Business @ Speed of Thought – Bill Gates

 
 
“Business is going change more in the next ten years than it has in the last fifty.” 
This opening statement made by Bill Gates in this book published in 1999 is applicable to Indian conditions today.
You can read the following excerpts from the book and check it for yourself.
Though at heart most business problems are information problems, almost no one is using information well.
For the first time,  all kinds of information – numbers, text, soumd, video – can be put into a digital form that any computer can store, process, and forward.
The internet creates  a new universal space for information sharing, collaboration, and commerce. It provides a new medium that takes the immediacy and spontaneity of technologies such as the TV and the phone and combines them with depth and breadth inherent in paper communication.
A digital nervous system consists of the digital processes that enable a company to perceive and react to its environment, to sense competitor challenges and customer needs, and to organize timely responses.
Community building is going to be one of the biggest growth areas in the next few years on the web.
You focus on bad news in order to get cracking on the solution. Learning from mistakes and constantly improving products is a key in all successful companies. An important measure of a company’s digital system is how quickly people in the company find out bad news and respond to it.
Unless all knowledge workers use e-mails several times a day, companies will not get enough value from it to make it worthwhile.
A company’s ability to respond to unplanned events, good or bad, is a prime indicator of its ability to compete. Focus on your most unhappy customers.
Use technology to gather rich information on their unhappy experiences with your product and to find out what they want you to put into the product.
Adopting a learning posture rather a negative defensive posture can make customer  complaints your best source of significant quality improvements.
Power comes not from knowledge kept, but from knowledge shared.Training is the most basic and sometimes most overlooked form of knowledge sharing that needs to go on in a company.
Every new project should directly build on the learning from any similar project undertaken anywhere else in the world.
Any time there is change there is opportunity. So it is paramount that an organization get energized rather than paralysed.
– Jack Walch, CEO, General Electric.
Digital tools magnify the abilities that make us unique in the world: the ability to think, the ability to articulate our thoughts, the ability to work together to act on those thoughts.