Will Page
Review via The Financial Times
Tarzan Economics borrows its title from technologist Jim Griffin’s 2009 speech reflecting on the music industry’s response to the file-sharer Napster. Griffin described how successful companies need always to swing forwards, Tarzan-like, by reaching “for the next vine”. Page has done time in the jungle himself, as a civil servant turned chief economist at PRS, the UK music rights collecting society, and Spotify.
He applies his “rockonomist” eye well beyond the music business, which he argues just happened to be the first industry to suffer significant digital disruption, and therefore the first to “grab a new vine” of streaming services and recover. “The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it is selling,” management thinker Peter Drucker said. “That’s why you need this book,” Page writes. “It makes you look afresh at what you think you know.”