If you have to be naked, you had better be buff. We are entering an extraordinary age of transparency, where businesses must for the first time make themselves clearly visible to shareholders, customers, employees, partners, and society. Financial data, employee grievances, internal memos, environmental disasters, product weaknesses, international protests, scandals and policies, good news and bad; all can be seen by anyone who knows where to look. Welcome to the world of the naked corporation. Transparency is revolutionizing every aspect of our economy and its industries and forcing firms to rethink their fundamental values. Don Tapscott, bestselling author and one of the most sought after strategists and speakers in the business world, is famous for seeing into the future and pointing out both its forest and its trees. David Ticoll, visionary researcher, columnist, and consultant, has identified countless breakthrough trends at the intersection of technology and business strategy. These two longtime collaborators now offer a brilliant guide to the new age of openness. In The Naked Corporation, they explain how the new transparency has caused a power shift toward customers, employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders; how and where information has exploded; and how corporations across many industries have seized on transparency not as a challenge but as an opportunity. Drawing on such examples as Chiquita's total turnaround on matters of ethics, to Shell Oil's reinvention of itself as an environmentally focused business, to Johnson & Johnson's longstanding and carefully nurtured reputation as a company worthy of trust -- as well as little-known examples from pharmaceuticals, insurance, high technology, and financial services -- Tapscott and Ticoll offer invaluable advice on how to lead the new age, rather than simply react to it. The Naked Corporation is a book for managers, employees, investors, customers, and anyone who cares about the future of the corporation and society. A new age is upon us, and you can either work with it and thrive, or fight it and die.
Don is one of the world’s leading authorities on innovation, media, and the economic and social impact of technology and advises business and government leaders around the world.
In 2011 Don was named one of the world's most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50. He has authored or co-authored 14 widely read books including the 1992 best seller Paradigm Shift. His 1995 hit Digital Economychanged thinking around the world about the transformational nature of the Internet and two years later he defined the Net Generation and the “digital divide” in Growing Up Digital.
His 2000 work, Digital Capital, introduced seminal ideas like “the business web” and was described by BusinessWeek as “pure enlightenment." Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything was the best selling management book in 2007 and translated into over 25 languages.
The Economist called his newest work Macrowikinomics: New Solutions for a Connected Planet a “Schumpeter-ian story of creative destruction” and the Huffington Post said the book is “nothing less than a game plan to fix a broken world.”
The idea of transparency in the Connection Economy is brilliant, unfortunately this book may have been written too early, and lacks the elements that would make it brilliant: Social Networks were not out yet. It turns the book into a formal analysis of what transparency should be, which makes it a bit of a hassle to read...