Blown to Bits

How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy

By: Philip Evans, Thomas S. Wurster

Narrated by: Jeff David

Length: 2 hrs and 25 mins

Publisher's summary

Richness or reach? For business leaders, it used to be a fundamental strategic tradeoff: focus on "rich information", customized products and services tailored to a niche market, or reach out to a broad, general market with watered-down information.

The new economics of information is blowing apart this traditional dichotomy. Increasingly, customers will have rich access to a universe of alternatives, suppliers will exploit direct access to your customers, and competitors will pick off the most profitable parts of your value chain. So where's your competitive advantage?

Blown to Bits demonstrates how companies can re-strategize to take advantage of the new economics of information. Using examples from a spectrum of industries, from financial services to health care, from consumer to industrial goods, from media to retail, Blown to Bits shows how to make the most of the new forces shaping competitive advantage.

©Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster. Published by arrangement with Harvard Business School Press (P)2000 HighBridge Company

A Dense Substantive Treatise on Disintegration

The basic idea is that most theory on business structure is based on managing a tradeoff between reach and depth. For example in financial services you can offer a rich personal relationship with a ???broker??? (or the modern surrogate for a broker) to a few customers or you can offer generic ???self-help??? services to a wide range of customers. The thesis of the book is that the internet substantially eliminates this trade-off. You can have your reach and your depth both. This will destroy a lot of business models and even some of the theory about the construction of business models.

They have a proposed fix that is not easy to summarize. Basically, businesses will be forced to unbundle or disintegrate in order to find the key value propositions and then do something with these gyms. They have some idea of what you need to do with the few true value centers, but this part seemed a bit fuzzy to me.

Unlike many similar books the authors have actually thought deeply about the subject. This is not a fluff, hype, ???go internet???, hack job. The trouble is in its abridged form the book becomes too dense; it is hard to follow.