The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing.

• Position: Book review

By Lisa Gansky. Portfolio, 253 pages. $25.95.

The Mesh isn't a book for traditional large businesses, those with far-flung units producing goods through an extensive supply chain and selling those goods in furious competition in well-defined markets.

Even if that's your company, there still may be nuggets to be gleaned from Lisa Gansky's book. Unquestionably, it celebrates small, entrepreneurial, nimble and new--many of the companies she writes about are still practically embryonic.

Kickstarter, Roomorama, Prosper are among the author's heroes. Craigslist, the goods and services listing site, and Groupon, which issues coupons daily to as many as five million subscribers, may be the best known of "mesh" companies.

What Gansky is championing is very hot: the use of social media, wireless networks and data coming from a stream of places and sources to provide goods and services at the exact moment a consumer wants them, without actually having to own extensive inventory.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Gansky, a veteran entrepreneur who founded several Internet companies, is passionate (even evangelical) about the change these young companies are bringing.

Mesh businesses, she writes, focus on goods and services that can be shared within a community or value chain. Such sharing makes local delivery or services valuable and relevant, and social networks can spread offers, news and recommendations to build subscribers and users.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

These businesses are "knotted to each other, and to the world, in myriad ways," she writes; those can include formal agreements or links through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Much has been written about the interconnectedness of the world--a phenomenon driven home by the almost simultaneous uprisings this past winter across North...