Shona Brown is responsibile for Google's business operations from 2003 as new Vice President, following almost a decade consulting for McKinsey & Co. What strategy will she propose as a remedy to the bad behavior google-watch.org says her new employer is showing: "If we're NOT lucky, we will be uploading our websites to Google's servers soon, much like the bloggers do at blogger.com (which was bought by Google in 2003). It would mean the end of the web as we know it. On the other hand, if we're lucky, one of the other three search companies will soon offer some competition.

Why? Because it collects your IP address, the time and date, your search terms, your browser configuration, and the cookie ID for your every step (read: search) Google is a privacy time bomb with 200 million searches per day, most from outside the U.S. It is able to access all their users' information because Google has no user-data Retention policy, and when the New York Times (2002-11-28) asked Sergey Brin about whether Google ever gets subpoenaed for this information, Brin had no comment.

The only way a webmaster can avoid having his site cached on Google is to put a "noarchive" meta in the header of every page on his site. Surfers like the cache, but webmasters don't. (Many webmasters have deleted questionable material from their sites, only to discover later that the problem pages live merrily on in Google's cache).
The cache copy should be "opt-in" for webmasters, not "opt-out."
By now Google enjoys a 75 percent monopoly for all external referrals to most websites. Webmasters cannot avoid seeking Google's approval these days, assuming they want to increase traffic to their site.
There are no detailed, published standards issued by Google, and there is no appeal process for penalized sites. Google is completely unaccountable. Most of the time Google doesn't even answer email from webmasters.

Worse yet, Google's toolbar updates to new versions quietly, and without asking. This means that if you have the toolbar installed, Google essentially has complete access to your hard disk every time you connect to Google (which is many times a day). Most software vendors, and even Microsoft, ask if you'd like an updated version. But not Google. Any software that updates automatically presents a massive security risk.

As a business school student I have covered a plethora of theories and frameworks regarding strategic analysis, planning, and development. Brown & Eisenhardt provide a fresh look at strategy. Competing on the Edge provides the latest thinking on emergent strategy and succeeding within high-velocity industries. Regardless if you are in industry or the classroom, this book is a must if you ever plan to drive strategy at the business level-no matter what the pace of change is in your industry. This book will teach you to think in new ways about how you create, manage and defend competitive advantage. This read will take you far beyond Porter, Mintzberg, and Barney.

Shona L.Brown and Kathleen M.Eisenhardt's book is dynamic and major break from traditional static approaches. "Competing on the edge contrasts with other approaches to strategy that assume clear industry boundaries, predictable competition, or a knowable future...The underlying insight behind competing on the edge is that strategy is the result of a firm's organizing to change constantly and letting a semicoherent strategic direction emerge from that organization...A semicoherent strategic direction is fundamentally different from what is traditionally called strategy" (p.7). Here, they ask, "What is unique and even provocative about it?":

* It is unpredictable. Competing on the edge is about surprise.

* It is uncontrolled. It is not about command and precision planning by senior executives.

* It is inefficient. Competing on the edge is not necessarily efficient in the short term.

* It is proactive. Competing on the edge is not about passively watching for the occasional discontinuity or waiting for other firms to move before taking action.

* It is continuous. It is about a rhythm of moves over time; not a set of disjointed actions.

* It is diverse. Competing on the edge is about making a variety of moves with varying scale and risk.

In this context, they write that "the premise of this book is that change is pervasive. The implcation is that the key strategic challenge facing managers in many contemporary businesses is managing this change. The challenge is to react quickly, anticipate when possible, and lead change where appropriate. A manager's dilemma is how to do this, not just once or every now and then, but consistently. Our book has argued that competing on the edge is the unpredictable, often uncontrolled, and even inefficient strategy that nonetheless defines best practice when change is pervasive." And,then, they list ten rules of competing on the edge that articulate the key assumptions and best practices about strategy, organization, and leadership that they have found to characterize firms that compete on the edge:

I- Strategy

Rule 1. Advantage is temporary.

Rule 2. Strategy is diverse, emergent, and complicated.

Rule 3. Reinvention is the goal.

II- Organization

Rule 4. Live in the present.

Rule 5. Stretch out the past.

Rule 6. Reach into the future.

Rule 7. Time pace change.

III- Leadership

Rule 8. Grow the strategy.

Rule 9. Drive strategy from the business level.

Rule 10. Repatch businesses to markets and articulate the whole.

Highly recommended.

This book was used in a graduate level strategic management class, and most of the topics were covered early in the book. There was little gained by reading the rest of it. Additionally, there was little information on how a company is supposed to find the balance at the edge of chaos. For the course that used it, there should have been more introduction to traditional strategy, and this book makes a poor core text for that purpose; however, that was probably not the authors' intentions.

I still feel it was a decent book, and I liked the concepts of time pacing and group improvisation. But, how does one determine how to find an balance on the edge. I mean after the first couple chapters we got the point. The examples mentioned were all anonymous like this review should be, so we could not study what those companies actually did on our own either. For the level of detail provided it could have been a case study instead of a book.

I suggest you buy the book and read the only the first few chapters and skim the rest of it or get the cliff notes.