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The Future Arrived Yesterday: The Rise of the Protean Corporation and What It Means for You
A bold vision about the ways companies will adapt and be reborn in a revolutionary world where business models implode and the search is on for what will work. . . .
The fate of newspapers and the music industry is a harbinger of what awaits every an aging business model in its death throes as people finally wake up to the grim fact that their products and the way they deliver them are completely out of sync not only with what customers want but how they want it. But Michael Malone–the author who, when the Internet was still the domain of technical experts, enabled his readers to see clearly the opportunities of the then-emerging digital age–is back and once again making sense of a future just around the corner.
Business considerations such as the wireless World Wide Web, billions of new consumers, and an entrepreneurial ethos are all converging. How a corporation is organized and how people will be managed and employed will change more quickly than anyone realizes. With technology poised to connect a billion new consumers from the most remote parts of the globe, corporations will enter a volatile economic era marked by unprecedented threats and opportunities. Survival will require companies to be “protean”–nimble shape-shifters able to change direction and identity in response to a rapidly evolving international marketplace. They must, in other words, act like perpetual entrepreneurial start-ups.
In our Web 2.0 world “the future arrived yesterday,” since the tools for success already exist and are the means for companies becoming protean. Malone provides remarkable insights into how this emerging corporate form will work and why it’s the key to competitiveness. Find
• Why the traditional CEO as master of the universe will be extinct. The CEO will be a chameleon, adapting management style and attitude to each company’s constituency.
• How to identify a core group of employees who will provide stability through their knowledge of the company's history, values, and culture.
• How to effectively recruit, manage, and retain the best talent in an increasingly nontraditional, entrepreneurial, and peripatetic workforce.
• Who stakeholders are, why they matter, and how they will extend beyond any comparable business organization to this point.
• Why the rigid boundaries between for-profit and nonprofit ventures are likely to dissolve through alternate forms of value creation, resulting in hybrid enterprises.
By embracing impermanence and becoming true shape-shifters, protean businesses will not only endure, they’ll come to dominate large segments of the global economy. Provocative and pragmatic, The Future Arrived Yesterday is a dynamic blueprint for a tumultuous economic age.
The fate of newspapers and the music industry is a harbinger of what awaits every an aging business model in its death throes as people finally wake up to the grim fact that their products and the way they deliver them are completely out of sync not only with what customers want but how they want it. But Michael Malone–the author who, when the Internet was still the domain of technical experts, enabled his readers to see clearly the opportunities of the then-emerging digital age–is back and once again making sense of a future just around the corner.
Business considerations such as the wireless World Wide Web, billions of new consumers, and an entrepreneurial ethos are all converging. How a corporation is organized and how people will be managed and employed will change more quickly than anyone realizes. With technology poised to connect a billion new consumers from the most remote parts of the globe, corporations will enter a volatile economic era marked by unprecedented threats and opportunities. Survival will require companies to be “protean”–nimble shape-shifters able to change direction and identity in response to a rapidly evolving international marketplace. They must, in other words, act like perpetual entrepreneurial start-ups.
In our Web 2.0 world “the future arrived yesterday,” since the tools for success already exist and are the means for companies becoming protean. Malone provides remarkable insights into how this emerging corporate form will work and why it’s the key to competitiveness. Find
• Why the traditional CEO as master of the universe will be extinct. The CEO will be a chameleon, adapting management style and attitude to each company’s constituency.
• How to identify a core group of employees who will provide stability through their knowledge of the company's history, values, and culture.
• How to effectively recruit, manage, and retain the best talent in an increasingly nontraditional, entrepreneurial, and peripatetic workforce.
• Who stakeholders are, why they matter, and how they will extend beyond any comparable business organization to this point.
• Why the rigid boundaries between for-profit and nonprofit ventures are likely to dissolve through alternate forms of value creation, resulting in hybrid enterprises.
By embracing impermanence and becoming true shape-shifters, protean businesses will not only endure, they’ll come to dominate large segments of the global economy. Provocative and pragmatic, The Future Arrived Yesterday is a dynamic blueprint for a tumultuous economic age.
- GenresBusiness
320 pages, Hardcover
First published May 5, 2009
About the author
Michael S. Malone
48 books63 followersMichael S. Malone is a journalist and author who has been nominated for the Pulitzer price twice for his investigative journalism contributions. He has a regular column Silicon Dreams in Forbes (previosuly Silicon Insider for ABC)
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 10, 2013
This book was mentioned in Paul Christiansen's January 28, 2013, article in the Wall Street Journal, To Outsmart ObamaCare, Go Protean. Christiansen suggested that many small companies should go Protean to keep under the 50 person limit and thus avoid ObamaCare.
While Malone has some interesting ideas, I was mostly not impressed. It is one of the weakest business books I have ever read.
“A Protean Corporation is an enterprise that features: (1) an amorphous external form that uses technology to rapidly adapt to changing situations with regard to market, customers, competition, finance, and even ownership, and (2) a slowly evolving internal center that uses interpretive tools to maintain the identity and continuity of the enterprise over time.
The ever-changing external 'Cloud' contains a majority of the individuals connected to the enterprise, including full-time and part-time employees, contractors and consultants, and other stakeholders. These stakeholders continually migrate between greater and lesser attachment to the enterprise according to the level, duration, and intensity of their commitment to the enterprise. A majority of these individuals migrate across the surface of the company, provide their contracted services, and move on. 'Cloud' employees are mostly rewarded for their contribution.
The center of the Protean Corporation is a solid 'Core' that contains a comparatively small number of permanent employees, from all levels of the traditional organizational chart. These individuals bear the task of maintaining the Protean Corporation's core identity, philosophy, standards, stories, and legends, as well as relationships with strategic partners and investors, intellectual property, and public image. 'Core' employees are mostly rewarded for their commitment.
The primary task of the 'Cloud' of a Protean Corporation is to quickly adapt to a changing world. The primary task of the 'Core' is to maintain the enterprise's core identity through these changes. The biggest challenge facing both is learning to work with the other.”
While Malone has some interesting ideas, I was mostly not impressed. It is one of the weakest business books I have ever read.
“A Protean Corporation is an enterprise that features: (1) an amorphous external form that uses technology to rapidly adapt to changing situations with regard to market, customers, competition, finance, and even ownership, and (2) a slowly evolving internal center that uses interpretive tools to maintain the identity and continuity of the enterprise over time.
The ever-changing external 'Cloud' contains a majority of the individuals connected to the enterprise, including full-time and part-time employees, contractors and consultants, and other stakeholders. These stakeholders continually migrate between greater and lesser attachment to the enterprise according to the level, duration, and intensity of their commitment to the enterprise. A majority of these individuals migrate across the surface of the company, provide their contracted services, and move on. 'Cloud' employees are mostly rewarded for their contribution.
The center of the Protean Corporation is a solid 'Core' that contains a comparatively small number of permanent employees, from all levels of the traditional organizational chart. These individuals bear the task of maintaining the Protean Corporation's core identity, philosophy, standards, stories, and legends, as well as relationships with strategic partners and investors, intellectual property, and public image. 'Core' employees are mostly rewarded for their commitment.
The primary task of the 'Cloud' of a Protean Corporation is to quickly adapt to a changing world. The primary task of the 'Core' is to maintain the enterprise's core identity through these changes. The biggest challenge facing both is learning to work with the other.”
February 15, 2021
Dry in style and dilute in content - this is a ten page memo stretched out needlessly to book length.
November 23, 2010
"Companies need to become morphing shape-shifters" This is Malone's very good premise. Unfortunately much of this book is speculation on how this can be implemented lacking the hard work of research, study, or experimentation.
Read
March 27, 2012Never finished - interesting ideas about the new world of work.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews