| Net Attitude: What It Is,
How to Get It, and Why Your Company Can't Survive Without It
By John R. Patrick and Stewart Alsop
Perseus Publishing, 2001.
Reviewed by Lise Hansen
A recent cartoon in The New Yorker by the aptly named
Tom Tomorrow laments that owners of cars with alarms are never within
earshot when the alarms go off, leaving hapless neighbors to lie
awake and curse the darkness. Tomorrow acidly suggests that alarm
owners should be obliged to wear a padlocked electronic collar that
delivers a series of “extremely painful and prolonged electric
shocks” from the time their alarms open up until they are
shut off.
The Internet technology scenario John Patrick dishes up for Net
Attitude is not as dark, but it’s just as appealing.
Patrick, who wrote this book when he was vice president of Internet
technology at IBM, is the maverick executive who, in 1994, dragged
the company, kicking and screaming, into involvement with the Web,
and became a sort of official enfant terrible for Big Blue as it
punched its way toward its transformation into e-business.
Patrick’s book throbs with impatience. He can see how things
could be—indeed, how they ought to be. He describes
in detail the dumb things that still go wrong when you try to use
the Web, and the dumb excuses businesses use to explain why they
can’t be fixed. How come? he asks. We have the technology.
We know how to do this. What’s lacking is Net Attitude—strong
leadership from businesses and institutions to, in essence, think
outside-in—the way their customers think.
Contrary to those who claim the Internet is stalled or even washed
up completely, Patrick claims that we’re in the very early
stages of the impact the Internet will have on our business, professional,
and personal lives. (His first chapter is called “We Haven’t
Seen Anything Yet.”) The next generation of the Internet,
Patrick says, will embody seven key characteristics, explained in
detail: fast, always on, everywhere, natural (intuitive), intelligent,
easy, and trusted. He’s especially strong on the security
issues that, handled correctly, lead to trust.
The visions come thick and fast: an online voting system that activates
your digital signature after you enter your pin number. An MRI apparatus
that lets a physician far away see and diagnose your knee problem
in real time. A mobile phone application that closes the garage
door from 300 miles away and turns up the heat before you come home,
via the server on your home LAN. E-diplomas made relevant not by
the issuing university, but by, say, the 10 experts with whom the
student studied online.
Good bonuses are the book’s acute and readable summaries
of individual technologies (Linux, XML, peer-to-peer networking)
and developments (the evolution of Internet standards and the Internet
Engineering Task Force, anyone?), as well as the first and only
analysis I’ve seen on the term “skunk works.”
The latter is fitting: One of Patrick’s biggest contributions
to IBM was his ability to attract the best and brightest Internet
technologists and turn them loose, protected from the bureaucracy,
in small, dynamic labs.
That said, Patrick doesn’t make much of a case for the part
of his title that promises to tell you why your company can’t
survive without "net attitude," beyond warning that future
generations of consumers and business-to-business customers increasingly
will live online. CEOs and boards hungry for ROI need more than
that; chart-and-graph wonks would like to see just one proof point.
But while giving a token nod to the business disciplines involved
in institutionalizing the Internet, Patrick isn’t much interested
in issues far from the barricades. His term for those who have to
cope with stuff like process reengineering or measurement? White
corpuscles.
But many a white corpuscle has been convinced by Patrick’s
vision to look outside the organization and work from a customer’s
perspective. “Outside is where the people are,” Patrick
writes. “Net Attitude will help you walk in their
shoes.”
This review originally appeared in the Winter
2003 Design Management Review
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