➻ Last week, I pointed you to early reviews of “One of the finest books of the year … Steven Johnson’s Where Good Idea Come From.” If you followed that link, you may have found The Economist‘s review of the book, Well, what a good idea!. And, if you did, you discovered another one of the best books to be released this year (or any year), Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants. Both of them were Jack Covert Selects this month, and both are absolutely essential reading. Seth Godin thinks Kelly’s is The book of the year, saying that “If there’s justice, it will win the Pulitzer Prize.”

Most reviewers are mentioning the fact that Kevin was the founding editor of Wired magazine, but I think it’s just as important to note that, in the ’80s, he freelanced for Whole Earth Catalog, “a publication that used it’s own readers to select and recommend appropriate tools picked out of the ocean of self-serving manufactured stuff”—which is essentially what Kevin has recreated today with his Cool Tools site. Learn more about What Technology Wants at the book’s website, and be sure to check out the Jack Covert Selects review we released today.

➻ Besides thinking that Kevin Kelly deserves a Pulitzer Prize, Seth Godin wonders, What does “pro-business” mean? After dispelling some oft-pronounced answers to that question as “pro-factory policies,” short-sighted, backward-looking, anti-solutions. He writes:

Perhaps we could see pro-business strategies looking more like this:

• Investing in training the workforce to solve interesting problems, so they can work at just about any job.
• Maintaining infrastructure, safety and civil rights so we can create a community where talented people and the entrepreneurs who hire them (two groups that can live wherever they choose) would choose to live there.
• Reward and celebrate the scientific process that leads to scalable breakthroughs, productivity and a stable path to the future.
• Spend community (our) money on services and infrastructure that help successful organizations and families thrive.

Once you’ve seen how difficult it is to start a thriving business in a place without clean water, fast internet connections and a stable government of rational laws, it’s a lot harder to take what we’ve built for granted.

This is one of the longest posts Seth has written lately and I imagine he could go on for a great deal longer on the issue.

➻ If you’d like to read more about Where Good Idea Come From before you pick it up, Salon’s Michael Humphrey interviewed him this week. From that interview:

MH: Why don’t you agree with the notion that most good ideas come from epiphanies?

SJ: What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don’t just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else. Their concepts take time to develop and incubate and sit around in the back of their minds sometimes for decades. It’s cobbled together from other people’s ideas and other people’s technologies and other people’s innovations. It’s a remixed version of something.

Read more about howEpiphanies are overrated over at Salon.

➻ Jonathan Fields, blogger-extraordinaire and author of Career Renegade, posted an interview he did with Lisa Gansky today. Lisa Gansky is the author of The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing, a great new book in the tradition of books like The Long Tail and Wikinomics—that is, a book documenting a paradigm shift in the ways technological connectivity is reshaping business. Though the interview is somewhat short, it is what you’d expect from such intelligent people—an in-depth exploration of the topic characterized by poignant questions that are answered in paragraph form, not talking points or soundbites. Here is one exchange:

JF: People have been forming buy groups, sharing rent, running collective farms and organic food coops for generations. Is that meshing, too, and if so how is it different than what you’re talking about?

LG: In many ways it is ‘meshing 1.0’. Sharing is at the heart of all the examples you suggest. Yet, one important aspect of the Mesh which is not necessarily incorporated into the types of businesses you mention is using the data and partnership opportunities inherent in Mesh business models. These data (generated from the company directly or shared via partnerships), provides a company with the capacity to see the customer more clearly.

You can see where she is heading, physically and technologically, to ensure that you are able to continue to delight her. For example, RentTheRunway, ThredUp and Swapaholics each specialize in providing clothing to their customers without the need to ‘own’ the wardrobe. Second-hand shops have been around for a long time. What makes these three Mesh fashion businesses different is that they are web based (which expands their reach and convenience to the customer), they actively create partnerships, and they use data.

They also are experimenting with a variety of business models, giving them far more ability to define and refine their offers to customers, evolve their service, and delight customers and customers’ friends—aka, future customers!

Head over to the original posting, The Mesh: Business Revolution or Shiny Object? to read more.

➻ If you’re interested in what the businesses of the future will look like, you may want to join Karie Willyerd, co-author of The 2020 Workplace, for a one-hour webinar next Tuesday.

➻ Ahmad Jamal, Vindicated. That’s the verdict from Francis Davis at The Village Voice.