The authors maintain that an economic downturn offers the perfect opportunity to get back into the e-business game. That means resisting the temptation to fob off e-business onto the IT department and instead treating it as a long-term, strategic, integral part of the enterprise. The authors report on traditional companies that offer these valuable success lessons: Integrate e-business with all other channels, build on your strengths, don’t let technical considerations be the tail that wags the dog, find a CIO who thinks like a business leader, and have a business expert head the operation.

Collaboration has become an established way of doing business with suppliers, channel partners and complementors. But, with a few notable exceptions, working directly withcustomers to co-create value remains a radical notion. As consumers have become increasingly empowered and demanding, marketing gurus have preached the benefits of customer-relationship management — essentially an “inside-out” approach to retaining [...]

Disruptive innovation is an imperative for any company seeking to create new markets and business models. Yet few companies are adept at creating any but sustaining innovations that meet the demands of existing customers in established markets. The authors draw on a decade’s worth of research to offer two sets of litmus tests that senior managers can use to shape business plans to maximize disruptive innovation. They test their own ideas in a hypothetical example that asks whether Xerox could disrupt Hewlett-Packard’s ink-jet printer business. They then outline a process by which any company can create an engine to generate disruptive businesses over and over again.

Traditional teams are not faring well in today business environment because they are too inwardly focused and lack flexibility. The authors detail the high levels of performance of a new, externally focused team, the X-team and outline the five components of X-teams they have studied.

Based on surveys of CEOs and CIOs at 97 companies, the authors conclude that many organizations are successfully aligning strategy and technology through the creation (or evolution) of a new role — the organizational architect. Generally, this is technology-smart CEO or business-savvy CIO who develops mechanisms to encourage communication between strategists and technologists. Specific scenarios and techniques are offered from Oracle, IBM, the utility Citipower and the investment bank Macquarie (the latter two in Australia).

As the experiences of Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, NTT DoCoMo and others demonstrate, platform leaders in the information-technology industry need to have a vision that extends beyond their current business operations. The authors delineate four levers of platform leadership (including productive ways to work with complementors and techniques for building a supportive internal organization) and offer practical advice to complementors as well. They provide guidelines on when to show your cards to competitors and when to hold them.

The ability to set the right price at the right time, any time — the very definition of a pricing capability — is becoming increasingly important. Based on their work with dozens of companies, the authors explain how investments in human capital, systems capital and social capital come together to form a pricing capability that competitors will have a hard time imitating.

The authors explain the six myths about how networks operate and why they are harmful; in place of these assumptions, they offer reality checks that can be implemented to help networks become more effective. Senior managers who can separate myth from reality, and act accordingly, stand a much better chance of fostering the growth and success of these increasingly important organizational structures.

Efforts to control piracy of digitized products have so far relied on legal arguments or technological safeguards. A far better solution, the authors suggest, is to segment that market into innovators (potential pirates) and the mainstream (potential paying customers), and address each segment differently. The authors use a variety of cases, including Napster, to illustrate the tactics whereby content creators can coexist with the innovator segment of their audiences while still controlling product price and distribution standards.