Product Description

This management handbook teaches readers how to outperform, outsmart and outrun your competition by successfully adapting to the changing business climate. The authors use the cartoon characters of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner as a metaphor for business managers seeking marketplace victories.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #798285 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this amusing but hopelessly dated book, the authors use the age-old cartoon battle between the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote as the metaphor for what will and will not work in business in the next millennium. The message of Bell, a management consultant, and Harari, a consultant and professor at the University of San Francisco, is simple, clear and presented through interviews with successful businesspeople and through humorous descriptions of scenes from the Warner Bros. cartoon. The bottom line: management and workers must be fast-moving, innovative, flexible and constantly learning; otherwise, like Wile E. Coyote, they are doomed to eat the dust of more nimble competitors like the Road Runner. There is nothing wrong with either the authors' presentation or their message. The problem is that the advice will strike even the most casual reader of management ideas as old hat. After all, the concepts of team work, continuous learning and taking control of your work life have been around for most of the 1990s. Drawing on corporate synergies--the parent company of Warner Books owns the rights to both the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner characters--makes the message more fun to hear again, but the authors don't break any new ground. Illus. $100,000 ad/promo; radio satellite tour.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Sensible and decent, albeit hyperventilated and not exactly original, behavioral advice for business managers in the new millennium, served up by consultants Bell and Harari. Wile E. Coyote is the foil and Road Runner the paragon in this management handbook. One is conniving, secretive, grim, myopic, mired in convention (Wile E. wears gray flannel); the other is fluid, improvisational, artful, and visionary, a trickster in Technicolor threads. Gathered under their aegis is a host of guidelines the authors consider life forces for conducting business. Get beyond the paradigm, they counsel, for there is no paradigm any longer. The age of computers and the Internet requires freethinking and risk-taking. The workplace will rarely have four walls and a nice view at the top; hierarchy gives way to egalitarianism and flexibility; power is about influence, not fear; a no-time mindsetthe kind that drives freelancersrules. The player in the newly dominant digital marketplace will be as nimble as that medium's circulation of information and capital, and the key words are speed, speed, speed, constrained only by honor and principle. Cross-fertilization will erode the false boundaries that obscure the big picture, and only the most unpredictable will be able to grab the attention of the crowd glued to their monitors. A jittery format of boxes, halftones, and a clipped text structures the book, yet there are also numerous examples that help ground Bell and Harari's potentially vacuous enjoinders to be ingenious, imaginative, and intuitive. Beneath their caffeine high, they're strong advocates of the currently trendy business humanism, which argues that anti-authoritarian, collegial work equals life, because that's where you want to be. Standard business leadership exhortations, already well-trafficked by the likes of Tom Peters and, for that matter, good old Road Runner himself. (B&w cartoons throughout) ($100,000 ad/promo) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
'Very powerful and entertaining.describes how companies need to rethink their structure, culture and information ownership.' - Michael S. Dell, founder of Dell Corporation

Customer Reviews

Thought-Provoking Visit to the Funny and Familiar
The Road Runner cartoons are classic. Most of us grew up laughing out loud as Wile E. Coyote encountered one challenge after another in his attempts to capture the Road Runner. The scenarios were simple. The coyote devised ways to capture lunch, never winning the competition. His tools, all products of Acme Company, backfired on him. He caused himself a great deal of difficulty, while the Road Runner went on with his life, practically oblivious to the coyote's campaign.

At the start of their book, Bell and Harari note that coyotes can run 30 miles per hour and road runners can't really fly and can only run 16 miles per hour. Wile E. Coyote has an endless arsenal of gadgets to trap the road runner, all provided by his single supplier, Acme. He's a master planner, yet continually fails . . . of his own volition. What's the problem here? Why is the Road Runner so successful? Because he's operating under different rules. The coyote may be seen as chained to conventional wisdom, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. A bureaucrat. The Road Runner is more like the agile entrepreneur, competing with a whole different paradigm.

The authors take this familiar cartoon and turn it into an instructive business case. Their objective is to help us become road runners among coyotes. In page after page, they pull lessons from the cartoons that we probably all missed as kids, comparing the characters and their motivations and their results. "Wile E. Coyote is preoccupied, earnest, conniving, and grim. The Road Runner is joyful, light, and free. Wile E. does nothing but go from pursuing one meal to the next, with perpetual frustration; the bird is gleefully living life to the fullest. The results are the same: Wile E. somehow manages to dig himself into the hole of failure, while the Road Runner strides on, undeterred and unaffected by life's bumps and obstacles."

Can you imagine the authors conducting their research for this book?

As we move through the book, we learn more about the comparative principles and how to succeed in the Age of the Road Runner. Familiar names populate the pages as we are provided with examples of companies and people. A "Tail Feathers" feature spotlights ordinary people doing extraordinary things-as Road Runners. The stories are inspirational, as well as educational. "Bird Seed" sections furnish the reader with solid advice that fits the concept, but it not linked to the two main characters.

Descriptive summaries of Road Runner cartoon incidents are liberally sprinkled throughout the book, keeping the reader laughing and smiling and wondering in amazement how the coyote could keep going in this futile struggle. And therein lies the tale of this book. To survive in a Road Runner Age, you cannot continue to operate like a coyote. The book is filled with current wisdom, but just as important, it's a fun book to read. People learn more when they're laughing, so expect to gain a lot from Beep! Beep!

A Good Read!
Wile E. Coyote hovers in a hot air balloon over the road, waiting to drop an anvil on the unsuspecting Road Runner. Wile E. puts a grenade in the seat of a toy airplane and ... you know what happens. He becomes the victim of his own diabolical plans. The Road Runner wins every time. Chip R. Bell and Oren Harari’s book turns a cartoon classic into a wonderful metaphor for today’s fast-paced work environment. Organizations are changing their cunning competitive ways. Instead of behaving like Wile E. Coyote, they are becoming like the quick, agile, joyful Road Runner. In an amusing style, the authors illustrate their points with cartoons of the famous duo and plenty of plot scenarios and interesting tidbits of trivia. The “Birdseed” sections scatter tips to help you and your company make the transition to the wide-open desert of opportunity ahead. Those who grew up with Road Runner will relate to this book immediately. We ...recommend this book to Road Runner’s business fans or to anyone who wants to have fun while learning how to steer a company through the speedy new marketplace.

A fast, worthwhile read --
In Beep! Beep!, Bell and Harari provide the reader with an entertaining look at business practice and culture today. In highlighting the behavior and actions of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, the authors provide a compare and contrast view of all facets of business and a unique perspective on how to be more competitive. The message is simple and clear, capturing the spirit of what it takes to compete in the fast-paced, global marketplace. (The book's preface is: "Road Runners don't have prefaces...they just begin!") Although the boxes which describe actual scenes from the Road Runner cartoons get a bit redundant as the book moves along, the "Birdseed" and "Tail Feathers" sections that summarize most of the chapters were appropriate and welcome. All-in-all, Beep! Beep! is a worthwhile read. It can easily be consumed in an average plane ride (as I did).