cover image Business Wisdom of the Electronic Elite: 34 Winning Management Strategies from C EOS at Microsoft,: Compaq, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, and Other Top Compan

Business Wisdom of the Electronic Elite: 34 Winning Management Strategies from C EOS at Microsoft,: Compaq, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, and Other Top Compan

Geoffrey James. Crown Business, $25 (254pp) ISBN 978-0-8129-6379-3

Members of the electronic elite--young entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft--have seized on the advent of microprocessors to develop affordable personal computers that have left old-guard mainframe and minicomputer vendors agape. They arrived as upstarts; Gates was a college dropout; Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus, a meditation teacher. They brought with them a new corporate culture, overturning traditional mindsets. The workplace, once a battlefield, becomes an ecosystem made up of symbiotic relationships. Workers on the loading dock are peers and on a first-name basis with the guys in the boardroom. They all dress informally, and at companies like Microsoft, employee motivation is fueled not by fear but by shared vision and stock options. Readers looking for hard criticism of Silicon Valley company policies will find it in short supply here. But James (The Tao of Programming) mounts a persuasive case that the elite companies' greatest legacy may be their new business culture and he admonishes workers on all levels to ""be part of that transformation!"" This succinct overview contains interviews with CEOs and end-of-chapter exercises. Illustrations. (June)