Sunday, September 24, 2006
Hugo Chavez, Please Read My Book
During his recent anti-Bush speech to the UN general assembly, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez held up a copy of Noam Chomsky’s book called Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance and highly recommended it. Since then sales of Chomsky’s book have increased spectacularly, and it even hit #1 at Amazon.com. Not bad for a book that "hasn’t sold particularly well" and whose author "does not write page turners, he writes page stoppers" according to the NY Times article I cited in the first sentence
Dear President Chavez,
About a year ago my co-author Tim McGrath and I published a book titled Document Engineering: Analyzing and Designing Documents for Business Informatics and Web Services that we think you would enjoy reading. Like you, we disagree with many of the traditional views held by capitalists about how businesses are designed and operated and we criticize them for their reactionary reluctance to adopt XML and service-oriented architectures. And like you, we disagree with the Bush administration’s approach for how to get people to adopt your ideas – trust us, we will never invade any country or drop bombs on them to impose the Document Engineering approach.
Unlike your approach, the solutions we propose are not political. Our suggestions in our book are primarily conceptual and methodological. But as we propose new ways to think about how firms can work together to automate processes and services to create new value and efficiencies, we would certainly hope that many of these benefits would flow to ordinary people and not to just the greedy capitalists whose firms adopt our methods.
You surely admire Karl Marx for his insights and visions about economic behavior and no doubt recommend his Manifesto. We think you should know that another famous economic thinker, Hal Varian, describes our book as a "MANIFESTO for the document engineering REVOLUTION" in a "blurb" that appears on the book jacket.
So we are sending you a copy of the book. Let us know the next time you come to the United States (or to Australia) so we can show you around and tell you more about our book.
Sincerely,
Bob Glushko
Dear President Chavez,
About a year ago my co-author Tim McGrath and I published a book titled Document Engineering: Analyzing and Designing Documents for Business Informatics and Web Services that we think you would enjoy reading. Like you, we disagree with many of the traditional views held by capitalists about how businesses are designed and operated and we criticize them for their reactionary reluctance to adopt XML and service-oriented architectures. And like you, we disagree with the Bush administration’s approach for how to get people to adopt your ideas – trust us, we will never invade any country or drop bombs on them to impose the Document Engineering approach.
Unlike your approach, the solutions we propose are not political. Our suggestions in our book are primarily conceptual and methodological. But as we propose new ways to think about how firms can work together to automate processes and services to create new value and efficiencies, we would certainly hope that many of these benefits would flow to ordinary people and not to just the greedy capitalists whose firms adopt our methods.
You surely admire Karl Marx for his insights and visions about economic behavior and no doubt recommend his Manifesto. We think you should know that another famous economic thinker, Hal Varian, describes our book as a "MANIFESTO for the document engineering REVOLUTION" in a "blurb" that appears on the book jacket.
So we are sending you a copy of the book. Let us know the next time you come to the United States (or to Australia) so we can show you around and tell you more about our book.
Sincerely,
Bob Glushko
# posted by Bob Glushko @ 4:23 PM 
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Mr Chavez would no doubt be well advised to read your book as would anyone else struggling with compexity in documentation. Alternatively you might ask Oprah to read it for a little marketing push.
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