Wrote articles for Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review

Taught at Boston University, Harvard Business School, the University of Chicago and the University of Texas at Austin

Served as a partner and director of research at Ernst & Young’s Center for Information Technology and Strategy

Directed IT research at McKinsey & Co. and at CSC Index

Books

The Attention Economy, coauthored with John Beck (Harvard Business School Press, 2001)

Mission Critical: Realizing the Promise of Enterprise Systems (Harvard Business School Press, 2000)

Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know, coauthored with Laurence Prusak (Harvard Business School Press, 1998)

Information Ecology: Mastering the Information and Knowledge Environment (Oxford University Press, 1997)

Contact

For speaking arrangements, contact Leading Thoughts at 781 235-4895 or leadingthoughts@aol.com. For consulting, contact Davenport at 617 454-8201.

Esther Dyson

E-business and innovation

Claim to Fame

Dyson plays a role in the governance and development of businesses on the Web and is widely recognized for her leadership role at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). She served as a member of the U.S. National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council and is commonly called on as an Internet expert.

Words of Wisdom for Today’s Business Executives

"A domain name is not going to ensure your future. It is an asset that you can possibly sell, but business is about leveraging assets, using people and building something. Issues of identity, issues of free speech are all very important and very interesting. But in the end, being successful in business depends on being successful in business, not your name."

Q&A

What are some common misconceptions about e-business and innovation?

Dyson: That it’s about technology.

Who is the most influential person in the new economy?

No single person; that’s the point. It’s a much more bottom up world than it used to be. That doesn’t mean that Time-Warner doesn’t matter. But at the same time, various people get huge amounts of press. If you look at a guy surfing, he’s visible, but if he doesn’t catch the wave right, he disappears. I would say the new economy is like the wave. Famous people like Bill Gates, whoever, caught the wave. But if they hadn’t, the wave would have gone on without them and somebody else would have caught it. They have all filled the slot that was waiting for somebody.

What is the biggest change the Internet has brought to business?

The change in the balance of power has shifted to consumers. But individuals are producers as well. It used to be that in order to be an effective producer, you had to be part of a big institution. Now, anybody with a PC can be extraordinarily productive. That doesn’t mean that everyone with a PC can be Rupert Murdoch, but it does mean that it’s a flatter marketplace, so you can find your market.