We all know that global computer networks will revolutionize a wide variety of industries. But which industries will change, and how? Globalization, Technology, and Competition: The Fusion of Computers and Telecommunications in the 1990s is a good introduction to the thinking of business professors on this subject. Its 15 articles, most of them grounded in case studies, provide simple but powerful concepts for understanding these issues. For example:
- The theory of transaction costs predicts which activities a company will conduct for itself, and which ones it will "outsource" - a matter of real concern if you're doing something that your employer doesn't regard as a "core competency."
- One formerly obscure travel agency understood that it could use global computer networking to assemble a "virtual company" - a global alliance of travel agencies that can rapidly reconfigure itself to serve increasingly globalized corporate customers.
- The retail sales business is being revolutionized by companies like Wal-Mart that can use computers and networking to track their inventory in real time and respond rapidly to demand. Products keep moving, prices keep adjusting, and suppliers are kept on their toes.
- Manufacturing is increasingly global as well. We've all heard about the car whose parts are made in half a dozen different countries and assembled in a few more, with materials constantly flowing wherever they're needed - another process that takes heavy networking.
So the phenomena are complicated and the concepts are powerful. The scary thing is that the authors of the articles in this book seem to talk only to managers. Their language is a synthesis of technocracy and hype in which the present and future tenses merge into one. Of course it's great when companies can provide me with the stuff I need right away. But do you really want to be competing in real time with every person on the planet? It's a difficult question even to think about in the stratospheric ozone of managerial talk. But let's read the book, and then ask it down here on earth.
Globalization, Technology, and Competition: The Fusion of Computers and Telecommunications in the 1990s, edited by Stephen P. Bradley, Jerry A. Hausman, and Richard L. Nolan, US$34.95. Harvard Business School Press: (800) 545 7685, +1 (617) 495 6192.
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