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THE NAKED CORPORATION
How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business
By Don Tapscott and David Ticoll

"A rare thing these days-a business book with a profound and important new idea. The Naked Corporation explains how a new force is changing the corporation and competitiveness. There are relevant, sometimes jarring insights in every chapter. And what a great read."
-Indra Nooyi, President & CFO of PepsiCo, Inc.

"The Naked Corporation argues, beautifully and persuasively, that there is no contradiction between good business and the values of honesty and openness.
This book belongs in the briefcase of every right-thinking manager in the country."
-Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point

If the bursting of the Internet bubble and the scandals of 2002 have told us anything, it is that the days of opacity in business are over. Thanks to the Internet, whistleblowers, aggressive news media, customers, trading partners, shareholders, and community activists are gaining unprecedented access to information regarding corporate behavior, operations, and performance-from financial data, employee grievances, and internal memos, to environmental disasters, product weaknesses, international protests, scandals and policies. Corporations are essentially becoming naked and "if you're going to be naked," say Don Tapscott and David Ticoll, "you'd better be buff."

In THE NAKED CORPORATION: How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business (Free Press; October 7, 2003; $28) Don Tapscott, best-selling author and one of the most sought after speakers in the business world, and David Ticoll, researcher, columnist and consultant, describe the powerful force of transparency that has been quietly gaining momentum through the last decade and is now triggering profound changes across the corporate world. The authors argue that firms that embrace this force and harness its power will thrive, while those who ignore or resist it will suffer.
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THE NAKED CORPORATION explains how and why transparency has moved to center stage. Tapscott and Ticoll introduce new concepts such as forced transparency, active transparency, apparent transparency, transparency fatigue, values dissonance, and the transparency divide. Readers will learn how opaque firms that lacked integrity have been devastated and, in some cases, reborn. They describe how enterprises thrive and succeed through candor and ethical core values. Among the authors' many conclusions are:
" Transparency and corporate values enhance market value: there is a competitive business case for strategies that focus on stakeholders and sustainability.
" Companies, whether they know it or not, have a network of stakeholders called "stakeholder webs" which scrutinize their every move and can devastate or destroy a business.
" Employees of an open enterprise have greater trust in one another and their employers-resulting in lower costs, improved quality, better innovation, and loyalty.
" Transparency is critical to business partnerships-lowering transaction costs between firms and enabling collaborative commerce.
" Corporations that align their values with those of the communities they touch, and behave accordingly, develop sustainably competitive business models.

Drawing on dozens of real world examples-from Accenture to Yahoo!-and pointing to an explosion of revealing websites such as Internalmemos.com, Tapscott and Ticoll describe how transparency has caused a power shift toward customers, employees, communities, business partners, and even shareholders; how, and where, information is exploding; and how corporations across many industries have seized on transparency not as a challenge but as an opportunity. THE NAKED CORPORATION will help managers who are striving to build effective firms in the new business environment as well as employees, customers, partners, neighbors, and shareholders who want to understand the changing role of the firm in society.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Don Tapscott and David Ticoll co-founded the business research and consulting firm Digital 4Sight in 1994. Tapscott is one of the best selling business authors of the last decade and together they co-authored the best sell "Digital Capital.: hey have written for publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes and have appeared on national broadcast media around the world. Both live in Toronto, Canada.

ABOUT THE BOOK
THE NAKED CORPORATION: How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business
By Don Tapscott and David Ticoll
Published by Free Press:
Publication date: October 7, 2003
Price: $28.00; ISBN: 0-7432-4650-0
Subsidiary rights information: Canadian rights sold to Viking Penguin Canada

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