Usiness Ummaries: The Big Idea
Usiness Ummaries: The Big Idea
Usiness Ummaries: The Big Idea
kn o w l e d g e | b e s t p r a c ti c e s | i n n o v a ti o n
Blur
The Speed of Change in the
Connected Economy
Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer
1998 Ernst & Young LLP
Perseus Publishing
ISBN: 0 201 33987 0
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the author/s
Stan Davis is an independent author and speaker and a visionary
business thinker who advises leading and fast-growing companies
around the world. He is the author of bestseller, Future Perfect, a
Tom Peters Book of the Decade Award winner.
~
Christopher Meyer is director of the Ernst & Young Center for
Business Innovation and President of Bios GP, Inc., E&Ys venture
in the application of complexity theory to business.
book features
Reading Time: 4-5 hours, 265 pages in book
In this groundbreaking book, Stan Davis and Chris Meyer deliver more
than a guided tour to these momentous shifts. They offer readers a
working model to illustrate and benefit from the new rules of the connected economy, where advantage is temporary and nothing is fixed in
time or space.
Showcasing the practices of dozens of enterprises exploring the new
frontiers of business from Amazon.com to Dreamworks SKG to
MBNA America Davis and Meyer build a new framework for delivering and capturing value, evaluating success, developing strategy, and
managing organizations in an economic world no longer determined by
static measures of supply and demand.
Blur provides a lens for bringing the emerging economic landscape into
focus a world in which change is constant; knowledge and imagination are more valuable than physical capital; products and services are
blended as offers; transactions give way to exchanges; and physical
markets take on the characteristics of financial markets.
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nutshell
This world rewards those who buck convention, like MCI, which
has reorganized every six months to release creativity, or David
Bowie, who has sold options on his future earnings as an artist.
Adaptability is paramount, as more companies build permeable
networks of business relationships with suppliers, distributors,
employees, and even competitors, and individuals become free
agents contracting their services to highest bidders.
INTRODUCTION
Speed. Intangibles. Connectivity.
As these three forces converge, every dimension of business behavior is being challenged to its core. If you think that business can be
sustained by the old rules of mass production, segmented pricing and
stable organizations, youll need to think again.
Welcome to the new economy a world where the rate of change is
so fast its only a blur, where the clear lines distinguishing buyer from
seller, product from service, employee from entrepreneur are disappearing. To profit from these revolutionary patterns of business, you
need a dynamic guide to the new economy. You need BLUR.
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The new world in which you will come to live and work.
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THE OFFER
The 10 Attributes of an Offer
Let us take a look at all these attributes, keeping in mind that the most
essential feature of all offers is that they are connected.
Anytime
Accessibility by users at any time of day is becoming a must-have for
offers of all kinds.
Real Time
This need for Speed of response in todays business environment puts a
premium on systems that can operate in real time.
Interactive
Another great benefit of online systems that eliminate the middle person
travel agent, bank teller, stockbroker (and sometimes maybe even the physician) is that they can easily be made interactive.
Anyplace
Hand in hand with anytime access goes anyplace access; this is the other
half of the mail-order boom. The trick is being able to service anyplace
access effectively anytime. Is your offer available to customers wherever
they are?
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Learning
Offer really start to get interesting when they make it possible to learn; that
is, when they can not only capture information about their use, but make
adjustments or initiate action in line with that new information.
Anticipating
Once offers have the ability to learn, its just a short step to give them
something even more blurred: the ability to anticipate.
Filtering
A special form of customization is the filtering of the wide range of information and choices that increasingly confront users.
Customizing
Customization is a major theme running through the offers cited so far,
whether they involve computers, jeans, or books.
Upgrading
One distinctive feature of software products is the constant stream of
upgrades they spawn. Once youve bought a program, it isnt necessary to
make a whole new purchase when its functionality is improved.
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Get a grip
on whats happening at this
instant, so the
right adjustment
can be made
without delay.
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Velocity of knowledge is crucial to your success. The more you give away,
the more youll get back. Spread it, get credit for having known it early,
become known as the source of interesting ideas, whether theyre original
or secondhand.
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3.
Remember, in BLUR, your skills are obsolete before you wear out, life
expectancies are lengthening, but social security isnt. If youre not creating something new all the time (the author leaves the ending of this to
your imagination).
4.
PreBlur, you moonlighted only when you needed extra money. Now that
youre managing your own stock price, you cant afford to dedicate yourself solely to the needs of your organization morning, noon, and night.
5.
A fine place to spread the word of your worth is on the Web, a great leveler of the meek and the mighty in that it gives an equal shot at a global
market to both you and the giant corporations.
6.
Even if you want to stay where you are and plan to put in some time
there, be sure you use the market as the yardstick by which to set your
compensation package.
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7.
As a free agent, with a value to market, brand it! You need to have a distinctive brand a voice, too. This doesnt mean to become distinctive
just within your department, either.
9.
Securitize Yourself