International business management

The information-based company depends on two nervous systems - the private and secure Intranet for internal use, and the external network linking customers, suppliers and the general public to the central brain.

As Fortune headlined in December 1998, 'The smartest companies are using the Net to create a whole new way of doing business. The pace-makers, writes Martin, 'think of business opportunities in terms of cyberspace, radically changed marketing, value streams reinvented for real-time interaction, agile intercorporate relationships and new employee teams'. You need no great prophetic powers to see the consequences of this sea-change.

As people's lives change, so will their work. Riding the Revolution demands changing the organisation, and how it is managed, in order to meet fast changing and more imperious demands from customer. Their use of the World Wide Web still seems peripheral to many managers, who, despite astronomical growth, take comfort in the relatively small size of Internet transactions. Cisco demonstrates the truth that, once a site is established commercially, the key to sustained success is to widen the offer to attract new customers and increase the business won from existing users.

The corporations and law firms who patronised the service used to buy only the company's proprietary software. In 14 months, IncSpot registered four times as many customers as the software product had acquired in five years. In other words, cannibalising its own product, far from losing business, expanded IncSpot greatly.

Commerce over the Internet, even though expanding at a phenomenal rate, remains small in relative terms. No business can afford to neglect the potential - and new net-based businesses are being born every day. The all-significant Millennial sea-change has already taken place.

Open a site on the World Wide Web, and your business is automatically international. - you're a fully-fledged global business.

This process, moreover, doesn't take a generation: thirty years, the traditional time needed for a company to become a big-time player. Established companies can observe this phenomenon, but they cannot join the unstoppable surge in their established formats. This produces 'a scissor effect'.