The call to "ride the revolution" by Robert Heller and Paul Spenley is not the new battle-cry of Britain's beleaguered fox-hunting fraternity but a call to take advantage of the e-commerce revolution - or die.

Changes in management have become inseparable from those in technology, they argue, and after 2000 companies will not survive unless they take part in a threefold revolution in management itself, information technology and global markets.

For their new motto, managers must look to Bill Clinton's: "It's the economy, stupid" and substitute "people" for "economy".

Dinosaurs who can't or won't change face catastrophe. For example, the sales of Encyclopaedia Britannica halved in half a dozen years after CD-Roms hit the market at one-thirtieth of the price.

"On one prediction, 80 per cent of companies in the Fortune 500 will either dwindle or disappear over the next few years," they say. In this brave new world where "over-valued" tech stocks push aside rock-solid but boring industrials, the Worldwide Web is the new El Dorado.

As Amazon.com found out, all you need to succeed is a website, investment (no shortage) and brains. The company riding the revolution is customer-driven.

In the financial services sector Davids are taking on Goliaths, with telephone banking pioneer First Direct and online broker Charles Schwab blazing a trail.

Riding The Revolution works well enough as a wake-up call for the many corporate stick-in-the-muds but can be simplistic in its analysis. The blurry big picture of the real world of business is sometimes forced to fit the shiny new e-commerce message.

And, guess what? The biggest obstacles are psychological. What a relief. We have nothing to fear but fear itself.