Summary: The Attention Economy

Review and Analysis of Davenport and Beck's Book

BusinessNews Publishing

• Verlag: Must Read Summaries
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9782511021583
• Thema: Negocios y empresa
• Thema: Desarrollo empresarial

The must-read summary of Thomas Davenport and John Beck's book: `The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business`.

This complete summary of the ideas from Thomas Davenport and John Beck's book `The Attention Economy` shows that the scarcest resource for businesses today is not capital, talent or ideas; it is attention. Consumers can only absorb so much information, or choose between so many products. It’s also an issue within the workplace; there are only so many work hours in the day and so many emails one person can reply to. In their book, the authors explain that the successful businesses of the future will realise that time and attention are valuable to their customers, employees and investors. This summary highlights some of the challenges that leaders can expect to face in the coming years and how you can prepare for them.

Added-value of this summary:
• Save time
• Understand key concepts
• Expand your knowledge

To learn more, read `The Attention Economy` and find out why you should focus on allocating attention within your company.

Summary of The Attention Economy (Thomas Davenport and John Beck)

1. The Two Central Attention Challenges

1. Paying attention to the most important things coming in
2. Generating sufficient attention in the things going out

Main Idea

Problems and challenges for businesspeople lie on both sides of the attention equation:

1. In deciding how to allocate your own attention in the face of an overwhelming number of options and choices.
2. In obtaining and then retaining the attention of your employees, customers and stockholders who are themselves awash in a flood of information resources.

Therefore attention management is always going to be difficult to put into practice until people learn how to better manage the critical yet finite resource.

Supporting Ideas

What, exactly, is attention? A simple definition is: “Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular piece of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act”.

In practical terms, attention occurs between awareness and action:

Thus, attention is the bridge between a narrowing phase (where we are aware of many things but choose to pay attention to just a select few items) and the decision phase (where we act on whatever has been decided).

Attention comes in six basic types (or units):

The most addictive and all consuming attention activities (like extreme sports) combine all six types of attention at once.

Increasingly, business attention is becoming an extremely rare resource since there is so much competition. Which, in turn, means attention becomes more valuable as it becomes scarcer. And it also means that understanding and managing attention is becoming the single most important determinant of business success.

From a business perspective, there are two central challenges generated by the need to manage attention better:

Addressing these challenges requires an understanding of these key attention management principles:

• Before you can manage attention, you first need to gain an understanding of just how depleted this resource is. An attentive human mind if the limiting factor for both sales revenues and internal innovation.
• When people run an ongoing attention deficit, at some stage there will be serious consequences – they will suffer “info-stress” and end up doing nothing.
• Since attention is a scarce resource, markets for attention will emerge. And the laws of supply and demand will mean consumers will come to understand what their attention is worth and demand payment (either in money or in experiences) in exchange for their attention.
• Attention management is not time management. Time management focuses on efficiency and avoiding waste. Attention management focuses on generating insights that enhance effectiveness – getting the right things done.
• Attention always precedes motivated action. Thus, it makes sense to structure meetings in terms of the attention required for each topic rather than the time allocated.
• Incentive systems should be changed not to reward people for the amount of time they spend at the job but for the creative ideas put forward and their success in implementation. That will change your organization from being time-based to becoming attention-based.
• Resources should be applied internally to helping everyone in the organization manage their logistical tasks more effectively – so they can devote less attention to bits and pieces and more attention to innovations and creative work.
• In the industrial era, there was the belief that if you had enough time, you could produce anything. Time was considered a proxy for output. In the current economy, both time and output are becoming less important and the usefulness of ideas is of greater importance. In the future, investors and employers will pay solely on the usefulness of an idea and an organization’s ability to implement that idea effectively.
• Attention management always requires priorities to be established. There will always be more attention available than people can possibly absorb. This information competition will intensify in the future. It’s only when people choose to pay attention to one thing at the expense of all other options that attention exists. Management of attention is our most important commercial activity.

So what is the future of the attention economy? Taking the management of attention to their log...