1 Ed
Hardcover, 272 pages
Published by Ballantine Books (Trd) [ click here to
order now ]
Publication date: May 1,1996
ISBN: 0345405412
Availability: This item usually shipped within 2-3 days.
Business
and Investment Expert Editor's Recommended Book, 10/01/96:
The business world is undergoing a profound revolution as the new millennium inches
closer, and one of the best assessments of its implications and possibilities comes from
Institute for the Future president Ian Morrison in his The Second Curve: Managing the
Velocity of Change. This thoughtful work advances one simple yet striking concept:
business leaders must stop focusing on the short-term and start planning for the long run.
Making the most of current profits is the first curve in business, Morrison writes; shifts
in technology and the marketplace signify the second. Understanding how these critical
changes develop and knowing what they mean, he contends, will help business leaders make
the necessary leap from one to the other.
Synopsis:
Morrison introduces a way for business leaders to ride the first curve--a company's
traditional business carried out in a familiar corporate climate--to the all-important
second curve, which consists of new consumers, new markets, and new technologies combined
to bring about sweeping changes in every way industry functions. WWW promo.
Synopsis:
Morrison offers a cutting edge audio about successfully managing the inevitable and
unavoidable changes imposed upon the business world. Using lively examples of famous
companies--both successes and failures--Morrison breaks down the huge mandate "change
or die" into reasonable pieces that managers can digest and utilize. 2 cassettes. --This
text refers to the
audio cassettes edition of this title.
Card catalog description
Every few years, business leaders are exhorted to master change and are given tools to do
it: Search for excellence. Reengineer your corporation. Learn the discipline of market
leaders. Downsize. Maximize. But unless you're prepared, massive changes in the
marketplace can erode the company you've built. In The Second Curve, Ian Morrison creates
a revolutionary new business model that can be used no matter what the market upheaval.
His theory is deceptively simple: You must ride the first curve - a company's traditional
business carried out in a familiar corporate climate - to the all-important second curve.
The second curve is the future - of new technologies, new consumers, and new markets that
will combine to bring about a sweeping and irrevocable alteration in the way every
business must organize and function. Ian Morrison draws on his own pathbreaking work as a
consultant to business giants, from SmithKline Beecham to Pitney Bowes, to explore how the
two-curve concept works in the real world. He analyzes a wide spectrum of business
triumphs and turnarounds, among them how Volvo jumped on the second curve by boosting
itself into global markets in both car and truck sales; how Netscape capitalized on the
untapped power of the World Wide Web with its stunningly successful browser software,
Navigator; how Hongkong Telecom is shaping the second curve with its trials of movie
delivery service over fiber optics to homes. At these and many other companies Morrison
profiles, leaders have learned to master both the first and second curves, to anticipate
the rate and pace of change, to know when and how to jump from the first curve to the
second, and whether and when to play both. This book sets forth all the crucial strategies
and explains how businesses can apply them to rapidly changing situations.
sukumar.ramanathan@Corp.Sun.Com,
06/03/96, rating=8:
A topical, provocative book replete with real-life anecdotes
The business book is as ubiquitous an item as a laptop computer in airplanes. In every
flight that I've ever been on in the US, there are legions of rent-an-MBAs, wearing grey
Hickey-Freeman suits and Cole-Haan wingtips, sipping a beer and grimacing as they try to
ingest the latest idea from Tom Peters. They've learned about searching for excellence,
the discipline of market leaders, constructing a virtual corporation and being part of a
learning organization. They've been folded, spindled, mutilated and re-engineered. They
have ridden the third wave and preached the fifth discipline. They have read the
machinations of Machiavelli, the homilies of Dale Carnegie and the leadership secrets of
Attila the Hun. They know that if they meet the Buddha on the road, they should kill him;
that if it ain't broken, they should break it; that the future is always shocking and that
you always swim with sharks. It was therefore with some cynicism that I picked up a new
business book off the shelf at Keplers this weekend. Even the title put me off. "The
Second Curve - Managing the Velocity of Change," by an Ian Morrison, who bore the
grandiose title of President of the Institute of the Future. But I had some familiarity
and liking for the writing of Paul Saffo, who works at the same institute. And my stack of
books at home was getting quite short. So I took a twenty-five dollar bet. I am glad I
did. "The Second Curve" kept me engrossed through the afternoon and the night,
and I stayed up till two finishing it, something I do increasingly rarely nowadays. Mr.
Morrison is that rarest of birds, an original thinker. More importantly, he is not an
armchair theorist. Almost all his writing is bolstered by real-world anecdotes and
experience from twenty years of being called upon as a consultant. In tone, it is
reminiscent of "The Art of the Long View", another book that I highly recommend.
The author's principal thesis is that technology is causing a sea change in almost every
facet of our lives. The first curve is the one that people are used to and which still
shows a reasonable pace of growth. Think, for instance, of the full-service brokerage
services offered by a place like Merill-Lynch. The second curve is the one that
understands that, in essence, such a company does nothing more than transactions and
brokering information. Both of these can be automated and done much cheaper via the
Internet. Enter Lombard OnLine. All transactions for twenty bucks! Unlimited company
reports for free! After all, the only things you're consuming is a few extra cycles of cpu
and a few extra kilobaud of bandwidth. Financial institutions still think of themselves as
their physical presence - brick and mortar and oak veneer. But they are really nothing
more than a conduit for electric impulses; credit A's account here, debit B's account
there, feed the earnings report to a browser, download a mortgage calculation applet. As
users get more aware of how they can access information themselves and manage their own
financial affairs, paying huge percentages as fees is going to seem quaint. Dean-Witter
and Smith-Barney have no idea how badly they are going to be hurt. To the authors credit,
he strongly advises against expecting the change to happen tomorrow. A line that appears
in many places in the book is that we always overestimate the change that will occur in
one year and underestimate the change that will occur in ten. So a key chapter in the book
is devoted to transition strategy from the first curve to the second. How do you gauge
when a supposed second curve is in fact a mirage (the Newton, picture telephones, personal
helicopters)? How do you surf a first curve to its entirety (the plain old telephone,
video rentals, mainframes)? When does it pay to bet the farm on a new paradigm (there, I
used that word)? When is it too risky to? There are some common-sense ideas here. One,
that technology makes it possible to do most things faster, better and cheaper. Think of
the fax machine and electronic mail replacing the US mail and memos. Two, that the new
consumer expects exceptional service as a birthright. He or she wants to be able to order
a pair of jeans from L.L Bean at midnight or to choose from six kinds of crackers at
Safeway. Three, that the new consumer is not necessarily Caucasian or Japanese. In the
next fifteen years, there will be 122 million middle-class households (incomes greater
than $25K per year) springing up in South Asia, China, and Latin America. In addition,
there are many provocative theses. One is that any industry that trafficks in information
(insurance, publishing, recorded music) is going to get decimated if it does not adapt to
the second curve. You can no longer live off your history as an authority figure. Gangsta
rap artists will not automatically go to Time-Warner because of its history in the
information business. Doctors can no longer expostulate that their long training makes
them worth two hundred dollars an hour. The HMO down the street will just take that doctor
off its database and cut his or her business by three-quarters. Medicine is not that
lucrative a profession any more. The second is that the real power in a value chain is no
longer with the manufacturer of a product but with the retailer. Wal-Mart can dictate the
selling price of a toy much more than Mattel can. All it has to do is threaten to withhold
shelf-space for the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. In like vein, CompUSA decides which is a
bestselling CD-ROM much more than Broderbund does, by the way it spends its advertising
and display dollars. It is going to become increasingly important to own your channel or
have very strong partnerships with it. And remember that with the Internet, the
eighteen-year old in the garage can still bypass all established channels and go straight
to the consumer. Id Software provides a sterling lesson in this in the way it sold
"Doom". I judge a book by how many of its ideas resonate in my head when I drive
to work the next morning. By this unscientific metric, "The Second Curve" is a
very worthwhile read.
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