The Network Always Wins: How to Influence Customers, Stay Relevant, and Transform Your Organization to Move Faster than the Market

Book description

The Definitive Business Guide to Surviving and Innovating in the Digital Age

The world is changing faster than ever. With the rise of new digital markets and the consequent network-ization of our environment, the phrase “The customer is always right” takes on a whole new meaning.

This powerful guide from serial entrepreneur and radical innovation consultant Peter Hinssen shows you how to keep your company up to speed with your market, engage with customers at a time when loyalty keeps fading into the background, and transform your organization into a network in order to thrive in this era of digital disruption.

The Network Always Wins provides step-by-step strategies to help you:

  • Reinvent your company—even after the market has flipped
  • Tap into the force of the network—and survive in a market characterized by speed, uncertainty, and complexity
  • Maintain relevance—and stay on top of emerging trends
  • Connect with your customers—and encourage them to interact

This business guide is as illuminating as it is pleasant and fun to read. It provides everything you need to adapt your organization for this exciting new age of networks and digital disruption. You’ll learn how to evolve faster, connect deeper, and make better decisions than ever before. You’ll find proven methods to speed up your reaction time, beat the clock of your competitors, and anticipate consumer trends before they even happen.

In today’s fast-moving marketplace, networks are power. This book shows you how to harness that power. For your company. For your customers. For your continued success in the digital age.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. Preface
  8. Let’s Get Started
  9. Chapter 1 The Age of Uncertainty
    1. The Theory of Everything
    2. The Rand Corporation
    3. The Ultimate Model
    4. Stepping into the Unknown
    5. VUCA
    6. VACINE
  10. Chapter 2 Speed, and Why the Theory of Relativity Matters
    1. A Brief History of Time
    2. Speed
    3. Faster, Faster, Faster
    4. The Era of Now
    5. Clock Speeds
    6. Internal Clock Speed
    7. The Clock Speed Conundrum
    8. The Theory of Relativity
    9. Breaking the Sound Barrier
  11. Chapter 3 Linearity is Dead
    1. Chasing Simplicity
    2. Linear Systems
    3. Dynamic Systems
    4. New Language of Systems
    5. Complex Adaptive Systems
    6. Entropy
    7. Schrödinger’s Cat
    8. Depressed Yet?
    9. The Age of Networks
    10. The Core Vocabulary of Complex Systems
    11. Scale-Free Networks
    12. Conclusions
  12. How the Media Discovered Networks
  13. Chapter 4 Information Becomes a Flow
    1. It’s a Small, Small World
    2. Flow of Magic
    3. Information Becomes a Flow
    4. Information Theory
    5. The Signal and the Noise
    6. The Gambling Connection
    7. The Gambler’s Fallacy
    8. The Signal and the Noise, 2.0
    9. The Little Elephant
    10. The Mathematics of War
    11. Graphs Rule The World
    12. The Rich Club
    13. Leverage the Power of Networks
    14. The Topology of Your Organization
  14. Education in the Age of Networks
  15. Chapter 5 When Markets Stop Being Markets
    1. Book Bind
    2. The Original Speedboats
    3. The (Old) Heart of Marketing
    4. Consumers Take Over
    5. Good Clean Funnel
    6. A Real-Life Mad Man
    7. Disruptive Forces
    8. Don and Martha
    9. From Firefly to Amazon
    10. Recommendations
    11. The Second Life of Netflix
    12. Getting Personal
    13. The Popcorn Experiment
    14. Unconscious Branding
    15. Fear, Trust, and Hormones
    16. Markets are Becoming Networks
    17. The Tribe Has Spoken
    18. The Agency Will Do All That
    19. The Paradox of Choice
    20. Conclusion
    21. They Bought a Zoo
    22. Watching Water Boil
  16. The Era of Networked Health
  17. Chapter 6 When Organizations Become Networks of Innovation
    1. Generation N
    2. Org Charts and Their Discontents
    3. Reimagining Careers
    4. Relevance Replaces Loyalty
    5. The Antihierarchy
    6. The Opposite of Fragile
    7. Both Wave and Particle
    8. Conway’s Law
    9. Build Fluid Organizations
  18. Chapter 7 Creation and Destruction
    1. Broken Halos
    2. Built to Last
    3. Creative Destruction
    4. Phoenix from the Ashes
    5. The Halo Effect
    6. Written in the Stars
    7. Building Stellar Companies—and Black Holes
  19. Chapter 8 Strategy for the Age of Networks
    1. Fun with Creeping Death
    2. Frozen, Fluid, Rigid, and Superfluid
    3. Fluidity and Start-Ups
    4. The Thermodynamic Cycle of Organizations
    5. The Triune Brain
    6. The Triune Networks
    7. Why Start-Ups Are Magic
    8. Industry Disruption
    9. It Takes a Network to Fight a Network
    10. The Golden Rule
    11. The Holy Trinity in the Age of Networks
    12. Waves of Disruption
    13. The Age of Networks
  20. Epilogue
  21. Endnotes
  22. Sources
  23. Index

Product information

  • Title: The Network Always Wins: How to Influence Customers, Stay Relevant, and Transform Your Organization to Move Faster than the Market
  • Author(s): Peter Hinssen
  • Release date: April 2015
  • Publisher(s): McGraw-Hill
  • ISBN: 9780071848701