Product Description

In the best-selling Funky Business Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale launch a manifesto for difference in business. Move it. In 1995, 1000 new soft drinks were launched on the Japanese market. A year later, 1% of them were still for sale. Move it fast. If you are driving a 1990 model car, approximately six years were spent developing it. Today, most companies do that job in two years. Move it faster. At Hewlett Packard, the majority revenues come from products that did not exist a year age. Move it now. In Tokyo, you can order a customized Toyota on Monday and be driving it on Friday. More products, more markets, more people, more competition. In a world of abundance and excess, competition is total and competition is personal. Difference rules.

If you think about it, most of what your business does could be bought from someone else using the Yellow Pages or an Internet search engine. How are you going to be attractive? By being more efficient? By doing it cheaper? Come on! This is the age of time and talent, where we are selling time and talent, exploiting time and talent, hiring time and talent, packaging time and talent. Today, the "critical resources" wear shoes and walk out the door around 5.30pm every day. Karl Marx was right; the workers should own the critical means of production - it's small, gray and weighs about 1.3 kilograms. It will move markets and it will make capital dance. Only talent will allow you to be unique, to escape business as usual. In this world we need business as unusual. We need innovative business. We need unpredictable business. We need Funky Business. This is business book as unusual.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #666167 in Books
• Published on: 2002-12-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.com Review
Oh dear. A book called Funky Business by two Swedish academics. At first glance, it has all the allure of Benny and Bjorn's (from Abba) sadly never-released concept album about life as a middle manger in a multinational conglomerate. There is something earnestly hip about the way Kjell Nordström and Jonas Ridderstråle of the Stockholm School of Economics present themselves. "They do gigs not seminars. These gigs sell out. They have shaved heads and wear black," says the blurb.

But that's what makes Funky Business worth reading. It's not so much the novelty of the authors' argument, which boils down to the notion that in an oversupplied world, ideas are what separate successful companies and individuals from failures. Rather, it's the vitality of their argument and the rhythm of their language that make their ideas so compelling. "Traditional roles, jobs, skills, ways of doing things, insights, strategies, aspirations, fears, and expectations no longer count. In this environment, we cannot have business as usual. We need business as unusual. We need different business. We need innovative business. We need unpredictable business. We need surprising business. We need funky business."

The book, which is almost a virtuoso display of rhetoric and intellectual power, bursts at the seams with the force of its argument and the weight of its colorful evidence. Sources quoted range from the pope to the British band the Prodigy. Funky, Inc., they say, "isn't like any other company. It is not a dull, old conglomerate. It is not a rigid bureaucracy. It is an organization that actually thrives on the changing circumstances and unpredictability of our times."

This is great entertainment. But the slick veneer does not invalidate the way the book pulls together many existing strands of thought about how business is developing and evokes a coherent and intriguing vision of a future whose main feature will be incoherence.

This really is one for the whole family. Or at least those old enough to have a job. --Alex Benady

Review
"Funky Business is the antidote to bland writing and bland thinking." Tom Peters "Could barely, literally put down, Funky Business."Warren Bennis "The gospel of the new thinking is Funky Business" "- "Industry Standard" "It's the best un-businesslike business book I have ever read ...Funky Business is less of a business handbook and more of a religion. It should be treated like a chain letter - read it and pass it onto 10 other people." (or even better, tell 10 other people to buy it) ... This book should carry a government health warning: Read with care - this book will seriously blow your mind. Go on, read it, be a devil - after all, you only live once." - "Human Resources" "You know when Time magazine trumps the rebirth of design on its from cover that something's up. You know too that the world of "boring is best commerce" is taking note of change when books like Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordstrom's Funky Business hits the best-seller lists." - Viewpoint magazine "Funky Business is a better book than most novels but it is not for bedtime. It will jerk you out of your complacency and make you question your very existence. It will transform your brain"." - Customer Management" "This is the New Economy's Killer Book!" Some say they can't put a certain book down. This one I had to - regularly - in order to recover from the impact of the statement I had just read. I'm in the Internet business and thought I understood plenty about the New Economy. But this book didn't just open my eyes, it ripped them out and tossed them high in the sky!" - Rich Preece , Hamburg, Germany, Amazon Customer Services "Funky Business - the groovy bible of modern business philosophy" - Red magazine "The sweat-shirted Mr Ridderstrale has become the antidote to the graph-wielding business academics on the lecture circuit." "Richard Donkin, The Financial Times" "What I've found really thought-provoking has been "Funky Business "by Ridderstrale and Nordstrom - this is so well-written and entertaining, and it conveys some pretty heavy messages such as business and the world will never be the same again, now values are changing the impact of technology, and the new society which is evolving. " "- Paul Mosson, Director of HR at Dewar's" "The reader will see that this book has a lot to say, and says it clearly, provocatively and breathlessly. Some of the analysis has been done before, and better, but the particular vision of funkiness is worth having to hand."- "Martin Ward, Knowledge Management"

From the Back Cover
The corporate world has to be a more interesting place to be. A place where people can be creative risk-taking entrepreneurs; a place where talent wants to live. A place where ideas happen and exciting products happen faster. And then change.

This is the world of Funky Business.

Funky Times The new world is different. Forget the old world order. Forget what you knew yesterday.

Forces of Funk Technology, institutions and values are being subverted and overturned. They are the triad, the inter-linked drivers of change, transforming each other and creating a global village of turbulence, tribes and fusion. We are deregulating life for ourselves and our children. The reality of our times is that we are all condemned to freedom - the freedom to choose.

Funky Village The drivers are shaping a new world. First, they are changing the way society operates. Social behavior, expectations and systems are undergoing seismic shifts. Society is restructuring itself along tribal lines as surplus and excess becomes a way of life and business.

Funky Inc. The second area in which change is most dramatic is among the great institutions of our age: corporations. The corporate complacency of yesterday has given way to insecurity and fear. So, how will the emergent organizations be different from those that have gone before?

Funky U And where does this leave the humble human being? Amid the maelstrom of change, people are seeking out understanding, meaning, development, skills and insight. So how should you lead others and how can you lead your own life?

Feeling Funky What do you need to do today and tomorrow to survive and thrive in the new world? Alberto Alessi is already doing it. So, too, are Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, and Jorma Ollila. They are all exploiting the last taboo.

Karl Marx was right. The workers do control the means of production; 1.3 kilograms of brain holds the key to all our futures.

Successful companies are different from the competition, and difference comes from the way people think rather than what companies make. In the new world, it's talent that makes capital dance. Business as usual is uninspired and that's no longer good enough; talent doesn't want to work there; customers don't want to buy there.

In these times we need FUNKY BUSINESS.

Customer Reviews

Action Book
Move it.
Move it fast.
Move it faster.
Move it now.

These are the words, which summarize all the 245 pages of the book and energize them. Although casual in style and easy-to-understand in language, Funky Business is yet a profound and philosophical survey of the recent shift of basic values in social and business structures of the global society. Those, who understand the spirit and emotions of Mission Impossible II or Swordfish - Password Accepted, will definitely appreciate both the style and the message. For the `businessmen', who love ACID Jazz the message of the book is also easy to catch. The other guys may miss it out.

True, none of the business concepts, exposed in the book is new to the business community. But the authors created the brand new vision of the modern business through hy-phe-nation (as they describe the phenomenon themselves) of the latest ideas. Only such a weird combination of ideas helped them to produce the most beautiful (and harmonious?) description of a competitive advantage I ever learnt: "Competitive advantages weigh no more than the dreams of a butterfly". I understood the vitality of this phrase when I heard one of businessman in Russia (not oil, timber or caviar tycoon) telling, that he is "dedicated to the quality of idea in his business, because the highest quality of idea is the only thing impossible to be replicated immediately". And this gives him a competitive advantage. Once again: it was asserted not from the sends of California, but from the woods of Russia. What else should be said or done to prove the unambiguous victory of Forces of Funk throughout the world?

But above all, this is not the book to read, to learn and to forget. This is the ACTION book. It wakes up those who haven't yet understood that Future Just Happened. And it puts more pressure on those who are already awoken in order to move faster. My judgement is that Funky Business is a must-read for everyone in business: from an intern to the CEO. We already did it in our office. Every newcomer MUST read Funky Business in a bid to speak with his peers and bosses (very few, really) in the same language.

This is the New Economy's Killer Book!
Some say they can't put a certain book down. This one I had to - regularly - in order to recover from the impact of the statement I had just read. I'm in the Internet business and thought I understood plenty about the New Economy. But this book didn't just open my eyes, it ripped them out and tossed them high in the sky!

Like being hit by a machine gun
This is the way business books ought to be. Michael Porter take cover. These Swedes have something to say, and they do so no holds barred. The contents might not all be white hot news to everybody, but all in all the book is a great place to start if you want to get up to speed on the immediate future and present. The books main attributes are:

A very refreshing approach to the world, not just business/economics, including humans as persons. Very wholistic, and I admire the way these intuitives manage to link everything together in the cobweb we name the world.

The style of writing is very intriguing in the way it is unheard of so far in this genre. It is like a machine gun in its rhythm and explosiveness.

The chapters on how to live and maximize your potential as a worker in the future. Very useful to anybody.

I reccomend this book to anybody that wants to know what this "new economy", "network economy" or "internet economy" means.