Unchained Value: The New Logic of Digital Business.(Review)

 Mary Cronin Harvard Business School Press, December 2000 240 pages; $29.95 ISBN: 0-87584-937-7 To order: call (800) 988-0886 or visit www.hbsp.harvard.edu; available December 2000 

Mary Cronin launches her new book, Unchained Value: The New Logic of Digital Business, with an ambitious proposition. She seeks to pick up where most e-business books leave off and "push beyond the limits of short-term e-commerce implementation to help managers develop a strategy that will move their companies into the next stage of digital enterprise."

True to her word, Cronin succeeds in providing a tightly interconnected and well-thought-out framework for how businesses can succeed in the new economy.

The book, however, begins in a familiar place for any reader of e-commerce books: Like many e-business book authors, Cronin starts by tossing aside the old value chain model developed by Michael Porter. For Cronin, the Internet has created a new economy where value no longer lies with the product or the process but with the information about the product or process. Furthermore, this information is no longer "chained" to the product or process but can flow separately from it. This new economy requires a new model that she calls the "digital value system."

This digital value system is rooted in five principles: information, trust, real-time relationships, customized services, and e-marketplaces. Although none of these five principles is revolutionary in theory, Cronin's later chapters do step beyond the usual business book generalities to provide specific details.

For instance, Cronin does not just argue that the speed of the Internet economy requires open and complete sharing of information. She also presents three successive models for information sharing, moving from partners exchanging transaction information to having access to internal operational databases to pooling together information. She envisions the final stage of information pooling as all companies in a value system contributing to and sharing access to a common database.

If the book has a flaw, it is that Cronin's vision sometimes borders on the utopian. In general, however, the book is well organized and effectively written. She packs its pages with numerous real-life examples from both traditional and dot-com companies. These examples show that Cronin has her finger on the pulse of the digital economy. Her model does seem to provide an accurate picture of what some innovative companies are hurtling toward. Whether her eloquent vision will describe reality for all companies in the new economy remains to be seen.