John Hagel comments on my recent post, All Edge, No Center:

[from comment at post]

Stowe - Sorry you were disappointed by our interview with Wharton. I hope that will not discourage you from listening to Ross in terms of reading our book. I sense that we are much more aligned than your post suggests. We make the point in the book that we are in the midst of a major change in the focus of IT investment in the enterprise from process automation to practice enhancement. The new technology tools are largely being adopted in a bottom up fashion by communities of practice who are wrestling with better ways to address the exceptions that standardized processes can't cope with. The point I was trying to make in the quote above is that there is a side-benefit of making local innovation and learning more visible to the rest of the organization rather than risk having it be lost forever. But this is only a side benefit - the primary value (and the reason the new technology is being adopted within the enterprise) is that it is really helpful to people on the edge in harnessing the power of swarm intelligence and distributed communities of practice (and, by the way, much of the relevant swarm resides outside the walls of the enterprise - something that previous generations of enterprise-centric technology failed to acknowledge).

I guess I wasn't disappointed in the interview, since I didn't really have any preconception of what might be said. But maybe I was dinged by the tone or angle of the discussion, which seemed to be following familiar ruts in the road.

I am still certainly planning to read the book, and I look forward to it more eagerly now that John has cleared up my misperceptions of the authors' intentions. Thanks John.