Clever Geek Handbook
6 October 2025

Delivering Happiness

Recommendation

Tony Hsieh (pronounced “shay”) became a multimillionaire in 1998, at age 24, by selling his first internet start-up firm to Microsoft for $265 million. Then he sold his online shoe retailer Zappos to Amazon in 2009 for $1.2 billion. This personable entrepreneur may sound like an enthusiastic cheerleader, but clearly he knows a lot about making a business grow and he’s worked hard to learn a lot about happiness. His vision encompasses a distinctive brand, a pipeline for developing talent and a creative corporate culture, all built on collegial fun and customer service. BooksInShort recommends this entertaining book. Hsieh details some of the secrets of his success, including how he and his team (a hard working crew whose surnames he never mentions) made Zappos so strong. Hsieh sees “delivering happiness” as a philosophy anyone can apply to business and all other areas of life (while wearing good shoes, of course).

Take-Aways

  • Tony Hsieh excelled at school. Even as a child, he had a drive to make money.
  • After Harvard, Hsieh went to work for Oracle, but he quickly grew bored.
  • In 1996, he and his college roommate began a web business called LinkExchange. Tony was 24 when they sold it to Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million.
  • In 1999, Tony’s investment fund helped finance Zappos; he became its CEO in 2000.
  • Zappos struggled, but remained committed to its “Brand, Culture and Pipeline” ethos.
  • The brand is built on customer service; the culture emphasizes collegiality, fun and cohesion; and the pipeline trains employees for rapid advancement.
  • In 2008, Zappos topped $1 billion in gross sales. The following year, Amazon acquired Zappos for $1.2 billion.
  • As CEO, Hsieh now devotes himself to the concept of “delivering happiness.”
  • He follows three happiness frameworks. The first gives staffers control of their careers. The second builds relationships with customers via service and connection.
  • The third offers the joy of professional pursuit, “flow” and a “higher purpose.”

Summary

Learning to Walk

Tony Hsieh grew up in Marin County, which lies across the Golden Gate Bridge to the north of San Francisco. His Taiwanese parents had high expectations that their three sons would excel at academics and music. To them, the ultimate prize was an Ivy League education and a Ph.D. Tony, the eldest son, was a high achiever in school, but he dreamed of get-rich schemes as well. He launched his first business venture, an earthworm farm, at the ripe age of nine. Backed by his parents, he purchased some 100 worms for $33.45. He envisioned a multiplying inventory, but, alas, the mud-filled worm box he built in his backyard allowed his entire stock to wiggle away. A few years later, Tony saw an ad in Boys’ Life magazine for a button-making machine. He wrote to the publishers of the book Free Stuff for Kids, asking to be included in their next edition. The editors posted his notice and his parents bought him the $50 machine. Kids who sent a photo, a stamped return envelope and $1 received a picture button. Parts cost 25 cents, so Tony made 75 cents each. He made $200 the first month, great money for a kid. When he burned out on buttons, he gave the business to his younger brother, who later handed it over to their youngest sibling.

“If you get the culture right, most of the other stuff – like great customer service, or building a great long-term brand, or passionate employees and customers – will happen naturally.”

Tony always received good grades in high school, but he focused his energy on making money. He earned $6 per hour testing video games for Lucasfilm. Then he moved on to making $15 an hour creating software for GDI, a programming company. Eager to run his own business, he tried mail order again. He developed a magic trick and placed an $800 classified ad in Boys’ Life. He quickly received his first order and recouped $10. Sadly, that was his only order, and the magic-trick business went the way of the worm farm.

College Loafers

To his parents’ delight, Hsieh attended Harvard. But once there, he mostly perfected work avoidance, procrastination, TV watching, video game playing and hanging out with friends. Yet he always managed to pull through academically. He skipped the readings and assignments in his Bible study class, since the teacher based the grade on the final exam. With two weeks left in the semester, Tony organized an online study group, inviting each participant to research two or three of the 100 possible exam topics. He compiled the responses into binders, which he sold to contributors for $20 each. Thus, he netted a great study guide, made money, did well on the exam and learned the value of crowdsourcing. Even at Harvard, Hsieh yearned to operate his own business. He and his roommate, Sanjay, took over the food concession in the Quincy House dorm. He resold burgers from McDonald’s, expanded into pizza making and began showing retaped MTV videos in the grill. One of his best customers was a student named Alfred, who bought at least one pepperoni pizza every evening. Years later, Tony discovered that Alfred was reselling the pizzas by the slice.

Bootstrap Entrepreneurs

Software giant Oracle hired Tony and Sanjay after they graduated from college. Tony liked the inspiring three-week training program. He found the $40,000 salary enthralling, but not the job, which was running automated tests. Bored, he and Sanjay started a side business designing websites. They built a site for the local Chamber of Commerce on spec to attract customers. Then they won a contract from a local mall and left Oracle. However, web design soon became as boring to them as their jobs had been. Living on savings from their college jobs, they spent a lot of time surfing the internet for new business ideas.

“Over time, as we focused more and more on our culture, we ultimately came to the realization that a company’s culture and a company’s brand are really just two sides of the same coin.”

This led them to develop the Internet Link Exchange, eventually shortened to LinkExchange, a system that created banner ads for participating websites and generated extra banner ad space to sell to large corporations. Within a week of testing LinkExchange, Hsieh knew it was a great idea. He and Sanjay devoted the next few months to expanding the network, programming it and answering customers’ emails. Five months after LinkExchange launched, a web company called Bigfoot offered Tony and Sanjay $1 million dollars for it. The offer blew them away, but when they countered by asking for $2 million, the deal fell through. Tony brought in another partner, Ali, the twin of a Harvard friend, and opened an office in San Francisco. The company had grown to 25 employees by 1997 when Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang offered $20 million dollars for it. Such a huge offer required soul searching. Hsieh listed everything he would do with that kind of money: purchase an apartment, a new computer and a large television; take a few small vacations; or maybe start another firm. He concluded that his needs were modest, and he enjoyed building LinkExchange – so why sell it? Faced with seemingly endless opportunities, the partners said no.

“I always fantasized about making money, because to me, money meant that later on in life I would have the freedom to do whatever I wanted.”

As LinkExchange grew, Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital invested $3 million. Tony hired Alfred, the Harvard pizza-slice entrepreneur, as vice president of finance. The firm opened New York and Chicago offices, and its hiring frenzy continued. Soon, Tony no longer recognized every employee. He saw that the new people – now more than 100 staffers – lacked the initial employees’ commitment and long-term goals; this diluted the company culture. As time passed, he no longer found his work exciting and motivating. When Netscape and Microsoft fought a bidding war for the company, the partners were receptive. Microsoft offered $265 million and asked Tony, Sanjay and Ali to stay on for at least a year. Instead of feeling elated, Sanjay and Tony felt deflated. They actually dreaded the “Vest in Peace” year ahead of them.

Well-Heeled

After a period of introspection, Tony walked away from the additional millions he could have earned by staying at LinkExchange. He began his now deep and abiding study of happiness, starting with exploring what he found meaningful in life. He bought a loft in a development in downtown San Francisco and persuaded several former LinkExchange employees to buy there as well. His new neighbors included Alfred, who joined Tony in starting an investment fund they called Venture Frogs. They met with Nick Swinmurn, who had just started an online shoe store called shoesite.com. He envisioned it as “the Amazon of shoes.” At first, Tony didn’t believe people would buy shoes online without being able to try them on for fit. But Nick’s pitch was persuasive: “Footwear is a $40 billion industry in the United States, of which catalog sales make up $2 billion. It is likely that e-commerce will continue to grow. And it is likely that people will continue to wear shoes in the foreseeable future.” Nick’s site was a “drop ship” store: It received orders and sent them to the manufacturers who shipped the goods. Tony decided to keep in touch with Nick and his partner, Fred, who had worked in men’s shoes at the Nordstrom department store. Nick suggested changing the site’s name to Zappos, based on the Spanish term for shoes, zapatos. Tony and Alfred decided to invest enough money to see Zappos through its first year.

“It seemed kind of silly to sell a company that I was excited about in order to start another company to be excited about.”

Meanwhile, Tony began playing poker. He gained many lessons from it, including “hope is not a good plan,” that he would eventually apply to business. He learned about tactics, such as carefully choosing a table and companions, playing for the long term, studying the game and knowing when to quit. Having kept tabs on Zappos, Tony became involved again. Soon, the start-up needed more funding to stay afloat. His former investors at Sequoia turned it down, but Tony and Alfred decided to rescue Zappos and to become more active in running it. Venture Frogs invested in other new companies, and the firm performed very well in 1999. With the dot-com collapse in 2000, however, its effort to raise money to start a second venture fund failed. Tony began to wonder if his amazing LinkExchange success was just a fluke. He wanted to pour his heart, soul and abilities into something he believed in, so he decided to devote himself to Zappos full time.

“I started noticing similarities between what was good poker strategy and what made for good business strategy.”

The next few tough years tested Tony’s talents and resolve. Every four months, he put more of his own money into the firm, which survived a round of layoffs and cuts to its marketing budget. Zappos refocused on getting existing customers to make additional purchases, and, in 2003, Tony and his team made customer service the company’s leading priority. When things were at their bleakest, Tony and Fred brainstormed a bold move: They downsized the drop-ship operation and began carrying their own inventory. Zappos teamed up with eLogistics, a firm with a warehouse near the UPS hub in Kentucky, but it failed to deliver on its promises to handle inventory, storage, management and shipping. Tony sold his last asset, his loft, and put the rest of his money into Zappos, which opened its own Kentucky warehouse. Tony gained helpful insight into the dangers of outsourcing a core competency.

“Never accept or be too comfortable with the status quo, because the companies that get into trouble are historically the ones that aren’t able to adapt to change and respond quickly enough.”

With a lot of work, Zappos’ team brought the warehouse operation under control. By 2002, Zappos had earned $32 million in gross sales, but cash was a big challenge until 2003, when Wells Fargo extended a $6 million line of credit. Zappos emerged from survival mode; that year it sold “$70 million in gross merchandise.”

“Our Brand, our Culture and our Pipeline...are the only competitive advantages that we will have in the long run. Everything else can and will eventually be copied.”

As Zappos moved its base to Las Vegas, Tony wanted to avoid his LinkExchange cultural error, so he nurtured a creative, tight-knit corporate ethos based on “Brand, Culture and Pipeline:”

  • Brand – Zappos has built its name with intense customer service. It often gives buyers upgrades to overnight shipping for free, it sends out shoes around the clock, and, instead of measuring phone call time, it uses calls to build conversational ties with customers, responding to their needs and crafting relationships as part of its brand identification.
  • Culture – The firm’s “core values” include: “embrace change; pursue growth and learning; create fun and a little weirdness; be adventurous, creative and open-minded; build a positive team and family spirit; be passionate and determined”; and “be humble.” The culture follows a one-line, pithy communication policy: “Be real and use your best judgment.” The firm compiled the “Zappos Culture Book,” a collection of employees’ statements about what its culture means to them, from practical jokes on new employees to tremendous support in times of trouble. Leaders use town hall meetings, newsletters, and more, to encourage staffers to ask questions, make comments and participate in the company’s development as well as their own.
  • Pipeline – Zappos trains staffers so they can climb the job ladder. For instance, call center employees have the ongoing opportunity to master a variety of “skills sets,” akin to merit badges in specific areas. Each time they learn a new competency, they receive a small pay increase. Zappos grants promotions over smaller increments of time, such as six months, so people can gauge and enjoy their progress. The pipeline philosophy encourages employees to seize every opportunity.

Shoeshines

As the media paid increasing attention to Zappos, Tony became a sought-after public speaker. After initial reluctance and a few rehearsed, stilted talks, he refocused on subjects he really cares about passionately and began telling genuine, personal stories. He developed his ideas about contributing to the world outside of Zappos. He taught his beliefs about “values-based” business and “delivering happiness” to customers and employees. The company’s board discouraged what its members called Tony’s “social experiments,” like seminars and workshops about happiness. They urged him to focus on profits. In 2008, Zappos topped $1 billion in gross sales. To cash in on the firm’s success, the board wanted to sell Zappos, but Tony and his team sought to commit to it long term. Tony, Alfred and Fred set out to raise the $200 million needed to buy out the board. They found their ally in Jeff Bezos of Amazon, which acquired Zappos while letting it continue to be an independent operation. The companies announced their $1.2 billion “all-stock transaction” on July 22, 2009.

“My hope is this [book] will not only bring you happiness, but also enable you to bring other people more happiness.”

Tony sums up his expanded vision in this statement of purpose: “Zappos is about delivering happiness to its employees and customers.” He follows three “happiness frameworks”:

  1. This framework puts employees in charge of their own destiny by increasing their access to training and promotion, and by building “engagement” and fulfillment.
  2. The second framework harnesses Maslow’s needs hierarchy to give customers, employees and investors even more than they have to have in terms of recognition, perks and meaning so that they will be happy.
  3. This happiness-based philosophy offers the joy of professional pursuit, the pleasure of finding “flow” at work and the quest for a “higher purpose.”
“For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny.”

As a student and teacher of the “science of happiness,” Tony emphasizes the company’s meaning and vision. Zappos employees feel that they are a part of something that involves more than making money. And their boss feels the same way.

About the Author

Tony Hsieh is CEO of Zappos.com, Inc. He is a frequent public speaker.

Read summary...
Delivering Happiness

Book Delivering Happiness

A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

Business Plus,
 


6 October 2025

Merchants of Doubt

Recommendation

“As recently as 2007, 40% of Americans believed that scientific experts were still arguing about the realities of global warming.” And, of course, they were not; global warming is a long-acknowledged, scientific fact, say science professor Naomi Oreskes and science writer Erik M. Conway. They present their case that “merchants of doubt” – a dedicated cabal of conservative scientists on the payrolls of industries and right-wing think tanks – have labored successfully over the decades to convince a broad spectrum of the public that the truth is not true, that scientific fact is merely opinion, that secondhand smoke will not kill you, that industrial pollution did not cause acid rain, that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) did not deplete the ozone layer and that global warming does not exist. In this jaw-dropping, meticulously researched work of science, politics and investigative journalism, Oreskes and Conway track the shockingly long history of widespread, willful dissemination of scientific fiction in the service of politics and profits. BooksInShort recommends this sure-to-be classic to all those interested in the environment, in the processes of politics, science and media, and in learning the hard facts that underlie so much propaganda.

Take-Aways

  • For decades, a group of scientists has worked aggressively to subvert scientific fact.
  • Physicists Robert Jastrow, Frederick Seitz and S. Fred Singer, among other scientists, fought the truth to serve their conservative agendas and corporate clients.
  • They promoted doubt regarding the dangers of tobacco, acid rain, ozone depletion and global warming
  • These contrarians did little research, and the facts uniformly disproved their stances.
  • Industrial interests and political organizations underwrote their sophisticated disinformation campaigns
  • The news media came to treat these campaigns as genuine scientific debate.
  • By repeatedly asserting bogus claims, these scientists sought to undermine public faith in all science.
  • When the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR collapsed, archconservatives found a new enemy – environmentalists.
  • Their prime strategic directive was the politicization of objective scientific findings.
  • The fight against the truth of global warming has been surprisingly effective.

Summary

“The Merchants of Doubt”

During the Cold War, “extremely hawkish” physicists Frederick Seitz and S. Fred Singer feared the Soviet Union and became prominent backers of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense system. Their outspoken politics brought them into a network of right-wing think tanks, institutions, corporations and political figures. Between 1979 and 1985, Seitz worked for R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, which provided $45 million for “biomedical research that could generate evidence...to be used in court” against those suing big tobacco. After decades of tobacco advocacy, Singer cowrote a significant attack on the Environmental Protection Agency’s position on the hazards of secondhand smoke. Claiming it was harmless, he said those who sought to limit people’s exposure to it just wanted an excuse to impose government regulation. A conservative think tank gave the Tobacco Institute funding for Singer’s report.

“A small group of men with scientific bona fides and deep political connections deliberately distorted public debate, running effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades.”

Later, Seitz and astrophysicist Robert Jastrow tried to deny global warming in a report that got them invited to George H. W. Bush’s White House. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek and other media covered the report as if it offered another serious view in the “scientific” discourse. Yet, in two decades, “these men did almost no original scientific research on any of the issues” they covered publicly, launching attacks on other scientists’ findings and “reputations.” Actually, “on every issue, they were on the wrong side of scientific consensus.”

Smoke and Secondhand Smoke

When Seitz and his colleagues James A. Shannon and Maclyn McCarthy contracted with R. J. Reynolds, their task was “to fight science with science.” The tobacco industry needed data to resist smokers’ lawsuits and forestall antismoking legislation. Seitz and others provided it. As early as 1953, Reader’s Digest, then the world’s most popular magazine, ran “Cancer by the Carton,” exposing the link between smoking and cancer. In response, the leaders of five giant tobacco firms formulated a coordinated public relations policy to defend their industry, even though big tobacco’s own research clearly linked cancer and smoking, and – by the 1960s – confirmed the addictiveness of nicotine.

“A key strategy…was to create the appearance that the claims being promoted were scientific.”

Behind closed doors, “the tobacco industry knew the dangers of smoking.” But Seitz and his colleagues fought every new release of data that confirmed what the industry already knew. By the mid-1980s, tobacco had spent more than $100 million on biomedical research. Then their scientists distorted their findings to try to blunt the rapidly emerging truth. As federal authorities found the tobacco giants guilty of breaking racketeering laws and conspiring to conceal what they knew, Seitz moved along, becoming the founding chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative think tank promoting “science for better public policy.”

Strategic Defense

The right-wing think tanks that agreed with Seitz’s devout anticommunism included the Hoover Institution, the Hudson Institution and the Heritage Foundation. During the 1970s, these groups and their congressional allies wrecked the notion of a peaceful détente with Russia. They backed an arms race and sought heavy government spending on weapons. While Seitz, Jastrow and Edward Teller (the “father of the hydrogen bomb”) argued for a nuclear defense system, astronomer Carl Sagan famously declared that any atomic weapons battle would lock Earth in a “nuclear winter.” Sagan had wide credibility and a large public platform.

“Fred Singer, Fred Seitz and a handful of other scientists joined forces with think tanks and private corporations to challenge scientific evidence.”

Department of Defense and CIA assessments of Soviet military strength in the late 1970s cast the USSR as far weaker than the US. Teller and his compatriots disagreed. Seeking an alternative view, they created a coalition of noted anti-Soviet hawks and called it “Team B.” They “cast the Soviet effort in the most alarming possible light.” When Reagan was elected, he promoted the Star Wars defense system of offensive and defensive nuclear weapons orbiting the Earth. Sagan joined many others in opposing Star Wars, debunking its false science and its underlying propaganda. He and his colleagues produced a report on everything untenable about Star Wars.

“Seitz and his colleagues would fight the facts and merchandise doubt all the way.”

Under the Marshall Institute’s auspices, Jastrow vowed to fight these opponents. With others, he launched personal attacks against Sagan, and far-fetched but well-presented assaults on the legitimate science in Sagan’s report. The attacks sought to confuse people about both positions. The Jastrow side understood that neither the public nor Congress knew enough science to make a choice based on the merits of scientific arguments. When Jastrow’s legitimately credentialed scientists loudly presented “phony science,” they set a model for their future ideological attacks.

Acid Rain

“For decades, preservationist environmentalism remained bipartisan.” President Richard Nixon, a Republican, established the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. Such bipartisanship was about to change. Take what happened with acid rain, a phenomenon that scientists in New Hampshire identified in 1963, and that scientists worldwide documented and studied over the following decade.

“Why did they continue to repeat charges long after they had been shown to be unfounded? The answer, of course, is that they were not interested in finding facts. They were interested in fighting them.”

In the early 1980s, a Reagan administration scientific panel found that most of acid rain’s acidity was “due to dissolved sulfate and the rest mostly to dissolved nitrate, by-products of burning coal and oil.” The administration rejected that panel’s findings as well as the National Academy of Sciences’ 1981 conclusion that the US should reduce industrial pollution by 50%. Reagan turned to Star Wars defender William (Bill) Nierenberg, who “hated environmentalists,” to chair the administration’s “own panel of experts,” which met in 1983. Details about acid rain’s long-term, irreversible damage appeared in the panel’s earliest reports but not in later versions.

“The Internet has created an information hall of mirrors, where any claim, no matter how ludicrous, can be multiplied indefinitely.”

Singer, a White House appointee to the panel, built ambivalence into the very process by which experts drew conclusions. In his appendix to the public report on the panel’s findings, Singer asked if reducing emissions would cut acid rain’s environmental impact. “In posing the question, he left the reader with the impression that the answer was, perhaps, no.” Over a few months, Singer and Nierenberg delayed and altered the report – “without the agreement of the full panel” – in a way that undercut its depiction of acid rain’s impact. Their strategy was clear: politicize scientific material. The lack of acid rain legislation in Reagan’s term was their victory. The White House took the stance that the government didn’t know what caused acid rain or how it originated, thus mirroring the tobacco industry’s decades-long position on smoking and cancer.

“Since no one knew the mechanism that started the hole [in the ozone layer], no one would be certain that it would not grow.”

The media echoed the “doubters’” relentless espousal of confusion as if that fit the facts, which it did not. In 2007, the Marshall Institute still claimed that acid rain destruction was “largely hypothetical.” The strategy of “sowing doubt” is astonishingly successful. In the future, doubters will not just “tamper with the peer review process,” they will “reject the science itself.”

The Ozone Hole

“The idea that human activities might be damaging the Earth’s protective ozone layer first entered the public mind in 1970.” Chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were at the root of the damage. If the ozone layer became depleted, humans would have less protection against ultraviolet radiation, proven to cause skin cancer. At the time, manufacturers produced “billions of pounds of CFCs...every year for use in spray cans, air conditioners and refrigerators.”

“ The expedition provided the ‘smoking gun’ by showing a strong correlation between high chlorine levels and low ozone levels.”

The aerosol industry instantly counterattacked scientific claims that CFCs caused ozone damage. Industry groups dispensed millions for research grants, seeking to disprove any connection between CFCs and global warming. A government panel recommended banning all CFC emissions immediately, but it shifted the weight of enacting its conclusion to the Academy of Science, where the “leadership was not pleased to be stuck with the job of deciding whether or not to extinguish the $1 billion per year CFC spray industry.” The CFC lobby fought hard, but the fervent race to enact regulation surprised the industry, as did the grassroots response: Consumers were voluntarily abandoning CFC products. “In 1977, CFC propellant use had already dropped by three-quarters.” The 1979 ban on CFCs only codified what was already in practice.

“The protocol was revised to include a complete ban on the manufacture of chlorofluorocarbons.”

In 1985, the British Antarctica Survey announced the discovery of a huge, worrying ozone hole over Antarctica. Scientific deniers made much of the fact that NASA’s orbiting satellite found no such hole. Further study showed that Antarctic ozone levels were so extraordinarily low that the satellite’s detection software mistook actual conditions for a glitch in its own processing, and so rejected the data. Later studies confirmed the hole, leading to even more stringent bans on CFCs. So “if environmental regulation should be based on science, then ozone is a success story.”

“Meanwhile, something very interesting had happened: American people had already started to change their habits.”

But, as before, conservative and radical free-market think tanks opposed any limit on profit-making substances and denied scientific facts. Even after CFC regulation, the doubters pushed their position: You cannot trust science, and a counternarrative always exists, no matter how fantastic. One counternarrative cast ozone depletion as the “extremist” scientific community’s conspiracy to acquire more funding for unneeded research. Singer spoke for this theory, and his first shot was a front-page article on “the ozone scare” in The Wall Street Journal. He had three propositions: “The science is incomplete and uncertain; replacing CFCs will be difficult, dangerous and expensive; and the scientific community is corrupt and motivated by self-interest and political ideology.” Singer flogged these ideas despite the hypocrisy of suggesting that others acted as he did.

“Nearly every American knew that smoking caused cancer, but still tobacco industry executives successfully promoted and sustained doubt.”

Singer established a nonprofit to push these views, and soon he had a powerful ally: Dixy Lee Ray – former governor of Washington state, former “zoologist and head of the Atomic Energy Commission” – proved a strident, media-friendly advocate. She listed the ozone hole, among other issues, as “‘scares’ promoted by environmentalists.” She seemed credible, having written a 1993 book called Environmental Overkill. Between 1988 and 1995, Singer continued to say ozone research was wrongheaded and motivated by greed.

Global Warming

Bill Nierenberg headed the Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee at the National Academy of Science. Unable to agree on a conclusion, the committee produced separate chapters, authored and signed by individuals. The chapters written by the natural scientists were straightforward: “No one challenged the basic claim that warming would occur with serious physical and biological ramifications.” Nierenberg’s allies offered a number of concocted hypotheses regarding the cause and, they claimed, short-term duration of any warming. A peer reviewer of the report, Alvin Weinberg, a physicist in charge of the Oak Ridge National Lab, found it “seriously flawed in its underlying analysis and in its conclusions.” That happened because certain members of the reporting panel hoped to create precisely such an impression. “The devil was not in the details. It was the main story. CO2 was a greenhouse gas. It trapped heat. So if you increased CO2, the Earth would warm up.”

“No one challenged the basic claim that warming would occur with serious physical and biological ramifications.”

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR’s reign ended. Institutions like the Marshall Institute, where Nierenberg was on the board, turned their attention from Russia to environmentalism. The Marshall Institute released a contrarian’s report claiming that most atmospheric warming had taken place prior to 1940; thus, warming was not a product of increased industrialization and emissions. “Jastrow, Nierenberg and Seitz had cherry-picked the data,” choosing only the facts that suited their argument. The three continued to attack all reports and commissions that studied the topic. Seitz used The New Republic and The Wall Street Journal as his primary vehicles. When more knowledgeable, less politicized experts wrote to the Journal asking to have their opposing view published, it edited their statements in ways that weakened their arguments. George H. W. Bush’s White House and the Journal continued to give credibility to the Marshall Institute’s contentions and, because they did, so did millions of citizens.

About the Authors

University of San Diego history and science studies professor Naomi Oreskes wrote “Beyond the Ivory Tower,” a global warming study in Science. Erik M. Conway has written four books, among them Atmospheric Science at NASA: A History.

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Merchants of Doubt

Book Merchants of Doubt

How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

Bloomsbury Press,
 


6 October 2025

Macrowikinomics

Recommendation

Welcome to your new world, courtesy of the digital revolution. Sorry, but you won’t be able to skate by as a passive, disinterested observer. Figuratively, the Internet is forcing you to get involved. Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams focus on how the online community’s “mass collaboration” is changing political and civic institutions. In this follow-up to their bestseller Wikinomics, the authors explain why technology and social media may hold the answers to some of the world’s most pressing problems. Written in a witty, sharp style, their book covers the Web 2.0 waterfront, describing how groups in industry, education, science, finance, medicine and government are creating value from “networked intelligence.” BooksInShort recommends this cogent, all-encompassing guide to the digital future but warns readers of Wikinomics to brace themselves for some repetition. Start reading soon, because change is accelerating every second.

Take-Aways

  • “Macrowikinomics” is the application of “the art and science of mass collaboration in business” to societal sectors such as business, government, education and science.
  • Macrowikinomics can help humanity solve some of its most grueling challenges.
  • The Internet upends conventional rigid, hierarchical social and business institutions.
  • “Collaboration, openness, sharing, integrity and interdependence” underlie Web 2.0.
  • Online collectives and shared “open source” resources will reshape many areas of society.
  • Scientists benefit from online collaborators who build on their work. For instance, sharing research creates “a green commons” among those who solve energy problems.
  • Ride sharing, car sharing and electric car charging stations will change how people view car ownership. Banking changes will make borrowers and lenders connect in new ways.
  • Universities will advance “collaborative knowledge” by putting curricula online.
  • Your online “Personal Health Page” (PHP) will track and monitor your health care.
  • To implement macrowikinomics in your company, involve the young, tech-savvy “Net Generation.”

Summary

Empowering the World

On January 12, 2010, a massive earthquake struck Haiti. Within an hour of learning about the quake, the people behind the “crisis-mapping” website, Ushahidi, were coordinating global relief efforts to “crowdsource assistance” for the devastated country. Ushahidi relied on hundreds of volunteers to translate Creole texts into English, to access maps in order to locate survivors and to coordinate food supplies. Aid workers on the ground in Haiti could access Ushahidi to relay translated cellphone messages from the wounded and trapped, allowing rescuers to find victims quickly. No government or international agency created or controls Ushahidi. Kenyan attorney Ory Okolloh founded it when he realized that an “Internet mapping solution” could rapidly marshal resources in crisis situations and could deliver unbiased information without waiting for or relying on formal entities to take the lead.

“Given an open platform and a complement of simple tools...ordinary people can create effective new information services that are speedier and more resilient than traditional bureaucratic channels.”

The Internet’s ability to empower individuals by providing them with information and tools upends the conventional, top-down functions of most social and business institutions. “Open-source” information and cooperation allow people to take responsibility for their own needs and make them active participants rather than passive recipients. The growth of social media heralds a sea change in human history: Now, each individual can change the world – literally. Applying “wikinomics,” or “the art and science of mass collaboration in business” to macro, societal sectors such as “government, education, science...energy and even health care” crystallizes humanity’s potential to solve some of its most difficult problems.

The Power of “Networked Intelligence”

Disruptive technologies change society, but their effects can take awhile to manifest. Gutenberg’s printing press distributed once-inaccessible information to the masses, unleashing knowledge that led to the flowering of science, trade and philosophy. This sharing of learning brought about social and economic upheavals that shifted power from the few to the many, and it created new ways of thinking and doing. Similarly, today’s “digital revolution” signals a shift that is only beginning to appear; its full ramifications remain unknown. Whatever awaits, institutions will need to adapt to meet these changes. Five precepts underlie networked intelligence, or the coming together of human thought and action. Organizations must begin to understand and welcome these forces:

  1. “Collaboration” – No company or institution can survive, let alone prosper, relying solely on the talents and abilities of its employees or members. Increasingly, digital age success will rest on making organizational borders “porous to external ideas and human capital.” Tapping into the broader, more varied capabilities of networked intelligence will drive “collaborative innovation” within and among organizations.
  2. “Openness” – Greater group efforts demand greater transparency and honesty. Traditionally, most companies’ “default position” leans toward keeping information under wraps, but the sheer amount of disclosure that Internet tools and social media generate is pushing organizations to practice greater candor and openness.
  3. “Sharing” – Just as groups disclose information online, so, too, will they increasingly need to place assets such as intellectual property, curricula and software codes into “the commons.” Swiss pharmaceutical firm Novartis posts its proprietary research on diabetes online to encourage its use among outsiders who could help find new diabetes drugs.
  4. “Integrity” – Good behavior is its own reward in a transparent online environment. Trying to obfuscate or sidestep demands for clarity will taint an organization’s reputation, often beyond repair. The more trust, “honesty, consideration and accountability” among a firm’s various stakeholders, the more likely its chances of success.
  5. “Interdependence” – As ideas, cultures, information and knowledge circulate online, they create cross-border connections. Global problems like financial crises and climate change highlight the need for the “four pillars of society: business, government, the civic sector and...the individual citizen” to work together to address mutual issues.
“The world has reached a critical turning point: Reboot all the old models, approaches and structures or risk institutional paralysis or even collapse.”

Critics claim open source innovations detract from private sector gains; that is, they worry that giving expertise away in online communities reduces profit-making opportunities. But, according to Linus Torvalds, founder of user-created Linux, “That’s like saying that public road works take away from the private commercial sector.” Digital innovators enable many more remunerative discoveries than possible under traditional practices, particularly when they extend the digital revolution to finance, energy, transport, education, health care, media and sociopolitical causes.

“Rebooting” Finance

Finance – an industry based on trust – is ripe for profound change. It can’t afford to operate as it has in the past, especially now that public trust has evaporated. Disclosure, transparency and sharing could root out potential problems and avert, or minimize, the next crisis. For example, the underlying data and assumptions in banks’ risk models should be available openly so that others can judge their validity. The Open Models Company (OMC) uses the skills of “quantitative analysts” called “quants” and other experts to craft opinions on methods and probabilities used in financial products. Like a “scientific peer review process,” OMC provides asset holders, buyers and sellers with an independent valuation by using its online community of unemployed and retired experts. Investors increasingly will come to favor securities evaluated by an impartial third party, though they may face resistance from skeptical, defensive bankers.

“Conventional wisdom says that ‘being open’ is rather like inviting your competitor into your home only to have them steal your lunch.”

Changing the financial paradigm will mean connecting borrowers and lenders in new ways. “Venture Capital 2.0” will use the power of mass collaboration to fund deserving new businesses. For instance, VenCorps’ online community members vote on start-up pitches, and the company invests its funds using that input. Winners of its “American Idol for entrepreneurs” competition receive cash and access to valuable networking. Peer-to-peer banking takes the middleman – in this case, the bank – out of the loan process. Borrowers and lenders meet online at websites such as Prosper, Zopa and Lending Club, where they strike deals to their mutual benefit. Lenders receive higher interest than they would get from a bank; borrowers pay less than they’d pay a bank.

“A Green Commons”

Google Earth’s distinctive world images allow scientists to track global deforestation without leaving their research labs; it’s “a killer application for mass collaboration [for] saving the planet.” Sites such as Carbonrally, EarthLab and World Without Oil teach people about carbon footprints and energy use, giving individuals incentives through games and challenges to adopt conservation techniques. GoodGuide aims to rate every product (75,000 so far) according to its “social and environmental impact,” providing data that parallels nutritional labels. Sportswear manufacturer Nike is researching ways to recycle everything it makes. It uses the Green Xchange “online marketplace” to share its green discoveries with other environmentally aware companies.

“Many of the institutions that have served us well for decades – even centuries – seem frozen and unable to move forward.”

One day, “smart grids” will monitor household electricity use, and people will buy and sell energy credits based on their “personal carbon allowances.” Marshaling new energy sources such as solar would make passive energy consumers into active “prosumers” who could sell their excess energy production back to utilities. But mass collaboration requires leadership. Denmark and Germany are leaders in the quest for renewable sources. Denmark is a net exporter of energy and, “since 1980, has managed to grow its economy by almost 80% while maintaining the same level of energy consumption.” Meanwhile, the US spent “a paltry $5 billion in 2008” on energy research and development. Internationally, the climate crisis seems to be accelerating the search for and exploitation of fossil fuels instead of the further development of “creative alternatives.”

Transportation 2.0

Automobiles pollute (10% of world carbon emissions), they are costly to operate (Americans spend 18% of their incomes on owning and maintaining cars) and are dangerous (globally ranking 10th among causes of death). Existing electric cars are expensive and problematic to charge on the road. Entrepreneur Shai Agassi’s company, Better Place, is working on a network of open-source charging stations in six countries. Israel Railways plans to install chargers at train stations, and Agassi thinks “50,000 to 70,000 charge spots” can serve the whole nation. Such wide access to chargers would provide the crucial link to sell more electric cars, bring down the price and help the environment.

“The 21st century university should be a network and an ecosystem – not a tower.”

Zipcar, the international car-sharing company, aims to overturn people’s concept of automobile ownership. Why own a car that is “idle 22 out of every 24 hours”? Commuters in Germany and Austria can register online to carpool. Other sites create social groups to share rides and use global positioning technology to track car availability.

Wiki Living

Schools and colleges are responding to the shift in how people learn. Students no longer are content to sit in a classroom in front of a droning professor. Instead, they want more virtual teaching, distance learning and shared courseware. Major universities such as MIT and Yale are putting their curricula online. Students one day will enroll in one institution but partake of the teachings of many different universities in custom-designed courses of study.

“Your monolithic, self-contained, inwardly focused enterprise is dead or dying.”

Technology allows scientists to gather reams of raw data, but who can analyze all of it? Creative thinkers – like those behind GalaxyZoo, an “online citizen science project” where interested viewers can help decipher millions of images of outer space – are opening their research data to the Web so online collaborators can build on and refine their work. Scientific papers now boast hundreds of authors. “High-profile...contests to motivate creative solutions to grand challenges” spark innovation from multitudes of people. After all, Charles Lindbergh flew nonstop from New York to Paris in 1927 in pursuit of a $25,000 prize. Now, entrepreneur Richard Branson is offering $25 million for a “commercially feasible way to remove greenhouse gases.” The first private firm to put “image-transmitting rovers” on the moon will win Google’s Lunar X Prize.

“Those that resist, or fail to get on board, will find themselves ever more isolated – cut off from the networks that are sharing, adapting and updating knowledge to solve problems, big and small.”

Health care is undergoing a slow but inevitable transformation. In the future, patients who now are “passive recipients” of medical care will become active in assuring their own well-being. “Collaborative health care” already is a reality on websites where sufferers of chronic illnesses form online communities for support and information. Collaborative health care could transform lives by making sure each individual, from birth, has an online “Personal Health Page” (PHP). Such useful data also could spur medical research. Already, Google can advise health authorities when and where a flu outbreak is imminent by noting increases in the number of searches for flu information. Technology even could automate the leaden insurance bureaucracy.

“The process of transformation is proving...challenging, exhilarating and sometimes agonizing. But given the stakes we have no choice but to forge this new future.”

Similar movements bespeak pervasive transformation, from the proliferation of microlenders, like Kiva, which bring the global online community together to address world poverty, to paradigm shifts in various facets of the communications industry. Conventional models are in motion, from media – such as the development of shared sourcing for good or ill on The Huffington Post – to government. New regulatory philosophies call for more openness, participation and discourse, plus the protection of “the public interest” and “collective action in industry.” To reinvent your organization with “macrowikinomics,” follow six rules:

  1. “Don’t just create.” Also, “curate a context for people to self-organize” – Build the “context or...platform” that encourages others to gather, collaborate and share.
  2. “Rethink the commons” – Foster group efforts by putting your data, intellectual property and other useful assets online. But sort your “portfolio” wisely; some assets benefit from mass sharing and some require confidentiality.
  3. “Let go” – Giving up control is hard, but you’ll benefit in return.
  4. “Find and strengthen the vanguard” – Online entities must cultivate leaders.
  5. “Create a culture of collaboration” – The BBC took cautiously to collaboration, starting with staff wikis and blogs to share data internally. While hierarchy still rules at the BBC, giving lower-level staffers access made their work easier and better.
  6. “Empower the Net generation” – The youths that make up 25% of the global population are “the first generation in history to grow up digital.” Use their ease with wikinomics to move your organization forward into the promising new world.

About the Authors

Don Tapscott, a prolific author, is the chairman of nGenera Insight, a business strategy think tank. Anthony D. Williams is a senior fellow with the Lisbon Council. They co-wrote the bestseller Wikinomics.

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