Funky Business: Talent Makes Capital Dance

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Funky Business: Talent Makes Capital Dance
Jonas Ridderstrale,Kjelle A. Nordstrom | 2002-12-10 00:00:00 | Financal Times Management | 288 | Economics
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.
Oh dear. A book called Funky Business by two Swedish academics. At first glance, it has all the allure of Benny and Bjorn's (from Abba) sadly never-released concept album about life as a middle manger in a multinational conglomerate. There is something earnestly hip about the way Kjell Nordström and Jonas Ridderstråle of the Stockholm School of Economics present themselves. "They do gigs not seminars. These gigs sell out. They have shaved heads and wear black," says the blurb.

But that's what makes Funky Business worth reading. It's not so much the novelty of the authors' argument, which boils down to the notion that in an oversupplied world, ideas are what separate successful companies and individuals from failures. Rather, it's the vitality of their argument and the rhythm of their language that make their ideas so compelling. "Traditional roles, jobs, skills, ways of doing things, insights, strategies, aspirations, fears, and expectations no longer count. In this environment, we cannot have business as usual. We need business as unusual. We need different business. We need innovative business. We need unpredictable business. We need surprising business. We need funky business."

The book, which is almost a virtuoso display of rhetoric and intellectual power, bursts at the seams with the force of its argument and the weight of its colorful evidence. Sources quoted range from the pope to the British band the Prodigy. Funky, Inc., they say, "isn't like any other company. It is not a dull, old conglomerate. It is not a rigid bureaucracy. It is an organization that actually thrives on the changing circumstances and unpredictability of our times."

This is great entertainment. But the slick veneer does not invalidate the way the book pulls together many existing strands of thought about how business is developing and evokes a coherent and intriguing vision of a future whose main feature will be incoherence.

This really is one for the whole family. Or at least those old enough to have a job. --Alex Benady
Reviews
Very good, simple and working advice is communicated through this book - Innovation as a competitive advantage! In a flattened global business today, rapid information exchange and steroid collaboration platforms - Ideas are the main factor helping to distinguish us from our competitors. Unfortunately - our idea today is in our portfolio the next day. And the day after in our competitors portfolio. Therefore - Constant Innovation as competitive advantage.
Reviews
Since the first Funky Business book was published their next two books: Karaoke Capitalism and Funky Business Forever has been a repeat of the same ideas and examples that was presented in the original.

I would only recommend that you buy this book if you missed out on the first.
Reviews
This book is about the funky (business) world we are living in. All three books written by the authors are such a pleasure to read ... so informative ... unconvential ... and non-conform. The reader will take many notes about funky business is truly global, working values, globally linked society, senseless supply, deregulated life, tribalisation, innovation etc. We live in a winner takes all world where normal = nothing. It's funky out there, very funky.



PS; This book is an up-dated version of their fantastic first book 'Funky Business; Talent Makes Capital Dance'. One controversial part of the first book is left out for more general acceptance :-)
Reviews
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.
Reviews
If you want to see things -business or normal life- from different perspectives, then this is the book to choose!

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