There's something vaguely unsettling about an electronic-commerce specialist writing a guide to management. Rene Carayol has certainly offered us a very disturbing book.
His premise is that new economy companies are "fast", while the others are slow. "The major legacy of the internet era will be speed," Carayol writes. It follows, then, that only equally "fast" people can cope. The pantheon of the "fast" people is populated by dotcom CEOs, such as Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang and Jim Clark of Netscape. Carayol also adds a couple of obvious non-dotcommers to his "A" list, such as Carly Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard, Chris Gent of Vodafone and Jack Welch of General Electric.
But for the most part, the author focuses on the dotcom boom. Carayol himself is a former programmer, who rose to become systems director for such traditional companies as department store chain Marks & Spencer and IPC, the magazine group.
Since then, he has joined the e-commerce circuit as chairman of E-Photomail.com and has become a regular on the talk circuit in Britain and Ireland and has a spot on Radio 4. His aim is to introduce bricks-and-mortar companies to the new economy through his company, Voodoo Group. Corporate Voodoo is a kind of marketing tie-in with these efforts. Carayol's co-author, Firth, is also a writer on management.
Corporate Voodoo is not a book to be read the traditional way: it's all panels and tables and anecdotes.
The book is a mish-mash of truisms, management-guru models and predictable tales from the corporate frontline. Orange is "fast", British Telecom is "slow", Tesco is "fast", Marks and Spencer is "slow". (Most of his examples are, like Carayol, British, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, as British entrepreneurs have been at the forefront of the new economy and have made some fairly splashy purchases in Europe and North America). Richard Branson, inconveniently, is both "fast" (Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Megastores) and "slow" (Virgin Trains).
Carayol breaks a golden rule of electronic communication by gathering soppy collections of truisms - "Work like you don't need the money" - and advising readers to "select Forward To from the drop down folder and select 10 people from your address book". If that doesn't summon evil voodoo magic from the ether, nothing will.
Furthermore, the book is already largely out of date. (Presumably, book publishing is not "fast"). "Spend time with any internet start-up and you'll see how passion and imagination are the drivers behind the astonishing creativity apparent in the e-world today," he gushes. It's almost too easy to kick Carayol while his voodoo e-world is down: there's no mention of profitability, sound business plans, coherent strategies, or obligations to investors.
Carayol appears to be a practitioner of the very hubris that plagued the new economy. Unfortunately, "fast" and smart companies don't date from the time of the internet. Neither does sound, responsive management.
From the earliest days of the industrial revolution, there have always been innovators to bring us the cotton gin and the stump-jump plough. Unfortunately, there have probably always been management gurus, too. Let's hope they learn something in time for the new, new economy.