The Power to Predict: How Real Time Businesses Anticipate Customer Needs, Create Opportunities, and Beat the Competition [Hardcover]

Vivek Ranadive (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 26, 2006

In the mid 1980s systems integration visionary Vivek Ranadivé broke the real-time information barrier and helped to digitize Wall Street. With his international bestseller The Power of Now, he helped usher in the real-time business revolution of the late 1990s. Now with this groundbreaking new book, Ranadivé brings news of the next big leap in business systems evolution-The Power to Predict.

Real-time business gives companies the ability to monitor and react to changes and address problems as they occurr. But no matter how sophisticated their information-gathering and data mining systems are, they're still playing catch-up. In The Power to Predict, Ranadivé forecasts the next step in achieving breakthrough business performance, a new approach he calls Predictive BusinessTM: the ability to anticipate business problems and opportunities and to act preemptively. Predictive Business allows companies to take real-time information, correlate it with historical patterns, and recognize events that hold tremendous profit potential.

In an effort to stay ahead of the curve, a handful of companies have been quietly making the transition from reactive organizations to proactive, anc are well-suited for a customer-centric business paradigm. Ranadive takes us inside a number of these companies-including Amazon, Pirelli, Harrah's, E. & J. Gallo, Wal-Mart, and 7-Eleven--to show how they are making that transition, and are able to:

• Anticipate customer needs and be ready satisfy them the minute they emerge
• Be prepared for sudden events such as a power outage, spikes in demand for a product or service, logistic issues due to changing weather patterns, or evolving customer requirements

In The Power to Predict you'll discover how your company can accomplish these goals by continuously matching real-time events with historical patterns to improve business processes. Just as important, you'll get expert insight to improve business processes and advice on what it will take to align your company's resources, technology, and culture into an unstoppable, world-class Predictive-Business.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A legitimate business surprise should never occur. Before any business mishap, disaster or opportunity, sufficient warning always exists to enable corrective, preventative or exploitative actions. RTEs that capture, analyze, report and act on materially important matters will dominate their sectors during the coming decade." - The Gartner Group"

From the Back Cover

A quiet revolution is underway that will forever change the way business is done

In The Power to Predict, real-time business pioneer Vivek Ranadivé breaks the code of silence to bring you news from the frontlines of the “Predictive Business”™ revolution, and, more importantly, to show you what you'll need to do to prepare your company for the shape of things to come.

Ranadivé fills you in on how Harrah's, Pirelli, E & J Gallo, and other leading-edge firms are making the transition from an event-driven real-time business model to a predictive one, which will help you cultivate new levels of customer loyalty.

“In the future, every company must be able to recognize what is coming early enough to take evasive action or steer toward an emerging opportunity. The Power to Predict challenges managers to think about the use of technology and information to augment historical analysis and business intelligence to produce better results.” —Frederick W. Smith, Chairman & CEO, FedEx (from the foreword)

“Every global organization is challenged to manage increased complexity. Ranadivé's vision for embracing your assets serves as a guide for proactively managing threats and opportunities.”—Indra Nooyi, President & Chief Financial Officer, PepsiCo, Inc.

“Once again, Vivek Ranadivé shows the path to the next wave of corporate growth. The Power to Predict will enable new dimensions to businesses in the future.”—Nandan M. Nilekani, CEO, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

“As technological innovation, real-time information and globalization act on all organizations to reduce competitive advantages, how do you continue to differentiate yourself? The Power to Predict shows how leading business thinkers have successfully challenged and transformed their organizations."—Thomas H. Glocer, CEO, Reuters Group PLC

"Vivek's book is a must-read for businesspeople trying to stay ahead of the surging onslaught of technology in all markets, everywhere."—Marc Andreessen, Chairman and Co-founder, Opsware Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (January 26, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0071450149
• ISBN-13: 978-0071450140
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,234,952 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Vivek Ranadivé is an entrepreneur, technology visionary, author, philanthropist, and sports team owner recognized for his outside-the-box thinking. He has led the advancement and use of real-time technology in business operations and decision making, earning him the nickname "Mr. Real Time" in technology circles. Mr. Ranadivé is dedicated to the vision that if you get the right information to the right place at the right time, you can make the world a better place.

In 1986 Mr. Ranadivé founded Teknekron Software Systems, which focused on creating the stock trading floor of the future. Teknekron went on to automate Wall Street, and its technology became the engine for most of the world's capital markets. In 1997 he founded his present company, TIBCO Software Inc., with the mission of bringing real-time computing into the mainstream. Today TIBCO technology helps more than 4,000 customers thrive by powering everything from the web to airlines, utilities, communications providers, manufacturers, and governments. With nearly a billion dollar revenue run rate, TIBCO is one of the fastest-growing software companies in its peer group.

Mr. Ranadivé has authored two books that are New York Times and global best sellers, both widely read in business and academia. The Power of Now covered how winning companies sense and respond to change using real-time technology, and his subsequent book, The Power to Predict, explored how companies can break new ground in their quest to anticipate customers' needs, capture new opportunities, and predict and avoid problems. A native of Bombay, India, Mr. Ranadivé watched a documentary on MIT and was inspired at the age of 16 to leave India for Cambridge, Massachusetts, arriving with only $50 in his pocket. After earning both a Master's and Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he obtained an MBA at Harvard where he was a Baker Scholar.

Mr. Ranadivé is a big basketball fan, which started when he coached his daughter's middle school team. Mr. Ranadivé's coaching success was highlighted in a New Yorker magazine article by Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point and Outliers) as an example of innovators who win big by doing the unexpected and breaking the rules. He is now the co-owner and vice chairman of the Golden State Warriors NBA franchise and dreams of taking the sport of basketball to India.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great read, March 3, 2006

By 

Amber Wilson - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Power to Predict: How Real Time Businesses Anticipate Customer Needs, Create Opportunities, and Beat the Competition (Hardcover)

I read a lot of business books for my MBA and for work. Most are theoretical and difficult to understand how the concepts are being applied. The Power to Predict was refreshing as it gives an exec-level perspective of the business landscape, changes that have occurred over the past few years, and a look ahead. Each chapter has real world examples that gave me an overview of a wide variety of industries.

The other thing I really liked about this book is that it was a quick read and very comprehensible.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well written overview of automated business, August 28, 2007

By 

James Taylor "Decision Management Consultant" (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Power to Predict: How Real Time Businesses Anticipate Customer Needs, Create Opportunities, and Beat the Competition (Hardcover)

Overall I liked the book - it was readable and well-written. It is a little Tibco-centric and seemed to be written before Vivek had many examples of the kinds of businesses he discusses - otherwise it would get 5 stars.

Vivek introduces the pressures in the business world pushing companies to be both real-time and increasingly predictive and how a real-time, predictive business can be more successful. This section is the best part of the book, laying out a nice case for change. His set of chapters on specific industries- financial services, telco, logistics, retail and consumer goods, healthcare, energy, and the military are discussed - is much weaker. There is too much on what is forcing change in those industries and not enough on how organizations in those industries can and have changed into real-time, predictive businesses. He ends with some discussion of how to get your business ready for predictive and a little bit of future gazing.

Although he is very focused on the event sense and respond part of this kind of business, all his examples have also automated decisions and are actively managing them. Indeed it is largely through these automated decisions that his examples apply predictive analytics. Many of the examples overlap with those in Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, where the analytics in question are being used as part of deciding how to respond to events. He does not go into enough detail on either the event-processing side (try The Power of Events: An Introduction to Complex Event Processing in Distributed Enterprise Systems instead) or decision automation side (try Smart Enough Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions) but the book would certainly help you articulate the value of the kind of changes he discusses.

3 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Shameless marketing, August 7, 2006

By 

Richard Szafranski - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Power to Predict: How Real Time Businesses Anticipate Customer Needs, Create Opportunities, and Beat the Competition (Hardcover)

Shallow veneer of "why" overlayed with "my company" and "my software" Sad.