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In Dot Vertigo: Doing Business in a Permeable World, HBS professor Richard Nolan shows how the next shift in Internet technology - the I-Net - is helping both bricks-and-mortar and first-generation Web companies stave off the competition while meeting the challenges of an increasingly unpredictable economic environment. The I-Net, Nolan explains, merges a firm's intranet seamlessly with the Internet, creating "fluid, permeable, and connected" enterprises that "truly reflect the speed, collaboration, and scalability of the network economy." Organizations that overlook the I-Net opportunity, however, risk falling prey to "dot vertigo" - Nolan's term for the first signs of trouble when an organization starts to fail because of inadequate understanding or deployment of technology.
Drawing on case-based management lessons, Nolan illustrates
how the dot-com revolution has incorporated technology as a strategy
rather than just a solution in firms of all kinds. "My work,"
Nolan writes in the book's preface, "has led me to the
conclusion that by their very nature, which is to be permeable
and fluid, dot companies have refined traditional business thinking
and approaches." In these organizations, Nolan says, technology
has so thoroughly penetrated every aspect of the business that
its activities, strategies, and functions have become transparent,
thereby circumventing any possibility of the disorienting dot
vertigo (symptoms of which include lack of shareholder value,
plummeting stock prices and market capitalizations, loss of market
share, failure to innovate, and reactionary cost-cutting).
Organized in three parts, Dot Vertigo addresses
the issue of business disorientation; the execution of the I-Net
infrastructure to increase the value of the corporation; and real-world
lessons from companies such as Cisco and drugstore.com and powerhouses
such as Charles Schwab, Merrill Lynch, and Ford that have networked
their organizations to a strategic advantage. The book ends with
a discussion dispelling what Nolan calls the "Five Myths
of the Internet": that dot companies are "dot nothings";
that legacy systems can be built upon; that the United States
is the Internet leader; that PCs provide the only access to the
Internet; and that English is the language of the Internet.
Nolan urges senior managers to look beyond these common assumptions about the Internet and instead to give careful consideration to its strategic role as their companies move forward. "The dot companies have given us a peek into the future of emerging organization structures and new management approaches, he observes. "We need to overcome dot vertigo to see clearly the implications."
- Nancy O. Perry
by Richard Nolan
(John Wiley
& Sons)
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