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Extreme Competition: Innovation And the Great 21st Century Business Reformation
There are some fierce new competitors on the block, ready to engage your company, and you personally, in extreme competition. In this riveting new book, Peter Fingar and his colleagues from around the globe sound a penetrating wake-up call to governments, companies, and individuals alike. Bringing great urgency to the book's pages, Fingar makes it crystal clear that we are not on the brink of a great transition -- we've already crossed the threshold to a new economic world order. With precision, insight and clarity, he reveals the 5 key drivers and 16 new realities of extreme competition that are hidden in plain sight. This book begins where Thomas Friedman's popular book, The World is Flat, leaves off, but spares readers from Friedman's grandiloquent prose, and offers 13 concrete suggestions for action. This thought-provoking book, along with its companion video, "Extreme The Keynote" is the definitive guide to winning in the new age of global competition. Peter Fingar and his colleagues from around the globe take us on a fascinating journey of discovery of tomorrow's flat world. For entrepreneurs and incumbent business leaders alike, the implications run deep and wide. --Rajesh Jain, Managing Director of Netcore, and Founder of IndiaWorld, Mumbai, India Peter Fingar has fused a gem of a book under the pressure of the need for change. I started to read Extreme Competition and I could not put it down until I finished it, except what was necessary to sustain life. I rarely take time to 'drink in' a book about business revolution, but this book has the potential to guide a significant change in the way we look at business. --Jim Sinur, VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner Research Extreme Competition shows in concrete detail how old assumptions and business models are being rapidly obliterated by the rise of India and China and the negation of time and distance by the Internet and global supply chain management. This is the definitive guide to business success in the new age of total global competition. --Clyde Prestowitz, President, Economic Strategy Institute,and author of Three Billion New Capitalists In an interconnected world, the services sector has seen varied levels innovation, often inspired by historical breakthroughs in manufacturing. At Wipro we are pioneering the use of Lean manufacturing techniques in the digitization of business processes. This innovation is our key to surviving and thriving in the world of Extreme Competition. --Azim Premji, Chairman, Wipro Ltd., Chennai, India Peter Fingar is exactly right that a new world of extreme competition is emerging, and that business process innovation will be its primary battleground. If you don't think that the ideas in this book are important, you simply won't be in business for very long. If you do, get busy reading about how to be successful in this brave new world. --Thomas H. Davenport, Professor and Director, Process Management Research Center, Babson College. Author of Thinking for a Living (Harvard Business Press) Extreme Competition is an exciting book about the realities and opportunities of the 21st Century. Its recommendations are right on, especially Fingar's call for setting the pace of sustained innovation. Of great value are the hundreds of engaging, real-life examples. --Mark. S. Lewis, EVP and Chief Development Officer, EMC Corporation Fingar takes the normally fuzzy topic of innovation and gives it structure. His suggestions for action are both practical and visionary. --Patrick Whitney, Professor, and Director, Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology Peter Fingar points the direction to tomorrow's business success, clearly and persuasively. Extreme Competition examines how the Internet and global sourcing are changing the rules for all businesses and how yesterday's proven strategies aren't likely to make for tomorrow's winners. Fingar charts a roadmap to the future that no business person today should be without. --Stan Gibson, Executive Editor, eWeek In order to beat the competition, we must first compete against ourselves. At Cincinnati Bell we are committed to a 'defend and grow' strategy, and use bundling to engage in both defensive and offensive plays. In short, we have no choice but to be the extreme competitor described in Peter's intriguing book, nor do you. --John F. Cassidy, CEO, Cincinnati Bell Extreme Competition eloquently describes how companies must rethink their business strategies, from the ground up, to respond to the realities of 21st century competition. --Bryan Maizlish, CTO, Program Team, Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems & Solutions Today, companies must ask how an ever more connected world will change the rules in their industries. Extreme Competition offers the in-depth analysis needed to formulate those questions, and chart a path ahead. --Edward C. Grady, CEO, Brooks Automation Companies that have embraced Fingar's message are moving ahead, and creating innovative new business models so remarkable that in some instances they appear to give away their core products and services. How? Extreme Competition captures the moment and provides the answer. --Steve Towers, CEO, Business Process Management Group, Warwick, England Reading Fingar's book on the plane made up for the hockey game I missed watching. The book's pace was faster and the impact made me feel like I was on the ice getting hit. And unlike a game that is forgotten when it is over, the ideas and challenges presented in this book simply cannot be forgotten. --Dave Hollander, Co-inventor of XML, the Lingua Franca of the Internet Peter Fingar makes it clear that to survive in a world of extreme competition, it's essential to develop an obsessive, even paranoid, attention to business processes, and to manage them to support continuous and unrelenting innovation. Readers and companies that have low adversity quotients on this issue will become history, extremely fast. --Kiran Garimella, Chief Architect, GE Healthcare Financial Services Peter Fingar draws an exciting portrait of what lies ahead as globalization and technological innovation magnifies both the opportunity and competition at hand. A must read for all businesses looking to navigate this new world paradigm. --Joseph Halpern, Partner, Halpern Capital
222 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
6 people want to read
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November 5, 2007http://www.blonnet.com/2007/07/17/sto...
It wasn’t the invention of the computer that triggered a great 21st century transformation, says Peter Fingar. “It was Sputnik in 1957, and the beginning of global telecommunications,” he adds, in Extreme Competition ( www.mkpress.com ). “Now all the world’s computers are linked by the Net, shrinking the planet to the size of the screen on your cell phone.”
To him, the dotcom crash of 2000 was not the signal for the beginning of the end. “It was a signal that we had reached the end of the beginning. The tinkering phase of the Internet was complete, and now it’s time to get on with the real transformation of business and society.”
The next big thing in business, according to Fingar, is not about dotcom booms. It’s about operational innovation and business transformation, driven by the emergence of a wired world, he declares. Discomfortingly for many, “the days of market stability and competitive advantage from a single innovation are over.” So what is the path of salvation? “Today, companies must respond to new entrants in their industries that come from nowhere,” advises the author. “And they must not just innovate, they must set the pace of innovation, gaining temporary advantage, one innovation at a time, and then move on to the next.”
In the new breed of companies, the Internet is ‘a digital nervous system’ that makes “deep structural changes in their core business processes. They innovate not just with clever new products, they innovate with services wrapped around these products.”
Meanwhile, employees of modern corporations are not bound by the master-servitor bond, as earlier. Fingar cites the example of Ford Motor Company that once had its own ‘factory police force’ to monitor the men, and keep away people related to unions! “Today, specialised knowledge workers are, in growing numbers, not even employees of he corporations they serve. They are equals in creating the means of production, not indentured minions.”
Knowledge as business capital is the first of the five transformers that the book discusses. “The knowledge society is a society of seniors and juniors rather than bosses and subordinates.” The information society is more than just technology, explains Fingar. “It includes social, cultural, institutional, moral, and political dislocations during our transition from a brute-force industrial society to a brain-force economy.”
The Internet is the second driver. The author speaks of the Executable Internet or X-Internet as the next giant leap: Not page-by-page download as we’re accustomed to, but programs that execute on the users’ desktops. “The X-Internet is precisely why Google strikes fear in the heart of Microsoft, for Google isn’t basing its future on its search engine, it’s building the next-generation computing platform, wanting to supersede today’s dominant Windows platform.” Heard about Ajax?
“Internet creative destruction, round two,” reads a quote of George Colony, Chairman and CEO at Forrester Research, that Fingar cites. “Now, you’ve got brains at both ends of the wire, resulting in a high-IQ, interactive, valuable conversation…”
Extremely important read.
It wasn’t the invention of the computer that triggered a great 21st century transformation, says Peter Fingar. “It was Sputnik in 1957, and the beginning of global telecommunications,” he adds, in Extreme Competition ( www.mkpress.com ). “Now all the world’s computers are linked by the Net, shrinking the planet to the size of the screen on your cell phone.”
To him, the dotcom crash of 2000 was not the signal for the beginning of the end. “It was a signal that we had reached the end of the beginning. The tinkering phase of the Internet was complete, and now it’s time to get on with the real transformation of business and society.”
The next big thing in business, according to Fingar, is not about dotcom booms. It’s about operational innovation and business transformation, driven by the emergence of a wired world, he declares. Discomfortingly for many, “the days of market stability and competitive advantage from a single innovation are over.” So what is the path of salvation? “Today, companies must respond to new entrants in their industries that come from nowhere,” advises the author. “And they must not just innovate, they must set the pace of innovation, gaining temporary advantage, one innovation at a time, and then move on to the next.”
In the new breed of companies, the Internet is ‘a digital nervous system’ that makes “deep structural changes in their core business processes. They innovate not just with clever new products, they innovate with services wrapped around these products.”
Meanwhile, employees of modern corporations are not bound by the master-servitor bond, as earlier. Fingar cites the example of Ford Motor Company that once had its own ‘factory police force’ to monitor the men, and keep away people related to unions! “Today, specialised knowledge workers are, in growing numbers, not even employees of he corporations they serve. They are equals in creating the means of production, not indentured minions.”
Knowledge as business capital is the first of the five transformers that the book discusses. “The knowledge society is a society of seniors and juniors rather than bosses and subordinates.” The information society is more than just technology, explains Fingar. “It includes social, cultural, institutional, moral, and political dislocations during our transition from a brute-force industrial society to a brain-force economy.”
The Internet is the second driver. The author speaks of the Executable Internet or X-Internet as the next giant leap: Not page-by-page download as we’re accustomed to, but programs that execute on the users’ desktops. “The X-Internet is precisely why Google strikes fear in the heart of Microsoft, for Google isn’t basing its future on its search engine, it’s building the next-generation computing platform, wanting to supersede today’s dominant Windows platform.” Heard about Ajax?
“Internet creative destruction, round two,” reads a quote of George Colony, Chairman and CEO at Forrester Research, that Fingar cites. “Now, you’ve got brains at both ends of the wire, resulting in a high-IQ, interactive, valuable conversation…”
Extremely important read.
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