Rethink: A Business Manifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation

Introduction

THIS BOOK HAD ITS genesis around the turn of the millennium. At the time, many large companies were adopting two kinds of software programs that transformed the way businesses were run. Customer relationship management (CRM) software measured and controlled contacts with customers from marketing, through sales, and into support and other services. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software helped manage inventory, logistics, accounting, and virtually every other aspect of an organization.

We at Microsoft were aware that the CRM and ERP programs were coloring companies’ decisions about which computer systems to buy—and there we were sitting on the sidelines. So we decided to create our own business application software. There was ...