The Connected Company

Introduction

More business books are published today than ever before in the history of mankind. Who has time to read them all? We designed this book with today’s busy reader in mind. In the front of the book you will find a Table of Contents that also serves as an executive summary and detailed outline of the book. This summary is designed to allow you to quickly and easily understand the book’s main argument.

If you decide to read the book from beginning to end, you will have the most complete and thorough experience. Reading the book in sequence will give you a guided tour of the connected company, starting with the challenges of today’s connected world and walking you through the core concepts of the connected company, step by step, concluding with some first steps you can take today to start moving your company into the connected age.

But you don’t have to read it that way. You can start by reading the summary and then dip in wherever you want. We have designed the book with the goal of making it as skimmable as possible: each chapter begins with a summary of its core ideas, and is broken into sections, marked with bold headlines. Diagrams and illustrations are peppered throughout the book to make the concepts easier to understand. We have also put some discussion questions in the back, in case you want to start a conversation at work about how your company can become a more connected company.

Our overarching goal was to make the book easy to read and navigate, a book that makes it easy for busy people to quickly find what they want and take away what they need. Enjoy!

– Dave Gray @davegray July 2012

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