RECOMMENDED BOOKS - PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE

FutureConsumer.Com: The Webolution of Shopping to 2010

By 2010, a majority of North Americans will live what Bill Gates calls a “Web Lifestyle” where they carry out most everyday activities through the Web. For sure, they will do at least some e-shopping and most of them will do most shopping online. Already, people are buying everything from luxury automobiles to the drug Zantac over the Web.

The Web takes shopping out of the shops. By 2010, the Internet will gobble up 31 percent of retail spendng, leaving most brick-and-mortar retailers in rubble. The head-spinning Internet Revolution, or “Webolution,” is not easy to forecast. However, before it’s over —around 2018 — it will reverse and unwind virtually eveything that the Industrial Revolution put into place. The rewards will accrue fastest to those who embrace the Webolution first.

The book reviews the online sales prospects of 12 product categories:

• Apparel & Footwear;
• Automobiles;
• Books;
• Education;
• Entertainment & Sports;
• Expressions;
• Financial Services;
• Groceries;
• Health & Beauty;
• Homes & Home Improvement;
• Newspapers; and
• Mass Merchandisers.

The book forecasts what percentage of each category’s sales will be made online by 2005 and 2010.

According to the author, many concepts in this book were prompted by several thought leaders, particularly by the farsighted media guru Marshall McLuhan and the pioneer futurist Alvin Toffler. The author makes it an annual habit to re-read the deeply penetrating and perceptive writings of these mental giants, particularly their Understanding Media and The Third Wave respectively.

How Digital Is Your Business: Creating the Company of the Future

Old-economy companies must take steps to avoid becoming victims of capitalism’s creative destruction, the unofficial system that flushes out the old to make way for the new. This book shows, first of all, that becoming digital is NOT about any of the following:

• having a great Web site,
• setting up a separate e-business,
• having next-generation software,
• or wiring your workforce.

What the authors so creatively demonstrate is that a digital business is one whose strategic options have been transformed — and significantly broadened — by the use of digital technologies. A digital business has strategic differentiation, a business model that creates and captures profits in new ways and develops powerful new value propositions for customers and talent. Above all, a digital business is one that is unique.

How Digital Is Your Business? is a groundbreaking book with universal appeal for everyone in the business world. It offers:

• Profiles of the future: the in-depth story of the digital pioneers — Dell Computer, Charles Schwab, Cisco Systems, Cemex.
• Insight into how to change a traditional enterprise into a digital business: the stories of GE and IBM.
• An analysis of the profitable dot-coms: AOL, Yahoo!, and eBay.

The book’s most invaluable central idea is that of digital business design and the array of powerful digital tools it offers for use in creating a digital future for your own company.