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.
Customer Reviews
Funky Review:
I found Funky Business to be a fresh look at how the business world continues to change (and how it refuses to admit to the need for change). The writing was fun and interesting, the subject matter worthwhile, the titles provocative. Thanks are in order to Jonas and Kjell for this in-your-face rant on what needs to change.
Different Perspectives:
If you want to see things -business or normal life- from different perspectives, then this is the book to choose!
Good book, but too much hype without real essence:
I have respect to all things coming out of Sweden (from music to cars). But after reading this book (as well as another Swedish made, ‘Netocracy’) I feel that Suedes are playing too much with theory/philosophy, instead of concentrating on practical solutions. By releasing such ‘guide for the future’ type of book, authors should excercise more responsibility to the people interested to act upon their advices. After finishing this book reader isn’t much smarter. Yes, authors describe present economic situation precisely, but they lack real and solid possible solutions. For example, they advice long-term focusing on narrow business niche in order to survive on the international competitive market. But, if some day better competitor(very likely) pops out of nowhere, our niche-rider is done. He put all effort and time to one skill, and doesn’t possess any other skills (read: back to square one). Deadly advice, indeed. Once again it showed that theory-writers (even if they are respected academics) cannot substitute book written by practical experience.
Twisty language beguiles the easily amused:
The influences are clear: rock journalism, pampleteering, dot-com uber capitalism and some basic ideas about markets. Spice up some old ideas from Tom Peters and Charles Handy with energizing language and lo and behold a bestselling book. This is an example of style well over content, language used to beguile and entrance without saying anything at all. Reading this thoroughly i cannot find a single original idea in this book. If this is cutting-edge thinking, business is in serious trouble.
Do not stop in thinking if funky is good or not…funky is:
Until today my concept for being the best have changed 180 degrees.
Funky business bring to all managers and people in general a new way of thinking…people driven…people focused. 1.3 kgs of human body made the differnce, not your high tech machines or your nice buildings and logos.
Today`s managers should take this book and use it to create a new way of make business focused in the prime good of all processes, humans, brains, minds.
Thank you Jonas and Kjell…hope to have the plasure to meet you.
Funkster 964
