Customer Reviews

Biz Dev 3.0: Changing Business As We Know It

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I am quite disappointed with this book. First of all, I think the title 'Biz Dev' is a misnomer. I reckon, to the author, Biz Dev is an eye catcher, and his book caught my eye while browsing it in a book store.

The book is more a ragtag collection of the author's generalised statements about building strategic relationships in our networked economy. He has artfully put his generalised statements into a 9-step process, each of which is appropriately packed with bullet points, for easy reading, across the many pages of the book.

Unfortunately, the author did not give specific and detailed information about 'how to go about it' of building the relationships. He talks a lot about 'continual dealing with the future', 'embracing chaos', 'speed and simplicity' and 'pro-active partner - and customer - orientations' but he skips the prescriptive guidelines. If he has put in more personal time and efforts in building his cases and then writing them here, I think the book would be substantially a much better read.

He outlines a lot of business cases to substantiate some of his generalised statements, and at the end each chapter, he also packs with a lot of website resources. In a way, he expects readers to do a lot of home work, in order to read his book.

In fairness to the author, I reckon his book may still be worth exploring by readers who are just beginners. This is because the book can still easily serve as an up-to-date but broad-brushed introduction to building strategic relationships in a knowledge-based economy.

For serious readers into business development, I believe Peter Skat-Rordam's Changing Strategic Direction: Practical Insights into Opportunity Drive Business Development would be an excellent choice.

In my personal view, one of the excellent books to explore about building strategic relationships is Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships - The Future of Professional Services by Ross Dawson.

Both books are my personal favourites.

can be seen in this book. The over-hype of "just do it". Don't bother over things like is there a viable ROI, just make them happen.

I found reading this book to be laborious. I spent about 3 hours on it, and mostly spent my time highlighting the occasional nuggets of gold in the text, and ignoring the prose. It continously restates the same theme with slightly varied words, and the examples of powerhouse companies built on bizdev, are no longer applicable. I didn't find it worth the money, but did find a few items worth keeping. I would place this is the pile of books about the heydey of the internet, that no longer have any real world applicability.

I am an entrepreneur with a successful non-internet business. While I have had some experience with business development in the past, I found this book useful. Business development is an extremely valuable tool for any business. This is one of the only books available to provide insight into this important strategic area.

I would credit Biz Dev 3.0 with helping me focus on making use of existing and new business partners in ways I would not have considered before. I have worked for years in marketing, yet found many new approaches. A single good new idea more than compensates me for the modest time and effort I spent reading this, and I found several. The book is thorough, well-written and it packs a punch.

If you want to spend 10 dollars to learn absolutely nothing this is the book for you. Yes, its full of psycho-babble without any substance like many books written by so-called experts on the internet era. In this case, the author's prose shows a complete lack of any writing ability much less any understanding of how to run a business.

Ask yourself this before you buy this book: can somone whose company had to file for bankruptcy protection really give any valuable insight into how to successfully run a company? I think not.

August 1, 2001: Ha-Lo/Starbelly files for bankruptcy. The company was run by Brad Keywell, author of the book "Biz Dev 3.0: Changing Business as we Know it".

Brad brags all through the book about how successful starbelly's biz dev effort is. What a joke!! Don't read the book, its poorly written and the info is just plain common sense. I work in biz dev for an internet company and I can say that reading the book was a complete waste of time. I could have written something ten times better.

This further proves that just because you went to law school dosen't mean you know how to run a company or that you know anything about business. It actually means you don't know anything about business. That's been my experience with lawyers who try to cross over.