The Future Arrived Yesterday

The coauthor of The Virtual Corporation urges today's companies to become "protean" or "shape-shifters" in the Web 2.0 world, and be ready to quickly change structure and business models to be successful in a rapidly evolving market.

A bold vision about the ways companies will adapt and be reborn in a revolutionary world where business models implode and the search is on for what will work. . . . The fate of newspapers and the music industry is a harbinger of what awaits every company: an aging business model in its death throes as people finally wake up to the grim fact that their products and the way they deliver them are completely out of sync not only with what customers want but how they want it. But Michael Malone–the author who, when the Internet was still the domain of technical experts, enabled his readers to see clearly the opportunities of the then-emerging digital age–is back and once again making sense of a future just around the corner. Business considerations such as the wireless World Wide Web, billions of new consumers, and an entrepreneurial ethos are all converging. How a corporation is organized and how people will be managed and employed will change more quickly than anyone realizes. With technology poised to connect a billion new consumers from the most remote parts of the globe, corporations will enter a volatile economic era marked by unprecedented threats and opportunities. Survival will require companies to be “protean”–nimble shape-shifters able to change direction and identity in response to a rapidly evolving international marketplace. They must, in other words, act like perpetual entrepreneurial start-ups. In our Web 2.0 world “the future arrived yesterday,” since the tools for success already exist and are the means for companies becoming protean. Malone provides remarkable insights into how this emerging corporate form will work and why it’s the key to competitiveness. Find out: • Why the traditional CEO as master of the universe will be extinct. The CEO will be a chameleon, adapting management style and attitude to each company’s constituency. • How to identify a core group of employees who will provide stability through their knowledge of the company's history, values, and culture. • How to effectively recruit, manage, and retain the best talent in an increasingly nontraditional, entrepreneurial, and peripatetic workforce. • Who stakeholders are, why they matter, and how they will extend beyond any comparable business organization to this point. • Why the rigid boundaries between for-profit and nonprofit ventures are likely to dissolve through alternate forms of value creation, resulting in hybrid enterprises. By embracing impermanence and becoming true shape-shifters, protean businesses will not only endure, they’ll come to dominate large segments of the global economy. Provocative and pragmatic, The Future Arrived Yesterday is a dynamic blueprint for a tumultuous economic age.

Today’s markets have splintered into millions of powerful consumer communities— how can businesses adapt? It’s no secret that traditional mass marketing— network television, newspapers, direct mail—is dying. Consumer markets are increasingly fragmented, even as they become more connected, transparent, and global. The future of business is about penetrating selfforming niches, from affinity groups on Facebook to thousands of satellite channels and millions of private online communities. So how can businesses reach new customers, win their trust, and earn their loyalty? Tom Hayes and Michael S. Malone urge an entirely new approach, embracing small, trust-based online groups as powerful vehicles for creating customers and gathering invaluable feedback. But what they call “marketing 3.0” isn’t as simple as setting up a YouTube channel. Drawing on many case studies, the authors offer a new set of tools for a world where attention is harder than ever to capture, but even more lucrative to hold. They explain how to use social media for a new kind of marketing—bottom-up instead of top-down, personal rather than public, subtle rather than full frontal. The payoff is a return to the power of oldfashioned handselling—turbocharged by bleedingedge technology.

Forget “business as usual.” Don’t believe everything you read about “best practices.” There is no “magic bullet.” When your market changes, you have to change your strategy and take control of your own success. You have to renew your business model. In a global market that is constantly evolving, you can’t expect “magic bullets” or “best practices”—or any stand-alone business philosophy that many books and gurus offer—to guide your company through good times and bad. Instead you need to take an active role in reviewing and retooling your strategies. You need to stop thinking “business as usual.” You need Business Model Renewal—a groundbreaking book that provides a language and multiple frameworks for how to think about and implement business model reinvention. A full-range guide to synthesizing and applying the most up-to-date thinking in business today, Business Model Renewal challenges you to re-evaluate your methods, rethink your options, and reignite your organization. Constantly challenging the mindset of “tried and true” numbers-based solutions such as market share, financials, and metrics, Gorchels integrates both traditional concepts and cutting-edge ideas to avoid the usual “one size fits all” approach that can stifle a company’s growth. You’ll learn how to build a custom-made business model that encompasses the totality of how your company produces value—including design, infrastructure, culture, operations, and more. You’ll learn how to adapt to newest emerging technologies, how to cope with the biggest market fluctuations, how to serve the latest demographic shifts, and how to plan ahead for your company’s future. Envisioning business model renewal efforts drives leaders and managers to deal with the ambiguity of future thinking. Shifts in technology, market needs, and competitive arenas can never be known precisely, but must nevertheless be anticipated. Scenario planning and other group-based, collaborative efforts to study the future are therefore necessary components of business model renewal. So, too, is corporate culture, decision making, business model portfolio design, and change management. That’s why the frameworks in this book touch on all of these facets. Business Model Renewal won’t give you seven proven steps, five key principles, or even 10 irrefutable laws. But it will challenge you to do the hard work of broadening the perspectives of your firm, the ecosystem in which it exists, the role of your personal leadership, and the followership within your corporate culture.

Bernard Comrie introduces readers to the range of variation found in tense systems across the languages of the world.