The Strategy Machine: Building Your Business One Idea at a Time [Hardcover]

Larry Downes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 4, 2002

Predicting a revolutionary age of "disposable computing," a guide on how businesses can respond and succeed presents case studies and offers advice on developing and nurturing a strategic portfolio while managing obstacles.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

To help companies succeed in the "next economy," Downes (coauthor, Unleashing the Killer App) presents a guide for managers, focusing on the concept of information as a valuable product in itself. "As the new supply chain emerges," he writes, "... information about products can be worth more than the products themselves." He cites TV Guide as an old-school example, then draws on his practice with myriad companies to explain the secrets of generating new products and services from a "complete circuit of information." Downes's strategy embraces all aspects of the information revolution, and succinctly with the aid of diagrams and charts elucidates why a company needs this strategy, how to assemble it and how to keep it running.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Larry Downes, coauthor of the groundbreaking bestseller Unleashing the Killer App, is a leading practitioner and speaker on the development of winningbusiness strategies for the digital age. He is the chairman of the Larry Downes Consulting Group.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Collins; 1st edition (June 4, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0066211298
• ISBN-13: 978-0066211299
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,099,099 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Larry Downes is a consultant and speaker on developing business strategies in an age of constant disruption caused by information technology.

Downes is author of the Business Week and New York Times business bestseller, "Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance" (Harvard Business School Press, 1998), which has sold nearly 200,000 copies and was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the five most important books ever published on business and technology.

His new book, "The Laws of Disruption: Harnessing the New Forces that Govern Business and Life in the Digital Age" (Basic Books 2009) offers nine strategies for success in the emerging world of information law. It combines Downes's unique perspective on economics, law, and innovation in the digital age.

Downes is also a Partner with the Bell-Mason Group, which works with Global 1000 corporations, providing corporate venturing methodologies, tools, techniques and support that accelerate corporate innovation and venturing programs.

He has written for a variety of publications, including USA Today, Harvard Business Review, Inc., Wired, CNet, Strategy & Leadership, CIO, The American Scholar and the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. He was a columnist for both The Industry Standard and CIO Insight.

Downes has held faculty appointments at The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Northwestern University School of Law, and the University of California-Berkeley's Haas School of Business, where he taught courses on corporate strategy and technology law. He is currently a nonresident Fellow with the Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Super tools for applying the Killer App!, April 21, 2004

By 

Robert W. Bradford "President and CEO of Cent... (Ann Arbor, MI United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Strategy Machine: Building Your Business One Idea at a Time (Hardcover)

Are you prepared to adapt your strategies to the constantly changing future? Are you ready for the rate of change to speed up? The Strategy Machine by Larry Downes (author of Unleashing the Killer App), contains great conceptual tools for thinking about ways to re-invent your business in the face of the technological and globalization revolutions.

It is clear that Downes wrote The Strategy Machine after getting a great deal more exposure to the strategic management process than he had when he wrote the classic Unleashing the Killer App. Where Killer App revolves around the central idea of organizations evolving towards success by destroying their own markets, fully a third of The Strategy Machine focuses on the greatest challenges of strategic change: overcoming cultural inertia and execution. This very likely comes from a close look at companies that, in the late 1990's, at least gave lip service to the revolutionary concepts in Killer App - companies that ultimately fell on hard times as the US economy bogged down on the twin disasters of the dot com bust and 9/11. In a sense, the book attempts to answer a question we will be hearing for years to come: Why did the 1990s juggernaut of self-destructive revolutionary companies slow down?

The core of Downe's strategic thinking revolves around three stages that an industry can go through - each of which amounts to a separate "industrial revolution", despite the fact that elements of each may be occurring simultaneously within a given industry:

1. Efficiency - Value is created through cost reduction with a full-bore attack on transaction costs.

2. Exchange - Value is created through information assets which arise from "virtual markets" which expose hidden transaction costs and other inefficiencies.

3. Emergence - Increased integration of the industry leads to an efficient "information supply chain"

One of the core concepts of the Killer App - the technological innovation that disrupts an industry by restructuring the supply chain - is a clear target for companies that are seeking to ride the emergence wave. Strategically, we see this concept somewhat differently based on your perspective: if you are a young company, you are probably seeking success by driving this kind of disruption, but if your company is more mature, your strategy may revolve around how you can profit from disruption that may extinguish your current business model.

The Strategy Machine does an excellent job of helping you to understand the concept of emergence so that you can be a part of the information supply chain - and therefore, one of the survivors in your industry. It then drives into some interesting prescriptions - always a tricky thing in strategy - which can help you think about executing on these concepts. First, Downes suggests that you design three concurrent plans for your strategy - one for each stage of industry transformation. The aim of these concurrent plans is to have a balanced portfolio of strategic projects going all the time - some delivering the mature process improvements required at the efficiency stage, some the blend of old and new technologies that characterize the exchange stage, and a few, very risky projects on the experimental end of the emergence stage. The Strategy Machine even goes so far as to suggest a ratio (3:2:1) of resource allocation to the projects as well as some good tools for populating your strategy portfolio and thinking about funding of projects at different stages. This is the meat of the practical tools offered by this book, and they are good tools.

The final part of The Strategy Machine covers the challenge of execution. Downes covers the social inertia confronted by all real strategic change, and gives a detailed assessment of the different types of obstacles - both external and internal - that you will have to overcome to successfully implement a profound change in your strategic direction. This part of the book is rich in anecdotes and real-world examples of companies that did or did not succeed in overcoming these obstacles. Unfortunately, while the concepts and examples are good, this last third of the book lacks the practical tools that make the middle third so valuable. Even so, The Strategy Machine is to be commended for devoting so much of its content to the ugly underside of strategy - implementation. This area is absolutely critical to strategic success, yet most strategy books focus all of their attention on information gathering, analysis and strategy formulation, leaving readers holding the bag when it comes to actual execution of strategy.

If your company is either seeking to disrupt an industry with innovative strategy or looking to survive an anticipated disruption, The Strategy Machine will give you excellent food for thought as well as some practical tools for thinking about the composition of your company's strategy portfolio.

15 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars How many times can we hear the same message, June 27, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Strategy Machine: Building Your Business One Idea at a Time (Hardcover)

This book has a few good nuggets, but the rest is filled with the same consultant-speak techno-hype that has been played before. This myth of a "new economy" should have been destroyed by the dot-bomb, or by the recent accounting scandals, or by the recession. We seem to forget that it is execution that counts. When will we realize that you can't build sustainable competitive advantages through technology. You can build more efficient operations, have better means of collecting, analyzing and using information, and respond in a much more rapid way to stakeholder needs; yet technology is only as good as the fundamental execution of your business. If you want a more enlightening, practical guide on technologies that will make an immediate difference, try "Going Wireless"; if you want to concentrate on strategic "blocking and tackling" pick up "Execution".

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some good stuff from a consultant, September 12, 2002

By 

"stupage_stu" (Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Strategy Machine: Building Your Business One Idea at a Time (Hardcover)

Have you ever had a consultant come in start off trying to explain what he's doing and you look at him funny. The consultant then goes in and does his thing. A few months later after the consultant's changes have had time to settle, get the edges off, etc. you go 'he had some pretty good ideas' I'm glad we hired him. That's sort of how this book is. In the beginning the author starts off explaining his theory and ideas and you kind of go "ummm yeah okay". Then he starts to put it into practice and you go "okay I see using part of that and some of this would work for my business" and at the end he brings it all together and half the stuff he said in the beginning was semi-useless, but you can see why he said it, and it comes together and you say "I can see how this would improve things". Overall I give the book a StuPage C.