The Pick of This Year's Crop of Books - BusinessWeek Top 10 Books of 2004

BusinessWeek

Top 10 Book of 2004

To respond to forces that are shaping consumer behavior, corporations may need to partner with their customers, say C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy in The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers (Harvard Business School Press). Only by letting individual corporate customers and consumers fashion products and services will business leaders escape the trap in which their products' only distinction is price, say the two professors at the University of Michigan Business School.

Reviewer Steve Hamm found that the "provocative" book lays out "how to change organizational behavior to make co-creation natural rather than an isolated, heroic act." The authors have sweeping change in mind: Alterations must be made to every corporate function, from product development to sales and marketing. Indeed, what the duo contemplates is nothing less than the democratization of commerce.

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