The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business is Small

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business is Small

Released September 2014
Publisher(s): Wiley
ISBN: 9780730312680

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Book description

Doing business in the digital age

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business is Small is a business survival manifesto for the technology revolution. As the world moves from the industrial era to the digital age, power is shifting and fragmenting. Power is no longer about might and ownership; power in a digital world is about access. Existing businesses need to understand this shift and position themselves to survive and thrive in an environment where entrepreneurs and start-ups enabled by access to technology are genuine threats.

Author Steve Sammartino is widely regarded as a thought leader on the subject of technology and business, and helps companies transition from industrial-era thinking to the mindset and processes required to compete in today's digital marketplace. The Great Fragmentation shows how technological changes such as Big Data, gamification, crowdfunding, Bitcoin, 3D printing, social media, mashup culture and artisanal production will forever change business and the way we live our lives.

  • Examine how the digital era has altered where we work, how we work, where we live and what we do

  • Discover how the digital era has impacted social and economic structures, including educational systems, financial systems and government policy

  • Understand that the social media and collecting 'friends' is just the tip of the iceberg in a digital business environment

    • Weaving together insights from business, technology and anthropology, The Great Fragmentation provides both corporations and entrepreneurs with a playbook for the future of work, life and business in the digital era.

    Table of contents

    1. Preface
    2. About the Author
    3. Chapter 1: The industrial deal: the shift from industry to technology
      1. Terms and conditions
      2. Unlearning
      3. A new business infrastructure
      4. The 4Ps
    4. Chapter 2: A global revolution: industrial leapfrog
      1. Beyond the fortunate few
      2. The multi-generational shift
      3. Changing habits
      4. Lifetime employment
      5. From employees to projecteers
      6. Industrial education
      7. Startup culture
      8. The truth about competitors
      9. Notes
    5. Chapter 3: The social reality: beyond the surface of social media
      1. It’s permanent
      2. Digital conversations = collective sentience
      3. Social media as an industrial-system protest
      4. Network diffusion
      5. Soul-crushing corporations
      6. Notes
    6. Chapter 4: Life in boxes: the industrial formula for living
      1. Parasocial interaction
      2. The homo sapiens operating system
      3. Dunbar’s number
      4. Enemy territory?
      5. Digital clustering
      6. Virtual is real
      7. IRL vs AFK
      8. Virtual is the physical preamble
      9. Let’s go surfing
      10. Digital replicates physical
      11. There is no ‘digital’
      12. What’s your electricity strategy?
      13. The market doesn’t care when you finished school
      14. Getting your digital on
      15. It’s not my job
      16. Welcome to med school
      17. Note
    7. Chapter 5: Rehumanisation: words define our future
      1. Dead-end products
      2. A future of unfinished products
      3. The malleable marketplace
      4. Corporate skulduggery?
      5. Outsourcing logic
      6. The end of bison hunting
      7. The tastemakers
      8. The selfish era
      9. So how do we survive?
      10. Creative types
      11. Collaboration, creative orientation and counter intuition
      12. Note
    8. Chapter 6: Demographics is history: moving on from predictive marketing
      1. How to get profiled
      2. The price of pop culture
      3. The best average
      4. The weapon of choice
      5. Don’t fence me in
      6. How do you define a teenager?
      7. Stealing music or connecting?
      8. Marketing 1.0
      9. Marketing revised
      10. The new intersection
      11. Social + interests = intention
      12. The story of cities
      13. Do I know you?
      14. The interest graph in action
      15. The anti-demographic recommendation engine
    9. Chapter 7: The truth about pricing: technology and omnipresent deflation
      1. Technology deflation
      2. Real-world technology deflation
      3. The free super computer
      4. The crux is human
      5. It’s getting quicker
      6. Technology curve jumping
      7. Technology stacking
      8. Omnipresent deflation
      9. Consumer price index trickery
      10. Connections and the impact on prices
      11. Economic border hopping
      12. The new minimum wage
      13. Notes
    10. Chapter 8: A zero-barrier world: how access to knowledge is breaking down barriers
      1. So what’s changed?
      2. Why do we even own stuff?
      3. The sharing economy
      4. Personal access
      5. Physical access
      6. Ownership is a mental state
      7. Commercial access
      8. Access to everything
      9. A personal global factory
      10. The clothing company
      11. The two-way street
      12. The laptop corporation
    11. Chapter 9: The infinite store: rebooting retail
      1. The physical and virtual challenges
      2. Retail was easy
      3. The retail revolution
      4. What retail forgot
      5. The discount death spiral
      6. Price and range equalise
      7. Same brand, different plan
      8. The questions that matter
      9. Selling online
      10. If you make, you retail (big and small)
      11. Border hopping and digital reinvention
      12. Experience > item
      13. Clues in coffee culture
    12. Chapter 10: Bigger than the internet: 3D printing
      1. A virtual physical reality
      2. The history of technology repeats
      3. The home factory
      4. Piracy on steroids
      5. Dad vs daughter
      6. Notes
    13. Chapter 11: Screen play: post–mass media
      1. Television is no more
      2. Device convergence
      3. Digital demarcation
      4. Mass-media platform fragmentation
      5. The legacy media challenge
      6. Blogs vs The New York Times
      7. Who do you trust?
      8. Screen first
      9. Media then/media now
      10. Platforms on platforms
      11. How to live in niche land
      12. People don’t have average interests
      13. Channelology
      14. The price of attention
      15. Channelling an audience
      16. This ain’t no Super Bowl
      17. Fill the channel void
      18. The easiest way to get attention
      19. Curation
      20. We’re all media companies
      21. We’re all nodes
      22. On the fast track to amazing
      23. Subscription television is doomed
      24. On-demand subscription
      25. We don’t want your packaged deal
      26. The usability gap
      27. In-home demos
      28. Demographics to the people
      29. Screens and cave walls
      30. Advice from a pirate
      31. The content producers forgot
      32. Winners and losers
    14. Chapter 12: Too big to fail?: the great financial disruption
      1. Their own private Napster
      2. They lost the most important asset
      3. So what do banks actually do?
      4. It’s virtual and data driven
      5. The leaky bucket
      6. Circumventing banks
      7. What is currency?
      8. Digital and crypto currencies
      9. It’s just another technology stack
      10. Why should banks care?
      11. Unstable yet permanent
      12. Crowdfunding
      13. Redefining decision authority
      14. Unearthed economic value
      15. Don’t expect a rush on the banks
      16. Do expect marginalisation
    15. Chapter 13: The 3-phase shift: a closer look at the web
      1. The phases
      2. Evolution at warp speed
      3. Inventing and stealing time
      4. Immature technology
      5. The web of things
      6. It’s already begun
      7. Will everything be connected?
      8. Then what?
      9. What’s first?
      10. The physical mash-up
      11. If-this-then-that living
      12. Ambient sharing
      13. Notes
    16. Chapter 14: The big game: an introduction to gamification
      1. Child’s play
      2. Digital game grooming
      3. More than a niche
      4. Games are for nerds, right?
      5. Friday night lights
      6. Yes, but it’s different
      7. Emotions + incentive = shaped behaviour
      8. People won’t share that stuff
      9. Bursting into reality
      10. Rising realism
      11. Doing > having
      12. The gaming mentality
      13. The sixth sense
      14. Our decentralised nervous system
      15. Start making sense
      16. Product = computer
      17. Mash-up heaven
      18. The seed is planted
      19. Not if, but when and who
    17. Chapter 15: System hacking: a great idea with a bad reputation
      1. Hacking defined
      2. Hacker culture
      3. Hacking is inevitable
      4. Retail hacking
      5. Industry hacking
      6. My favourite media hack
      7. Why we have to self-hack
      8. Step forward MOOCs
      9. Yes, but they’re not-for-profits
    18. Chapter 16: The job, the factory and the home: how location follows technology
      1. From the city, to the suburbs, to wherever
      2. Along came Henry
      3. The end of offices
      4. History repeats
      5. Work options
      6. Offices, control and profits
      7. A better office offer
      8. Idea diffusion
      9. The office is not immune
      10. The last industrial relic
    19. Chapter 17: A stranger from Romania: building a real Lego car
      1. A new low for the internet
      2. Digital tenacity
      3. Marketing rocket science
      4. The Super Awesome Micro Project
      5. The hourglass strategy
      6. The human motive
      7. An open-ended strategy
    20. Chapter 18: Market-share folly and industrial fragmentation: industrial metrics
      1. Market-share folly
      2. The key assumption = we know the market
      3. Software is eating the world
      4. Did they see them coming?
      5. Redefining industries through infrastructure
      6. Collaboration with competitors
      7. We’ll just buy the winners
      8. The pace of change
      9. Internal venture capital
      10. Cold War era thinking
      11. Ignore resources and self-disrupt
    21. Chapter 19: The externality reality: is this the end of privacy?
      1. Digital footprints
      2. Geo-locating isn’t weird
      3. A history of privacy concerns
      4. Types of privacy
      5. Privacy vs secrecy
    22. Chapter 20: Business = technology: the 4Ps revised
      1. Product
      2. Price
      3. Place
      4. Promotion
      5. Selling potatoes
      6. The end of ‘big’?
      7. The ‘now’ question
      8. Survival is about evolution
      9. A lab or a factory?
      10. The great fragmentation
      11. Note
    23. Recommended books and documentaries
    24. Index
    25. Advert
    26. End User License Agreement

    Product information

    • Title: The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business is Small
    • Author(s):
    • Release date: September 2014
    • Publisher(s): Wiley
    • ISBN: 9780730312680