[BOOKS] - BUSINESS @ THE SPEED OF THOUGHT BY BILL GATES

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10/08/2013

Unit - 1 Manage with the force of facts

1. The big work behind business judgment is in finding and acknowledging the facts and circumstances concerning technology, the market and the like in their continuously changing forms. The rapidity of modern technological change makes the search for facts a permanently necessary feature.
2. How you gather, manage and use information will determine whether you win or lose.
3. The critical thing is that a company's managers have the information to understood their competitive edge and what their next great market could be.
4. Information technology and business are becoming in inextricably interwoven.
5. The immediate availability of accurate information changes strategic thinking from a separate, stand-alone activity to an ongoing process integrated with regular business activities.
6. Information work is thinking work.
7. Companies should spend less time protecting financial data from employees and more time teaching them to analyze and act on it.
8. Pilots like to say that good landings are the result of good approaches. Good meetings are the result of good preparation.
9. Without facts it's impossible to put a sound policy into effect. I am optimistic enough to believe that if you have sound facts, you can put a sound policy into effect.
10. The more interactive a site is, the more business activity it gets from its visitors.
11. Michael dell puts it well when he says that process innovation is now the fundamental source of competitive advantage.

Unit - 2 Can your digital nervous system do this?

1. A firm's IQ is determined by the degree to which its IT infrastructure connects, shares and structures information. Isolated applications and date, no matter how impressive, can produce idiot savants but not a highly functional corporate behavior.
2. No company will prosper for long if products don't go out the door or if the bills and the employees don't get paid.
3. Too-often, important customer and sales information is pulled together on a one time only basis when consultants arrive. You should have that information available on an ongoing basis for your regular business staff.
4. Integrating sales data with partners not only streamlines reporting processes, but also raises the business discussions to a more strategic level.
5. The ability to touch their customers with individualized service is increasing their revenue.
6. The web life style is about broadening horizons not narrowing them.

Unit - 8 Change the boundaries of business

1. The re-engineering principle is that companies should focus on their core competencies and outsource everything else.
2. By and large the changes in organizational structure will empower good employees.
3. Technology threatens us if we sit back and let someone else use it. It helps us if we use it to move quickly to design services where the bank becomes the value-added intermediary to our customers.
4. Almost all the time involved in producing an item is in the coordination of the work, not in the actual production.
5. An essential quality of a good manager is a determination to deal with any kind of bad news head on to seek it out rather than deny it. An effective manager wants to hear about what's going wrong before he or she hears about what's going right.
6. To get into a new business, you have to believe at-least for a while. But you also have to be alert to bad news and you have to be agile enough to adapt if the opportunity morphs into something new.
7. Meeting time is so precious that you want to be sure you are dealing with facts and good recommendations based on solid analysis, not just anecdotal evidence. You want to be sure that meetings produce actionable decisions, that you don't just sit around speculating and talking about philosophical stuff.
8. Ignoring bad news is a formula for decline.
9. We need to expose ourselves to lower level employees, who when encouraged, will tell us a lot what we need to know.
10. Boeing built jet-powered 707 on speculation, without a single customer order on hand and never looked back.
11. It doesn't do any good to be receptive to bad news if you can't get bad news up through your organization and then do something about it in a hurry.
12. I think my most important job as a CEO is to listen for bad news. If you don't act on it your people will eventually stop bringing bad news to your attention and that's the beginning of the end.
13. A company's ability to respond to unplanned events, good or bad, is a prime indicator of its ability to compete.

Unit - 11  Convert bad news to good

1. Once you embrace unpleasant news not as a negative but as evidence of a need for change, you are not defeated by it. You are learning from it. It's all in how you approach failures.
2. Learning from mistakes and constantly improving products is a key in all successful companies.
3. Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
4. The business side of any company starts and ends with hard core analysis of its numbers.
5. A number on a piece of paper is a dead end. A number in digital form is the start of meaningful thought and action.
6. The secret to success with information products is understanding the profile and buying habits of your most likely customer.
7. As software extracts more and more ore from the mine of information, people will always have work turning into gold.
8. Apply software analysis first to those aspects of your business where you are most able to act on the results.
9. Information is a verb not a static noun.
10. Power come not from knowledge kept, but from knowledge shared.

Unit - 15  Big wins require big risks 

1. Big bets mean big failures as well as successes
2. If you decline to take risks early, you will decline in the market later.
3. In high-tech businesses digital information is the only way to drive new breakthroughs.
4. Managing a process instead of executing tasks makes someone a knowledge worker.
5. Anything that can eliminate "touches" reduces the opportunities for error and helps to assure quality.
6. Identifying the primary, focused objective of any process is the way to begin solving process problems.
7. Very few corporate applications need a center point of view.
8. Business leaders, not IT alone, must own decisions about processes involving technology.
9. Companies that try to manage down to direct every action from the center will simply not be able to move fast enough to deal with the tempo of the new economy.

END