Book Reviews

Several members of the Marriott School faculty and eBusiness Center Advisory Board share insights on The World Is Flat

Richard Dance reviews the book The Influentials. The book talks about the tremendous influence 10% of the population has on the other 90%-with regards to purchasing, voting, eating, and other routine decisions. The book answers the following questions: Who are the "influentials?" What makes them tick? How do they spread influence? What are they saying today?

Richard Dance reviews the book Planning Your Internet Marketing Strategy. The book is designed for start-up to mid-sized companies. Notable chapters include discussion on strategic planning and "naming your online business."

Dr. Ralph Wilson, the book's author, was the 2001 recipient of the Tenagra Award for "Individual Contribution to Internet Marketing."

Curt Coffman and Gabriel Gonzalez-Molina's Follow This Path is an in-depth look at how employees function in the workplace. The book analyzes three types of employees: engaged, not engaged, and actively disengaged.

The book also recommends twelve ways to help "engage" employees. Emphasis is also placed on the development of talents and common errors found in businesses.

Richard Dance reviews the book E-Business - Principles and strategies for accountants. The book acts as a supplement for accounting students. Unlike some books with a technical backbone E-Business is "short, concise, understandable, connected, and useful." Even though the book was written for accountants, the contents are geared towards anyone wanting to gain a better understanding of e-business and the Internet.

Steven Johnson's Emergence is an in-depth look at how simple components become increasingly complex and develop familiar behavior patterns. Unlikely subjects such as slime molds, ants, cities, and brains are carefully examined.

For those that haven't given much thought about bottom-up organization, this book explains how people and computers work together to establish patterns and structures without really consciously trying.

Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point is an in-depth look at "how little things can make a big difference." The book explores how ideas, products, messages, and behaviors spread like viruses.The book challenges companies and individuals to focus on the subtle aspects of business and social interaction in order to produce greater results. Topics such as epidemics and the Rule of 150 are focal points of Malcolm's book.

The impact of re-engineering was internal. Now James Champy believes that businesses must prepare for the next stage of transformation which is both internal and external and must include internal shareholders, managers, and employees as well as external customers, suppliers, and partners. This book was written to help managers confront the new challenges of connectedness and interdependency.

I have noticed it's summertime and have been basking in the sunny weather and warm temperatures we are having in Seattle. I have also been trying to fit in more waterskiing (for health and fitness reasons of course). Consequently, I haven't been able to get into the book that I had previously designated to review this month. So I decided to find a book that met the following criteria: a book related to e-business, you could read it in sections, your wife and children might appreciate it, you would consider taking it on vacation, you could read parts of it between water ski rides.

Peter Keen of Keen Innovations and Mark McDonald of Andersen Consulting teamed together for 18 months to review over 80 eCommerce projects to identify the emerging business practices and principles to guide companies in the future.

Tim Wroblewski's main premise is "to become a company in the digital economy, management must develop and act upon a sound Global Digital Business Strategy" Wroblewski defines this Global Digital Business Strategy as "a set of dynamic, integrated business management and e-business decisions, custom tailored to your own firm's prospects for creating global business advantages in the new economy."

We interrupt this constant stream of e-business book reviews to bring you a new book released on February 14, 2002 entitled "Love is the Killer App" by Tim Sanders. This book is a must-read for anyone wanting to build a lasting foundation for his or her e-business. Sanders writes this book to offer a counter-proposal for business success. He says that success is NOT crushing the weak, disdaining people who are not as smart, protecting everything you know, and always being hostile and battle-ready.

In the forward to The Death of "e", Fingar and Aronica state "e" is dead because e-business is no longer an option, rather every business must be an e-business. Now that the "e" hype is over, the real work of business transformation has begun. The book challenges companies to be predictive, adaptive, and flexible in unconventional ways. It lays the foundation for the networked economy operating in the future.

This book is an in-depth and broad study of e-business and would be appealing to students with an interest in e-business or professionals who want a desk reference. The authors include a broad range of people of various ages who come together to give the reader a well-balanced e-business education. At the end of the book, the authors supply a case study on building a storefront e-business that sells books online.

This book is unique in the series of reviews that we have performed to date in that it is a publication written for CoreHarbor, Inc., an Ariba software premier provider/implementer, and forwarded by Arthur Anderson, who has long had alliances with Oracle, SAP and Ariba, among other major vendors. If your firm maintains a decentralized purchasing model (e.g., employees are empowered to buy their supplies from a company of their choosing) and is experiencing difficulty with attempts to centralize purchasing, evaluate vendors, and control costs, then this guide is tailored to you.

In last month's review (August 2001), Richard Dance set the stage for this month's book, How Digital is Your Business?, by introducing e-books. The format of this review will take a two-pronged approach - one will be to discuss the book and its content using a Q & A format, and the other will be to discuss a few of my impressions about using electronic media as a way to read. These comments are contained within the sidebars you'll see in the right margin.

As Richard Dance prepared to write the next e-business book review (an electronic book that he wanted to evaluate), he realized how far e-books have come in the last few years. In fact, Dance was so impressed with the expanding e-book market that he decided to write a precursor on e-book technology in order to prepare you for next month's evaluation of the e-book entitled How Digital is Your Business. He hopes you enjoy this new way to read, educate, and distribute thoughts and ideas, delivered right to your PC or hand-held device.

This is version 2.0 of the e-Business Roadmap for Success book. Kudos to the authors for being able to re-write the book, with such insight, less than one year from their first edition. The review focuses on the principal changes between 1.0 and version 2.0. This will alert you to the new material and revisions that are worth noting and reading and perhaps implementing at your company.

The purpose of this book is to examine the e-business blueprint and offer step-by-step guidance in choosing and implementing the right strategies to survive the e-commerce onslaught and succeed. The focus of the book is practical; first Kalakota and Robinson focus on design and strategy, then on e-commerce applications.

The purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive framework for developing Internet strategies that dovetail with an organization's overall business strategy. Their premise is that the CEO and the Executive Team should be the architect of their own Internet strategy that is connected to, and helps deploy, the enterprise's business strategy.

The purpose of this book is to explain the stakeholder model and eBiz Readiness framework so the readers can assess their e-business readiness and formulate a plan to become e-business ready.

This book is meant to cover all the topics Daniel Amor believes are required for a complete and secure e-business solution. The major question for all the technologies that he introduces in the book is "why should I use it?" His book therefore gives a historical explanation of terms and concepts.

The four principal authors from PWC equate e-business to a pictorial panorama where different snapshots can be taken that when glued together show the landscape of e-business. Hence their new e-business model talks about 4 principal snapshots.