Rules To Break & Laws To Follow:How Your Business Can Beat the Crisis of Short-Termism

Before the rise of the World Wide Web, the old rules served as reasonable guides for running a successful business. But a number of new technologies have introduced capabilities and influences on business that have created a “perfect storm” of radical change.

As we’ll explain in our summary of Rules to Break & Laws to Follow: How Your Business Can Beat the Crisis of Short-Termism, by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, PhD, the technology of business has changed so radically that the old accepted wisdoms just don’t work anymore. Customers share their experiences electronically with millions of other customers. Business is transacted at the speed of wireless e-mail. And the lowliest employee can leap tall corporate hierarchies with a single click.

In place of the old rules, smart leaders are embracing a whole new way of thinking about how to create real shareholder value in today’s competitive environment.

Peppers and Rogers are the co-authors of seven previous business books, including The One to One Future, Managing Customer Relationships, and Return on Customer. They are the founding partners of Peppers and Rogers Group and 1to1 Media, now part of Carlson Marketing Worldwide, Inc.

In this summary, you’ll learn how to overcome the three unspoken assumptions about how businesses create value. Companies have followed these rules for more than a century, but they are false, and we’ll tell you why and how to break them. In their place, we’ll introduce the 12 Laws to Follow that will allow you to achieve success in both the current quarter and the long term. Along the way, you’ll also learn:

• Why short-termism drives your business, and what you can do to stop it while still paying the bills;
• Why new, interactive technologies mean that customer trust is more important today than it ever was before;
• How respectful disagreement and dissent within your business can lead to more innovations;
• How to recover your customers’ trust after it is undermined by a PR disaster or some other problem; and
• What kind of corporate culture you need to ensure that your employees create real value for your business even when no one’s looking over their shoulders.