Harvard Business Review - Monopolies and Tech Giants

1. Start creating the future version of your company today.
2. Strategy, ethics, and network competition in the age of digital superpowers.
3. by Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani
4. What industry concentration means for businesses and consumers.
5. by David Wessel
6. Updating the definition of monopoly for our digital age.
7. by Maurice E. Stucke
8. It doesnt need to be a partisan issue.
9. by William A. Galston and Clara Hendrickson
10. Facebook is a natural monopoly, so regulate it accordingly.
11. by Dipayan Ghosh
12. Todays rules havent caught up to innovation.
13. by Larry Downes
14. Retailers must learn to compete on agile innovation and expense management.
15. by Darrell K. Rigby
16. Lessons from Xiaomi.
17. by Howard Yu
18. Four approaches when build a moat no longer applies.
19. Excerpts by Julian Birkinshaw, Walter Frick, Denise Lee Yohn, and Michael G. Jacobides
20. Industrial incumbents and digital natives both have a chance.
21. by Vijay Govindarajan
22. They know how to build customer loyalty.
23. by Amit Sharma

This book isnt another celebration of Apples genius or Amazons disciplined multidecade vision. Nor is it a breathless screed against Googles anticompetitive practices or Facebooks repeated policy disasters. Youve probably read those books already, and they havent given you the answers you and your business need.

The tech giantslove them, hate them, or just fear themare here to stay and continuing to grow in power and influence. Theyre using their sprawling networks and vast advantages in data collection and AI to expand into industries ranging from groceries to personal finance to education. Theyre acquiring their competitors left and right, and pushing many more into bankruptcy. If you want your business to exist in a few years, let alone to be thriving and growing, you need to be thinking now about how your company will fit in once the new tech monopolies have finished rewriting all the rules.

You know them by many names: the frightful five, FAANGs, BATs, the big nine, the tech titans. Theres no comprehensive list, but its safe to say that Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Facebook, and Tencent are high among them. Microsoft seemed to be out of the club for a while, but its back (perhaps it was never really gone). Uber and Lyft were ascending into the pantheon until the grease-and-gridlock challenges of the transportation industry, a disappointing IPO, and good old-fashioned mismanagement lopped a few inches off their unicorn horns.

Their leaders have been equally lionized and demonized in the business press and even on film. Steve Jobs is seen as both the patron saint of ecosystems and an autocratic leader no Harvard Business Review reader from this decade would want to emulate. Mark Zuckerbergs reputation has evolved from an idealistic, brilliant wunderkind into a petulant billionaire ostrich, willing to turn a blind eye to the real-world problems to retain Facebooks share of advertising dollars. Their philanthropic ventures and side projects have at times been tinged with sci-fi fantasies (for example, Jeff Bezoss plans for billionsor is it trillions?of moon colonists). Yet some, like the Gates Foundations global health efforts, may one day be worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.

As their customers, both at work and at home, we can see the contradictions. We love their products. We hate what they do to our attention spans and to small businesses. We try, desperately, to make our companies more like them, even as the tech-bro culture and antiworker policies make us queasy. We break up with them. We come crawling back. We renounce and denounce them on their own platforms, delete our accounts, and are left with the nagging feeling that we can never really quit them. Even a small task like thistyping a dashuses Apple hardware using Microsoft software on an Amazon Web Services cloud. Are you ever