Clicks and Mortar

January 3, 2000
The more things change, the more you must concentrate on the basics of running your business, according to Pottruck, president and co-CEO of the Charles Schwab investment firm, and consultant Pierce, author of Leading Out Loud. In their view, the basics include creating a corporate vision that drives the firm and the company culture forward, having a leader who models that vision and keeps the company on course and implementing management practices designed to realize the vision. It is hard to disagree with these tenets, and there is nothing wrong with reviewing the basics, but the authors don't probe very deeply into the ways that the Internet--the "clicks" in their title--affects their basic principles. They might have achieved it by exploring the insights in the final chapter--which features a "dialogue on the future" with such figures as Steve Ballmer, president of Microsoft; Lew Platt of Hewlett-Packard (who also wrote the foreword); and venture capitalist Ann Winblad in a roundtable discussion--or through a more detailed look at Charles Schwab's integration of the Internet into its existing "retail outlets." Instead, we get a rehash of what most leaders already know, aridly wrought in workmanlike prose.