In The New Pioneers, Thomas Petzinger brings alive the people who are leading a revolution in American business. Petzinger contends that fundamental changes in the U.S. economy are being spurred by technology that obliterates old boundaries as well as new freedoms in the workplace and the efforts of entrepreneurs with a zeal for innovation and customer service. "We can't yet see it everywhere, but a great awakening is now under way in business," he writes.

Thomas Petzinger, Jr., The Wall Street Journal
The New Pioneers

How would you classify a book that begins with the salutation "People of Earth..."? While the captains of industry may dismiss it as mere science fiction, The Cluetrain Manifesto is definitely of this day and age. Aiming squarely at the solar plexus of corporate America, authors Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger show how the Internet is turning business upside down. They proclaim that, thanks to conversations taking place on Web sites and message boards, and in e-mail and chat rooms, employees and customers alike have found voices that undermine the traditional command-and-control hierarchy that organizes most corporate marketing groups. "Markets are conversations," the authors write, and those conversations are "getting smarter faster than most companies." In their view, the lowly customer service rep wields far more power and influence in today's marketplace than the well-oiled front office PR machine.

Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto : The End of Business As Usual

No one ever said consumerism was easy. At one end, the poor consumer faces a bewildering array of goods and services. On the other, vendors contend with a diverse and fragmented marketplace that makes finding the right set of customers akin to finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. And in between are the billions misspent on muffed purchases and broken marketing campaigns that serve only to stuff mailboxes and alienate the very customers that vendors are trying to attract. The rise of e-commerce has only intensified the problem by offering consumers even greater choice and vendors more competition. John Hagel and Marc Singer think they've got a better idea, and in Net Worth, they present an online scenario that would end this chaos and give both customers and vendors what they really want.

John Hagel, III, Partner, McKinsey & Company and Net Worth and Net Gain

Journalist Michael Wolff is a recognized pioneer in the business of cyberspace, meaning he has been developing products and services for the online world since the dark ages of 1994. During the intervening years, however, not all the activities he engaged in, nor all the people he dealt with, left a pleasant taste in his mouth--although, to be sure, his cumulative adventures certainly have been very lucrative. In Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet, Wolff pulls few punches as he candidly and methodically recounts the single steps forward and multiple steps back that marked his experiences while trying to transform a fledgling print media enterprise into a towering New Media colossus. After developing a series of "NetGuide" books that proved hugely successful, he attempted to transfer the concept to a variety of online offshoots and in so doing connected with Wired magazine, Time-Warner's Pathfinder, the late Robert Maxwell's media empire, AOL, assorted venture capitalists, sundry competitors, and numerous would-be partners. Burn Rate is a fascinating tale that might best be characterized by the old adage that warns us to "be careful what we wish for, for we just might get it."

Michael Wolff, Burn Rate

Once Raymond has established the components and players necessary for an optimally running open-source model, he sets out to counter the conventional wisdom of private, closed-source software development. Like superbly written code, the author's arguments systematically anticipate their rebuttals. For programmers who "worry that the transition to open source will abolish or devalue their jobs," Raymond adeptly and factually counters that "most developer's salaries don't depend on software sale value." Raymond's uncanny ability to convince is as unrestrained as his capacity for extrapolating upon the promise of open-source development.

Eric S. Raymond, President, Open Source Initiative, The Cathedral and the Bazaar

In her first book, respected digerati opinion-maker Esther Dyson looks at computing and the Internet and how they will profoundly change our business and social lives in a fully wired world. The wisdom of Dyson's view is that, while the digital age will be vastly different from the one we know, it will be governed by the same forces that have always shaped social organizations. She has given lots of thought to how those forces will interact with specific new technologies and does a convincing job of predicting the shape of things to come in considerable detail.

Esther Dyson, Chairman, EDventure Holdings, Release 2.0

Thomas Stewart, an editor at Fortune, weaves the genesis of intellectual capital with flair and historical insights. Intellectual capital is the synergy, flexibility and strength gained from focusing and investing in three fundamentals: human capital, structural capital and customer capital. Stewart explains the long-building pressures that are making the tenets of intellectual capital attractive. His book provides compelling trends, anecdotes and guidelines for executives, startups and knowledge workers struggling to discover the secrets of intellectual capital.

Thomas A. Stewart, Intellectual Capital

The technological wave is making products smarter and changing what consumers buy, how they buy, and where their loyalty goes. Enterprise One to One can help your business stay in front of the wave. Our current technology makes it easy for businesses to build customer relationships. Businesses can now treat different customers differently; however, it's important to know how each customer wants to be treated. Peppers & Rogers explain how to harness technology to achieve competitive advantages in customer loyalty and unit margin. They show you how you can tell customers apart, remember them individually, and have them give feedback directly to you. They also display how mass customization technology enables businesses to customize products and services as a matter of routine. Enterprise One to One explains what kinds of strategies are applicable to what kinds of businesses and under what circumstances; how to retain customers and increase your share of each customer's business; how to create entirely new markets of individual customers who have diverse needs; how to make the transition to the interactive age, taking advantage of new technologies without being threatened by them.

Don Peppers, co-founder Peppers and Rogers Group, Enterprise One to One

Two years after its release, the second edition of David Siegel's Creating Killer Web Sites remains a bestselling guide to building sites that are driven by design aesthetics rather than technological prowess. Now, in Futurize Your Enterprise, Siegel takes off his Web designer hat and turns his attention to developing a corporate online presence aimed at meeting consumer needs. He cautions readers to throw off their old bricks-and-mortar mindsets and focus not on "how to build a Web site but how to build a Web business." Siegel divides the book into four parts--"Principles," "Practice," "Prototypes," and "Predictions"--that moves from "tools and methodologies you'll need to transform your management-led organization into what I call a customer-led company," to fictional case studies that show how these techniques may be applied today, to speculative future scenarios "in which the Internet is no longer a tool but a platform for work, community-building and individual empowerment."

His suggestions include establishing an autonomous Web division that takes the medium more seriously than itself, encouraging (if not insisting that) all employees interact directly with online customers, and factoring in participatory or community aspects that actively attract those who share demographics or specific interests. Some may find that Siegel's recommendations suffer because of his repeated use of fictional case studies to make his point. However, those looking for new ideas will surely find some here. Futurize Your Enterprise is for Web masters, business people, and the many that Siegel won over through his earlier books.

David Siegel, Futurize Your Enterprise

Seth Godin, one of the world's foremost online promoters, offers his best advice for advertising in Permission Marketing. Godin argues that businesses can no longer rely solely on traditional forms of "interruption advertising" in magazines, mailings, or radio and television commercials. He writes that today consumers are bombarded by marketing messages almost everywhere they go. If you want to grab someone's attention, you first need to get his or her permission with some kind of bait--a free sample, a big discount, a contest, an 800 number, or even just an opinion survey. Once a customer volunteers his or her time, you're on your way to establishing a long-term relationship and making a sale. "By talking only to volunteers, Permission Marketing guarantees that consumers pay more attention to the marketing message," he writes. "It serves both customers and marketers in a symbiotic exchange."

Seth Godin, Permission Marketing

Currently, computer users must navigate a sea of guidebooks, frequently asked questions (FAQs), and wizards to perform a task such as searching the Web or creating a spreadsheet. While Donald Norman acknowledges that the personal computer allows for "flexibility and power," he also makes its limitations perfectly clear. "The personal computer is perhaps the most frustrating technology ever," he writes. "It should be quiet, invisible, unobtrusive." His vision is that of the "information appliance," digital tools created to answer our specific needs, yet interconnected to allow communication between devices.

His solution? "Design the tool to fit so well that the tool becomes a part of the task." He proposes using the PC as the infrastructure for devices hidden in walls, in car dashboards, and held in the palm of the hand. A word of caution: some of Norman's zealotry leads to a certain creepiness (global positioning body implants) and goofiness (electric-power-generating plants in shoes). His message, though, is reasonably situated in the concept that the tools should bend to fit us and our goals: we sit down to write, not to word process; to balance bank accounts, not to fill in cells on a spreadsheet. In evenly measuring out the future of humanity's technological needs--and the limitations of the PC's current incarnation--Norman presents a formidable argument for a renaissance of the information appliance.

Don Norman , The Invisible Computer