Cybercorp: The New Business Revolution (James Martin, 1996), ISBN 0814403514

If you read only one book on future "thrival" (better than mere "survival"), let it be "Cybercorp" by James Martin. He goes so many steps beyond the "Beyond Re-engineering" genre of books and articles, you may as well save your time and just go after the best, especially if you're involved in setting corporate strategy, rather than the nuts & bolts of implementation. Come to think of it, you probably should read this book even if you are not involved in strategy-setting. "Cybercorp" will arm you with plenty of ammunition if your management insists that you re-engineer obsolete, pre-cyber business processes. You might even save your hide by sidestepping a lose-lose situation.

Generally, I find plenty in even the slimmest of books to disagree with; I only found a couple of sentences in all of 311 pages that I couldn't quite say "amen" to. No, I won't tell you what they are.

The overall message? "Don't re-engineer and automate what ought to be thrown out. Don't waste your time trying to teach the old dog new tricks. Design and generate a new puppy instead." (But ... Martin emphatically does not advocate the usual, easy way out, i.e. tossing your people out into the streets. A major lesson of "People and Management," the final of three sections of the book is: communicate, educate and re-deploy.)

If you like laundry lists and rules of thumb, you'll revel in the wealth of both, and the bibliography at the end of each chapter makes for much easier reference, should you want to pursue a given topic in greater depth. The lists and rules of thumb offer ideas, guidelines and caveats. Pay particular attention to the caveats. Such as? The counterintuitive consequences of cyber activity, due to geographic and time separations. Your "causes" may produce unexpected, disastrous "effects."

In my humble opinion, Cybercorp is Martin's masterpiece. He ties together important business concepts such as value streams, the corporation as learning laboratory and as part of a business ecosystem with the intelligent application of technology. This is his one hundredth book.