Thursday, July 21, 2011

Introducing Business Goes Virtual - Chapter 1: Virtual Business - Real or Imaginary?

This blog post is the first of a ten post series about my new book, Business Goes Virtual, written with John and JoAnn Girard. Each post will feature chapter excerpts and general commentary on the current topic.
In a nutshell, Business Goes Virtual combines academic theory and case studies of real-world success stories to provide leaders with leading practices and lessons learned to help their organizations innovate and grow more rapidly.


Virtual Business Defined (Sort of)



...Wikipedia defines the term as follows: “A virtual business employs electronic means to transact business as opposed to a traditional brick and mortar business that relies on face- to- face transactions with physical documents and physical currency or credit.”


Our use of the Wikipedia definition is very deliberate. We are very aware that some readers will cringe as they read the word “Wikipedia” and immediately challenge the validity of the definition. However, we believe that Wikipedia is an excellent source of material, especially given the subject of the book. Throughout Business Goes Virtual, we will use a variety of high- quality online references including blogs, wikis, social media, and corporate web presences as well as more traditional academic sources such as peer- reviewed journal articles, books, and conference proceedings. We will select the sources carefully; however, we will not differentiate based on whether the source is from electronic or paper media....


From our study of businesses in the domain, we define the term as follows: A virtual business provides innovative solutions to new and traditional business challenges by exploiting social technology, leadership, and collaboration in both the real and virtual worlds.


(Pg 9-10)
According to a New York Times interview with Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley venture-capitalist, tech businesses (where most of which are virtual businesses) are still being undervalued because of the 90’s tech bubble and its eventual burst in the early 2000’s. With the recent valuations of LinkedIn at $9 billion and Pandora at $3.4 billion (Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/01/as-zynga-files-for-1b-ipo-linkedin-and-pandora-stocks-pop/), do you still agree with him? Are you willing to invest in these kinds of companies armed with the knowledge that there could be another bubble burst? Comment below, I’d love to hear your thoughts.


The content includes:
PART I - THE CONVERGENCE
Chapter 1 - Virtual Business: Real or Imaginary? *Read the first chapter online at the above link*
Chapter 2 - The New Face(book) of Organizations
Chapter 3 - Real Leadership in the Virtual World
Chapter 4 - The Power of Sharing
Chapter 5 - Making Sense of Virtual Worlds

PART II THE STRATEGIES
Chapter 6 - Any Place, Any Time
Chapter 7 - The People Know Best
Chapter 8 - Everyone Has a Stake
Chapter 9 - Real in the Virtual World

PART III THE WAY AHEAD
Chapter 10 - What Every Leader Needs to Know

1 comment:

Gexton said...

This blog post is the first of a ten post series about my new book, Business Goes Virtual, written with John and JoAnn Girard. Each post will feature chapter excerpts and general commentary on the current topic.
Virtual assistant Alberta
Virtual Business Solution Canada

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