Acknowledgments

If you want to find out who your friends are, dump a book-length manuscript into the laps of a bunch of people and say, “Could you read this for me?” My mother, Nancy Haller, and my brother, David McAfee, took time out of their busy lives to do just that, and both read carefully and provided feedback above and beyond the call of shared DNA. My brother amazed me with his helpfulness; in the middle of preparing to move his family to Madagascar, he sequestered himself for a couple days and emerged with a set of extremely sharp comments and edits.

My great friend Anna Ivey did the same, applying her gift for clear thinking and formidable editing and proofreading skills to my initial draft. A first-time author is a sensitive and easily wounded soul, and Anna was as gentle with my ego as she was firm with my ideas and prose. I will be forever grateful to her.

Brian Surette was my editor at Harvard Business Press, and was a great colleague at every stage from conceptualizing this book to preparing it for the market. He was particularly insightful at seeing how the initial draft should be reshaped so that it flowed better, seeing possibilities that had never occurred to me. Monica Jainschigg whipped the manuscript into shape, and Jeff Kehoe was the first person from the Press to approach me about turning my initial Sloan Management Review article on Enterprise 2.0 into a book. I am grateful to all of them, and to the three reviewers who encouraged improvement and publication of the book.

The ideas that wound up on the pages here were, for the most part, initiated and stress-tested on my blog, in MBA and executive education classrooms, and in front of audiences at many conferences and seminars. I’m grateful to the people who participated in these forums by asking questions, voicing objections and concerns, and engaging with me on the subject matter. I can only hope that they learned as much as I did. I’d also like to thank David Streiff of Harvard Business School’s IT staff, who set up and maintained my initial blog, thereby allowing me to practice what I preached about emergent social software platforms.

The field research that led to the case studies opening this book was supported by the HBS Department of Research and conducted in collaboration (at various times) with Karim Lakhani, Peter Coles, and Anders Sjoman, all of whom were fantastic colleagues. So was my faculty assistant, Esther Simmons, who by now is the only hope for getting me to show up at the right place and time. Thank you, Esther, for never losing patience with me.

I want to offer special thank-you’s to Ross Mayfield, founder of enterprise wiki vendor SocialText, and JP Rangaswami, who was the CIO of the investment bank DrKW when I did my case study interviews there. I feel like they introduced me to the world of Enterprise 2.0 and helped me understand why it was worthy of attention and study. I met both Ross and JP through my student Matthew Mahoney, who came into my office one day in 2004 and announced that he wanted to do his course project on wikis. I replied that I liked Star Wars too, but that the movie’s creatures weren’t really appropriate for study at the MBA level. He explained that he was not, in fact, referring to Chewbacca, and started talking to me about a fascinating new technology for collaboration. That conversation led directly, if not immediately, to this book. So thanks, Matt.