"In a world of suits, Nordstrom and Ridderstrale's message is refreshingly different." Business Strategy Review, The Greatest Business Books of All Time

"Funky Business gives a unique, informed and defiantly Funky perspective on the new world order. It is the antidote to bland writing and bland thinking." - Tom Peters

"Funky Business - the groovy bible of modern business philosophy" - Red magazine

In the best-selling Funky Business Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale launch a manifesto for difference in business.

Move it. In 1995, 1000 new soft drinks were launched on the Japanese market. A year later, 1% of them were still for sale.

Move it fast. If you are driving a 1990 model car, approximately six years were spent developing it. Today, most companies do that job in two years.

Move it faster. At Hewlett Packard, the majority revenues come from products that did not exist a year age.

Move it now. In Tokyo, you can order a customized Toyota on Monday and be driving it on Friday.

More products, more markets, more people, more competition. In a world of abundance and excess, competition is total and competition is personal. Difference rules. If you think about it, most of what your business does could be bought from someone else using the Yellow Pages or an Internet search engine. How are you going to be attractive? By being more efficient? By doing it cheaper? Come on!

This is the age of time and talent, where we are selling time and talent, exploiting time and talent, hiring time and talent, packaging time and talent. Today, the "critical resources" wear shoes and walk out the door around 5.30pm every day. Karl Marx was right; the workers should own the critical means of production - it's small, gray and weighs about 1.3 kilograms. It will move markets and it will make capital dance.

Only talent will allow you to be unique, to escape business as usual. In this world we need business as unusual. We need innovative business. We need unpredictable business. We need Funky Business. This is business book as unusual.

"Funky Business is a better book than most novels but it is not for bedtime. It will jerk you out of your complacency and make you question your very existence. It will transform your brain." - Customer Management

Are you ready to let your talent make capital dance?

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Review

Oh dear--a book called Funky Business by two Swedish academics. At first glance it has all the allure of Benny and Bjorn's (from Abba) sadly never released concept album about life as a middle manger in a multinational conglomerate. There is something very earnestly hip about the way that Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale of the Stockholm School Of Economics present themselves. "They do gigs not seminars. These gigs sell out. They have shaved heads and wear black", says the blurb.

But that's what makes Funky Business worth reading. It's not so much the novelty of its argument--which boils down to the idea that in an oversupplied world, ideas are what separate successful companies and successful individuals from the failures. It is the vitality of the argument and, dare I say it, the rhythm of the language that make it so compelling. "Traditional roles, jobs, skills, ways of doing things, insights, strategies, aspirations, fears and expectations no longer count. In this environment we cannot have business as usual. We need business as unusual. We need different business. We need innovative business. We need unpredictable business. We need surprising business. We need funky business."

The book, which is almost a virtuoso display of rhetoric and intellectual power, bursts at the seams with the exuberant force of its argument and the weight of its highly colourful supporting evidence. Sources quoted range from the Pope to the Prodigy. Funky Inc, they say, "isn't like any other company. It is not a dull, old conglomerate. It is not a rigid bureaucracy. It is an organisation that actually thrives on the changing circumstances and unpredictability of our times."

This is great entertainment. But the slick veneer does not invalidate the way that the book pulls together many existing strands of thought about how business is developing and evokes a coherent and intriguing vision of a future whose main feature will be incoherence.

This really is one for all the family. Or at least all those old enough to have a job. --Alex Benady

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Funky Business: Talent Makes Capital Dance

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