THE ATTENTION ECONOMY
Trillions of documents
circulate in U.S. offices annually. Internet traffic doubles every hundred days.
Approximately two hundred messages flood managers' desktops daily. Welcome to the
attention economy, in which the new scarcest resource isn't ideas or even talent, but
attention itself.
This groundbreaking book
argues that today's businesses are headed for disaster-unless they can overcome the
dangerously high attention deficits that threaten to cripple today's workplace. Accenture
consultants and academics Thomas Davenport and John Beck explain that the problems for
businesspeople lie on both sides of the attention equation: on getting and holding the
attention of information-flooded employees, consumers, and stockholders, and on parceling
out their own attention in the face of overwhelming options. The resolution: learn to
manage this critical yet finite resource, or fail.
Drawing from compelling
research, the authors outline four perspectives on attention management that are critical
to understanding its impact on business: (1) measuring and allocating attention, (2)
understanding and leveraging its psychological dimensions, (3) mastering new streamlining
technologies, and (4) adapting lessons from traditional attention industries like
advertising. Using these perspectives, the authors shine new light on critical business
areas including e-commerce, organizational leadership, information and knowledge
management, and strategy. Attention management can be applied to help companies improve
talent motivation and retention, avoid employee burnout, win customer loyalty on the Web,
more effectively sell products and services, impress investors and analysts, and more.
The authors also introduce a
revolutionary measurement tool, the AttentionScape, that can help diagnose attention
distribution problems, determine how the company is directing employees' attention, and
analyze the attention the company is getting from customers.
The first book to explore the
burgeoning attention economy and outline a plan for how organizations must operate within
it, this landmark work details how to earn and spend the new currency of business.
FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE
TOPICS IN THIS BOOK, GO TO THE WEB SITE WWW.ATTENTIONBOOK.COM
THOMAS H. DAVENPORT is the
Director of the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change and a Distinguished Scholar in
Residence at Babson College. He is the author of Mission Critical: Realizing the Promise
of Enterprise Systems and Process Innovation: Reengineering Work through Information
Technology, and the coauthor of Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They
Know. JOHN C. BECK is a Senior Research Fellow at the Accenture Institute for Strategic
Change and a Visiting Professor at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA.
255 pages