Rating: 
Summary: Build passion to gain your employees and customers' loyalty.
Review: In their book "Blown to Bits" Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster were concluding that hierarchical leadership is becoming obsolete in an Internet driven world. They were pleading for new leaders able to create culture and strategy. For them only a rich culture joined with a shared strategy can resist deconstruction. The corporation has to become a purposeful community in a world where business boundaries and organizational structures are melting in transience.
"Clicks and Mortar" from David S. Pottruck and Terry Pearce is the book to illustrate these ideas. Mortar, there, does not mean the physical assets as in "bricks and mortar", but means a new mortar that holds an extended company together: passion. "Passion is built. . . by making good promises, making good on those promises, and by giving people a chance to collectively and individually respond to their impulse to serve, to make a difference for others". "People hate change, but they love progress. The difference between the two is a sense of purpose-a shared purpose-provided by a culture that is intentionally built. This idea, which was a good one before the Internet world is becoming an operational imperative in the Internet world."
In the new economy under continuous change, only passionate people committed to a compelling cause or purpose can produce necessary innovation. It is the leaders' responsibility to build commitment and loyalty around a strong corporate culture, which needs to be communicated explicitly. Such a culture has to be anchored with service and customer experience to succeed and not to be centered on the company itself.
"The driving force is the customer experience: our desire and ability to create it, and the customers' satisfaction with it. Serving, serving, serving. It is the heartbeat of a company that works." This message coming directly from Charles Schwab's experience of David S. Pottruck is clear: culture must be centered on customer experience to become the DNA of a company.
As Internet creates interdependence and asks for transparency, living the culture every day is the only way to reinforce commitment and mutual trust.
In the first part of the book we learn how to build such a culture, how to live it every day through stories, images and rituals, and how to cultivate people commitment. An interesting idea is that people serving in a company must be a mirror of the customers to serve. Diversity of employees with different points of view is becoming an important asset in the Internet world for final decision makers.
In the second part we learn how leaders have to communicate and manage others perceptions to create an atmosphere of encouragement rather than competition and to inspire people working with them. Their mission is to make information useful and meaningful to others, in a two-way communication with more responds to people than answers to questions. These conditions and acceptance of failures, as a learning process, must lead to innovation the only true measurement for knowledge workers.
In Internet environment, business heads must be entrepreneurial and team players and must demonstrate a good understanding of technology, which can be no more considered as a simple tool but as the lifeblood to compete.
Technology is used to serve customers who are driving innovation and new product development and gives opportunity to your employees to serve them with passion, the new mortar of a competitive Internet organization.
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Summary: Clicks and Mortar transcends the world of business
Review: One need not be involved with the corporate world to benefit from reading Clicks and Mortar. As a visual artist, I find Terry Pearce and David Pottrucks philosophy of passion driven business highly applicable to my work. Clicks and Mortar transcends the world of business, it is for anyone interested in examining their own values and putting them into action. This is a superb book.
Rating:
Summary: Clicks and Mortar transcends the world of business
Review: One need not be involved with the corporate world to benefit from reading Clicks and Mortar. As a visual artist, I find Terry Pearce and David Pottrucks philosophy of passion driven business highly applicable to my work. Clicks and Mortar transcends the world of business, it is for anyone interested in examining their own values and putting them into action. This is a superb book.
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Summary: The Power of Passionate People
Review: Pottruck and Pearce have made a signficant contribution to the betterment of business with this terrific read. I am not a fan of business books, finding them detached from the realities of what it takes to truly succeed in business and in life. But Clicks and Mortar combines deep, personal insights with tangible lessons from one of the best managed businesses in America. The simple but profound realization that leading passionate people is essential to the long term success of a business is often discounted as too far removed from the nuts and bolts of day to day management. Pottruck, however, gives concrete and convincing examples of how the bottom line is directly impacted. I thank the authors for adding flesh to the business philosophy of inspiration while adding a prescription for a well run business. If you want the benefits of the hard won wisdom of a great business leader read this book, if you don't want to change in the process avoid it.
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Summary: From Culture to Customer, secrets of a successful business
Review: Pottruck and Pearce take their combined business experience and weave a great primer on passion driven growth. It all begins with culture, diversity, leadership, innovation, measurement, technology and ends with the customer experience. Their wonderful examples show how to achieve the highest level of success from your business. An engaging presentation made stronger by actual experiences.
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Summary: VERY HELPFUL!
Review: Someday ALL business will be on the net...this book is a great roadmap!
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Summary: Every corporate leader with a future needs to read this book
Review: The focus of my research and authorship is corporate branding and net-age leadership. Both, when realised for maximum human potential, revolve round making unique promises simply and earning the trust of all of the community that interacts with your company. The content index of this book provides a more promising map for 21st C corporate value leadership than any outline I can recall. As a cherry on the top, the book's finale makes you wonder wow - why can't all worthwhile business books launch the erader into the future in this way:"We used to have debates in undergraduate religion classes about whether prophets predict the future or create it. I came down on the side of creation because I'd seen the impact of declaration on the action of others. "All men are created equal" was not fact until Jeferson and others said it was so. When it was established by declaration, everyone who wanted it to be true took actio to make it real and those who didn't want it to be true took counteraction. So to me it seemed reasonable that declaration was an act of creation, not an act of clairvoyance. In that spirit we asked 8 people to join us in a dialogue (a virual conversation) about the future, on what we hoped would put some rhetorical stakes in the ground, helping to create the future of commerce. Our group of 8: Steve Balmer, Microsoft President Leonard Berry, Professor Texas A&M, author discovering the soul od service 1999 Tom Gerrity, Professor Wharton, Director of e-commerce forum Bill Harris, Former President, Intuit Lew Platt, Chairman Hewlett Packard Condoleexa Rice, former provost Stanford Erich Schmidt, Chairman/CEO Novell Ann Winblad : co-founder of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners To get the dialogue started questions asked were: Looking ahead 10 to 20 years: other than technology and change management, what factors will most affect organizations' ability to thrive? It is often said "employee and customer loyalty are dead". To the extent that this is true, what is driving this perception. How do we reverse it? Do we need to? The internet is certainly driving enormous price competition. What beyond price will matter to consumers and what will be valued most? How will companies differentiate themselves in an internet-driven world? Is the new technology like the telephone or the assemble line that will transform business, or is it the beginning of a revolution that will have an impact on every area of our lives? chris macrae, author Brand Chartering, contributing author The 2025 Report. editor of the special issue of Journal of Brand Management: 21st C brandknowledege : human relationships and e-branding
Rating:
Summary: An e-CEO agenda
Review: The title may be misleading : this is not another "e-book", it's about how a company should be led and managed to succeed in the "e-conomy" by the CEO of one company that did it. What can you get from the authors : - after the first chapters that deal with "leadership", the reader will probably be confused : no "e-something", only conventional winsdom about leadership. The only difference is that it comes from people who did it and do it day to day, not from the academia, the examples quoted come from mr. Pottruck hands on experience which adds significant value to its words. The "customer focus" case is so overwhelming that it is worse reading again - Then, come the e-stuff, splitted in four themes : measurement, technology, marketing and Brand. Every word is worth it and should be digested slowly in order to remain. I particularly liked the one about technology, because it's my profession - as a consultant -and I do not see so often such good understanding of the "it side of the firm" at such high level of management. CEO that want their businesses to adapt the so-called new economy should read this book and provide it to their close collaborators. On the other side, mere mortal will understand what it take to their company to succeed(schwab seem to be a good case)and diagnose their own enterprise through the ideas brought in the book. Last but not least, the authors sincerity is amazing, especially given his responsibility. Only for that, it is worse reading
Rating:
Summary: An e-CEO agenda
Review: The title may be misleading : this is not another "e-book", it's about how a company should be led and managed to succeed in the "e-conomy" by the CEO of one company that did it. What can you get from the authors : - after the first chapters that deal with "leadership", the reader will probably be confused : no "e-something", only conventional winsdom about leadership. The only difference is that it comes from people who did it and do it day to day, not from the academia, the examples quoted come from mr. Pottruck hands on experience which adds significant value to its words. The "customer focus" case is so overwhelming that it is worse reading again - Then, come the e-stuff, splitted in four themes : measurement, technology, marketing and Brand. Every word is worth it and should be digested slowly in order to remain. I particularly liked the one about technology, because it's my profession - as a consultant -and I do not see so often such good understanding of the "it side of the firm" at such high level of management. CEO that want their businesses to adapt the so-called new economy should read this book and provide it to their close collaborators. On the other side, mere mortal will understand what it take to their company to succeed(schwab seem to be a good case)and diagnose their own enterprise through the ideas brought in the book. Last but not least, the authors sincerity is amazing, especially given his responsibility. Only for that, it is worse reading
Rating: 
Summary: Not really an Internet book
Review: The title on this book is a bit of a misnomer -- this isn't really an Internet business book. The book's focus is on building a sustainable, healthy corporate culture. While it's not an Internet book per se, some aspects and examples can be applied to Internet businesses too.
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