"The digital revolution is bringing Tamil from paper to the computer and the internet. Swaminathatha Iyer and Thamotherampillai heralded the Tamil renaissance in the 19th century. Today, a Tamil digital renaissance is taking place - and is helping to bring Tamil people together not simply culturally but also in political and economic terms." - Tamil Digital Renaissance

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*A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, Y. S. Rajan - India 2020; a Vision for the New Millennium /Hardcover / Published 1998

* John Arquilla(Editor) - In Athena's Camp : Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age  Paperback / Published 1998

*H. J. Blommestein - The New Financial Landscape: Forces Shaping the Revolution in Banking

*John Hagel, Arthur G. Armstrong - Net Gain : Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities  / Hardcover / Published 1997

*Graham Hamel & C K Prahalad - Competing for the Future

"...(Organisations)  are going to have to unlearn a lot of their past – and also forget it! The future will not be an extrapolation of the past... Like a space rocket on the way to the moon, (an organisation) has to be willing to jettison the parts of its past which no longer contain fuel for the journey and which are becoming, in effect, excess baggage. That is particularly difficult for ... those who actually built the past, and who still have a lot of emotional equity invested in it..." [** alternate link to amazon.co.uk]

* Andrew S. Grove - Only the Paranoid Survive : How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company and Career / Hardcover / Published 1996

*Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger - The Cluetrain Manifesto / Published February 2000 -

"A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed...For every entry in the encyclopedia, there is now a Web site. For any idea you can imagine - and some you can't -  there are thousands of articles and images electronically swirling around the globe. But that's not the real story. That's not the big news. The word that's going around, the word that's finally getting out, is something much larger, far more fundamental. The word that's passing like a spark from keyboard to screen, from heart to mind, is the permission we're giving ourselves and each other: to be human and to speak as humans..."

The Cluetrain Manifesto began as a Web site in 1999 when the authors, who have worked variously at IBM, Sun Microsystems, the Linux Journal, and NPR, posted 95 theses that pronounced what they felt was the new reality of the networked marketplace.

"Like Zen masters, these four irreverent visionaries produce startling insights by first confronting our most cherished but often misguided beliefs about business. Seeing the Internet as forcing profound and deeply humanistic change, this book lights the way into the 21st century for e-businesses large and small." Eric Severson, Executive Consultant IBM Global Services.

* John Naisbitt - Global Paradox Paperback, January 1995

From an Amazon.com review by D.J.Smith and F.Rendon: "(1) The bigger the world's economy, the more powerful its smallest players. As globalization occurs, people seek linkages which cater to smaller, more "tribal" concerns: language, culture and/or niche markets. (2) Individualism will prevail over government-run structure. The person can influence the direction of economic consumption and governance: both tribal and global concerns, not one or the other, can be addressed. (3) Technological driving forces: blending old and new technology allows ubiquitous, anytime access to everyone. This allows community groupings to develop based on desire to share certain knowledge, rather than in a predetermined or overtly mediated fashion. A mixed-use approach to education and technology will give fluidity and greater access to learners, educators and anyone who desires to know something; and do so in a manner appropriate to the moment..."

* Jakob Nielsen - Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity  December 1999 [suggested by Andrew Horton]

From Amazon.com Review: Creating Web sites is easy. Creating sites that truly meet the needs and expectations of a wide range of online users is quite another story. In Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, renowned Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen shares his insightful thoughts on the subject. Packed with annotated examples of actual Web sites, this book sets out many of the design precepts all Web developers should follow.

"...In 1997 the United States and Canada accounted for around 80 percent of total web user population. By 1999, the proportion of web users in the U.S. and Canada had dropped to 55 percent. It is close to guaranteed that the Web will achieve a 50/50 split between North America and overseas in 2000. The only question is whether this will happen early or late in the year. It is likely that the picture will have been reversed by 2005, with about 80 percent of users overseas and only about 20 percent of users in North America. Around 2010, I expect the Web to reach a billion users, distributed with about 200 million in North America, 200 million in Europe, 500 million in Asia, and 100 million in the rest of the world..." 

* David S. Pottruck, Terry Pearce - Clicks and Mortar - Passion Driven Growth in an Internet Driven World, April 2000

David S. Pottruck, president and co-CEO of Charles Schwab, and Terry Pearce, founder of Leadership Communication, are among those who believe the Net will forever change the way business is conducted--if it hasn't done so already. In Clicks and Mortar, they draw on personal experience to suggest corporate officials prepare for this new reality by refocusing their practices, principles, and passions on the real needs of a 21st-century company....

"....Metaphors for leadership are changing, from 'General' to 'Coach', from 'Charismatic Boss' to 'Orchestra Conductor'. Corporate leaders are trying not only to play the musical notes correctly, they are trying to create music that fills the room. In the fields of music and art and at the highest level of team sports, everyone can sense the difference between participation with energy and passion and just participation. To be effective, business leaders must now ask themselves, 'How do I tap into that passion?' 'How can I connect with the part of myself and of the other person that actually cares?' 'How can I inspire … them … and me?'..."[**Alternate link to Amazon.co. bookshop]

*Don Tapscott et al - Creating Value in the Network Economy - Hardback, 1999. [contributed by Andrew Horton]

"Collects 12 recent articles from the Harvard Business Review dealing with how the new internet economy requires different paradigms on value creation. The articles are grouped in three categories. First are those having to do with the changing nature of value. The Net provides a new, function-rich, high-capacity and nearly ubiquitous infrastructure for business…Value propositions and the value chains used to create products and deliver them to market can also become disaggregated, enabling value to be created in radically different ways. The second group of articles moves on, to describe new models of the firm, which appear to be as different from the integrated corporation of the industrial economy as it was from the penultimate, agrarian economy. The third describes how much of what is known about marketing is changing, as new interactive relationships with customers become possible." [**Alternate link to Amazon.co.uk bookshop]

* Alvin Tofler - Third Wave Mass Market Paperback / Published 1991

*Alvin Toffler - Future Shock  Mass Market Paperback / Published 1991

*Alvin Toffler - Powershift : Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century 1991

"Toffler argues that while headlines focus on shifts of power at the global level, equally significant shifts are taking place in our everyday world - supermarkets, hospitals, banks, television, and politics. As old antagonisms fade, Toffler identifies where the next, far more important world division will arise.."

*Peter Senge - The Fifth Discipline : The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization

"...The irony is that to do things faster, you often have to go slower. You have to be more reflective. You have to develop real trust. You have to develop the abilities of people to think together. Why? Because it requires you to go through basic redesigns. You need to build a shared understanding of how the present system works.... People must trust one another through difficult systemic changes..."

* Patrick Young & Thomas Theys - Capital Market Revolution /Hardcover / Published 1999

"...When the printing press was invented it didn’t merely level the playing field to make information more freely available to all levels of society, rather it revolutionised society by providing a new, cheap method of disseminating information to far more people than could be accommodated by the handwritten copying of manuscripts in monasteries. In the information age the internet provides the opportunity to pass on vast quantities of information at little incremental cost to every form of trader, investor and market counterpart. The old hegemony of existing institutional investors, exchanges and brokers is doomed to collapse under the ‘new reality’. Just as the clerics lost power after the printing press, the information revolution undermines the power of established financial institutions...." [**Alternate link to Amazon.co.uk bookshop]