Book Summaries

The ability to see the world differently can create significant opportunities, as companies such as Southwest Airlines, FedEx, Charles Schwab and others have demonstrated. But even successful models can ultimately become a prison if they limit your ability to make sense of a changing world, in the way that major airlines failed to fully recognize the threat of upstarts such as Ryanair or that music companies failed to see the opportunities and threats of music file sharing.

In a May 2003 article in the Harvard Business Review entitled “IT Doesn’t Matter,” Nicholas G. Carr introduced the idea that information technology (IT) does not provide a competitive advantage to companies in a strategic manner. In Does IT Matter?, Carr argues that IT has become a commodity, and because the very nature of strategy requires differentiation, IT cannot possibly qualify. IT can be used to supplement and improve strategy implementation, but it is not the foundation of a com