The reflections on our book on business model innovation are advancing daily. Yves Pigneur, my co-author, and I have come up with a first rough prototype book structure. We will refine our thinking this Friday and we are, of course, curious to hear your feedback.
You can check out the structure in the slidecast below. It gives you an idea where we are heading, though this first draft structure only sketches out the rough outlines.
To listen to and visualize the slidecast, please hit the play button. All the rest is automatic.
I’m looking forward to your first feedbacks…
Nice to see a little more material. The book sounds nice, but it would be interesting to see more about the kind of novelty you want to bring in to business model design. A few comments:
1. I think you should be careful about calling this the greatest management book of the year/decade (in whatever form). It is good to sound sure of oneself, but I’m afraid that kind of comment will scare some people off. Also, books sell on buzz and reviews, and that is the kind of statement that can create negative buzz and that reviewers can bring out against you.
2. I’d be careful about putting in too many checklists. They can make a book feel a bit childish and simplified. Some people love them, but many in business know that lists won’t make you great.
3. The idea with stories in the end is great, but why just at the end? Why not make this something that goes through the book? A number of bestsellers have used this technique, and it can be really powerful if well executed.
OK, just a few short comments for now… Best of luck!
Thanks for your comments, Alf. The point on calling this “the best management book” is well taken. Actually, this doesn’t really correspond to my style, so I’ll shelf this type of language
Alex,
you might remember I favored a book on this as I followed your & Yves work in the past.
My two cents comments: the followings should be considered not necessarily at top level of the index structure (i.e. if you want to keep such index level very thin) but I expect these somewhere on the content.
A) Fist section: “who?” should carry out a BM innovation, analysis or re-engineer ? A CxO only? a business unit manager (e.g. CEO of a Telco or the responsible of a consumer offer of a Telco) ? A Product/Portfolio Manager reviewing the offer strategy (product/services)? A consultant going to help customers ? A salesman addressing customer neeeds ? I don’t mean such section should “really” define who (whoever is interested
, but discuss tackel the “who-s” question to illustrate benefits/applicability/use scenarios better (eventually to help CEOs position this into the organization … with implication on audience of the book). This “who?” might be in the introduction and not necessarily in the current section 1.
I understand writing possible “whos” has implications about who you will target with such booksand how you will monetize it. e.g. free (i.e. bundled) to ToP managers wokshops (ok CEO,CIO, entp) on Amazon on sale for anybody ? … but at present it seem from section 3 you are targeting CIO, CXO, enterprenours. BTW I’m not any of those
Depending on your goal, this comment would apply or not to your structure.
2. Section 2… I see implementation, in the current text you don’t mention the word “organization / organizational alignment” will you cover part of this ??
3. Examples: CEO, CIO, Enterpreneur … see comment before. Maybe the goal of this section is to illustrate the importance for a CEO of its organization using BM design. But the way it is in the index (“looks the story of a …”) calls for an indentification with one of them from the target audience. And a business model innovation, although with different shapes, could come from any part of the organization, not just top-down, despite alignment is indeed in the hand of such people.
So it seemed (from the wording of the index) you lost a little the original concept of a common language in the organization, value chain actors and are now addressing mostly the leader (CxO) point of view. Again I think this is a problem of not knowing the content you will put, just a first impression from top level structure.
I would also appreciate also something in verticals (retail, banking, telco … ). I actually am interested in BM innovation from adjacent industries, as a spillover / mashups from one environment to the other. Maybe these are distributed in examples throughout the book. I work in Telco, but I appreciated the case of the Mountreaux Festival as well, Pandora and the others ….
4. Checklists … well I like frameworks (ex consultant) but just guidelines in the books and then real ones in electronic formats and I can use the pieces I like (ppt, add-on, tools, Mindjet (tree-sw) extensions.
Ok. hope this can give some hints. I volunteer for any review case in the Telco/on-line media space
Ciao
Carlo
PS writing in this tiny blog window is terribly difficult
Carlo, great contribution! Here a couple of quick answers to your 4 questions:
1. the “who” question is essential and will be tackled throughout the book. We will described who should be involved in business model projects and how. I think more then ever before, everybody in a company should contribute to strengthening its business model. Thus, the common language still applies.
In the stories at the end – CEO, CIO, entrepreneur – our focus is not to focus on the “who”, but on the usage scenarios – see answer 3.
2. “organizational alignment” must of course figure in the book…
3. With the stories we simply want to illustrate three different usage scenarios:
* A CEO starts from a given business model, wants to detect the weaknesses and innovation
* A CIO needs to align business model and IT
* An entrepreneur starts from a “green field” and has to put all the pieces of his business model together
4. Advice taken. We have already been thinking about ppt-templates to design business models
We will post a new prototype book structure with more details online in 1-3 weeks. This was a first high level reflection…