Burning the Ships: Transforming Your Company's Culture Through Intellectual Property Strategy - Softcover

Phelps, Marshall; Kline, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0470918217 ISBN 13: 9780470918210

Publisher: Wiley, 2010

Synopsis

Now in paperback, the inside story of "the greatest transformation of Microsoft since it became a multinational company"

Marshall Phelps's remarkable eyewitness story offers lessons for any executive struggling with today's innovation and intellectual property challenges. Burning the Ships offers Phelps's dramatic behind-the-scenes account of how he overcame internal resistance and got Microsoft to open up channels of collaboration with other firms.

• Discover the never-before-told details of Microsoft's secret two-year negotiations with Red Hat and Novell that led to the world's first intellectual property peace treaty and technical collaboration with the open source community
• Witness the sometimes-nervous support Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer gave to Phelps in turning their company around 180 degrees from market bully to collaborative industry partner
• Offers an extraordinary behind-the-scenes view of the high-level deliberations of the company's senior-most executives, the internal debates and conflicts among executives and rank-and-file employees alike over the company's new collaborative direction

There are lessons in this book for executives in every industry-most especially on the role that intellectual property can play in liberating previously untapped value in a company and opening up powerful new business opportunities in today's era of "open innovation." Here is a powerful inside account of the dawn of a new era at what is arguably the most powerful technology company on earth.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

Burning the Ships: Intellectual Property and the Transformation of Microsoft

At the start of this decade, Microsoft was on the defensive-beset on all sides by anti-trust suits and costly litigation, and viewed by many in the technology industry as a monopolist and market bully. How was it going to survive and succeed in the emerging new era of "open innovation," where collaboration and cooperation between firms, rather than market conquest, would be the keystones of success?

This was the challenge facing Microsoft founder and Chairman Bill Gates. But "like Cortez burning his ships at the shores of the New World," Gates decided to embrace the change that was needed. He recruited Marshall Phelps-the legendary "godfather" of intellectual property who had turned IBM's IP portfolio into a $2-billion-a-year gold mine-out of retirement and into the cauldron of controversy that was Microsoft. Only this time Phelps's mission was infinitely more challenging than simply making money from IP. It was to help reform Microsoft's "man the barricades" culture, encourage the company to abandon its fortress mentality around its technology and share it with others for mutual benefit, and use intellectual property not as a weapon of competitive warfare but as a bridge to collaboration with other firms instead.

Here, for the first time (and 500 collaboration deals later), is the inside story of what one analyst has called "the biggest change Microsoft has undergone since it became a multinational company."

In this book, authors Marshall Phelps and David Kline take the reader inside the dramatic struggle within Microsoft to find a new direction. They offer an extraordinary behind-the-scenes view of the high-level deliberations of the company's senior-most executives, the internal debates and conflicts among executives and rank-and-file employees alike over the company's new collaborative direction, and the company's controversial top-secret partnership-building efforts with major open source companies and others around the world. Nothing was held back from this book save for information specifically prohibited from disclosure by confidentiality agreements that Microsoft signed with other companies. Indeed, the degree of access to Microsoft's inner workings granted to the authors-and the honest self-criticism offered by Microsoft leaders and employees alike-was unprecedented in the company's thirty-four-year history.

There are lessons in this book for executives in every industry-most especially on the role that intellectual property can play in liberating previously untapped value in a company and opening up powerful new business opportunities in today's era of "open innovation." Here is a powerful inside account of the dawn of a new era at what is arguably the most powerful technology company on earth.

From the Back Cover

Praise for Burning The Ships

"Told with a litigator's attention to detail, Burning the Ships recounts the journey that forced Microsoft to face its own 'succeed or die' moment. It's a powerful high-stakes lesson in strategy and survival that speaks volumes to business leaders of all stripes about the courage required to embrace radical business transformation."
—William J. Amelio, President and CEO, Lenovo

"Intellectual property does not show up on your balance sheet, and your board of directors would not recognize it if it were set out on a table in the lobby. But do not kid yourself: in an era of ever-commoditizing supply and distribution, IP is the essential fabric out of which your competitive advantage will be fashioned. Burning the Ships gives you an insider's look into how this engine of economic returns operates and what you can do to maintain it."
—Geoffrey A. Moore, author, Crossing the Chasm and Dealing with Darwin

"It would be difficult to overestimate the influence that Marshall Phelps has had on corporate thinking in regard to intellectual property. Simply put, he is the one we look to for guidance in such matters. Burning the Ships will be widely read in Japan and Europe as well as America."
—Michio Naruto, former vice chairman, Fujitsu Limited

"Phelps and Kline offer us a first look at tomorrow's business strategy, which of necessity involves the collaborative use of intellectual property. Don't miss out on the chance to see what future business leaders will be thinking about."
—Nathan Myhrvold, CEO, Intellectual Ventures

"Academics have spilled a good deal of ink over the past fifteen years on the question of how intellectual property can be deployed to enhance innovation and enterprise success. Finally we're getting the skinny on this vital issue—not just from someone who's been in the trenches, but from Marshall Phelps himself, the man who revolutionized and set the standard for the management of intellectual property across the whole information technology sector."
—Wesley Marc Cohen, PhD, Frederick C. Joerg Professor of Business Administration, Professor of Strategy, Economics, and Management, Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0470918217
• ISBN 13: 9780470918210
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208