Living Networks: Leading Your Company, Customers, and Partners in the Hyper-Connected Economy [Hardcover]

Ross Dawson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 21, 2002

Living Networks examines how the swift rise of business connectivity and integration is transforming how companies work and achieve success. Using an impressive array of real-life examples as diverse as the American Express Blue card, Procter and Gamble's supply chain initiatives, and MTV Europe's interactive programming, Ross Dawson shows how the flow of information and ideas through networks has become the heart of the economy. Dawson contends that as the boundaries between organizations blur, companies and individuals will only succeed if they provide clear leadership to their customers and partners on new ways of working. IBM's alphaWorks unit gives all-comers access to cutting-edge software fresh from its famed research laboratories, and gets them to help develop it into marketable products. Herman Miller provides systems that allow even its smallest suppliers to gain real-time access to orders, schedules, and engineering data, allowing it to slash its delivery times. The book goes on to provide a framework for developing strategy in what Dawson describes as the "flow economy," using examples like budget travel guide publisher Lonely Planet's move into telecommunications and handheld software, and rock group Radiohead's massively successful promotion, which included providing its hit album for free on the Internet.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Today, every aspect of business is dominated by networks. The powerful impact of broadband and mobile networking is being accelerated by emerging technologies ranging from XML to peer-to-peer. These drivers, together with swiftly changing consumer and worker behavior, are bringing these networks to life. In an economy dominated by the flow of information and ideas, the rules of success have changed dramatically. Living Networks shows managers the profound business implications-and offers detailed, specific guidance on how to respond.

Ross Dawson shows how to use tomorrow's living networks to build lasting customer and partner relationships based on transparency, collaboration, and shared value. Dawson introduces proven techniques for leading companies toward tomorrow's business models and for leveraging living networks in the creation of new products, services, and intellectual property. Simply put, he not only shows leaders how to leverage changes in technology but in the underlying sources of business value.

* Doing business in a world with "zero degrees of separation"

Leveraging living networks for competitive advantage

* New rules for business relationships

How to accelerate trust and earn attention

* The organization as "network presence"

Understanding the enterprise as an ongoing flow of marketing, feedback, and community

* The real "convergence"- and its real impact

One giant market space: telecom, information technology, media, finance, and beyond

* How living networks will liberate the individual

Plugging into living networks for greater profit and personal fulfillment

"Dawson is exactly right-pervasive networking profoundly changes the business models and strategies required for success. Living Networks provides invaluable insights for decision makers wanting to prosper in an increasingly complex and demanding business environment."

—Don Tapscott,
co-author of Digital Capital: Harnessing the Power of Business Webs,
and President, New Paradigm Learning Corporation.

"Ross Dawson argues persuasively that leading economies are driven by the flow of information and ideas. The ideas in his own book can position any individual or company at the center of that flow. It's a fast read, fun, and full of examples."

—Thomas H. Davenport,
Director, Accenture Institute for Strategic Change,
Professor of Information Technology and Management, Babson College,
and co-author, The Attention Economy

"I'm not sure that even Ross Dawson realizes how radical-and how likely—his vision of the future is. Ideas that spread win, and organizations that spawn them will be in charge."

—Seth Godin,
author, Unleashing the Ideavirus

"Living Networks is a fast-paced tour of today's business frontier. Rich with examples drawn from a myriad of settings, every page forces the reader to ask 'How can I use that?' Beware! This book will make you think!"

—David Maister,
consultant and co-author, First Among Equals

The executive's guide to profiting from ubiquitous networks.

• Networks come alive: understanding the "everywhere, all-the-time" flow of information and ideas
• Get to market faster, better, and smarter by leveraging the new "distributed innovation"
• Professional networks of best-of-breed experts: making traditional service delivery models obsolete
• Exploiting networks without losing control over your intellectual property
• How living networks can liberate the individual

Networks are coming to life. Billions of humans and machines are linking as tightly as neurons in a brain, generating and exchanging ideas at unprecedented speed. In Living Networks, Ross Dawson offers a systematic executive's framework for taking advantage of this extraordinary transformation.

Dawson shows how to lead organizations that leverage living networks as the most powerful source of new business value. He demonstrates how to use living networks to deepen relationships with customers and partners, promote "distributed innovation," and accelerate the creation of profitable new products and services. Finally, he shows how individuals can plug into living networks to liberate themselves from conventional organizations, earn more money, and achieve greater personal satisfaction.

For additional material and references, see the book Web site at www.livingnetworksbook.com

About the Author

ROSS DAWSON is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Advanced Human Technologies, an international consulting firm that helps leading organizations develop strategy and client relationships in the digital, connected economy. He is author of the Amazon.com bestseller Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships: The Future of Professional Services and more than 50 articles on international business. Dawson is in demand worldwide for his innovative work as a keynote speaker, workshop presenter, and strategy facilitator. His global media appearances include CNN, Bloomberg TV, SkyNews, European Business Network, and Channel News Asia.

Prior to founding Advanced Human Technologies in 1996, Dawson worked in a variety of senior positions in London, Tokyo, and Sydney, most recently as Global Director, Capital Markets, at Thomson Financial. He speaks five languages.

Ross can be contacted at [e-mail]

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Financial Times Prentice Hall (October 21, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0130353337
• ISBN-13: 978-0130353337
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,074,238 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A well written, clear exposition, March 6, 2003

By 

Bill Godfrey (Mt Stuart, TAS Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Living Networks: Leading Your Company, Customers, and Partners in the Hyper-Connected Economy (Hardcover)

Networks, networking and relationship building through networks have become a very popular theme for business writing, the thesis being that strategic networking is one of the critical keys to business success.

Ross Dawson's first book Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships, focused on relationships between knowledge working professionals and their clients. His new book has a much broader reach, being concerned with the development of network technologies and the implications for business strategy across the whole range of stakeholder and competitor relationships.

The author has demonstrated that the success of his first book was no mere flash in the pan. He writes excellent colloquial English, develops his argument clearly and logically and uses examples and illustrations well to clarify the main points in his argument (unlike the many authors who seem to use examples to overwhelm rather than enlighten). The subject itself is an important one and, although Dawson is not alone in tackling it, his book is the one I would choose as a guide to understanding and action for the practical business person. (For example, I find it more approachable than Verna Allee's The Future of Knowledge, which is written at a more conceptual level and is rather more difficult to read.) It is one of the few books I have read which is clearly informed by an implicitly (as well as explicitly) systemic view of the world.

Living Networks elucidates these systemic relationships and then proposes strategies to achieve successful competitive placement within the systems that the entity chooses to try to influence. Its prescriptions are also based on values that are made explicit in various parts of the book - for example the value on retaining and fostering diversity despite globalization and the importance of operating in ways that build trust.

The book is arranged in four parts: Evolving Networks; Evolving Organizations; Evolving Strategy; and Future Networks (the evolution of business). Each of the ten chapters in Parts 1 to 3 ends with a summary section connecting it to the argument in the rest of the book.

Part 1, Evolving Networks, is a short introductory section that starts by identifying five key issues that the author seeks to explore. These are the impact of networking technologies on:
* the nature of relationships between companies and those they deal with;
* ways of working and relating within organizations;
* innovation and intellectual property, with a particular emphasis given to the importance of open source models of innovation;
* strategy in an economy in which strategic positioning in relation to the flow of information and ideas is becoming critically important; and
* the need for styles of leadership that move beyond the box of traditional command and control and position their organizations effectively within networks, while developing their capacity to recognize, bring together and exploit intellectual property.

Part 1 provides the base for the main focus of the book in Parts 2 and 3. Part 2 describes the evolution of organizations in a systemic world governed by the rules of complexity, but from the particular perspective of networking, relationship building and innovation. The description is complementary to that in books like Moore: The Death of Competition, Hock: Birth of the Chaordic Age, or Youngblood: Life at the Edge of Chaos, all of which provide different insights on the same general phenomenon.
13 action steps are offered for building network presence. In order to keep the scope of the book within reasonable bounds, the important issues of privacy and of intellectual property are mentioned, but not discussed in any detail.

Part 3 turns to strategy. The thesis is that:
Devices, communications, and industries are all converging into one vast space for doing business. This is the flow economy, in which almost all value is based on the flow of information and ideas. Companies must continually reposition themselves in this flow economy, both to meet new competitive challenges ... and to take advantage of ... emerging opportunities.

The single chapter in Part 4 develops 10 propositions or forecasts:

* We will soon be immersed in connectivity [access will spread and bandwidth will become greater]
* Transparency will drive business and society [suggesting that privacy will vanish]
* Collaborative filtering will be the heart of the networks
* Information filtering will be an evolutionary battlefield [marketers trying to insert messages and technology and other means becoming available to exclude them]
* Open, accepted standards will predominate
* almost all value creation will stem from collaborative relationships
* Collaborative intellectual property models will flourish
* Highly virtualised organizations will be a dominant force
* The rapidly increasing pool of free agents will be polarized [the rich will get richer and the poor poorer]
* People and networks will merge [technologies for integrating the human and the machine are developing].

These are of course forecasts or bets on the future. The development of their implications makes interesting reading and provides a possible direction. Whether we want to, or do go that way is another question. As with the debate on globalization, what we can do, what we should do and what we will do are not necessarily the same and depend in large part on the underlying 'rules of the game', including the measures by which we judge success. What those are and should be is a debate that is taking place at the level of societal governance ? a debate of immense importance to us all.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fun and practical primer to today's economy, November 4, 2002

By 

Jim Dubois (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Living Networks: Leading Your Company, Customers, and Partners in the Hyper-Connected Economy (Hardcover)

There's a lot of confusion out there about what technology means to business in the wake of the dotcom bust. Living Networks finally brings clarity to this field. It explains clearly where we are, and covers what managers have to do in organizations, strategy, innovation, and more. It really is exceptional to find a business book that is both very practical, and also such an entertaining read.

No point doing a synopsis. The book has a Website ... which has an overview and chapters to download. And a "blog", so you get the author's realtime commentary too. Bring on the day when all book's have this value-add!

Two (small) reservations. First, Dawson implies that everything he covers is happening now. Much of it is, but some stuff in the book (especially web services) will pan out over the next few years. Second (if you can call it a problem), the book is so broad in scope that it doesn't have the theory and richness of more specialist books. Want to know the latest on network theory and the social implications? Read Nexus by Buchanan or Barabasi's Linked. Want in-depth network strategy? Information Rules by Shapiro and Varian. Mathematical business analysis of networks? Buy Shy's Economics of Network Industries. The key issues in intellectual property? Lessig's The Future of Ideas. What the new dynamics are for individuals? Pink's Free Agent Nation is still a winner. Want the whole kit and kaboodle: what's happening in the economy today, and what to do about it? No question, Living Networks is the standout book. Hopefully it will get some good competition soon.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From Conceptualization to Plan of Action, June 2, 2003

By 

P. Gardner - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Living Networks: Leading Your Company, Customers, and Partners in the Hyper-Connected Economy (Hardcover)

Ross Dawson's book, "Living Networks," provides an exceptionally lucid and visionary framework in which to chart a succesful company or individual course in the Knowledge Economy. Through concise bullet lists at key points throughout the book, the author provides a series of critical considerations and steps to develop a solid plan of action for the reader to embark on a voyage into the future of high-value commerce that, in a globalized world of business, will be characterized in significant measure by networks and relationships. The writing is quick and lively and the advice and insight imparted are invaluable.