Ten Tips: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Economy

Whether they like it or not, it’s incumbent on CIOs to help lead their businesses through the purple haze of the new economy. Heaven knows there are lots of guides for hire and hundreds of assorted gurus with opinions on e-business innovation, marketing, business model disruption and more. We’ve tried to simplify things by assembling a guide to the most well-known and pedigreed pundits and asking them for some quick-hit advice, plus pointers for more in-depth investigation.

Thomas H. Davenport

Knowledge management, e-commerce, reengineering and enterprise systems

Claim to Fame

Davenport has written two best-selling books and many articles on reengineering and knowledge management. He is often one of the earliest pundits to write and speak about hot IT-oriented topics, such as reengineering and the role of the chief knowledge officer. He started two think tanks at major consulting companies and is a prolific writer and university lecturer.

Words of Wisdom for Today’s Business Executives

“The most valuable resource in the new economy is neither technology nor information, but rather human attention. Managers and professionals of all types should be thinking about how their own attention is best allocated and how to capture the attention of their colleagues, their customers and their business partners. The key markets in the future will be those in which attention is bought and sold. It’s an attention economy, and those who succeed in it will be those who know how to manage attention.”

Q&A

What are some common misconceptions about e-business?

Davenport: By far, the most common misconception is that success at some IT-related business objective can be achieved through the use of IT alone. Instead, success almost always derives from the human aspects of an initiative.

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

The Internet has been astounding in the breadth of the business change it has wrought. Almost every business transaction can now be done in part over the Internet. We’ve recently learned, however, that the depth of change is less than anticipated. Only a few industries have been transformed by the Internet, and the volume of business is slow to take off. It’s not frictionless commerce, but it is still amazing.

Curriculum Vitae

Directs the Andersen Consulting Institute for Strategic Change

Teaches management and IT at Babson College, where he is a distinguished scholar in residence

Teaches management and IT at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business

Member of CIO’s editorial advisory board

Writes the “Davenport On…” column for CIO

Writes the “Higher Order” column for Darwin

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.

Curriculum Vitae

ICANN chairman

Chair of EDventure Holdings, a company that invests in emerging IT companies around the world

Publisher of Release 1.0, a monthly computer industry newsletter

Sponsor of the PC Forum conference and EDventure’s High-Tech Forum in Europe

Board member of numerous companies, including WPP Group, Uproar.com, Newspaperdirect, GreaterTalent.com, Souceree, Trustworks, CV-Online, Rambler Group, IBS and Medicalogic/ Medscape

Former chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Wrote for Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Wired magazine, Forbes and Transition

Books

Release 2.1: A Design for Living in the Digital Age (Broadway Books, 1998)

Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age (Broadway Books, 1997)

Contact

For speaking arrangements, contact Dyson’s assistant, Irene Lawrence, at 212 924-8800.

Geoffrey A. Moore

Developing high-tech markets and strategies

Claim to Fame

As a consultant, Moore has helped Fortune 500 companies learn the advantages of new, disruptive technologies. His best-selling books are required reading at leading business schools, including Stanford, MIT and Harvard.

Words of Wisdom for Today’s Business Executives

“In an era of dramatic change, the key currencies are time, talent and management attention. Waste any of these and you put your entire enterprise in jeopardy.”

Q&A

What are some common misconceptions about high-tech strategy and markets?

Moore: In terms of strategy, the most common misconception is that it can be separated from execution and that execution is all that really matters. The truth is, a large number of failures in execution are from working out the flaws in strategy.

Who is the most influential person in the new economy?

I could not pick a person. The institution I would pick is venture capital companies. The top 10 companies have the catbird seat in shaping the new economy from the point of view of funding their most novel constituents.

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

The Internet empowers partnering for and outsourcing of business processes at a level of intimacy never before possible. This allows companies to focus more and more resources on what is their core value- add, thereby driving up their returns on invested capital to unprecedented heights.

Curriculum Vitae

Founder and chairman of The Chasm Group, a high-tech marketing strategy consultancy

Venture partner with Mohr, Davidow Ventures, a venture capital company specializing in specific technology markets

Former principal and partner at high-tech marketing company Regis McKenna (now known as The McKenna Group)

Taught literature at Olivet College, and received a PhD in Renaissance literature from the University of Washington

Books

Living on the Faultline: Managing for Shareholder Value in the Age of the Internet (HarperCollins Publishers, May 2000)

Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers (HarperCollins Publishers, August 2000)

Inside the Tornado: Marketing Strategies from Silicon Valley’s Cutting Edge (Harper Business, July 1999)

The Gorilla Game: Picking Winners in High Technology (HarperCollins Publishers, October 1999), coauthored with Paul Johnson and Tom Kippola

Contact

Moore can be reached through The Chasm Group at or 650 312-1940.

Chunka Mui

E-business

Claim to Fame

Mui’s best-seller, Unleashing the Killer App, coauthored with Larry Downes, was the first book to lay out the technology and economics of digitization and offered a set of design principles for creating “killer apps.” Mui also consults on changing market dynamics.

Words of Wisdom for Today’s Business Executives

“A huge percentage of the economy is connected to the Internet, comfortable with it and prepared to use it for conducting business. Rather than going after small niche markets, large companies should be targeting their core markets [on the Internet]. Rather than creating entrepreneurial carve-outs, they should be reinventing their core businesses.”

Q&A

What are some common misconceptions held about killer apps?

Mui: The biggest misconception is that you build one and you’re done. You really need to have a mechanism for continuous improvement. It just gets harder after each one.

Who is the most influential person in the new economy?

I think there are three. Gordon E. Moore, he was there so early and so dead-on in his formulation of Moore’s law. Ronald Coase, the Nobel prize-winning economist who explained the concept of transactive costs. And Bob Metcalfe, who explained why networks get big fast and why the Internet came to dominate closed networks.

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

The Internet has made the information about the businesses and products more valuable than the products themselves.

Curriculum Vitae

Senior partner with Diamond Technology Partners

Executive editor for Context magazine

Member of the State of Illinois’ VentureTECH advisory committee

Book

Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance (Harvard Business School Press, 1998)

Contact

For speaking or consulting information, contact Mui at cmui@diamtech.com.

Joseph B. Pine II

Mass customization and the emerging experience economy

Claim to Fame

Pine’s first book, Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition, which won the 1995 Shingo prize for excellence in manufacturing research, established him as an authority on mass customizing products. His acclaimed book The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage introduced the concept of the experience economy.

Words of Wisdom for Today’s Business Executives

“Ignore the hype. There’s no such thing as an ’information economy.’ As Stewart Brand likes to say, information wants to be free. It’s only when you turn it into informational goods, information services or informing experiences that customers will value it enough to pay you money. And today, customers value experiences much more than they do rapidly commoditizing goods and services.”

Q&A

What are some common misconceptions about the experience economy?

Pine: That experiences mean entertainment. That we have to entertain our customers and make them have fun. Entertainment is only one realm of an experience. The key to an experience is engaging people. You can engage people through entertainment, but you also can engage people through education where they are actively involved in the experience. You can engage people in an escapist manner, where they are doing things as part of the experience. And you can engage people with aesthetics so that they are passively immersed in a wonderful environment. We encourage companies to have aspects of all four realms of the experience.

Who is the most influential person in the new economy?

Howard Schultz, the head of Starbucks. Starbucks created an environment that allowed all the programmers working in the new economy to stay up late at night, working. It provides a place for all those free agents to congregate during the day, and it provides a tremendous example of a company that has taken a core commodity—coffee—and really turned it into an experience.

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

The Internet is the greatest force of commoditization ever invented. Because it is commoditizing all goods and services, it is forcing companies to think more richly about their products, and in many cases, they are going beyond goods and services and staging experiences.

Curriculum Vitae

Cofounder of consultancy Strategic Horizons

Fellow at Diamond Technology Partners

Wrote for the Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Chief Executive, Worldlink and CIO magazines

Taught at the University of Amsterdam, Pennsylvania State University, the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management, the IBM Advanced Business Institute and the MIT Sloan School of Management

Former program manager at IBM

Books

Markets of One: Achieving Customer-Unique Value through Mass Customization, coauthored with Jim Gilmore (Harvard Business School Press, 2000)

The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage, coauthored with Jim Gilmore (Harvard Business School Press, 1999)

Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition (Harvard Business School Press, 1993)

Contact

Pine is available for speaking and consulting. Contact Doug Parker at 105 Woodland Trace, Aurora, Ohio, 44202-8076, 330 995-4680 or dougpark@aol.com.

Mohanbir Sawhney

E-business and technology marketing

Claim to Fame

Sawhney, a professor at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, has had his research published in the California Management Review, Harvard Business Review, Management Science, Marketing Science and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. Sawhney consults for several startup and Global 2000 companies, and BusinessWeek named him one of the 25 most influential people in e-business.

Words of Wisdom for Today’s Business Executives

“There is no such thing as e-business. There is simply business. Think of e-business as a set of possibilities that allow you to improve and reinvent your business. Don’t push e-business out of your enterprise by spinning off your e-business ventures. Instead, bring it in, and make e-business part of the plumbing of your enterprise.”

Q&A

What are some common misconceptions about e-business?

Sawhney: The belief that there is a neat distinction between online commerce and offline commerce. These are just channels, not separate businesses.

Who is the most influential person in the new economy?

Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers.

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

The Internet has connected companies with partners far more deeply and has made partnerships one of the most important factors in a company’s success.

Curriculum Vitae

McCormick Tribune professor of e-commerce/technology at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University

Heads the Technology and E-Commerce (TEC) group at Kellogg

Contributing editor and advisory board member of Business 2.0, and editorial board member of Context and Silicon India magazines

Consults at companies such as Amgen, Andersen Consulting, Baker & McKenzie, Bank of America, Dell Computer Corp., Eli Lilly and Co., General Mills, USA Networks and Xerox

On the board of directors for divine interVentures, Edmunds.com, EthnicGrocer.com, HealthCite, MyPotential.com and Vest@Capital (Europe)

On the strategic advisory boards of more than 15 e-commerce and technology startups, including Asera, Autodaq and Biztro

Fellow for the World Economic Forum

Books

The Seven Steps to Nirvana: Strategic Insights into eBusiness Transformation (McGraw-Hill, 2001)

Photo Wars (Prentice Hall, 1999)

Contact

Sawhney is available for speaking and consulting. He can be reached at www.mohansawhney.com, mohans@nwu.edu or 847 491-2713.

Michael Schrage

Innovation

Claim to Fame

Schrage writes prolifically on innovation and the new economic order. He also directs The Merrill Lynch Forum’s Innovation Grants Competition, which rewards creative approaches to commercializing PhD research.

Words of Wisdom for Today’s Business Executives

“In the 19th century, a French economist by the name of Le Play observed that ’the most important product of the mines is the miner.’ In today’s post-industrial economy, it should be clear that the most important product of the network is the networker.”

Q&A

What are some common misconceptions about innovation?

Schrage: That behavior and design are squishy and soft subjects. The reality is that technology makes the trade-off associated with difficult decisions hard and explicit.

Who is the most influential person in the new economy?

The flip answer would be Alan Greenspan, Joel Klein, David Boies or Bill Gates. The real answer is that what makes the new economy new is that there is no such person.

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

It has made it way too easy for businesses to act before they think—for better and for worse.

Curriculum Vitae

Codirector of the MIT Media Laboratory’s e-markets special interest group

Writes a bimonthly column, “Brave New Work,” for Fortune

Editorial board member of Sloan Management Review

Cocreator of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Science for Development prize

Coinventer of PF Magic’s (now The Learning Co.) best-selling line of virtual pets

Books

Serious Play: How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate (Harvard Business School Press, 2000)

No More Teams!: Mastering the Dynamics of Creative Collaboration (Doubleday Currency, 1995)

Contact

Schrage is available for speaking arrangements through the Leigh Bureau at 908 253-8600. For consulting, contact Schrage directly at schrage@media.mit.edu.

Patricia B. Seybold

Customer-centric Web business strategy

Claim to Fame

Seybold’s book Customers.com made the BusinessWeek, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, BN.com and Amazon.com best-seller lists. With her e-business consultancy, the Patricia Seybold Group, she manages communities of business visionaries and technology pioneers that meet to exchange best practices. She also conducts workshops in which companies work with customers to design business processes and applications. She speaks frequently at conferences and executive briefings.

Words of Wisdom for Today’s Business Executives

“What’s the one factor that’s the best predictor of success or failure in e-business? It’s whether your company has a high-level executive who’s responsible for the quality of your branded customer experience. This executive needs to have enough clout to change business policies, pricing, channel strategies and product priorities for your entire business—not just your e-business.”

Q&A

What are some common misconceptions about e-business?

Seybold: One is that e-business is primarily about customer acquisition and lowering the cost to serve customers. Successful e-business practitioners realize that e-business is about making it easy for customers (both prospects and existing customers) to do business with you, creating and sustaining a wonderful and seamless customer experience and building customer retention.

Another is that there are e-customers. There are no e-customers. There are only customers. Sometimes they want to do business with you online. Sometimes they want to interact with you face-to-face or by phone.

Who is the most influential person in the new economy?

Jeff Bezos at Amazon. He has the courage to continue to push the envelope despite rampant skepticism about his business model.

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

The Internet has turned the world outside in. Customers are now in control. There’s a customer revolution afoot. Customers, empowered by the Internet and mobile, wireless devices, are now dictating our business practices and policies, our distribution strategies and our product development agendas. It’s great!

Curriculum Vitae

CEO of Patricia Seybold Group, an e-business consultancy she founded in 1978

Helped create the Open Software Foundation and the Object Management Group

Book

Customers.Com: How to Create a Profitable Business Strategy for the Internet and Beyond, coauthored with Ronni T. Marshak (Random House, 1998)

Contact

Seybold can be reached through the Patricia Seybold Group at www.psgroup.com/consulting/overview.html.

David Shenk

Digital culture

Claim to Fame

Shenk’s book Data Smog was the first well-reviewed book to warn about the consequences of information overload and living life at hyperspeed. Through his books, essays and commentaries, Shenk has emerged as a leading voice for balanced assessment of technology.

Words of Wisdom for Today’s Business Executives

“Avoid gratuitous complexity. Don’t rush to adopt new technologies just because others are rushing. Be mindful that almost always when adopting new tools, you gain things and you give things up. Try to be aware what you’re giving up and compensate for that. Also, be mindful of our culture’s distractedness; seek people’s attention respectfully.”

Q&A

What are some common misconceptions about the social impact of technology?

Shenk: That we should ignore it. Technorealism tries to remind people about the real consequences of these technologies and not to assume that these marketing lines are true.

Who is the most influential person in the new economy?

The one person who was amazingly influential who hasn’t gotten the credit that he deserves is Lou Rossetto, publisher of Wired. I don’t think any of this would have happened without Wired. It created a new lens so that ordinary people could see what these things could do. It helped an entire world to see this new promise. Even the greatest magazines in history didn’t have that direct influence.

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

There’s a whole new visibility to microstore operations, the mom-and-pop stores that don’t have a storefront. The best way to see this is through eBay. You get this overwhelming sense that there are people basing their lives on being able to sell their stuff. There are just so many people with a basement full of stuff who are selling it and making some sort of living.

Curriculum Vitae

Cofounder of Technorealism, a group that critiques technologies and their social and political implications

Guest commentator for National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered”

Wrote for Harper’s, Wired magazine, Salon, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and CIO

Former producer for National Public Radio, and also a former editor and columnist at Spy magazine.

Researched Japanese technology and cultural issues as a 1998 United States/Japan fellow

Served as a Freedom Forum Media Studies fellow, a nine-month fellowship at Columbia University

Books

The End of Patience: Cautionary Notes on the Information Revolution (Indiana University Press, 1999)

Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut (HarperCollins Publishers, 1999)

Contact

For speaking information, contact Shenk at or ;.

Don Tapscott

The impact of technology on society

Claim to Fame

Tapscott speaks at conferences around the world on IT policy and strategy to government and business leaders. Tapscott introduced and popularized the phrases “paradigm shift,” “digital economy,” “disintermediation,” “digital divide,” and “Net generation.” Washington Technology Report ranks him “among the most influential media authorities since Marshall McLuhan,” Vice President Al Gore says he is “one of the world’s leading cybergurus,” and the Library Journal recommended Growing Up Digital for all libraries.

Words of Wisdom for Today’s Business Executives

“The industrial-age corporation must adapt or die. The digital economy has created a new business form: fluid congregations of businesses that come together on the Internet to create value for customers and wealth for their shareholders. The key to success in this totally different environment is business-model innovation.”

Q&A

What are some common misconceptions about IT and society?

Tapscott: The biggest one is that people think that building a successful business and being socially responsible are mutually exclusive.

Who is the most influential person in the new economy?

Al Gore. Actually, he was instrumental in explaining and popularizing the Internet. Every country should have had an Al Gore.

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

The Internet is fundamentally changing the nature of the company, the way we create value for customers and wealth for shareholders and societies.

Curriculum Vitae

Chair of Toronto-based consultancy and think tank Digital 4Sight

President of New Paradigm Learning Corp.

Writes a monthly column for The Industry Standard

Is a board member of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health Foundation and a former member of the Board of Trustees at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry

Chair of the Trent University Capital Fundraising Campaign

Books

Digital Capital: Harnessing the Power of Business Webs, coauthored with David Ticoll and Alex Lowy (Harvard Business School Publishing, 2000)

Blueprint to the Digital Economy: Creating Wealth in the Era of E-Business, coedited with David Ticoll and Alex Lowy (The McGraw-Hill Co., 1999)

Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (The McGraw-Hill Co., 2000)

The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence (The McGraw-Hill Co., 1997)

Paradigm Shift: The New Promise of Information Technology, coauthored with Art Caston (The McGraw-Hill Co., 1992)

Who Knows: Safeguarding Your Privacy in a Networked World, coauthored with Ann Cavoukian (The McGraw-Hill Co., 1996)

Contact

Contact Tapscott for speaking arrangements through the Leigh Bureau at 908 253-8600 or www.leighbureau.com/contact_us.html.