The fad in business these days is to "reengineer" your company. This is accomplished by spinning off business units and flattening middle management. Every morning, we see the results of this fad as we read that AT&T, Kodak, or some other corporate entity is sacking 50,000 employees. Reengineering is like hitting a company with a neutron bomb: the buildings are still standing, but the people are gone.
Instead of showering companies with pink slips, recommends Don Tapscott in The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence, rewire them into digital nets and spread these nets far and wide. Send computing power out the door into networks that democratize corporate structure and amplify workers' contributions. This "collective, networked, virtual force" is the real engine for social growth, Tapscott says.
A Toronto-based cyberguru to numerous Fortune 500 companies, Tapscott has packed his book with stories about businesses that succeeded and others that failed in getting wired. The computers used by Boeing engineers to design its successful new 777 jet were programmed with criteria supplied by Boeing's customers. FedEx has grabbed market share by allowing people to tap into the company's real-time parcel-tracking system. On the other side of the equation are cautionary tales of the millions of "virtual aliens" employed by American companies to keyboard data in Shanghai, New Delhi, and Hong Kong.
The Digital Economy will be big among information technocrats, but the book is cogent enough to deserve a larger audience. For US$24.95, Tapscott maps the same terrain that he charges his corporate clients $100,000 to go over, making this book a bargain.
The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence, by Don Tapscott: US$24.95. McGraw-Hill: (800) 722 4726, on the Web at www.mcgraw-hill.com/. Also check out Tapscott's international oxymoron database at www.mtnlake.com:80/paradigm/moron.html.
STREET CRED
Empire without EmperorEmail Snaps
Workers of the World, Get Wired!
