Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

In this worthwhile prognosis of the successful 21st-century business, Davidow, a venture capitalist, and Malone, a business writer, bring together findings on the effects of information technologies, organizational dynamics, and manufacturing systems on enterprises. The output resulting from these forces is the ``virtual'' product (most likely a service ) that ``can be made available at any time, in any place, and in any variety.'' The authors' virtual corporation, epitomized by Lenscrafters, Taco Bell Express, and various semiconductor fabricators, harkens back to preindustrial artisans' crafting of pieces to customer specifications--but now with many times the responsiveness of those days. The authors see change as a nutrient in the organizations portrayed and say fostering trust and adaptability in employees will be vital in the new virtual corporation. Recommended for collections on modern business.-- Michael Stevenson, Harvard Business Sch. Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Virtual reality is a new technology that has already been well hyped and oversimplified in the popular press, so that it has become a catchphrase, all but losing its original, more technical meaning. Virtual reality is computer-based simulation using 3-D graphics with interactive and adaptive aspects that make cybernetics and servomechanisms seem clunky and outdated. It is these interactive and adaptive qualities the authors have in mind when they describe the "virtual" corporation and "virtual" products of the future. Davidow is a venture capitalist and Malone is a business writer who profiled Silicon Valley in The Big Score (Doubleday, 1985). They argue that advances in information technology will allow companies to adapt products to customers' specific needs through constant, immediate input and feedback and that the process will be an ongoing form of customer service throughout the life of the product. Similar relationships with suppliers will develop based on such strategies as just-in-time marketing. Interactive technologies will also improve employee relations, alter management structures, and eliminate middle management. Davidow and Malone describe the technologies and the changes in management thinking that will be needed to enable this to happen. ~--David Rouse

Kirkus Book Review

An overstated case for the proposition that our socioeconomic future depends largely upon the emergence of amorphous entities that the authors dub ``virtual corporations.'' By the breathless account of Davidow (Marketing High Technology, 1986) and Malone (Going Public, 1991, etc.), a virtual corporation is a radically restructured, free-form enterprise equipped to deliver immediate consumer gratification in cost- effective fashion. Among other examples of virtual goods and services that are already available, the authors cite camcorders that make instant movies, desktop publishing, and eyeglasses in an hour. Davidow and Malone go on to assess the advanced systems and/or procedures that permit industry to offer such products. Covered as well are organizational issues--most notably, the changing roles played by labor, management, customers, suppliers, and others in an era marked by intense transnational competition. That the most commercial concerns must be adaptive, flexible, and responsive--as well better able to gather, process, and act upon relevant data if they are to survive, much less thrive--seems inarguable. Whether all or even very many of them may be obliged to do so according to the convulsive, scattershot prescriptions of Davidow and Malone, however, will strike even casual observers as a very open question. Moreover, the authors offer few insights that could be accurately described as new. In fact, to create what passes for a coherent synthesis, they simply combine anecdotal commentary on computer-aided design, flexible manufacturing, kaizen (incremental improvement), kanban (just-in-time inventory practices), visionary leadership, and other trendy topics with short, baleful takes on the bad old days when mass production (and merchandising) set the pace. Speculative nonsense, albeit of the slick, state-of-the-art sort for which there is an indisputably durable demand.