Amazon.com Review
Zero Space, by Frank Lekanne Deprez and René Tissen, is both a thought-provoking argument for truly open organizations--occupying the ephemeral region of their title--and a practical manual for developing them. Lekanne Deprez and Tissen, Amsterdam-based consultants who have separately and together written five previous books, are certainly not the first to suggest that intangibles like knowledge are far more relevant today than tangibles like machinery in the creation of corporate value. They do, though, give fresh insight into the type of company that successfully incorporates these 21st-century assets, and they propose a feasible framework others can use to tear away from traditional, but counterproductive, thinking and create the "all brain, no body" organization that truly meets ongoing challenges. In part 1, the authors discuss why their defining concept of "zero-mindedness" has become so critical. In part 2, they examine it in contexts that corporations will actually confront, such as time (dealing with sped-up consumer demands and business relationships), technology (making it so ubiquitous it is taken for granted), and alliances (forging the proper ones with customers, suppliers, and even competitors). In the final part, Lekanne Deprez and Tissen leave the theorizing behind to offer concrete suggestions for utilizing their ideas in the real world.
--Howard Rothman
About the Author
Frank Lekanne Deprez is a senior consultant at KPMG Knowledge Advisory Services. Rene Tissen is managing director of KPMG Knowledge Advisory Services and part-time professor of Business Management at Nyenrode University, The Netherlands School of Business
