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The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business
At the height of the information-overload era, in the midst of all the voice mail, e-mail, faxes, and countless other messages we receive each day, two authors have developed an insightful book about our information age worthy of managers' attention. In their book, appropriately entitled The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, Thomas Davenport and John Beck focus on the what, why, and consequences of individual and organizational attention, given the increasing amounts of information we receive today.
Davenport and Beck lead us through an interesting and convincing argument that attention is in increasingly short supply, yet is critically important to effectively managing people and the business strategy of the firm. The authors suggest that attention, like money, should be viewed as a currency: "Those who don't have it want it. Even those who have it want more. You can trade it, you can purchase it.... People work to preserve and extend what they already have ... and attention can be converted into other currencies."
This frame of reference is valuable to executives as a way of viewing their organizations as continually competing for the attention of customers, investors, and employees. In short, organizations must grab attention, then guard that attention from new distractions in order to be most effective.
Davenport and Beck present attention management as a new lens through which we can better understand what goes on in organizations, and for making organizations more effective. They suggest that organizations need to learn how to capture, manage, and hold the attention of consumers, stockholders, and employees. They argue that managing attention is "the single most important determinant of business success" for organizations and our personal lives.
The center of the authors' discussion is that attention is defined as focused mental engagement that screens out some information and narrows what is left, constraining mental processing. Thus what individuals pay attention to affects the decisions they make in their lives and in organizations. The result is that...