Great Book!, one of Ohmae's best book. Read it, and you will understand why this world would getting smaller and smaller everyday. In this globalized economy, every single nation could take an advantage from it, no matter how poor it is, because we believe everyone in this world has a spesific competencies and capabilities to increasing their own wealth quality. See how the business organizations around the world develop their competencies and capabilities and take profit from "interlinked economy", and create something called "win-win solution", something that almost impossible if we talk that in the past paradigm.

This tilte can give us the great idea how to successfully live in the coming 21th century. After finishing this title, you can say he is one of the best auther about business.

Dr. Ohmae reveals the fundamental driving forces of the world in the new era. With his astute logic based upon numerous cases, he delineates how wealth can be created both on corporation bases and also on nation bases. No wonder Prime Minister of Malaysia invited Dr. Ohmae as an economic advisor for the nation. So far his logics have been proven to be the realities of the today's world. Some may call him a visonary, but I think what he says in this book is not the outcome of his dubious imaginations. It has been some time since this book came out, and not only we have witnessed some of the phnomena he discussed and foretold, but also now we can catch ourselves using the terminology, "borderless world", or "borderless economy" while thinking about the world. This "BORDERLESS" is one of words he made commonly used in our lives, if not he is the one who coined the word.

I was a political science major in college in the United States. I! tried hard to understand the logic of the world while studying hegemonies of various nations. However, I can tell that this book was the most powerful book for me to understand the world, not all the thick textbooks or ugly notes from the boring lectures.

So, why don't you give it a try and order this phenomenal book with Amazon!

Thank you very much, Dr. Ohmae & Amazon.

Minoru Nadai, alias NORM

The mind of a strategist: Business Planning for Competitive advantage

A ground-breaking approach to strategic planning in the world of business, Ohmae goes beyond the standard formula for success into the mind of the creative corporate thinker.

It is Dr. Ohmae's contention - supported by facts and figures from companies such as Sony, Nissan, Honda and Yamaha - that in today's market strategic thiking is the key to success. He shows the creative planner in action - dissecting the market, weighing the competition's strength's and weaknesses, questioning the prevailing assumptions of an industry, discovering the actual needs and wants of the customer, and finally, implementing the strategies that mean success in the marketplace.

One of what I consider the enlightening books that allow you to gain a new perspective on a seemingly complex subject. In one go the author attempts to explain how recent economic, technological, commercial and societal developments have conspired to create a new world order. Decision-makers would do well to use the lessons of this book to analyze their decisions. I sometimes feel that the people making the decisions, universally, are under-educated and naive and would not even consider the wider ramifications of their decisions.

My only complaint is that Mr. Ohmae tends to ramble on topics that may well be more concise. He also pauses every once in a while to complain against the egregious faults of the Japanese government. I don't blame him but it would be better if he treated it in a seperate book on the subject.

It talks about how 3 new forces - cyber, economic multiples, globalisation - are reshaping the world's future. Not only in business or economic, bu also in political and social spheres.

These 3 forces are not really new and there shall be lot of literature talking about them. Strength of this book is to look at them from a macro perspective; and they interact (together with "real" economy) and affect well-being of mankind. It is not a descriptive book. In fact, the author shares his vision of how we shall deal with these changes - as an individual, a company, a country, a government, and everyone of us as an international citizen.

Author exercises powerful imagination of what will happen in future, e.g. a new cold war using the 3 forces. This may seem wild but certainly not empty talking. You may not take this seriously but it can enhance your feel about many future possibilities.

Unlike most Japanese, author has his independent opinions and express them critically. It is always sensitive for a foreigner to talk about other countries - e.g. Americans blocking Japan's recovery, Koreans maintaining developing countries mindset, China and Russia disintegration - let us be open minded and respect free speech.

As the author of "Start & Run a Profitable Exporting Business," I had the great honor of receiving Dr. Ohmae's endorsement of my book. I have been an admirer of his since starting a global marketing, consulting and web content providing business in 1985. His first book, "The Borderless World," not only inspired me to focus my entire professional career on global trade, but also changed forever the way in which managers throughout the world viewed their business.

Now, looking forward with great anticipation to this new book, "The Invisible Continent: Four Strategic Imperatives of the New Economy," I wondered how Dr. Ohmae could live up to his pioneering work of the early 80's on "globalism" -- a word he coined that is now in everyday use -- and give us an equally ground-breaking text for the 21st century. I'm delighted to report that I read his book and it is Dr. Ohmae's best work ever. He remains a foremost architect of the future of business on (as he describes it) our cyber-enabled continent.

This is a work of awe-inspiring business genius, offering a boundless wealth of ideas about how to thrive in our new economy. The enormity of Dr. Ohmae's intellect and the clarity of focus with which he seamlessly assembles complex ideas about our "continent without land" make this a text that is at once profound, sophisticated and marvelously easy to understand. Here's a characteristic comment, at once colorful and thought-provoking: "The Internet has made it much easier to become simultaneously global and newly born." Dr. Ohmae compels us to think about the conditions of world business not as they are, but as they will be -- much faster than you think -- and what to do about it. I put down the book asking myself, "What just happened here?" -- it was that provocative.

If you want a forecast of the future of traditional and e-business NOW, then you should secure your copy of "The Invisible Continent: Four Strategic Imperatives of the New Economy" TODAY.

Professor Ohmae has created one of the most balanced and useful perspectives ever in this outstanding book on business strategy. Anyone who wants to improve their strategy would do well to read and apply the lessons in The Mind of the Strategist.

I have over 30 years of experience with strategic thinking as a consultant and planner. I constantly find that people in the same organization have totally different concepts of what strategy is all about. Each perspective tends to be either too focused in one area (like competition), or incomplete in some aspects (like ignoring the effect of compensation to focus strategic intent).

As a result, people "logically" arrive at some pretty bad strategic conclusions. Typically, this involves a strategy that the organization cannot execute well or which the competitors will quickly negate.

What I like about this simple book is that it nicely summarizes the case for a balanced perspective involving your customers, competitors and your own company. Although most American companies will believe that they already do this, the American approach is usually much more superficial and incomplete than the Japanese one.

For example, if a Japanese company wants to add a new product, the evaluation looks heavily at how well the customer will be able to use the product and how effectively the company will be able to provide it in the context of probable competitive offerings. An American analysis will feature financial analysis of a forecast that is often based on little more than spreadsheet doodling. The development of the Sony PlayStation as described in Revolutionaries at Sony will help you see this point.

The weakness of the Japanese model is that it typically looks too little at the business environment (notice how often Japanese companies buy American businesses and properties at the top of the market for inflated prices), and are relatively insensitive to financial implications. In fast moving technology markets, the Japanese consensus-building process also tends to slow down time to market. That is what makes the Sony success mentioned above so interesting.

Clearly, there is no perfect model for strategic thinking that fits all situations. A major weakness of many efforts is to assume that the future can be precisely forecast. That is patently wrong. Typically, the relative importance of the elements considered needs to be adjusted to fit the circumstnace. That seems to be an art rather than a science at this point. You may enjoy The Art of the Long View on this point.

Although this book has its limitations (as suggested above), it is a valuable perspective on strategy thinking that will be helpful to most American business people if they think about the concepts in a more thorough way.

To balance the perspective here, I suggest you also read Profit Patterns to get a sense of how surrounding circumstances play a role in profitability.

Good thinking! May this book help you overcome any stalled thinking you have about not doing your home work in thinking about outperforming competitors to provide benefits that matter a lot to customers.

May you enjoy irresistible growth!

This is the best book I have ever read about Strategic Thinking. What is different and not existing in other popular books as 'Thinking Strategically, Co-opetition, Leading the Revolution, Competitive Strategy...' etc is HOW to think instead of WHAT to think.

The book's main chapter's include the following competencies:

Part I-The Art of Strategic Thinking:
--> What is strategy?
--> What can be the possible ways to overcome competitor?
--> How strategic mind should work?
(Instead of analysis to idea, idea to analysis)

Part II-Building Successful Strategies:
--> Define yourself - the corporation
--> Define the others - the competition
--> Define the rewarders - the consumers
--> And finally define the above 3C in one map

Part III-Modern Strategic Realities:
--> What is the affect of economic environment to 3C's?
--> How to cope with strategic changes?
--> A case analysis: A nations strategic gain: Japan
--> How to project the future 3C's?
--> And finally is there a strategic success formula?

The main thing I captured from the book is: strategic thinking is a way of life, not a special time event. Working in a US multinational for years, I am more and more aware of the facts and success path defined by Mr. Ohmae - McKinsey guru. Especially, determining the strategic degrees of freedom of any issue (can be a business issue, or a weekend tennis journey, or even life -I applied-) and determining the actions to take to get the determined result is the best thing I learned.

This is a short book (wrt to other strategic management books) but it teaches how to think instead of popular strategy methods.
It is a must read & can be taken as foreword of all business books.

Many people talk about strategy. So does Dr. Ohmae in this book. Many voracious readers on business might be quite bored with the banal materials appeared on hundreads of pages of those books.

However, The Mind of the Strategist stands apart from other books in terms of its profound discussion on what the strategy really means. With this definition, he further talks about four ways of thinking to deal with a given situation in a business world. He may not give you off-the-rack answers of what to do. Rather than spoon feeding you, he gives you the right logic, not just techniques, to come up with your own solutions to maximize your competitiveness. It is your job to use your thoughts and imaginations to win the game of business.

The author must have intentionally taken this approach to discuss on strategy in order to sincerely tell us that there is no correct strategy for every situation. The author has done his job by giving us the way of thinking. Now it is our own job to think strategically after having read this book once. And I firmly believe that every reader can take full advantage of new way of thinking in business over your competitors. It means that reading The Mind of the Strategist itself is a strategic move for you. It should be your strategy in your personal business agenda.

Minoru Nadai "åˆä -«

Omae Ken'ichi writes from the perspective of a radical of the global elite. Should the various states of the world use welfare programs or social protections to blunt popular opposition to the exploitation and structural violence inherent in the free market system? Never! Omae demands that all social programs be abolished so that "global solutions will flow [via the market] to where they are needed without the intervention of nation states".

This is prima facie ridiculous, and Omae gets away with it only with remarkably vague explication and by refusing to entertain criticisms. Even libertarian ideologues must admit that only those problems whose solutions can be made profitable would thus be solved -- and since most of the world is poor, no solutions will be forthcoming (consider AIDS in Africa).

But the problems with this book extend well beyond the notion that the market will solve the world's problems if given a chance. The list is long (including no consideration of the environment, cultural diversity, or poor countries), but most disturbing is Omae's condemnation of democracy. He believes sovereign governments are the corrupt instruments of special interests -- true enough, but a humane solution is not based on giving free rein to the corporate puppetmasters. Morever, Omae explicitly opposes the principle of one person, one vote: "The tyranny of modern democracy is that it tends to give equal weight
to votes before contributions to the maintenance of society as a whole are taken into account".

Omae's solution, then, is to concentrate economic power even more than is currently the case in the hands of those rewarded by the market (generally the most ruthless, greedy, or lucky) while cutting the vast majority out of the process altogether. In other words, establish a formal oligarchy, instead of our current informal oligarchy hidden behind sham elections. These conclusions are pernicious, and Omae's arguments so weakly supported that this book is not even useful for understanding the thinking of those who favor greater corporate control of the globe.

After proclaiming in an earlier book that we are now living in a 'borderless world', Ohmae now writes about the 'end of the nation state'. Ohmae's work is very popular among geographers who like to use it as an antidote to their own research and perspectives. They claim that national borders still matter and, in general, that space has become more rather than less important. Ohmae has allegedly not understood this. So, I expected Ohmae to argue that the nation state didn't matter any more. But he did not do this. On the contrary, all his examples show that the nation state is still very important. Rather than proving that the nation state does not matter any more, Ohmae shows that people like him can be very frustrated by the actions of nation states. He basically argues that the nation state hinders the market and therefore should be dissolved. He tells us that we should give managers of multinationals all the space and freedom they need so we can benefit from the blessings of the market. Ohmae equates market forces with freedom and prosperity and associates the nation state with repression and corruption. Rather than an economic analysis, his book is a political agenda for right-wing politicians and the managers of TNC's. I think that most people who question the benevolence of the market, will be very irritated by the way Ohmae confuses his own personal interest and the interests of the economic/managerial elite in general with the public interest. I'm one of those people and I can't say that I gained a lot of knowledge from reading this work. Nevertheless, I have to say that Ohmae presents his arguments in a very challenging way. That makes the book interesting in at least one respect, and I guess that people who share his political view will therefore enjoy the book. I didn't enjoy it and I hope that other people will also read between the lines and see that business gurus like Ohmae represent the interests of a small minority (mainly share holders of TNC's) rather than the general interest.

Ohmae has brilliantly managed to explain in a crystal clear way how the political and economic structures of mankind are starting to experience an impressive change. The book is very revealing in terms of how globalisation is already reshaping the way people interact, making national states unnecessary, costly and counterproducing, as they have just become obstacles in today's world. Ohmae has said in easy words what we all (in favour or against) knew or suspected but couldn't put so clearly: that what he calls "the world according to the United Nations", that colourful political map we all learnt in school, full of borders and flags representing different cultures, levels of income, geopolitical interests, etc., is simply over. With the end of national states comes a new and exciting era when individuals and their spontaneous order, their free associations and their voluntary alliances are important, not any longer the opinions, positions or decisions of government bureaucrats and politicians. With globalisation comes freedom to an extent we humans have no historic precedents for. This logically causes fear among all brands of right-wing or left-wing collectivists and, especially, among that chaste of elegant leaders living on our coerced tax-paying.

es n muy buen libro con ejemplos calros de lo que sucede