IEEE ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT REVIEW
Book Reviews: Volume 31, Number 1, First Quarter 2003
The Company of the
Future
By Frances Cairncross
Harvard Business School
Press, 2002
ISBN
1-57851-657-9
Breadth of Audience: 3.25
(Good)
Topical Utility: 3.06 (Good)
Content Applicable: 2.50 (Fair)
Writing Quality: 2.88 (Good)
Overall: 2.92 (Good)
COMMENTS FROM THE
REVIEWERS:
1. I suspect—and this book
does not suggest otherwise—that neither people nor cultures change greatly, and
certainly not fast. But to achieve what the author proposes, change we must. And
our management skills, currently woefully inadequate, must improve
significantly. This book is a must—but strictly for the thinking manager with a
bias for action who is prepared to challenge its conclusions, think them
through, and then address the questions: What must I now do? How differently
must I behave? And how shall I acquire the skills?
Frances Cairncross gives us
a readable and shrewd account of the terrain through which we pass. She
correctly identifies the key characteristics of the company of tomorrow.
However, the precise steps by which executives and managers are to get from
here to there remain, as yet, obscure. In particular, micro-businesses struggle
with issues of capitalization and knowledge management. Here the problem is a
lack of hands-on guidance and facilitation from those who have done it before.
I am uncertain how this book, excellent though it is, may help. Even the “Ten
Rules for Survival” that provide the lead section hardly suggest what must now
be done.
British readers may be
deflected or discouraged by the fact that the overwhelming majority of the
cited exemplars, authors, and gurus work in the USA. Such endless citation can
become self-defeating. It would of course be a mistake to reject the core
message of the book on that account, but one does wish that some of the subtler
and less grandiose approaches favored in the U.K. and European cultural
contexts, often more difficult to identify and document, had been identified
and lauded. One longs to see it accepted that not all management tricks and
tools of U.S. origin transplant well into U.K. soil. The contextually
appropriate management of culture is perhaps the most daunting aspect of the
challenges ahead.
2. This book is an extensive
list of the author’s view of the Internet’s impact on business life and
management.
ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT REVIEW
A publication of the IEEE Engineering Management Society