With digital transformation in trending on business and social media, certainly books written about it are aplenty. And Bharat Anand’s The Content Trap: A Strategist’s Guide to Digital Change is one to pay attention to.

Written in four parts, the first three discusses user, product and functional connections whilst the last is simply entitled “Everyone’s a Media Company”. The author initiated the discussion in his book with the study on The Yellowstone Fires in 1988-  arguing that the three errors that caused the fire, are prevalent in nearly every digital domain, were overlooked and caused us to see things discretely, in isolation, rather than as connected parts of a whole, and to miss what is actually important- “connections”.

The author deliberates on three types of connections central to any information- based enterprise; connections between users, connections between products and connections across an organization’s activities. Through cogent and diverse case studies from multiple businesses, all these infrastructures combined is known as the Connections Triad. This Connections Triad can lead companies out from the Content Trap mindset.

The first part of the triad, which is also the focus of Part I of the book, is devoted to “networking” towards the sale of information goods. How Tencent, a Chinese internet giant grew to become one of the world’s most valuable internet firm and how a Scandinavian digital trail- blazer, Schibsted, became the most successful newspaper company in Europe are the focus of Part I, explaining how these organizations succeeded in their businesses not by trying to predict triggers, but by predicting how and when those fires will spread.

Part II focuses on the concept of product complements. The iPods and iTunes are a major complement to one other and this part explains how Apple had transitioned from one that erected propriety barriers everywhere to one that knew when to let them fall. In other words, Apple’s “insanely great” products are no guarantee of corporate success, but the success of one is the result of having great complements, and these two i.e. the iPod and iTunes, are complements if a user’s value from consuming both is greater than the sum of their value from consuming each alone.

The final quadrant of the Connections Triad discusses on functional connections. One point to note, the author encourages businesses to go back to the basis of strategy- know your customers, know what they want and align your business to deliver it your way. That is the winning strategy behind firms like Walmart and Amazon, which stood the test of time, for nearly none of the competitor can match.

Bharat identifies the conditions under which digital fires spread and become like The Yellowstone Fires in 1988.  And how businesses shouldn’t fight every change that comes about but adapt it into their own strategy. As the author concludes in his book: “Create to connect. Expand to preserve. Dare to not mimic. But yet so often we fall into the trap of doing exactly the opposite”. A must read for all who wants to connect digitally.