A few weeks ago, the Federal News Radio Book Club featured Jeff Jarvis’ What Would Google Do?

The book is fascinating for many industries — there is a false but growing thought that Google has undermined good journalism when, in fact, journalism needs to change with the times.

But times are also changing for government. This change is a bit scary. People often talk about how the change is really a mind-set, and Jarvis’ What Would Google Do? does a great job at providing a guide to this new thinking. (BusinessWeek magazine earlier this year ran excerpts of the book. I have links to the BusinessWeek pieces from here.

You can hear Federal News Radio Book Club discussion about What Would Google Do? here … we have the entire hour online.

I should also note that I wrote about What Would Google Do? in Signal magazine in my April column.

What Would Google Do? has many principles that speak to the challenges facing government agencies. The book taps into the idea that information is power, but that the real power of information comes in the sharing. Among the principles the book outlines are: give up control; get out of the way; and make mistakes well.

Read the full column here.

Along with the book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, I think What Would Google Do? is one of the seminal books on the subject of how to view information… and how to survive in the new information focused world… a guidebook for how to think about information management — and information sharing.

And a quick preview: The Federal News Radio Book Club book for April is Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World HC… Friday, April 17 at 2p on Federal News Radio 1500 AM’s In Depth with Francis Rose. More details on that soon.

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