Innovating in e-business

LEADING THE REVOLUTION: Gary Hamel; Harvard Business School ress; Distributed by Tata McGraw-Hill Pub. Co. Ltd., 158, Arcot Road, Vadapalani, Chennai-600026. Email: xldel/tmh/vpc@tmhmaa.satyam.net.in; $. 29.95.

THERE ARE not too many "how to'' books written specifically for chief executives; maybe the market is perceived to be too small, at the top. After all, for a thousand potential readers who may be interested in a technology, only one can be the "head honcho'', in a position to direct that technology in a company.

There is a way out of this problem: make your book so compulsively readable, pack it with so many arresting graphics and tell it like it has never been told before like a prophet of the Internet Age that armies of armchair CEOs and closet entrepreneurs are motivated to read you.

That is no mean achievement and that is precisely what Gary Hamel's addictive prose achieves across 300 "unputdownable" pages.

The road, according to Hamel (he is the California-based founder of a business strategies company), is not the well-tried traditional path. "In a non-linear world, only non-linear ideas will create new wealth," he says and illustrates it with telling examples from contemporary corporate history: Sabeer Bhatia's winning strategy for hotmail: free e-mail supported by advertisements -- an idea he sold to Microsoft within a year or so for $400 million; Internet Telephony: the idea that one can make international calls at the price of a local call; Michael Dell's brilliantly simple strategy to reduce dead inventories and maximise sales -- build a PC only after it has been ordered; build it to the customer's specification -- and deliver it within one week, flat{hellip} an impassioned analysis of why one computer or communication market leader missed the recent Net boom, while another, more market-savvy competitor rode the wave is revealing: there is no room for plodding foot soldiers, in an age of revolutionaries. "Unless you become adept at business concept innovation, more adept minds will capture tomorrow's wealth".

Throughout the book, Hamel motivates the reader to break the mould -- to cut away from tradition. "The real issue is not the present versus the future, but the orthodox versus the heterodox".

Not surprisingly his most striking examples of creative disruption come from the computer industry: "Silicon Valley is nothing more than a refugee camp for revolutionaries who could not get a hearing elsewhere".

For repressed revolutionaries and others impatient to get ahead in the "cyberat'' race, Gary Hamel's evangelist prose will sound like the rousing management "mantra'' for the new Information Age.

ANAND PARTHASARATHY

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