(@mmilan)

Yesterday, I recieved Alex Osterwalder’s and Yves Pigneur’s new book, “Business Model Generation” in the mail. Over the last year Alex and Yves, along with the help of Alan Smith and over 470 collaborators around the world, have taken this book from concept to reality, and the results are inspiring.

First off, I have to rave about the appearance of the book. It’s easily one of the best looking business books on the market. Having recently purchased a number of new business and/or design books, including Tim Brown’s “Change by Design”, it’s easy to say that from a visual perspective, this is a cut above the rest in terms of presentation.  It really stands out, and screams “use me”!

Content wise, the book is also very strong.  I’ve been following Alex’s ideas and applying them with clients for a couple of years and so far the book has exceeded my expectations.  The depth of exploration is fantastic, and should appeal to experienced practitioners as well as those who are new to the business model design field.

Alex and Yves have broken the book up into a number of sections that lead the reader though an understanding of the model, theory, techniques and methods.

Each section is well focused and acts like a mini-book within the book.  This makes it easy for someone to pick up the book and start to apply the ideas and concepts quickly.  It also means that unlike 90% of the business books out there, you won’t read the first 50 pages and then never return.  Care has been taken to chunk out the content into discrete, easily digested pieces. There’s real attention to detail present here, and it shows well beyond the appearance and the focus of the subject matter.

One of the best things about this book is that it focuses on making complex things simple and understandable. It’s able to cover a lot of background material in a way that doesn’t affect the pacing of its primary teaching and communication goals. As an example, they’ve managed to condense most of the core concepts of the Long Tail into a single page that you can absorb in a couple of minutes.  Similarly, the six pages they devote to explaining the application of their framework to Blue Ocean Strategy is clear and concise, allowing the reader to start thinking of BOS in the context of business model generation right away.

They’ve done an excellent job with this book by covering a lot of ground without creating “framework fatigue”.  There’s a bit of a “System of the World” thing going on under the surface here, and it’s nice to see their framework step up to the challenge of unifying a lot of the disparate business strategy theories we’ve seen pop up over the last couple of decades.

This attempt at a form of “business framework” unity that just happens to incorporate design as a consideration is the book’s greatest accomplishment in my opinion.  Whether Alex and Yves intended this outcome or not isn’t as important as the fact that they’ve clearly shown that this level of integration around business “thinking” frameworks is possible.

Like the 4 minute mile, breaking the psychological barrier is what really matters here.  I’m cool if this is the Roger Bannister of framework unification, because we really need to start thinking of business strategy not in a “multi-framework” perspective but a “trans-framework” perspective.  This book is a good start, and I have no doubt that collaborative approach used to develop the content helped in this regard.

Bottom line, this is an important book as much for what it represents as for its content.  I expected the book to be good, but not this good.  It’s a game changer.

If there’s one thing I can complain about, it’s that this book doesn’t stand out on a bookshelf.  This might be a small detail, but when clients come into our office, they always spend a few minutes perusing our library of 300+ books on design, strategy and business.  I doubt that many of them will grab this book off the shelf on their own accord.  Even if they go looking for it specifically on the shelf, it’s not an easy find.  I know that part of the binding choices for the book were dictated by usage factors, specifically the ability to lie flat on a table”, but I think it’s a bit of a missed opportunity.

Bottom line, this is a great book - well designed, easy to understand and chock full of great thinking.  You won’t regret picking it up.