Collaborative Communities

Collaborative Communities: Partnering for Profit in the Networked Economy challenges your most deeply held assumptions about how to build a profitable business. It is the first and only book to show how to organize your business around customers in collaboration with business partners and suppliers.

Business is going through a revolution and companies and industries as we know them are ceasing to exist. Regardless of how long you’ve been in business, no matter how many customers you have, or your company’s revenues and profits, you must embrace the Collaborative Community™ as the business pattern for achieving success in the networked economy.

Business is quickly becoming defined by the choices the individual customer wants businesses to make available to him or her, not what a business chooses to make available. Customers are increasingly expecting to collaborate in the development of personalized goods, services, and information. The problem, quite simply, is that the business structures that prevail in our economy are not designed to fulfill the needs and wants of knowledgeable and powerful customers.

The challenge facing all businesspeople is to disregard how their business works today, to discard their legacy thinking, take out a “clean sheet of paper,” begin with the customer, and then work backward through the value creation process, developing an understanding of when, where, and how value is created.

Collaborative Communities explains in detail how to build this new business pattern – the seamless alliance of businesses best able to profitably satisfy the shared set of needs and wants of a virtual customer community. This alliance is led by a “choreographer,” a business whose function is to balance the satisfaction of the customers’ personal needs with the need of the business members in the community to operate profitably.

Collaborative Communities describes in detail what you need to know to benefit from this emerging business pattern and gain customer loyalty, grow profitably, and increase shareholder value in the Networked Economy.

Jeffrey Shuman, Ph.D. is the co-founder and CEO of The Rhythm of Business, Inc. A five-time entrepreneur, Shuman is also Professor and Director of Entrepreneurial Studies at Bentley College, Waltham, MA, author of The Rhythm of Business: The Key to Building and Running Successful Companies, and a recipient of an Ernst & Young New England Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Janice Twombly is the President and co-founder of The Rhythm of Business, Inc., and an author and speaker on business success in the networked economy. David Rottenberg is the editor for The Rhythm of Business, Inc., and contributed to The Rhythm of Business: The Key to Building and Running Successful Companies. Jeff and Jan’s columns and articles have been widely published by media outlets including Alta Vista and the Wall Street Journal’s startup.wsj.com and careerjournal.com, and national media including CIO Magazine, Smart Money Magazine, The Boston Globe, and Los Angeles Times, seek their insights and analysis. Frequent speakers and presenters on the challenges of designing a business built from the customer’s perspective, their simply stated views provide an unconventional context for understanding the dramatic changes in business brought about by advances in communications and information technologies.

The Rhythm of Business, Inc. works with entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies to achieve and maintain success through the development and implementation of collaborative business models and processes that can iterate as customers and technologies change.