Futurize Your Enterprise: Business Strategy in the Age of the E-Customer

I see only one flaw to David Siegel's new book: Like customers.com, it's arrived far too early to capture the imaginations of most business executives, its target audience. But for executives brave enough, smart enough, and awake enough, it's a great guide.If you currently work to build websites for a company that hasn't quite gotten it, this book makes a good bolster, friend, and consultant you can send off to your executive team to help them see the path ahead.At the very least, business folks can direct their executive teams and marketing and customer service groups and -- well, everybody -- to the Web Boot Camp Siegel hosts on the amazing companion website. That site, again targeted to busy business professionals, is a great service to web developers of all kinds.If you can't get anybody at your company to look at the site or read this book and at least consider this sensible approach: Run, dear reader. Run like the wind. There are other companies out there who want smart people like you to help change the world.

Futurize Your Enterprise closely parallels the excellent book by Richard Whiteley, The Customer- Driven Company, and adds the element of how to apply Whiteley's concepts through the Internet. Futurize is the best thought-through to date of the Internet books about how to serve customer needs better. Futurize is also good for giving you simple, practical steps for implementing Siegel's universal process. Those who are interested in strategy will find that this book is all about the customer-intimacy model, as spelled out in The Discipline of Market Leaders. While that is a perfectly valid strategic alternative, most markets are led by those who are advanced in providing innovations and low-cost providers. Futurize has a lot less to say about what those other companies should do. Some of the examples seem to imply that the benefit for the majority is primarily in overcoming a negative impression with customers and potential customers through clumsy communications. A third group will probably feel excluded as well: established smaller businesses. The scale and scope of what Siegel proposes will be beyond what most people can do who have less than several million dollars avaiable to focus on the Internet. On the other hand, if you are a well-funded Internet start-up, this book can give you a basic strategy outline that will help you avoid some mistakes. In terms of content, I have only one major objection. I am skeptical about Siegel's claim that brands will be relatively unimportant on the Internet. Rather, it seems like Internet-driven branding will become very important. I notice that many people automatically go to their bookmarketed sites, for example, rather than shopping around for the best deal. Brands are the consequence of trust-building and habit. To get rid of brands, you would have to change the way that peoples' minds work. That is unlikely to occur in the next 10 years. Think of this book as the best customer-focused book about creating Internet businesses available at the end of 1999. I am sure that better ones will come along in the future, because Siegel's focus is too limited to really cover the subject. But you would be well-advised to read this book. Almost anyone will learn something valuable along the way -- if only to see your ideas about how to work with the Internet constantly challenged by the author. If Siegel does another edition, I hope the next edition drops the fictional cases and uses only real ones instead. That would make the book a lot more compelling and useful. I have one final comment: How did someone who is famous for outstanding Web site designs end up with such an ugly book cover design?

This is the first "e" book that I can seriously say is worth purchasing. As a seasoned professional in the field with a library full of worthless literature on the "new economy", coming across this book was a welcomed change. I actually pulled out my highlighter and marked up the pages! Buy it...you're e-customers will applaud you!