Book Excerpt: The Change Function

I found some interesting online resources that explore Pip Coburn's new book, The Change Function. I think this is an important book because it challenges many traditional approaches to tech development.

Chapter One excerpt is a available below and at Coburn Ventures.

Intro excerpt (19 pages).

It's a good read in Coburn's breezy self-dialog style of asking simple but profound questions.  Coburn observes that the traditional approaches of creating and marketing new technologies honed in the past 40 years were incomplete because they ignored users' concerns and fuelled hatred and mistrust for technology.

For another angle, there is a good podcast with Coburn created by bookseller 800-CEO-Read in which he challenges the traditional engineering approach of milking Moore's Law to deliver new technologies at lower prices. Instead, technology suppliers need to consider the user's total perceived pain of adoption vs the user's crisis, he says.

Here is an online presentation (with many links) on some of Coburn's thinking, from www.changethis.com, a group of optimists dedicated to calm online dialog.

We also did a Q&A with Pip Coburn a short while ago.