The Attention Economy:
Understanding the New Currency of
Business by John C. Beck
The Attention Asset: Giving, Getting, Growing, And Keeping, It
If you like to keep on top of whats going on in the world but find it difficult
to get through more than a section or two of the Sunday New York Times,
take heart. Were you to actually plow through the whole thing, even just
once, youd be taking in more factual information than was gathered in all
the written material available to a reader in the 15th century. And thats just
a Sunday paper; what about all the e-mail, voice mail, meetings, Web
pages (2 billion or so of them), and publications (more than 60,000 new
books and 18,000 magazines published annually in the U.S. alone) vying
for your attention? According to Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck,
we live in an age of information overload, where attention has become the
most valuable business currency. Welcome to The Attention Economy.
If yesterday was the age of information, today is the age of trying to attract
or employ peoples attention. Indeed, leaders and managers in the
business world face this two-fold problem daily, constantly seeking the
attention of their customers and employees while managing their own
limited supply. Declaring that understanding and managing attention is
now the single most important determinant of business success, the
authors examine what attention is, how it can be measured, how its being
technologically constructed and protected, and where and how attention is
being most effectively exploited. Predictably, nowhere are these
economics more important than in the realm of e-commerce. In the
chapter entitled Eyeballs and Cyber Malls, the authors discuss the
strategies needed to gain and maintain attention stickiness. The book
contains numerous suggestions on how leaders can manage their own
attention and that of their employees more effectively (and how to avoid
and treat info-stress), but always with an eye on the ultimate goal:
affecting the type and amount of attention your customers give you.
Already, more money is often spent on attracting attention to a product
than spent on the product itself (were reminded of The Blair Witch
Project, which cost a mere $350,000 to make and $11 million to market).
And as our information environment gets increasingly saturated, holding a
persons attention becomes an ever more difficult proposition; as the
authors suggest, actually paying for someone to rec eive your information
is a realistic prospect in the not-too-distant future. Indeed, the books final
chapter is devoted to what the authors predict will affect attention in the
future, and how attention can and will be acquired, monitored, and
distributed. The Attention Economy is peppered with anecdotal pull-outs
and overheard comments; though intriguing in as random factoids and
zippy, little quotes, this sideline information doesnt always tie in with the
authors points and often seems distracting. The book is well written,
though, and the authors, both of whom work at the Accenture Institute for
Strategic Change, take an informed and well-balanced look at what is
perhaps our societys most priceless, ephemeral commodity. --S. Ketchum
Features:
* ISBN13: 9781578518715
* Condition: NEW
* Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Personal Review: The Attention Economy: Understanding the
New Currency of Business by John C. Beck
This is a fine book! It is clear and creative writing on a novel concept and
promising area - The Attention Economy.
On page 20 the book defines attention as a "focused mental engagement
on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we
attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act" (ori ginal
italics). From this definition it follows that The Attention Economy is a
system for managing the attention asset. And why manage attention?
Because attention is an economic (scarce) resource. Like Joan Robinson
is believed to have put it, "Scarce resources command a positive price." In
this case the price of attention is attention, or as the authors suggest: to
get attention one has to give attention. In other words, scarcity compels
(rational) choices, and on the margin of decisions choices have op portunity
costs as well as benefits. To say that attention is a "focused mental
engagement" is to say that producing attention requires lowering the
opportunity cost of producing attention by specializing on the basis of a
comparative advantage. Standard economics.
The book argues that the study of attention is important because business
success depends on attention and attention management, just as it does
other resources. While the options theory of asset pricing seems to apply
to the attention asset as well, a key difference is that the attention asset is
a perishable intangible. Information designed to get attention often
perishes into gluts that may lead to "organizational attention deficit
disorder" and on to bankruptcy, suggesting a need for attention
management.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are nuggets of gold both analytically and in terms of
descriptive content. Chapter 3 deals with the measurement of attention -
pay attention to pages 40-47. Chapter 4, on "the psychobiology of
attention", outlines gener al hierarchical schemes for understanding human
needs relevant to giving, getting, growing, and keeping the attention
resource. Chapter 5 is particularly about how a business can get people
(its employees, customers, and competitors) to pay attention to its
attention. Among many examples: It can use attention technologies such
as customizing solutions; it can avoid shoving its attention onto others; and
it can use its people to keep the attention it already gets.
The sixth chapter of the book gives examples of industries where one
would find the attention resource in practical uses. These include:
advertising, movies, TV, and publishing. A defining characteristic of
attention in these industries is "stickiness", i.e., paying and keeping
attention (see p. 115ff).
The next five chapters stress e-commerce, leadership, strategies, changes
of organizational structure, and information and knowledge management,
all in the attention economy. The last chapter looks to the future, especially
to the challenges and pr ospects the attention economy presents.
This is a good book, and the first five chapters are especially good. Some
of the last chapters sound more like the revolutions we heard so much
about during the dotcom era. The revolutionaries then told us to compl etely
forget the "old economy", and singularly embrace the "new economy".
Such predictions turned out to be hoity-toity, mainly because revolutions
rarely succeed; they are generally too destructive even for their own good.
Many revolutions have failed because, whereas people dislike the effects
of change, they hate the disruptions of revolutions. Having said all that, I
would still recommend The Attention Economy as fine work and good
reading.
Amavilah, Author
Modeling Determinants of Income in Embedded Economies
ISBN: 1600210465
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