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Titles:
How to survive the e-business downturn - C. Barrow; John Wiley; ISBN 0471498319; 2000; Purchase from amazon.co.uk
Executive's Guide to e business - M.V. Deise et al; John Wiley; ISBN 0471376396; 2000; Purchase from amazon.co.uk or amazon.com
E business and ERP - G. Norris et al; John Wiley; ISBN 0471392081; 2000; Purchase from amazon.co.uk or amazon.com
How to write a .com business plan - J. Eglash; McGraw Hill; ISBN 007135753X; 2000; Purchase from amazon.co.uk or amazon.com
Review:
These four books are typical of a spate of books that have appeared in
the last 12 months on setting up and running a dot com company and/or
creating an e business. As someone who has been the non-executive
director of a start-up dot com company and who has seen the turmoil
involved at first hand, I was particularly interested to see how
helpful these books might have been to me, and my fellow directors,
had I had a chance to read them earlier. Would they have offered a
clear strategic vision and would they have shown the things to do and
the things not to do?
Overall, it must be said that the qualityy of the books was somewhat
disappointing. One was good, two were badly written and one was
dreadful. So let's go through them in that order.
The good one is Colin Barrow's, and ironically, it has a misleading
title. It isn't actually anything to do with surviving a downturn and
everything about how to set up a successful dot com company. It
contains a nice mixture of UK and US case studies, all pretty up to
date, to highlight the points it makes. It a 220-page paperback
written in a fluent style by an academic at the Cranfield School of
Management. It's in five parts, entitled "One step forward, two steps
back", "upgrading marketing", "management", "real money for virtual
firms" and "abandon ship". The advice is sensible and reassuring, and
includes action checklists and tests to be done by the reader. It
includes a fairly basic index and some guidance for further reading.
Someone setting up, or running a dot com company would not go far
wrong by starting with this book, and then going on to the further
reading as needed. It covers all the major issues that need to be
taken into account.
The two badly written books are those by Deise et al and Norris et al,
curiously enough both by a group of authors from
PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Perhaps it is something about PWC and its
house style, but they clearly believe that long setnences, silly words
and heavy reliance on the language of systems is what sells books.
Having in a previous incarnation worked as a middle manager for 12
years in large international companies, I know that middle and senior
managers in those companies have little or no time for this style of
work, and I doubt it is appropriate for those in smaller companies
either. In addition, the Deise et al book has a misleading title, as
it does not cover all the issues to do with e business (hardly
touching at all on personnel issues or or legal issues, for example).
It has the redeeming feature of a useful Appendix on the e-business
value chain and a good index. The book may well be excellent for MBA
students, but managers will simply gert frustrated by its approach and
dense language.
The Norris et al book is a plug for a proprietary software apparently
promoted by PWC. This software is designed to enhance the company's
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), a concept that is clearly
explained in the book as a method of optimising a company's internal
value chain. Unfortunately, the book is based entirely on the premise
that you accept ERP is a good thing and that you accept that software
is necessary to achieve this ERP. Because of the lack of balance, it
can only be recommended to those who have already been sold this
particular management concept. As readersd of this review may have
realised, the authors failed to sell the idea to me.
At least in can be argued that the Deise et al and Norris et al are
clearly heavy weight books intended for a limited audience, and are
simply not appropriate for those starting up a dot com company. Not
so Eglash's book, which is aimed at those setting up a dot com company
for the first time and need advice on writing a business plan. It is
a typical book in its genre - written in a gee-whizz style, and
covering the USA only. It pretty much ignores what is surely THE key
part of a business plan, namely the financials. It tells you how to
write an Executive Summary, a Mission Statement, It discusses how to
write about competitors, the marketplace and the customers. It tells
you how to describe your products and services, and marketing and
operations plans. And then we come to the chapter on financials -
nine pages long out of a 190 page book. It tells you what items you
should have in your financials, but then stops. It gives you not the
slightest idea what figures to put in, how to present them in the best
light, what predictions to make, hows they should be calculated. No
advice whatsoever on the nitty gritty of preparing the financial data.
The author provides a model business plan from an imaginary company,
called turnips.com. Guess what - it doesn't include a financial
section.
That's bad enough, but the author also believes you can find
everything you need about your market and the competition using a
small number of Web search engines. She clearly knows little about
competitor intelligence searching, has no idea how bad Web search
engines are and has never heard of online or CD ROM databases. The
best that can be said for this book is that it provides a bare bones
introduction to the art of business plans, and that having read it,
one should get some professional advice from a qualified information
professional regarding the marketplace and competitive position; and
talk to accountants about creating the financial side of the business
plan.
Free Pint Reviewer:
Charles Oppenheim is Professor of Information Science at Loughborough
University. He's had a varied career in both academia and the
electronic publishing industry. He is a Fellow of the Institute of
Information Scientists and the Library Association, and is a frequent
contributor to conferences and journals in the library and information
science area. His main professional interests are in legal aspects of
information. He's on a lot of committees and editorial boards, and in
his spare time, he enjoys doing book reviews. He is the owner of an
identical twin brother. Most of his hobbies are unpublishable. Tel
+44 (0)1509-223065.
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