Quick—what do good business and good writing have in common? Great storytelling. Success in business depends on how well you tell your company’s story to your customers. Similarly, successful writing rotates around compelling storytelling. We currently have two—count ‘em, two—pretty good business novelists in Po Bronson and Michael Lewis. Both writers are more than adequate business writers, but more importantly they’re both good storytellers.
Lewis’ current release, Next: The Future Just Happened, is probably his best work to date and documents how and why the Internet went boom with no adult supervision. Forget about the dot-com bursting bubble; innovation continues, as it always will. Lewis can’t be bothered with something as mundane as market bubbles. He finds it much more interesting to tell the stories of how outsiders have managed to create a completely new communications medium right under the rest of our noses.
To weave his story, Lewis begins with a snapshot of how his childhood home of New Orleans has been displaced as the center of commerce in the American South by Atlanta, a city that has transformed into unreality, “no longer even a city; it’s an airport, a blur of movement unrelated to anything but the pursuit of money.” From there he relates how the practice of law had changed during his father’s lifetime from a profession with perhaps marginal dignity to one of mere commercial expediency. Lewis identifies the two distinctly American instincts—democratization and commercialization—that formed and continue to fuel the Internet. And then we’re off with profiles of several youngsters—outsiders—who caused no end of grief to the adult insiders.
The central theme illustrated by Lewis’ vignettes is simple: innovative development and creativity always migrate from the edges to the center. Once they’ve reached the center, the instinct is to “raise the drawbridge” to keep out the riff-raff by establishing rules. The rules are bypassed by those on the outside edges, and the outsiders are largely ignored by those insiders at the center. Ignorance in the center transforms into denial until it’s too late: the outside edges are then either co-opted or the outside becomes the inside. And the wheel turns. This has always been the case, and it will remain so. The Internet has now become the center—or almost so, dot-com bubble bursts notwithstanding—and we have to look to the edges for what comes next.
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