New Book Review: "Future Legends"
New book review for Future Legends: Business in Hyper-Dynamic Markets, by Janka Krings-Klebe, Joachim Heinz, and Jörg Schreiner, 2017:
Copy provided by author Jörg Schreiner.
Just recently, I read a post submitted to a professional forum that someone had written on the subject of agility and why agility is not really what organizations need to succeed. This particular post attracted over a dozen comments from readers, and somewhere across the thread of discussion an individual remarked that an assertion another reader had made was correct with the given that agility was synonymous with speed. In turn, I responded by commenting that these two terms are actually not synonymous, and that agility is typically needed but cannot be considered in isolation.
This discussion recalled to mind that I have found myself needing to repeatedly define quite a few seemingly common terms for others in the workplace, as many terms summoned by those around me in conversation come prepackaged with assumptions, with conversation participants often not seeing eye to eye so-to-speak. The authors do touch on a number of terms with which readers may already be familiar, but their presentation was thoughtfully put together in a way that makes the risk of losing reader attention low. At the outset, the authors comment that their focus was to provide a collection of their insights and answers around five key questions in the hope that it will provide inspiration and hands-on guidance to business leaders and policy makers.
These five questions are the following, slightly reworded for clarity: (1) "What exactly makes digitalization such a powerful force in the marketplace?" (2) "What are the principles that make companies highly adaptive and innovative in the digital age?" (3) "How can the innovativeness of start-ups be combined with the scale of large organizations?" (4) "How do the practices of management need to change for a connected business?" and (5) "What could connected businesses contribute to solve income and opportunity disparities?"