Excerpted from the introduction of THE 5-STAR BUSINESS NETWORK
Business Network is now the engine of the society and it will need newer models of commerce to fast track the recovery.
Hollowing out of skills out of entire societies without replacing them with another set of useful skills, very high level of youth unemployment (frequently disguised by serious looking play on iPads and tablets), growing economic imbalances risking implosions of unrest, civil commotion or even a great war have all combined to create a very alarming set of circumstances.
Whatever transpires in the short term, eventually the business people will have to lead the way to recovery around the world. It is evident that I am passionate about newer models that work better. In my projects and work around the world, I have noticed that in almost all circumstances there is always some way to make things better. We only have to look around and see where the guidelines are, what the trends are and which models will suit the trends.
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) famously said – Great minds discuss ideas, Average minds discuss events, Small minds discuss people.
While it is very tempting to discuss just one of the three key ingredients of life – either ideas, or events or even people, I prefer to discuss all three because all three of these are inextricably linked. People make events and create ideas. Ideas create events and help people become successful. And events shape people and give impetus to ideas. A book full of concepts and ideas but with no stories about people or events would be extremely boring and dry.
On the other hand, a book with just chronicles of events or people would hardly be worth bothering to read unless its authors possessed immensely entertaining style of writing (which I do not) and even then would be of little practical value besides entertainment. I mostly use events and people to illustrate ideas and concepts to make them more tangible for the readers.
Primarily, then, this book is about ideas and concepts – yet you will see enough discussion about people and events to be able to use the concepts. Most of the people and events discussed are relatively well known so that background contextual information is already present in the readers’ domain and I do not have to supply it. Occasionally I had to use events from case studies based on our work – only because we could not find a well known event illustrating the concept.
I do not make apologies for that or for disguising some data or names of the entities for obvious reasons of confidentiality. Every couple of decades powerful juxtaposition of the trends leads to unique and revolutionary way of commerce. Contrary to the portrayal by the gushing accounts and adulation of the commentators, most pioneers merely stumble on the these trends by a process of trial and error. Other companies, the more nimble and hungry ones, follow the pioneers closely and build strong businesses in their lead.
More established companies then follow suit and try and recover lost ground using their financial muscle and market power sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing in this. Many other companies are so caught up in hubris of their past success or internal politics or some other such attention sapping device that they fail to move at all, or move too late, often with disastrous consequences. Chronicles of such disasters would perhaps be more instructive than the starry eyed accounts of success. As Daniel Coyle points out in his book The Talent Code, the only way to succeed massively is by failing repeatedly at progressively more complex smaller tasks till you master them.
However, most writers and authors persist with the formula that has succeeded since the first bard told stories of the victories in war, and I have no doubt that we will continue to see many starry-eyed accounts of success for centuries to come. It is difficult not to get caught up in the current of adulation that surrounds a particular company at a point in time.
Any such apparent adulation in this book is despite my effort to be objective and cognizant of the cyclical nature of success. As defined earlier, the aim of this book is rather more solemn. It is to take a wide and deep perspective on business trends, define the useful trends as seen from user perspectives, and come up with useful information for the business executives and managers.
The biggest trend sweeping the world – business and non-business – today is networking. Just last week Facebook has announced its IPO filing, valuing the company at $100 Billion. Analysts, pundits and business school professors are still debating what entitles it to that kind of valuation when many others with similar business model – Orkut, MySpace and a plethora of wannabes – have failed to monetize the eyeballs to any great extent. It is not even validated how many of those numerous Facebook accounts are authentic.
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— Excerpted from the introduction of THE 5-STAR BUSINESS NETWORK
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