The Power of Mobility: How Your Business Can Compete and Win in the Next Technology Revolution - Rilegato

McGuire, R.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0470171286 ISBN 13: 9780470171288

Casa editrice: John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2007

Riassunto

Praise For The Power of Mobility: How Your Business Can Compete and Win in the Next Technology Revolution

"Mobility is the next technology force that is redefining how businesses operate. Going forward, the winners will be 'anywhere enterprises' that learn how to combine the Power of Mobility with broadband connectivity to create competitive advantage. Russell's book lays out a straightforward road map for how to do just that."
—Berge Ayvazian, Chief Strategy Officer, Yankee Group

"Our experience has proved that integrating the mobility of our services into the lives of students creates tremendous opportunities and new value. The ideas presented in this book will serve organizations and businesses of all types well as they explore the innovative growth that can come with the Power of Mobility."
—Dr. Karen Pennington, Vice President, Student Development and Campus Life, Montclair State University

"For many professionals, the workplace is no longer a 'place,' and the work day is no longer a 'day.' The Power of Mobility shows us that companies that recognize this fundamental shift are in the best position to take advantage of mobility to increase business agility, transform the way they serve customers, and enable exciting new business models."
—Don Proctor, Senior Vice President, Collaboration Software Group, Cisco

"What businesses need is a plain English explanation of the new values and disciplines of the Mobility Age. In The Power of Mobility, Russell McGuire provides that clear guidance without the 'technospeak.'"
—Clint Parr, Chief Executive Officer and President, Anyware Mobile Solutions

"Companies that figure out how to keep employees connected and leverage context have the opportunity to outperform their peers in the marketplace. The Power of Mobility explains what this all means in simple terms, describes how companies can build mobility into their businesses, and provides helpful examples for those wanting to gain competitive advantage."
—H.P. Jin, PhD, Chief Executive Officer & President, TeleNav Inc.

"The Power of Mobility prepares you, in a step-by-step fashion, to interpret the opportunity presented by mobility into your firm's environment."
—Danny Briere, Chief Executive Officer, Telechoice

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Russ McGuire (Overland Park, KS) is a leading strategist and visionary in the telecom industry. As director of business strategy for Sprint, he is responsible for developing the strategic vision and competitive strategies for the business-focused division of the $30B+ telecommunications giant. His experience includes 20 years in the telecom industry as well as experience in the defense and nuclear power industries. Prior to joining Sprint, Mr. McGuire was Chief Strategy Officer for TeleChoice, a leading business strategy consultancy solely focused on identifying innovative telecom market opportunities. Mr. McGuire was also sought out for his perspectives on the telecom industry as a top conference speaker and as a quoted source in stories published by The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, The Associated Press, as well as other national, industry, and local publications. Mr. McGuire has also been a regular columnist for Network World, Business Reform, and Success magazines.

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The Power of Mobility: How Your Business Can Compete and Win in the Next Technology Revolution

Over eighty percent of Americans above the age of five own a cell phone, most with digital cameras built in, and bundled with an e-mail service specifically designed for sending those captured moments to friends and family. These consumer applications are just simple examples of mobility being built into everyday products to create tremendous new value. From a business perspective, a new technology can introduce radical changes—changes so dramatic that they fundamentally change the nature of the business, the nature of the product, and the reasons why customers buy the product. When this happens, the rules of competition change. It is happening now: the Age of Mobility is upon us. How will it impact you and your business in the months and years to come?

The Power of Mobility shows you how to look forward, envision the Power of Mobility in your business, and implement the steps required to turn vision into reality.?Russell McGuire, one of the telecom industry's leading strategists, details the specific actions you must take to deliver the tremendous value that mobility adds—and win customers' hearts and wallets. He presents a powerful framework for capturing the Power of Mobility: the Seven Steps. If you can Digitize, Connect, Evaluate, Limit, Position, Protect, and Learn, you will capture the Power of Mobility in your products, your services, and your processes. He further clarifies the power of the Seven Steps with illustrative case studies of seven companies that have successfully implemented this framework and redefined the rules of competition in their industries.

The Mobility Age represents a great opportunity for businesses large and small to capture the Power of Mobility in order to create competitive differentiation and to take market share. Stories of businesses that have been crushed by the competition because they have denied the changes brought by technologies in the past will likely be repeated. You have a choice. You can wait for a competitor to lead and define the rules to his benefit and your demise. Or you can lead and set the rules—if you capture The Power of Mobility now.

Over eighty percent of Americans above the age of five own a cell phone, most with digital cameras built in, and bundled with an e-mail service specifically designed for sending those captured moments to friends and family. These consumer applications are just simple examples of mobility being built into everyday products to create tremendous new value. From a business perspective, a new technology can introduce radical changes changes so dramatic that they fundamentally change the nature of the business, the nature of the product, and the reasons why customers buy the product. When this happens, the rules of competition change. It is happening now: the Age of Mobility is upon us. How will it impact you and your business in the months and years to come?

The Power of Mobility shows you how to look forward, envision the Power of Mobility in your business, and implement the steps required to turn vision into reality.?Russell McGuire, one of the telecom industry's leading strategists, details the specific actions you must take to deliver the tremendous value that mobility adds and win customers' hearts and wallets. He presents a powerful framework for capturing the Power of Mobility: the Seven Steps. If you can Digitize, Connect, Evaluate, Limit, Position, Protect, and Learn, you will capture the Power of Mobility in your products, your services, and your processes. He further clarifies the power of the Seven Steps with illustrative case studies of seven companies that have successfully implemented this framework and redefined the rules of competition in their industries.

The Mobility Age represents a great opportunity for businesses large and small to capture the Power of Mobility in order to create competitive differentiation and to take market share. Stories of businesses that have been crushed by the competition because they have denied the changes brought by technologies in the past will likely be repeated. You have a choice. You can wait for a competitor to lead and define the rules to his benefit and your demise. Or you can lead and set the rules if you capture The Power of Mobility now.

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The Power of Mobility

How Your Business Can Compete and Win in the Next Technology Revolution By Russell McGuire

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2007 Russell McGuire
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-17128-8

Chapter One

Technology Sets the Stage

The oft-repeated curse says "Those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it." I prefer the more positive twist: "If you want to know the future, understand how the past keeps repeating itself." Since this book is all about knowing the future, we will start by understanding how history continues to repeat itself. Time and time again, new technologies have been introduced and broadly adopted, resulting in dramatic impacts on society and the nature of business.

From a business perspective, a new technology can reduce a business's cost to produce a product or increase a product's value. In most cases, this improvement is relatively small but still worthwhile to the business.

Some new technologies introduce radical change to business. The reduction in cost or the increase in value may be an order of magnitude change-meaning that it is one-tenth the cost or ten times the value. These changes are so dramatic that they fundamentally change the nature of the business, the nature of the product, and the reasons why customers buy the product.

When this happens, the rules of competition change. And the new rules typically favor competitors with different strengths than the old leaders. Sometimes the old leaders can adapt and survive. Sometimes they can't.

Stories of businesses that have been crushed because they have failed to believe and have denied the changes brought by technologies in the past will likely be repeated. Now powerful companies will be crushed in the future when they disbelieve and deny the changes being wrought by emerging technologies. However, the stories of businesses that have believed in the coming changes and have turned change into value for customers, employees, and owners will also continue to be repeated.

The Gutenberg Press Unleashes Reformation and Renaissance

It is almost impossible to imagine a world without printing. In fact, arguably, all of the other technology advances we will consider would have been significantly hindered in their development if economical printing had never been developed.

And we must remember that the impact of Gutenberg's invention was purely economic. Prior to Gutenberg, there were printed documents-many made by hand (manuscripts), but printing presses were also cranking out documents by the mid-fifteenth century as well.

The innovation that Gutenberg introduced was threefold:

1. Alphabetic movable type.

2. Thicker ink that would stick to the press.

3. Perfection of the materials to be used in making the type.

The result was a dramatic improvement in the cost and speed of printing. In fact, printing a book became the first assembly line process-mechanically combining replaceable parts to produce a complex end product-predating similar industrial processes by 300 years. These advantages were quickly recognized by others, and lacking patent systems to protect the intellectual property (and slow its adoption), movable type printing spread rapidly.

Gutenberg began work on his first product, a beautiful Bible, in 1452. He first sold the product at the 1455 Frankfurt Book Fair, introducing his innovation to the world. Approximately 50 copies of that original Bible exist today. By the early 1470s, the printing press had spread to the major trade centers in Germany; and by the early 1480s it had spread across western and central Europe. Within 50 years, over 1,000 publishers had printed over a million books using Gutenberg's technology.

Prior to Gutenberg's invention, there was little reason for literacy to broadly develop within society. Books were so rare and expensive that it was meaningless for the average citizen to bother learning how to read. As Walter J. Ong noted, "Many of the features we have taken for granted in thought and expression in literature, philosophy and science, and even in oral discourse among literates, are not directly native to human existence as such but have come into being because of the resources which the technology of writing makes available to human consciousness."

As a simple example, Ong relates that, prior to printing, most people never knew in what calendar year they were born. With no newspapers or calendars to regularly remind them of the year, such a number would appear to have no relation to anything in "real life."

Robert Logan claims that the characteristics of Gutenberg's press enhanced and multiplied the prior impacts of the alphabet "unleashing a powerful new force that completely transformed Western civilization, leaving in its wake the Renaissance, the rise of science, the Reformation, individualism, democracy, nationalism, the systematic exploitation of technology, and the Industrial Revolution-in short, the modern world."

Bacon's Law

There are two key questions we must wrestle with for each of the technologies we examine. Why was adoption so quick and why did the technology have such an impact on society and business? In most cases, we'll find that there is a simple observation, a simple truth that explains why adoption and impact were unstoppable.

In the case of the printing press, the simple observation was made in 1597 by Sir Francis Bacon in his Religious Meditations, Of Heresies. The observation, which has become known as Bacon's Law, is that "knowledge is power."

The printing press enabled knowledge, which had been a virtual monopoly of the church and the universities, to be distributed. As Bacon observed, with the distribution of knowledge came the distribution of power. The powerless hungered for the freedom that came with the new flow of information, and, of course, those who had horded knowledge were threatened as their hold on power became challenged.

Given this true observation, once the printing press existed, nothing could hold it back and its impact on society and business was clearly dramatic.

The Steam Engine Powers the Industrial Age

The first practical steam engine was invented by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. Newcomen introduced four key innovations that made the steam engine a practical source of power:

1. Techniques for generating a vacuum. 2. The managed use of pressure.

3. Means for generating steam. 4. The piston and cylinder for capturing the mechanical power.

Newcomen built his first steam engine to operate a mine drainage pump near Dudley Castle in Staffordshire. However, it is not Thomas Newcomen who is best remembered as the inventor of the steam engine; instead, it is James Watt.

In 1764, Watt was asked to repair a Newcomen steam engine owned by the University of Glasgow. In working on it, he realized there were a number of ways in which the design could be improved. The most significant of these improvements was the use of a separate chamber for condensing the steam back to liquid at the end of each cycle. This allowed more of the energy in the main cylinder to be retained, greatly improving the overall efficiency of the engine.

Watt built the first working model of his new design in May 1765, and in 1768 he applied for a patent on the invention. However, Watt did not have the capital required to build a manufacturing business around his invention, and therefore to meaningfully profit from it. He sought out investors and found them in John Roebuck and Matthew Boulton. To justify the large expense they would incur in establishing their business, the partners went to Parliament to get an extension to the normal patent to protect their intellectual property through 1800.

The industrial factory predated Watt's steam engine. Water-powered factories were operational in England as early as 1721 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_revolution). But it was the steam engine that really accelerated the pace of change that became the Industrial Revolution. The first benefactor was coal mining. Pumps driven by steam engines enabled deeper and more productive coal seams to be mined, doubling British coal output between 1750 and 1800.

By 1800, cotton mills were the chief users as the steam engine provided reliable and continuous power for spinning. Up until 1750, agriculture had dominated the British economy. British agriculture was 2.5 times more productive than that of France, which itself was much more efficient than the rest of Europe. From 1750 on, three export sectors became increasingly important: coal, iron, and textiles. Cotton was insignificant as an export in 1750, but by 1810 had become 39 percent of exports by value.

In short, the steam engine radically changed the nature of business. But it also had a dramatic impact on all of society.

From 1750 to 1850 there were two dramatic shifts in the British population. The first was simple growth. Agriculture advances supported England's recovery from the Great Plague. In 1750, it is estimated that 5.8 million people lived in England. By 1801, this increased to 8.3 million, and by 1851 it had nearly tripled to 16.92 million.

The second shift was from country to town and to city. By 1801, about 30 percent of the mainland British lived in towns. By 1851, more than half the population lived in towns rather than in the country.

London specifically reflected these shifts. In 1750, the population of London was about 700,000. By 1800, it had grown to over a million, and by 1850 it had more than doubled again to 2,362,000. London had rapidly shot past all the other cities in the world to become far and away the largest.

These changes also dramatically changed the structure of society. In agricultural Britain prior to 1750, most of the farming land was owned by wealthy landowners who leased the land to tenant farmers. The farmers paid rent in the form of the goods they grew or produced. The economy was largely local, with specialized tradesmen making the nonagricultural goods needed by the community.

The shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy created clear distinctions between work and home. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most work was done in and around the home and often involved many members of the family. As work moved out of the home and into the factory, the men followed the work first, while the women stayed to care for the family and the home. However, in time, industrial productivity required even more workers, and women and then children were drawn into the workforce, creating tremendous social stress. The first child labor laws were passed in 1833 to bring the greatest dangers under control.

As referenced before, Watt's invention also sparked a new era of capitalism. The Industrial Age introduced business opportunities that required significant levels of funding. Notably, the London Stock Exchange formally opened on March 3, 1801, reflecting this new era of capitalism.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

As with the printing press, we must answer the questions of why the steam engine was rapidly adopted and why it had such an impact on business and society.

Bacon's Law observed the philosophical truths that answered these questions for the printing press. For the steam engine, the answer has a much more scientific foundation.

In 1865, Rudolf Clausius developed the classic statement that we know as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The statement is rather complex and is accurately quoted as "the entropy of an isolated system not at thermal equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value." However, in practical terms this means that heat flows from hot places to cold places.

Big deal, right? Well, this simple truth that heat flows to where there isn't heat is what made the steam engine work and create motive power. The steam engine came onto the scene at the precise moment when mines and factories were ramping up their need for motive power. The dramatic increase in power produced by the steam engine then drove even greater productivity in industry, radically changing the shape of business and society.

The Telegraph Signals the Telecom Era

The telecommunications industry was born on March 2, 1791, in Brulon, France. On that day, brothers Claude and Ren Chappe demonstrated the first practical optical telegraph system. Claude Chappe wanted to call the invention the tachygraphe-meaning "fast writer"-but instead the name telegraphe-or "far writer"-stuck instead.

However, it wasn't until electric telegraphy, whose invention is broadly attributed to Samuel Morse based on work he completed between 1832 and 1838, that practical telecommunications actually began to significantly impact the world. In 1843, Congress approved funds to build the first telegraph line in the United States from Washington to Baltimore, and on May 24 of that year, the famous "first message" of "What hath God wrought!" was transmitted over the line opening the American telecommunications industry.

A new company, the Magnetic Telegraph Company, was formed and completed its first link, between New York and Philadelphia, in January 1846. Before this line opened, the only telegraph in the country was the original 40-mile stretch. By 1848, this had grown to approximately 2,000 miles, and by 1852 there were over 23,000 miles of telegraph lines in operation, with another 10,000 miles under construction.

Writing in 1852, Laurence Turnbull noted that the growth in capacity and traffic showed "how important an agent the telegraph has become in the transmission of business communications. It is every day coming more into use, and every day adding to its power to be useful."

In 1861, the transcontinental telegraph line was completed to California. This new communications link made obsolete the Pony Express, enabling the instant communication of information that previously had taken 10 days. The Pony Express itself had dramatically improved the previous time of 20 days for a message to reach the West Coast.

International routes also began to be built. England and France were connected in 1851 and the first transatlantic cable was installed in 1858. Prior to these investments, international communications took as long as it took for ships to sail. A message from London to Bombay and back could take 10 weeks. But by the 1870s, a message from London to Bombay and back could take four minutes.

The telegraph dramatically changed diplomacy, financial and commodities markets, and the news industry.

These changes in specific industries also had dramatic effects on all businesses. The telegraph effectively enabled the growth of very large businesses with centralized hierarchical command-and-control management styles. The increase in information flow also increased the pace of business decisions of all kinds and began the trend toward today's business pulse.

These changes, especially in the news industry, also dramatically changed how society looked at the world. Originally, all news was local. Local newspapers carried local news, and news only traveled to other places as the newspapers themselves were carried along. Timeliness of news was not a major focus, since it could be weeks or months before news reached distant corners of the country or world. As newspapers shifted to reporting on national and then global events, and as the news being reported increasingly was still happening (not an event already over), how people interacted with the news, and ultimately with the world, changed in the same ways as businesses. People became much more aware of places and events around them and the news of "now" really caught their attention.

"Time Is Money"

Again, we must ask the question, "Why?" Why was the telegraph so rapidly adopted, and why did it have such an impact on business and society?

Writing in 1748, Ben Franklin made the truthful observation that answers our question and that should help us understand why any technology that helps us gain information and/or make a decision and/ or complete a task more quickly will always be highly valued. He said, "Remember that time is money."

Businessmen using more recent information to outwit their competitors clearly learned how to use the telegraph to turn time into money. Newspapers could sell more copies of their paper with more timely news, proving that time is money.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Power of Mobilityby Russell McGuire Copyright © 2007 by Russell McGuire. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: John Wiley & Sons Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 2007
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0470171286
• ISBN 13: 9780470171288
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 232
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile