Implosion

Implosion: review by Nick Jefferson

I haven’t yet written a book. And so I take my hat off to anyone who does – the effort, thought and time required are not to be underestimated.  So bravo, Andy Law, for sitting down to write ‘Implosion’.

The problem is, it’s not very good. At all.

I don’t have anything against Andy Law. I’ve never met him, and he’s been at the helm of some incredible, and very successful, businesses.

But he’s no writer.

‘Implosion’ is, in the first instance, littered with typographical, grammatical and simple spelling errors. It needs a darn good edit. That might be forgivable if the book was otherwise compelling.

Unfortunately, it isn’t.

The ‘controversial insight into where we are heading…the exciting future that is just a few clicks away’ promised by the sleeve notes is instead, at best, a series of admirably enthusiastic but facile, highly repetitive, disconnected, intellectually incoherent, and broadly unsubstantiated breathy assertions; one hundred and forty five pages of wondering whether, etiquette-wise, you can get away with leaving the amiable-but-noisy guy holding court in the pub to talk at someone else for a bit whilst you pretend to go the bar.

In between the axiomatic-masquerading-as-insight, the faux humility, the suggestion that the internet somehow occupies the bottom tranche of Maslow’s pyramid of needs (‘being on the internet is like eating’….‘we categorically cannot do without it’), and some plain and simple Emperor’s-New-Clothes-gobbledigook, there is is the odd, vaguely interesting, idea.

Law says that ‘we have moved beyond a networked society and into a multi-contributory world’, that ‘the internet gives us huge privileges of knowledge gathering, but we are herded into a small number of vast stockades’ and he touches upon the emergence of something he calls an ‘atomocracy, a government of one’. But, much like the central thesis of the notion of implosion itself (at least in this context), these ‘ideas’ are so underdeveloped that it’s difficult to form a view as to whether or not one agrees with them.

The book’s jacket describes the author ‘as one of the world’s foremost practitioners of breakthrough business thinking’. The most generous assessment of ‘Implosion’ is that Andy Law was too busy doing that ‘business breakthrough thinking’ with his clients to have the time to demonstrate any in this book.


Nick is Managing Director of gyro @nickjefferson. Andy is Chairman of Fearlessly Frank @FearlesslyTweet. Read more from Nick and more from Andy throughout our Clubhouse.

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