X-Engineering the Corporation: Reinventing Your Business in the Digital Age

James Champy

Warner Business Books, 2002

232 pages; $29.95

ISBN: 0-446-52800-5

Business author James Champy gained widespread renown with his first book, Reengineering the Corporation. With over 2.5 million copies sold worldwide, the best seller led legions of business executives back to the drawing board to rebuild the processes and cultures that gave life to their companies.

In his latest work, X-Engineering the Corporation: Reinventing your Business in the Digital Age, Champy shares his views on how forward-thinking organizations are developing new ways of doing business by embracing the capabilities of a world of free-flowing information and products.

Champy's X-Engineering concept calls for business to turn competitors into allies by sharing goals and avoiding overlap for mutual prosperity, without sacrificing proprietary information. The nature of competition today, Champy asserts, is leading many companies to the conclusion that cooperation is a better path to success. With companies collaborating and sharing information regarding process improvements, redundancies can be eliminated, waste can be reduced, and potentially billions of dollars can be saved.

The path to the X-Engineering process, Champy writes, begins with the answers to three questions. First, how must a company change? Second, what will the benefit be? And third, with whom should we collaborate? With the answers to those questions in hand, Champy says the three Ps of the X-Engineering triangle are formed: process, proposition, and participation.

The points raised by Champy are well-illustrated in the book with real-world examples. He describes in detail, for instance, how EMC Corp., by listening to its customers and responding, launched new products in rapid fashion, innovated faster, created less expensive manufacturing methods, and broke new barriers in customer service. The result was one of the fastest corporate growth cycles in business history.

In its conclusion, Champy warns that X-Engineering is by no means a final destination for business advancement. It does, though, set the stage for the ongoing nurturing of innovation. This innovation will be supported by a flow of information, largely enabled by the emergence of technologies such at the Internet. The X-Engineering process, he notes, takes business to "a place where information technology supports and improves the human potential, and where work has been designed to make it less of a burden and more of a joy."

The Company of the Future: How the Communications Revolution is Changing Management

Frances Cairncross

Harvard Business School Press, 2002

272 pages; $27.50

ISBN: 1-57851-657-9

The mainstream business press has devoted considerable coverage in the past year to the often times financially catastrophic demise of the dot.com pioneers. The media's collective condemnation of the philosophies that lead to the meteoric ascent, and then fatal decline of many Internet-based companies has led many business people to dismiss the Internet as a viable platform for future growth.

Author Frances Cairncross makes a very strong case that those observers, quite frankly, are dead wrong. In her recent book, The Company of the Future: How the Communications Revolution is Changing Management , Cairncross argues that many business professionals have grossly underestimated the capacity of the Internet to change the way companies behave. While admitting that short-term profitability of the Internet was greatly exaggerated, she states that its long-term significance was not.

Cairncross asserts that the evolution of Internet technologies is changing the face of business and will continue to do so, at an accelerated rate. Companies managed by executives who fail to embrace and exploit the capabilities of the Internet, she writes, will quickly find their very survival at risk.

To avoid this potential failure, she advises that managers first examine the Internet's capabilities to improve internal process and performance. Only after the organization has achieved a reasonable level of mastery with the technology, can it expect to succeed in using it as a platform that will encompasses the business processes of not only itself, but its business partners as well.

Each chapter of Cairncross' book details the potential of Internet technologies to spread to every aspect of a company. This includes recruiting, retaining, and training talent; communicating better internally and externally; nurturing customer relationships; building brands, managing alliances; and fostering innovation. Finally, Cairncross also addresses the many changes companies must make if they are to reap the full benefits.

JobsInLogistics.com (JIL) calls itself North America's largest logistics career board. Although it's unclear what this claim is based on, it's true that JIL has a more extensive listing of job openings in logistics and supply chain management than most other comparable sites.

A search under "distribution," for example, produced 180 job postings, 25 of which had been posted in the last week. They represented a wide range of job titles from industrial engineer-distribution to president and CEO. The majority seemed to be posted by recruitment firms specializing in logistics and supply chain management, such as PeopleSource Solutions and Hunt Valley Executive Resources. There were also a smattering of posting from third-party logistics firms such as Menlo Logistics, Schneider Logistics, and DHL Express, as well as some from retailers and manufacturers such as Walgreens and Nature's Best.

The site is free to job seekers who wish to search listings and post their resume. Employers, however, must pay job-posting fees and resume search subscriptions.

The site divides the job postings into 40 different categories for management jobs and 17 different categories for associate jobs (listings range from administration to forklift operator to order picker).

Commendably, the site sticks to its simple mission and does not try to be a portal of supply chain and logistics information. It does not clutter up its space by trying to provide supply chain and logistics news or acting as a logistics search engine or directory. Overall, it is intuitive and easy to use.

JIL, however, might be over-reaching its grasp when it sets itself up as a rival to general job posting sites. JIL's site claims that "most recruiting Web sites do not even recognize logistics or distribution in their list of jobs. When using keywords 'logistics' or 'distribution,' less than 10 percent of the jobs are remotely connected with our profession." Yet Monster.com recently turned up 1,000 job postings under "logistics" and all of them seemed applicable.

For the most part, however, different jobs seemed to be posted on the two sites. This makes JIL an excellent supplement to job seekers in the logistics and supply chain management fields.