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Summary: Kudo's to Dave Once Again!
Review: In this world of 'High Tech', so many companies are loosing sight of the 'High Touch' end. In essence, customer satisfaction should come first and foremost. And the insights in this book drives that point home. As art director and creator of booklineshawaii.com I'm learning more each day of what needs to be done in this 'High Tech' world from resources like this book. Thanks Dave!Also recommended: Creating Killer Web Sites, Pyscho-Cybernetics 2000, The Road Ahead, Business @ the Speed of Thought
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Summary: Futurize Your Enterprise
Review: Wow! This book is truly inspirational. It gives specific action points and detailed examples of how to move your online business to the next level. Siegel has a savvy, honest approach and dares to plot a course to a win-win situation for both business and consumer.
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Summary: A web site is not a separate offering from your business
Review: I could easily distil the message of this book into one line: if you want to remain competitive in the future, a web-site is not a separate offering from your business, but an integral part of it. As in his previous books, David Siegel explores how the Internet, and the World Wide Web, can be used as tools to enrich your business, not only as inter-communication channels, but as part and parcel of the whole customer experience. FYE is a book about the technologised business future, but its ultimate message is the old-fashioned maxim: "the customer is always right." Although a generalisation, what Siegel advises is that businesses who want to 'get'the Internet must first ask what their customers want out of the Internet. A flashy, buzzing web site, filled with all the latest bells and whistles, plug-ins and streaming video up the wazoo is nothing if it does not provide for the customer; this kind of web site (brochureware, on-line advert, virtual building) is no more than a folly, something built for the glorification and edification of its owner. Instead, the best businesses on the Internet and the Web shift the whole organisation so that the web site is the front-end of a much more customer-oriented company. What Siegel calls the Customer-Led Revolution is the need for a business to give its customers what they want. How he suggests we as business leaders put this into practice is the heart of FYE, beginning with a shift in business philosophy and mission statement by reorienting entire companies to serve one's major customer groups. With examples from many forms of manufacturer, wholesaler, distributor and service provider, this book provides powerful business models as hypothetical case studies, each of which ultimately asks what a company's customer groups desire from it. On final analysis, what one realises is that Siegel is very aware of the coming technology and how it will impinge on our daily lives. With faster connections, global digital delivery, and a ubiquitous integrated Internet, the world in 2010 is largely what previous generations thought the future would be: easy, fast and democratic. Whether all the businesses which exist today will still be around in ten years' time remains to be seen, but one thing is certain; that David Siegel will be right at the forefront of the Customer-Led Revolution. (P.S: To those of you who think that David Siegel should practice what he preaches, please consider that the best web design firms are too busy with their customers to constantly update, never mind create, their own web sites.)
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Summary: This book will tear down some Walls in your head!
Review: This book is a must read. The thesis are great and Siegel is not getting more scientific than he really needs to. Only some of the findings and prototypes aren't all that new, but thats about all the bad things I can tell you about this book. And to all the people in Germany: Don't wait until they translated the book. Go and get it!
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Summary: Siegelvision: 20/20
Review: I've been a fan of David Siegel's earlier work on web site design/project management. This one, however, goes off in a different direction -- up a level or two to deal with the key issues of ebusiness strategy. I found the book to be extremely thought provoking in reflecting on the strategy development work that I've been doing with startups and major corporations. I especially liked David's chapters on "Predictions" and his choice of excellent illustrations of XML-based applications that are coming just around the corner and that will affect all of us. Highly recommended!
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Summary: Revolution, not Evolution
Review: David Siegel is a well-respected graphics/ website designer who has now moved ahead of the e-biz book pack with his latest book. Doing business on the internet is not about the technology, and it's not about putting old processes online. It's about taking the entire business and aligning it around the customers' needs. To be successful in the face of higher customer expectations, businesses will need to provide solutions to their problems, which is a different focus that convincing them to buy the product you've been designing for the last 18 months. It requires a thorough understanding of what your customers are like, what they want, and what they're likely to want. This is a process that will probably not work through traditional tools (think of the IBM focus group spot on TV these days...) To accomplish this paradigm-shift, Siegel proposes aligning companies around the customer to be served. He provides down to earth, executable tactics to get the strategy aligned and running. He spends the first third of the book talking about Principles and Practice of this new alignment. Some of this has been covered before, but Siegel combines the concepts of the internet-enabled business with some of the idealism that permeated the microcomputer world back when Jobs and Wozniak were the original "two guys in a garage". It's refreshing to hear people talk about truth, positive attitudes and meritocracies. In the last two thirds of the book, Siegel shows how these concepts can be (and are being) implemented/ integrated into the new business model. First, he describes 8 prototypical (but fictional) companies that could currently be executing the concepts he discusses, and then extends the discussion to include predictions of ten new customer situations that execute the principles described earlier in the book. I found this method of continually stretching the possibilities to be very entertaining and educational at the same time. I kept on thinking to myself, "OK, we can do this, but what about.... Oh, yeah!", and then finding another paradigm unblocked. I had more "aha!" moments while reading this book than all my other e-business reading combined. Overall, this book was very appealing. Now that I think back on it, it was a fairly easy read, but it was definitely not light on concept. I think Siegel has certainly "gotten it" (heck, he may have invented "it" when he was writing his website design books), and would highly recommend this book to those who are trying to see what all the fuss is about. Aligning your organization around your customers will not be easy, but will likely be necessary to survive in the near future. David Siegel points a clear direction with this book. I'm looking forward to the next three chapters on futurizenow.com.
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Summary: Has its place
Review: Siegel has done a fair job at cobbling together some of the better thoughts about e-business. Problem is Customer.com and Net Gain already did it a couple of years ago. The thin "prototypes" of businesses that Siegel covers have existed for years too. So it is really a book that is a couple of years too late (like Siegel's promised futurizenow companion web site --which is a shell as of early Nov -- ouch! credibility gap). However Futurize does have a place as a quick reference or if I had a dumber than a rock boss that I was trying to spoonfeed, I'd likely choose Siegel's book.
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Summary: Doesn't seem to practice what he preaches
Review: The book was good. Great emphasis on serving the customer. AMAZINGLY he promotes his website throughout the entire book but his own website is not ready yet! Talk about practicing what you preach! If you go to his website (as of Nov. 2, 1999) it's not available yet. On the site he claims that the people who were putting it together "didn't work out". This certainly forced me to question many other aspects of the book.
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Summary: An e-business "MBA" in a book. An e-business "must read"!
Review: David Siegel has put in one book what took me five years learn. As an e-business consultant I am always looking for books to give my clients that will guide them in e-business. Now I only need to recommend one, Futurize Your Enterprise. The e-business "MBA" in a book. THE company text book for the next millennium!
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Summary: Bold vision &roadmap for companies entering the new century
Review: David Siegel has painted a picture of how large and small companies alike can go beyond "killer web sites" and create customer-led companies that can crush their competition. His vision is simple - begin a dialogue with your selected customers and find innovative ways to meet their needs. Simple thoughts, but difficult for large, hierarchical companies that rely on defending existing channels and keeping employees in samll "pigeon hole" jobs. He envisions rethinking the linkages between employees and customers to make them direct lines instead of through a beauracracy, creating a sense of empowerment that will add energy to any company. The examples he gives are provocative and futuristic, but achieveable and practical given the capabilities of today's internet. How outlines a process for how to achieve this that goes beyond "what should my website look like?" and gets at the foundation of delivering customer value and creating a dominant "customer value proposition". This book may be the first to go beyond the basics of internet models, statistics and web site designs and force any and every company to rethink their business strategy to leverage the internet.
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