Blown to Bits Concluding Summary

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Blown to Bits Concluding Summary

• Chapters 6-11

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Fig. 6-3 The Three Dimensions of Competitive
Advantage
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Chapter 6Sound Bits

• The new navigators compete on reach, affiliation
  and richness.
• Reach is clutter w/o navigation.
• Push is a function of high search costs. Lower
  costs leads to pull.
• Stickiness occurs because reach as developed
  faster than navigation.
• Random, small-scale innovation may never achieve
  critical massbig bets.

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Chapter 7Sound Bits

• Reach constraints led to navigators affiliation
  with sellers.
• Agency shift will promote affiliation with
  consumers and greater reach.
• It is surprising that navigators have not
  affiliated with consumers in the past.
• The navigator business may be worth more than the
  supplier business.

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Fig. 8-1
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Analysis of Fig. 8-1

• As the trade-off shifts, reach will go up.
• However, greater richness is possible.
• The greater the increase in richness, the lesser
  the increase in reach.
• The strategic priority is to tilt north rather
  than east.
• East is toward commoditization and
  disintermediation.
• North is toward informational glue.

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Chapter 8Sound Bits

• Adding richness is the most powerful way to
  forestall deconstruction.
• Privacy is the Achilles Heel of the information
  economy.
• The consumer is your competitor what are you
  doing for him that he cannot do for himself?
• The value of sellers richness goes up as reach
  increases.

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Chapter 9Sound Bits

• Connectivity is achieved, standards are the more
  critical challenge.
• Radical uncertainty governing the evolution of
  standards.
• Communication channels start within the industry
  but quickly move out.
• Explosion of richness and reach will change
  competitive advantage.
• Extranets encourage outsourcing.

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Chapter 10Sound Bits

• Markets vs. Hierarchies and Western vs. Japanese.
• If information is symmetric, trust substitutes
  for control.
• Structures are similar within and across
  organizations boundaries become fuzzy.
• All organizations interact on the basis of
  flatness, fluidity, and trust.
• Cooperation and competition, Collaboration and
  initiative, richness and reach all coexist.

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Chapter 11Monday Morning

• No business leader today can presume that the
  business definition in his or her business will
  still be valid a few years from now.
• Deconstruction is most likely to strike in
  precisely those parts of the business where
  incumbents have most to lose and are least
  willing to recognize it.
• Waiting for someone else to demonstrate the
  feasibility of deconstruction hands over the
  biggest advantage a competitor could possibly
  wish for time.

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• Leaders need to wrestle with the full range of
  possible patterns of deconstruction.
• Strategy really matters. It creates economic
  realities in a deconstructed world.
• The value of winning will esclate as will the
  cost of losing.

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• The reconstructed business definitions will
  rarely correspond to the old.
• The hardest step for an incumbent organization is
  the mental one of seeing the business through a
  different, deconstructed lens and then acting on
  this insight.
• The subtler pitfall is co-option and passive
  resistance by a skeptical and self-preserving
  organization.

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• Strategy in a deconstructing world has to be
  generally right, but need not be specifically
  right, as long as the organization maintains a
  capacity to learn from its mistakes.
• The value of incumbents best assets is all too
  often destroyed by the organizational,
  behavioral, and personal baggage that they insist
  on bringing to the new venture.

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• Incumbents can be the insurgents, if they choose.
• Old models of leadership become invalid in a
  deconstructed world. But leaders must create
  culture and establish a big move strategy.