Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital...

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 470 pages
• Published by: Business Plus
• Edition: 1st Edition May 15, 2000
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0446675962
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0446675963
• Book Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Weighs: 1.6 pounds

Product Review
So where do you want to go tomorrow? That's the question Bill Gates tries to answer in Business @ the Speed of Thought. Gates offers a 12-step program for companies wanting to do business in the next millennium. The book's premise: Thanks to technology, the speed of business is accelerating at an ever-increasing rate, and to survive, it must develop an infrastructure--a "digital nervous system"--that allows for the unfettered movement of information inside a company. Gates writes that "The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competition is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose."

The book is peppered with examples of companies that have already successfully engineered information networks to manage inventory, sales, and customer relationships better. The examples run from Coca-Cola's ability to download sales data from vending machines to Microsoft's own internal practices, such as its reliance on e-mail for company-wide communication and the conversion of most paper processes to digital ones (an assertion that seems somewhat at odds with the now-infamous "by hand on sheets of paper" method of tracking profits that was revealed during Microsoft's antitrust trial).

While Gates breaks no new ground--dozens of authors have been writing about competing on a digital playing field for some time, among them Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian in Information Rules and Patricia Seybold in Customers.com--businesses that want a wakeup call may find this book a ringer. With excerpts in Time magazine, a dedicated Web site, and an all-out media assault, Microsoft is working hard to push Business @ the Speed of Thought into the national dialogue, and for many it will be difficult to see the book as anything but a finely tuned marketing campaign for the forthcoming versions of Windows NT and MS Office. Nevertheless, as Gates has shown time and time again, him, Microsoft, and perhaps even this book you may ignore at your own peril. --Harry C. Edwards --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
There's a companion Web site , and the back cover carries the message that Gates is donating his share of proceeds to charity. See also Clark's Netscape Time, p.1450. Bonnie Smothers --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reader Reviews
This book is a beacon and a lighthouse in our transforming world of e-anything you want. Bill Gates is an optimist and it shows. I think the whole book can be reduced to a quotation by Alfred Sloan, the Chairman of General Motors : « Bedside manners are no substitute for the right diagnosis. » Bill Gates analyzes absolutely all the consequences of the release of Information Technology in the Internet time onto the economy, society, administration, life. He does not take any precaution to sweeten or soften his message. You will follow this revolution, that is unescapable, or just plain die. When reduced to that the book is by far too long. But it is not only that. The book studies hundreds of particular cases were the problem was confronted, solved or refused and the consequences of this acceptation to go along with modern times or of this refusal to have anything to do with such an iconoclastic approach that destroys, makes obsolete everything that was common creed in our society. Those cases are extremely well shown and described and are superbly enlightening and entertaining. Because this book is also entertaining. You will find some real pleasure in reading it. But the book also goes beyond this. It is a book for all the CEOs and CIOs of the world. Hence it is pedagogical and didactic. It demonstrates what has to be done and it gives examples of the right solutions, and all the practical advice and even diagnosing recipes needed for any one to find their ways in the labyrinth and jungle of modern information times. The main objective then becomes to liberate thinking in business by entrusting machines with collecting and analyzing data, with the help of some human friends. When this thinking is finally liberated, business can use the speed of thought to increase its efficiency, its transformation and its progress. The general idea is that failure, slump or recession is never anything else but the inability to seize the day in these technological times. It also, here and there, explains how Microsoft navigated through all the troubled waters of change and capitalistic success. Strange enough it makes us feel and think that the word « capitalism » itself is obsolete in global times. It is obsolete because the economy, business have to give each one member of the working team that the workers (at all levels) have to become and be for the economy to work, their total independence of thought, autonomy of decision and yet integration in the wider picture of the team. He shows marvelously that there is no business that can survive if democracy, discussion, confrontation and common objectives emerging from the aforesaid are not the very core and ethics of the economy and business. He also implies that any business has to become global to survive : global by covering the whole world ; global by envisaging the totality of a problem, product, range of products, etc ; global by the desire to dominate your field completely and totally. That leads to an understood and never expressed idea that the anti-trust regulations that are ours today are passé, old-fashioned, ineffective, even dangerous because mutilating for thought, business and the future of the world. Then competition is no longer the same thing as it used to be : the competition between several firms producing or providing the same goods or services. Competition is innovation and this can only come through the liberation of thought and through a new organization of business : a firm has to literally control its whole field of activity but including innnovation and democracy in its everyday functioning and concentrating on the core issues and activities necesary for its global role to be total, and by understanding that free business thinking will always produce the start-up that may break you if you are not one step ahead of any possible innovation. A businessperson is both a visionary prophet and a convincing guru. And keep in mind that profit, both individual and collective, is and has always been, the objective of the human race. It empowers each and all human beings with the energy to go beyond even the farthest limits and frontiers. We do not venture in hostile lands if we do not aim at getting a profit out of it. Otherwise we are forced to do it : it is slavery or the gulag. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU