Funky Business: Talent Makes Capital Dance - Softcover

Ridderstrale, Jonas; Nordstrom, Kjelle A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0273659073 ISBN 13: 9780273659075

Publisher: Ft Pr, 2002

Synopsis

In the best-selling Funky Business Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale launch a manifesto for difference in business. Move it. In 1995, 1000 new soft drinks were launched on the Japanese market. A year later, 1% of them were still for sale. Move it fast. If you are driving a 1990 model car, approximately six years were spent developing it. Today, most companies do that job in two years. Move it faster. At Hewlett Packard, the majority revenues come from products that did not exist a year age. Move it now. In Tokyo, you can order a customized Toyota on Monday and be driving it on Friday. More products, more markets, more people, more competition. In a world of abundance and excess, competition is total and competition is personal. Difference rules.

If you think about it, most of what your business does could be bought from someone else using the Yellow Pages or an Internet search engine. How are you going to be attractive? By being more efficient? By doing it cheaper? Come on! This is the age of time and talent, where we are selling time and talent, exploiting time and talent, hiring time and talent, packaging time and talent. Today, the "critical resources" wear shoes and walk out the door around 5.30pm every day. Karl Marx was right; the workers should own the critical means of production - it's small, gray and weighs about 1.3 kilograms. It will move markets and it will make capital dance. Only talent will allow you to be unique, to escape business as usual. In this world we need business as unusual. We need innovative business. We need unpredictable business. We need Funky Business. This is business book as unusual.

About this title

Review:

Oh dear. A book called Funky Business by two Swedish academics. At first glance, it has all the allure of Benny and Bjorn's (from Abba) sadly never-released concept album about life as a middle manger in a multinational conglomerate. There is something earnestly hip about the way Kjell Nordström and Jonas Ridderstråle of the Stockholm School of Economics present themselves. "They do gigs not seminars. These gigs sell out. They have shaved heads and wear black," says the blurb.

But that's what makes Funky Business worth reading. It's not so much the novelty of the authors' argument, which boils down to the notion that in an oversupplied world, ideas are what separate successful companies and individuals from failures. Rather, it's the vitality of their argument and the rhythm of their language that make their ideas so compelling. "Traditional roles, jobs, skills, ways of doing things, insights, strategies, aspirations, fears, and expectations no longer count. In this environment, we cannot have business as usual. We need business as unusual. We need different business. We need innovative business. We need unpredictable business. We need surprising business. We need funky business."

The book, which is almost a virtuoso display of rhetoric and intellectual power, bursts at the seams with the force of its argument and the weight of its colorful evidence. Sources quoted range from the pope to the British band the Prodigy. Funky, Inc., they say, "isn't like any other company. It is not a dull, old conglomerate. It is not a rigid bureaucracy. It is an organization that actually thrives on the changing circumstances and unpredictability of our times."

This is great entertainment. But the slick veneer does not invalidate the way the book pulls together many existing strands of thought about how business is developing and evokes a coherent and intriguing vision of a future whose main feature will be incoherence.

This really is one for the whole family. Or at least those old enough to have a job. --Alex Benady

From the Back Cover:

"In a world of suits, Nordström and RidderstrSle's message is refreshingly different." Business Strategy Review,'The Greatest Business Books of All Time'

 

"Funky Business- the groovy bible of modern business philosophy."  Red magazine

 

"Could barely, literally, put down Funky Business." Warren Bennis

 

“It will transform your brain."   Customer Management

 

 

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER THAT PUTS THE FUN(K) BACK INTO BUSINESS. FOREVER.

 

Funky Business: no business book is more stylish, or more funky. Now it’s back and it’s more funky than ever. Funky Business Forever casts a penetrating glance back over its shoulder to see how many of its predictions came true and turns a piercing gaze on the future to see where funky business is headed next. What’s new? What’s different? How will we be living, working, thinking tomorrow?

 

Dip into this inimitable and exuberant gallop through the big issues of today and see what the original funksters, Nordström and RidderstrSle, have to say about capitalism, the economy, politics, technology, the environment, talent. Always provocative, always controversial, their ideas may make you laugh, shout, grind your teeth, nod your head, pull your hair out, but one thing’s for sure, they’ll make you think. And they might even make you more funky ...

 

BUSINESS AS USUAL? FUNK THAT.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ft Pr
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0273659073
• ISBN 13: 9780273659075
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 288