriate capabilities of its pepperoni partners to address my Tuesday night meat lover’s pizza needs?
• Cisco also uses e-training. They force their employees “pull” mass-produced yet “personalized” training presentations and watching them at their desks. Now that’s power! That’s pull!
• University of Phoenix is another pull success story, because they standardize their e-training material for a really really big number of students who have to “pull” the stuff across the internet with their browsers. This apparently serves students more effectively. Pull rulez!

To be a bit more serious, let me pick apart the U of Phoenix example to demonstrate just how fluffy this waste of 49 pages, toner and the power to run the printer, really is.

Hagel and Brown say “To serve its students more effectively, [The University of Phoenix] became one of the pioneers in using the Internet to help students pull educational resources to them when and where they wanted to participate in the learning process.”

To begin with what do they mean by “effective?” And effective for whom? The situation they describe (hyper-efficient delivery of hyper-standardized curriculum) strikes me as effective tool for accumulating content, but what does this have to do with the educational quality (presumably what the studen’t are interested in pulling, and how they would measure “effective”). So, is education about growth or content accumulation?

According to Brown’s own theories such a method of necessarily sequestered learning is striped of all potential social, environmental and serendipitous learning—which together provide dramatically more educational value and growth potential than plain old curricular training. Indeed Brown has already made a convincing case for the social life of information. Surely he is not now taking that back?

If we then to assume he is in fact not taking it back, then “effectiveness” cannot refer to the quality of the educational experience, nor can it be from the student’s perspective. “Effectiveness” must then be from the producer’s perspective, and refer to the economies of scale they can realize through hyper-efficiency of their distribution mechanisms and production standardizations.

But this is the language of push. This is the language of 19th industrial mass production. This isn’t the language of pull. This isn’t the language of an innovative new approach. Do Hagel and Brown even know what they’re saying? Or is this perhaps a computer generated paper that takes a theme as input and then scours blogs for related fashionable info-biscuits to assemble? Is this perhaps the result of a Chinese box, indifferent to the ultimate sematics and coherence of its output?

Hagel and Brown then go on to say “[w]hile the timing and delivery of these educational materials is customized, the materials themselves are still highly standardized.” Notice how it’s the timing and delivery that are standardized–how on earth can you standardize timing and delivery in a pull environment, since by definition you as the producer of content have absolutely no control over how and when your content is being pulled?!?!

I could go on and on, but I think I’ve made my point here: intellectually, this paper is gibberish. Perhaps it really improves in later chapters. I wouldn’t know because I reached my tolerance for nonsense by page 14. I just couldn’t persevere though the ambiguity, muddled thinking, intellectual curly-queues, contradictions, lazy rhetoric, etc. How can two people so highly regarded publish this kind of work?