The Age of the Network offers leaders, managers, and teams a new, practical view of how to think about their companies and reinvent them without losing the value and knowledge that's embedded in their current organization. The Age of the Network delivers a rich array of advice and insights for starting the vital process of creating a networked enterprise. Lipnack and Stamps show managers how to focus on five essential team net (networks of teams) principles which include establishing a clear purpose and creating communication links. Next, they offer a guided tour describing how organizations can turn these principles into practice and evaluate their real potential for creating a networked organization.
Pivot your organization toward a more scalable and profitable business model. Digital networks are changing all the rules of business. New, scalable, digitally networked business models, like those of Amazon, Google, Uber, and Airbnb, are affecting growth, scale, and profit potential for companies in every industry. But this seismic shift isn’t unique to digital start-ups and tech superstars. Digital transformation is affecting every business sector, and as investor capital, top talent, and customers shift toward network-centric organizations, the performance gap between early and late adopters is widening. So the question isn’t whether your organization needs to change, but when and how much. The Network Imperative is a call to action for managers and executives to embrace network-based business models. The benefits are indisputable: companies that leverage digital platforms to co-create and share value with networks of employees, customers, and suppliers are fast outpacing the market. These companies, or network orchestrators, grow faster, scale with lower marginal cost, and generate the highest revenue multipliers. Supported by research that covers fifteen hundred companies, authors Barry Libert, Megan Beck, and Jerry Wind guide leaders and investors through the ten principles that all organizations can use to grow and profit regardless of their industry. They also share a five-step process for pivoting an organization toward a more scalable and profitable business model. The Network Imperative, brimming with compelling case studies and actionable advice, provides managers with what they really need: new tools and frameworks to generate unprecedented value in a rapidly changing age.
An internationally known public speaker, entrepreneur, and marketing executive shares practical, up-to-date tips for mastering the skills of networking. Networking doesn’t have to be that frenzied old-school game of calendars packed with stuffy power lunches and sterile evenings at community business gatherings. We’ve entered a new era, one in which shifting cultural values and the explosion of digital technology enable us to network in vastly more efficient, more focused, and more enjoyable ways. A fresh take on How to Win Friends and Influence People, Your Network Is Your Net Worth is an entertaining, straightforward guide filled with revealing case studies, hands-on advice, and innovative strategies for building your network. Written by sought-after speaker, entrepreneur, and marketing executive Porter Gale, with a foreword by Apple evangelist and bestselling author Guy Kawasaki, this book shows you how to establish, expand, and nurture your connections both online and off. New ways to network are popping up every day—and Gale tells you how to make the most of them—but even traditional networking opportunities are not the same animals that they once were, and we need to shift our attitudes and approaches accordingly. Networking has evolved from a transactional game to a transformational process. Whereas once it was about power plays, now it’s about charting your own course, following your passions, and making meaningful connections, which in turn increase your happiness and productivity. In addition to chronicling her own rise from an ad agency intern to an in-demand consultant, Gale also shares the inspiring stories of so many others who live by this networking model: a military wife who connects with social media communities while her husband is deployed overseas, a young woman blog-ger battling leukemia, a dyslexic politician who wins elections by telling stories, and the CEO of a Major League Baseball team who once made a phone call that changed the course of his life. When you focus on your passions and reorganize your networking around your values and beliefs, you will discover the kind of lasting relationships, personal transformation, and, ultimately, tangible wealth that are the foundation for happiness and success. With a message both timely and important, Your Network Is Your Net Worth is the definitive handbook to Networking 2.0.
In Prometheus Wired, Darin Barney debunks claims that a networked society will provide the infrastructure for a political revolution and shows that the resources we need for understanding and making sound judgments about this new technology are surprisingly close at hand. By looking to thinkers who grappled with the relationship of society and technology, such as Plato, Aristotle, Marx, and Heidegger, Barney critically examines such assertions about the character of digital networks.
The Bell System dominated telecommunications in the United States and Canada for most of the twentieth century, but its monopoly was not inevitable. In the decades around 1900, ordinary citizens—farmers, doctors, small-town entrepreneurs—established tens of thousands of independent telephone systems, stringing their own wires to bring this new technology to the people. Managed by opportunists and idealists alike, these small businesses were motivated not only by profit but also by the promise of open communication as a weapon against monopoly capital and for protection of regional autonomy. As the Bell empire grew, independents fought fiercely to retain control of their local networks and companies—a struggle with an emerging corporate giant that has been almost entirely forgotten. The People's Network reconstructs the story of the telephone's contentious beginnings, exploring the interplay of political economy, business strategy, and social practice in the creation of modern North American telecommunications. Drawing from government documents in the United States and Canada, independent telephone journals and publications, and the archives of regional Bell operating companies and their rivals, Robert MacDougall locates the national debates over the meaning, use, and organization of the telephone industry as a turning point in the history of information networks. The competing businesses represented dueling political philosophies: regional versus national identity and local versus centralized power. Although independent telephone companies did not win their fight with big business, they fundamentally changed the way telecommunications were conceived.
Since the 1967 riots that ripped apart the city, Detroit has traditionally been viewed either as a place in ruins or a metropolis on the verge of rejuvenation. In Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network, author Jeff Rice goes beyond the notion of Detroit as simply a city of two ideas. Instead he explores the city as a web of multiple meanings which, in the digital age, come together in the city’s spaces to form a network that shapes the writing, the activity, and the very thinking of those around it. Rice focuses his study on four of Detroit’s most iconic places—Woodward Avenue, the Maccabees Building, Michigan Central Station, and 8 Mile—covering each in a separate chapter. Each of these chapters explains one of the four features of network rhetoric: folksono(me), the affective interface, response, and decision making. As these rhetorical features connect, they form the overall network called Digital Detroit. Rice demonstrates how new media, such as podcasts, wikis, blogs, interactive maps, and the Internet in general, knit together Detroit into a digital network whose identity is fluid and ever-changing. In telling Detroit’s spatial story, Rice deftly illustrates how this new media, as a rhetorical practice, ultimately shapes understandings of space in ways that computer applications and city planning often cannot. The result is a model for a new way of thinking and interacting with space and the imagination, and for a better understanding of the challenges network rhetorics pose for writing.
This first book in Castells' groundbreaking trilogy, with a substantial new preface, highlights the economic and social dynamics of the information age and shows how the network society has now fully risen on a global scale. Groundbreaking volume on the impact of the age of information on all aspects of society Includes coverage of the influence of the internet and the net-economy Describes the accelerating pace of innovation and social transformation Based on research in the USA, Asia, Latin America, and Europe
Life on the Screen is a book not about computers, but about people and how computers are causing us to reevaluate our identities in the age of the Internet. We are using life on the screen to engage in new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, politics, sex, and the self. Life on the Screen traces a set of boundary negotiations, telling the story of the changing impact of the computer on our psychological lives and our evolving ideas about minds, bodies, and machines. What is emerging, Turkle says, is a new sense of identity—as decentered and multiple. She describes trends in computer design, in artificial intelligence, and in people’s experiences of virtual environments that confirm a dramatic shift in our notions of self, other, machine, and world. The computer emerges as an object that brings postmodernism down to earth.
"An incredibly useful and valuable guidebook to the new consumer economy. Buy it. Learn from it. Succeed with it."--Jeff Jarvis, author of "What Would Google Do " "This is the stuff that every business and nonprofit needs to embrace if they're going to succeed in a changing world."--Vivian Schiller, CEO of NPR With clear analysis and practical frameworks, this book provides a strategic guide that any business or nonprofit can use to succeed in the digital age. Marketing expert David Rogers examines how digital technologies--from smartphones to social networks--connect us in frameworks that transform our relationships to business and each other. To thrive today, organizations need new strategies--strategies designed for customer networks. Rogers offers five strategies that any business can use to create new value: ACCESS--be faster, be easier, be everywhere, be always on ENGAGE--become a source of valued content CUSTOMIZE--make your offering adaptable to your customer's needs CONNECT--become a part of your customers' conversations COLLABORATE--involve your customers at every stage of your enterpriseRogers explains these five strategies with over 100 cases from every type and size of business--from shoes to news, and software to healthcare. In "The Network Is Your Customer," he shows: How Apple harnessed a host of collaborators to write apps for its iPhone How IBM designed a videogame to help sell its enterprise software How Ford Motors inspired an online community to build brand awareness for its new Fiesta...and countless other cases from consumer, b2b, and nonprofit categories. The book outlines a process for planning and implementing a customer network strategy to match "your" customers, "your" business, and "your" objectives--whether you need to drive sales, to enhance innovation, to reduce costs, to gain customer insight, or to build breakthrough products and services. Because today, whatever your goals and whatever your business, the network is your customer.
