Amazon.com Review
Review
?Hey, business executives! Wake up! Stop the off-site planning meetings, tear up the strategic plan, and buy everyone in your company a copy of this book. With Cohan's crisp description of the ?success cycle' and his cold slap-in-the-face reality of ?betting under uncertainty,' you'll rethink every decision after you put down this page-turner.? --Kevin R. Compton, general partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
?With a forceful and engaging style, Cohan describes what makes technology companies like Hewlett-Packard so successful. The book is full of practical insights illustrated with fresh examples. Any executive aspiring to market leadership should read The Technology Leaders.? --Dean O. Morton, retired executive vice president, COO and director, Hewlett Packard Company
?Peter Cohan has created a powerful tool for anyone working in the arena of creating great products from technology. By carefully dissecting the approaches taken by a wide series of strong and successful companies, he has distilled a great deal of useful wisdom. I enthusiastically recommAnd this new addition to the entrepreneurial literature.? --Robert J. Saldich, former president and CEO, Raychem Corporation
?Peter Cohan is an outstanding manager with a keen eye for value. His book gets behind the numbers of some of America's most profitable high-tech companies. With a clear and engaging style, he presents a framework that investors can use to pan for gold in today's flood of high-tech investment opportunities. If you want to pick tomorrow's winners, read this book!? --Peter S. Laino, director of development, K-III Communications Corporation
Strategy and investment consultant Peter S. Cohan examined 20 companies in several industries, including computer hardware, software and semiconductors, as well as pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, searching for the qualities that allow them to "innovate their way to success.&Quot; He discovered that leading companies are driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, build or acquire the best technologies in their fields, lower the internal barriers blocking successful development and allocate their resources wisely.
The key principles of The Technology Leaders are straightforward, such as: "recognize the need for change," "create linkage between customer needs and product attributes" and "analyze the competition." The best material comes from the illustrative examples of how the major players operate. Many of these stories, however, will probably be familiar to industry veterans, making them of interest primarily to new entrants. The real value for readers is toward the back of the book, in an "innovation scorecard" that can be used to gauge how effectively a company enacts the technology leadership principles.
In a brief closing chapter, Cohan's fervent espousal of these core values' ability to transform the industry inspires him to outline an economic utopia straight out of Wired magazine's "long boom" paradigm. Cohan predicts that "the business landscape will become more efficient as technology leaders continue to make the world a better place, finding new ways to create better customer value at a lower cost."
It's a charming hypothesis, but strikingly at odds with the cutthroat methods by which leaders such as Intel do business. Like the bulk of The Technology Leaders, it seems harmless enough to appeal to beginners, but naive enough to turn off industry veterans. -- Upside, Ron Hogan
