Sidebar: Cheat Sheet

If you're competing on Internet time, you may not have time to read this book. Here's some brain food for your next beer bust.

Best Example of Internet Time: It took Netscape ("one of the fastest growing startups ever") slightly more than three years to exceed annual sales of $500 million. It took Microsoft almost 14 years to reach that plateau.

The New FAQs of Life: Between 1993 and 1998, Web commerce grew from next to nothing to become a $22 billion business.

Most Memorable One-Liner: "By the middle of the next decade, today's Internet will feel like an old black and white television without a remote."

Best New Buzzword: Judo strategy: rapid movement into new markets; extreme flexibility; and leveraging the weight of your competitors against them.

Best Barksdale-ism: "If Microsoft is a shark, we strive to be a bear and make sure the battle takes place not in the ocean but in the jungle."

Most Telling Job Description: "Defender of the Faith" -- found on the business card of Michael Toy, a Netscape engineering manager.

Crystal Ball: Netscape may lose the browser war. But that outcome won't necessarily signal the company's demise.

Sidebar: FC Recommends

Big Picture: "The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress" by Virginia Postrel (Free Press, 1998).

"We hate not knowing the future," writes Postrel, the talented and provocative editor of Reason magazine. That aversion makes for some strange bedfellows: reactionaries who prefer to shut down what they can't control, and technocrats who want to plan the future. There's a better way: a spirit of experimentation. That spirit is everywhere -- from Cambodian-owned doughnut shops in California to the culture at Southwest Airlines.

Best Practice: "Net Future: The 7 Cyber Trends That Will Drive Your Business, Create New Wealth, and Define Your Future" by Chuck Martin (McGraw-Hill, 1998).

Martin, the founder of Interactive Age magazine, breaks down all of the major trends now driving the "Netting" of the value chain. The book is worth picking up for Chapter 9 alone, which maps the Net in a book-of-lists style.

Sleeper: "doFuture" produced by the KesselsKramer Agency (I-D Books, 1998).

This pamphlet-size book from the "brains" at an ad agency in Amsterdam is gimmicky (it starts on page 1998), self-consciously hip (it's written in prose-poem style), and self-referential. It is also a mind-blowing compilation of street-level evidence about how brands behave. Think Tom Peters meets Ken Kesey.

Keeper: "Open Boundaries: Creating Business Innovation Through Complexity" by Howard J. Sherman and Ron Schultz (Perseus Books, 1998).

Sherman, a managing director at the Santa Fe Center for Emergent Strategies, and Schultz, a consultant, offer a readable primer on complexity and adaptive systems. "Why is complexity theory important to business?" they ask. Their answer amounts to a powerful and pragmatic set of exercises for exploring how we think, how we create the world around us, and how we can change it.