The book of the month: “Meta-Capitalism” by Grady Means and David Schneider

News categories: enterprise and business strategy, e-commerce, managing intangibles / intellectual capital, digitising the new economy enterprise

The period from 2000-2002 will witness the single greatest change in global economic and business conditions ever – the realignment form traditional corporate structure to Internet-leveraged styles of brand-owning, customer focused companies on the one hand, and extremely efficient “value-added communities”, networks of supplying companies, on the other hand. According to the very convincing estimation of the two authors (the equation is laid out in detail in the chapter about “the new economics”), this developments will lead to a worldwide capital market expansion from $20 trillion of today, to $200 trillion over the next 10 years.

This book explains how the business-to-business e-business revolution can stimulate economic growth and value creation through totally new technology backed forms how companies work together to better leverage both financial and human capital. It explains how "decapitalization" of traditional companies will enable them to leverage the dynamics of “Meta-Capitalism” - a term the authors use to describe this new phenomena -, it describes new business process models for B2B, built on these new corporate structures, and it makes the new economics of Meta-Capitalism transparent and provides answers for appropriate performance measurement techniques and for strategies to meet the challenge of organizational and change management.

Written by Grady E. Means, managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers and a top management consultant for thirty years, and by David M. Schneider, also managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers and former General Electric manager, “Meta-Capitalism: The e-Business Revolution and the Design of 21^st-Century Companies and Markets” is an outstanding business book that both describes the big picture of the upcoming economic changes and provides in-depth analysis of the different aspects of the B2B e-business revolution and how managers can reformulate their companies for success..

Case histories and examples from major corporations like Cisco Systems and major industries like the automobile industry, reveal how market leaders today are already accelerating economic growth and value creation by capitalizing on global expansion and market access, on better leverage of capital, on significant advances in operating efficiency, on improvements in the efficiencies of capital markets and on dramatic unleashing of human potential and capital.

In this new era of outsourcing and diminishing physical capital base, how will companies be valued by the markets ? Can “brand-owning” companies- as opposed to manufacturers – maintain sufficient controls and systems to guarantee that their network partners are will integrated with each other and the marketplace ? How will “value-added communities” – both horizontal and vertical – support brand owners in dramatically reducing costs, increasing quality, and responding rapidly to customer demand and markets shifts ?

“Meta-Capitalism” by Grady E. Means and David M. Schneider is trying to answer successfully these questions and is highly recommended to any reader interested in business and economic developments.

Meta-Capitalism
by Grady Means and David Schneider
Hardcover - 208 pages (June 2000)
John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0471393355

… feedback

… more books recommended by Juergen Daum

Back