Burning the Ships: Transforming Your Company's Culture Through Intellectual Property Strategy

Marshall Phelps, David Kline

Wiley, Mar 30, 2009 - Business & Economics - 208 pages

Now in paperback, the inside story of "the greatesttransformation of Microsoft since it became a multinationalcompany"

Marshall Phelps's remarkable eyewitness story offers lessons forany executive struggling with today's innovation and intellectualproperty challenges. Burning the Ships offers Phelps'sdramatic behind-the-scenes account of how he overcame internalresistance and got Microsoft to open up channels of collaborationwith other firms.

• Discover the never-before-told details of Microsoft's secrettwo-year negotiations with Red Hat and Novell that led to theworld's first intellectual property peace treaty and technicalcollaboration with the open source community
• Witness the sometimes-nervous support Bill Gates and CEO SteveBallmer gave to Phelps in turning their company around 180 degreesfrom market bully to collaborative industry partner
• Offers an extraordinary behind-the-scenes view of thehigh-level deliberations of the company's senior-most executives,the internal debates and conflicts among executives andrank-and-file employees alike over the company's new collaborativedirection

There are lessons in this book for executives in everyindustry-most especially on the role that intellectual property canplay in liberating previously untapped value in a company andopening up powerful new business opportunities in today's era of"open innovation." Here is a powerful inside account of the dawn ofa new era at what is arguably the most powerful technology companyon earth.

About the author

Marshall Phelps is Microsoft's corporate Vice Presidentfor Intellectual Property Policy and Strategy and is responsiblefor setting the global intellectual property strategies andpolicies for the company. He also works with governments, othercompanies in the technology industry, and outside institutions tobroaden awareness of intellectual property issues. Phelps joinedMicrosoft in June 2003 after a twenty-eight-year career at IBMCorp., where he served as vice president for intellectual propertyand licensing and built its world-leading $2-billion-a-yearlicensing program. Phelps is an executive in residence at DukeUniversity's Fuqua School of Business and was elected to theinitial class of the Intellectual Property Hall of Fame in 2006. Hemay be reached at [e-mail].

David Kline is a journalist, author, and intellectualproperty consultant who has earned acclaim for his unique abilityto demystify complex IP issues and explain them in a clear andrelevant manner to a broad business audience. His bestselling 2000book, Rembrandts in the Attic from Harvard Business School Press,is considered a seminal work in the field of intellectual propertystrategy within corporate America. As a journalist, Kline hascovered some of the world's most critical wars, famines, and othercrises for the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor,NBC and CBS News, the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Wired, and othermajor media. He may be reached at [e-mail].

Bibliographic information

• Title: Burning the Ships: Transforming Your Company's Culture Through Intellectual Property Strategy
• Authors: Marshall Phelps, David Kline
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Wiley, 2009
• ISBN: 0470432152, 9780470432150
• Length: 208 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / Decision-Making & Problem Solving; Business & Economics / Management