Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Russell McGuire, Director of Strategy for Sprint, is responsible for developing the strategic vision and competitive strategies for the $40 billion+ telecommunications giant. His experience includes twenty years in the telecom industry plus experience in the defense and nuclear power industries. Prior to joining Sprint, Mr. McGuire was chief strategy officer for TeleChoice, a leading business strategy consultancy solely focused on innovative telecom market opportunities. He has also been a regular columnist for Network World, Business Reform, and Success magazines.

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The Power of Mobility
 
How Your Business Can Compete and Win in the Next Technology Revolution
 
Over eighty percent of Americans above the age of five own a cell phone, most with digital cameras built in, and bundled with an e-mail service specifically designed for sending those captured moments to friends and family. These consumer applications are just simple examples of mobility being built into everyday products to create tremendous new value. From a business perspective, a new technology can introduce radical changes-changes so dramatic that they fundamentally change the nature of the business, the nature of the product, and the reasons why customers buy the product. When this happens, the rules of competition change. It is happening now: the Age of Mobility is upon us. How will it impact you and your business in the months and years to come?
 
The Power of Mobility shows you how to look forward, envision the Power of Mobility in your business, and implement the steps required to turn vision into reality.?Russell McGuire, one of the telecom industry's leading strategists, details the specific actions you must take to deliver the tremendous value that mobility adds-and win customers' hearts and wallets. He presents a powerful framework for capturing the Power of Mobility: the Seven Steps. If you can Digitize, Connect, Evaluate, Limit, Position, Protect, and Learn, you will capture the Power of Mobility in your products, your services, and your processes. He further clarifies the power of the Seven Steps with illustrative case studies of seven companies that have successfully implemented this framework and redefined the rules of competition in their industries.
 
The Mobility Age represents a great opportunity for businesses large and small to capture the Power of Mobility in order to create competitive differentiation and to take market share. Stories of businesses that have been crushed by the competition because they have denied the changes brought by technologies in the past will likely be repeated. You have a choice. You can wait for a competitor to lead and define the rules to his benefit and your demise. Or you can lead and set the rules-if you capture The Power of Mobility now.

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Praise For
 
The Power of Mobility
 
How Your Business Can Compete and Win in the Next Technology Revolution
 
"Mobility is the next technology force that is redefining how businesses operate. Going forward, the winners will be 'anywhere enterprises' that learn how to combine the Power of Mobility with broadband connectivity to create competitive advantage. Russell's book lays out a straightforward road map for how to do just that."
-Berge Ayvazian, Chief Strategy Officer
Yankee Group
 
"Our experience has proved that integrating the mobility of our services into the lives of students creates tremendous opportunities and new value. The ideas presented in this book will serve organizations and businesses of all types well as they explore the innovative growth that can come with the Power of Mobility."
-Dr. Karen Pennington, Vice President
Student Development and Campus Life, Montclair State University
 
"For many professionals, the workplace is no longer a 'place,' and the work day is no longer a 'day.' The Power of Mobility shows us that companies that recognize this fundamental shift are in the best position to take advantage of mobility to increase business agility, transform the way they serve customers, and enable exciting new business models."
-Don Proctor, Senior Vice President
Collaboration Software Group, Cisco
 
"What businesses need is a plain English explanation of the new values and disciplines of the Mobility Age. In The Power of Mobility, Russell McGuire provides that clear guidance without the 'technospeak.'"
-Clint Parr, Chief Executive Officer and President
Anyware Mobile Solutions
 
"Companies that figure out how to keep employees connected and leverage context have the opportunity to outperform their peers in the marketplace. The Power of Mobility explains what this all means in simple terms, describes how companies can build mobility into their businesses, and provides helpful examples for those wanting to gain competitive advantage."
-H.P. Jin, PhD, Chief Executive Officer & President
TeleNav Inc.
 
"The Power of Mobility prepares you, in a step-by-step fashion, to interpret the opportunity presented by mobility into your firm's environment."
-Danny Briere, Chief Executive Officer
Telechoice

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The Power of Mobility

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

The oft-repeated curse says "Those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it." I prefer the more positive twist: "If you want to know the future, understand how the past keeps repeating itself." Since this book is all about knowing the future, we will start by understanding how history continues to repeat itself. Time and time again, new technologies have been introduced and broadly adopted, resulting in dramatic impacts on society and the nature of business.

From a business perspective, a new technology can reduce a business's cost to produce a product or increase a product's value. In most cases, this improvement is relatively small but still worthwhile to the business.

Some new technologies introduce radical change to business. The reduction in cost or the increase in value may be an order of magnitude change-meaning that it is one-tenth the cost or ten times the value. These changes are so dramatic that they fundamentally change the nature of the business, the nature of the product, and the reasons why customers buy the product.

When this happens, the rules of competition change. And the new rules typically favor competitors with different strengths than the old leaders. Sometimes the old leaders can adapt and survive. Sometimes they can't.

Stories of businesses that have been crushed because they have failed to believe and have denied the changes brought by technologies in the past will likely be repeated. Now powerful companies will be crushed in the future when they disbelieve and deny the changes being wrought by emerging technologies. However, the stories of businesses that have believed in the coming changes and have turned change into value for customers, employees, and owners will also continue to be repeated.

The Gutenberg Press Unleashes Reformation and Renaissance

It is almost impossible to imagine a world without printing. In fact, arguably, all of the other technology advances we will consider would have been significantly hindered in their development if economical printing had never been developed.

And we must remember that the impact of Gutenberg's invention was purely economic. Prior to Gutenberg, there were printed documents-many made by hand (manuscripts), but printing presses were also cranking out documents by the mid-fifteenth century as well.

The innovation that Gutenberg introduced was threefold:

1. Alphabetic movable type.

2. Thicker ink that would stick to the press.

3. Perfection of the materials to be used in making the type.

The result was a dramatic improvement in the cost and speed of printing. In fact, printing a book became the first assembly line process-mechanically combining replaceable parts to produce a complex end product-predating similar industrial processes by 300 years. These advantages were quickly recognized by others, and lacking patent systems to protect the intellectual property (and slow its adoption), movable type printing spread rapidly.

Gutenberg began work on his first product, a beautiful Bible, in 1452. He first sold the product at the 1455 Frankfurt Book Fair, introducing his innovation to the world. Approximately 50 copies of that original Bible exist today. By the early 1470s, the printing press had spread to the major trade centers in Germany; and by the early 1480s it had spread across western and central Europe. Within 50 years, over 1,000 publishers had printed over a million books using Gutenberg's technology.

Prior to Gutenberg's invention, there was little reason for literacy to broadly develop within society. Books were so rare and expensive that it was meaningless for the average citizen to bother learning how to read. As Walter J. Ong noted, "Many of the features we have taken for granted in thought and expression in literature, philosophy and science, and even in oral discourse among literates, are not directly native to human existence as such but have come into being because of the resources which the technology of writing makes available to human consciousness."

As a simple example, Ong relates that, prior to printing, most people never knew in what calendar year they were born. With no newspapers or calendars to regularly remind them of the year, such a number would appear to have no relation to anything in "real life."

Robert Logan claims that the characteristics of Gutenberg's press enhanced and multiplied the prior impacts of the alphabet "unleashing a powerful new force that completely transformed Western civilization, leaving in its wake the Renaissance, the rise of science, the Reformation, individualism, democracy, nationalism, the systematic exploitation of technology, and the Industrial Revolution-in short, the modern world."

Bacon's Law

There are two key questions we must wrestle with for each of the technologies we examine. Why was adoption so quick and why did the technology have such an impact on society and business? In most cases, we'll find that there is a simple observation, a simple truth that explains why adoption and impact were unstoppable.

In the case of the printing press, the simple observation was made in 1597 by Sir Francis Bacon in his Religious Meditations, Of Heresies. The observation, which has become known as Bacon's Law, is that "knowledge is power."

The printing press enabled knowledge, which had been a virtual monopoly of the church and the universities, to be distributed. As Bacon observed, with the distribution of knowledge came the distribution of power. The powerless hungered for the freedom that came with the new flow of information, and, of course, those who had horded knowledge were threatened as their hold on power became challenged.

Given this true observation, once the printing press existed, nothing could hold it back and its impact on society and business was clearly dramatic.

The Steam Engine Powers the Industrial Age

The first practical steam engine was invented by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. Newcomen introduced four key innovations that made the steam engine a practical source of power:

1. Techniques for generating a vacuum. 2. The managed use of pressure.

3. Means for generating steam. 4. The piston and cylinder for capturing the mechanical power.

Newcomen built his first steam engine to operate a mine drainage pump near Dudley Castle in Staffordshire. However, it is not Thomas Newcomen who is best remembered as the inventor of the steam engine; instead, it is James Watt.

In 1764, Watt was asked to repair a Newcomen steam engine owned by the University of Glasgow. In working on it, he realized there were a number of ways in which the design could be improved. The most significant of these improvements was the use of a separate chamber for condensing the steam back to liquid at the end of each cycle. This allowed more of the energy in the main cylinder to be retained, greatly improving the overall efficiency of the engine.

Watt built the first working model of his new design in May 1765, and in 1768 he applied for a patent on the invention. However, Watt did not have the capital required to build a manufacturing business around his invention, and therefore to meaningfully profit from it. He...