Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best… and Learn from the Worst, Sutton, Robert I.
I’m becoming a fanboy of Bob Sutton, an engineering professor at Stanford who co-founded the d.school there. It started when i read The Knowing-Doing Gap : How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action, which he co-authored with organizational [...]
8 Things We Hate About IT: How to Move Beyond the Frustrations to Form a New Partnership with IT, Cramm, Susan
The tensions between business leaders and their IT counterparts remains an evergreen topic. Susan Cramm, a former CIO herself, weighs in on the topic in a way that’s revealing and productive in two ways. [...]
Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Shirky, Clay
Anyone who can use lolcats to make a relevant and provocative intellectual point is worth paying attention to. Clay Shirky pulls it off in his latest book. Here’s his point:
Let’s nominate the process of making a lolcat as the stupidest possible creative act…. The [...]
The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist, Brooks, Frederick P.
Currently a professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina, Fred Brooks led the development of IBM’s System/360 and its operating system. He’s the author of The Mythical Man-Month : Essays on Software Engineering, which remains one of the best books [...]
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Carr, Nicholas
Nicholas Carr has a knack for framing provocative questions. In his latest book, he expands on an article he wrote for the Atlantic in 2008, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Provocative but unanswerable.
When I was a young consultant, I would frequently get [...]
[cross posted at FASTforward blog]
Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal, Johnson, Mark W.
What is a "business model" and can you create a new one in a systematic and disciplined way? That’s the question that Mark Johnson, chairman of the consulting firm Innosight, sets for himself in Seizing the White [...]
Blind Spot: A Leader’s Guide To IT-Enabled Business Transformation, Feld, Charlie
In the 1980s a handful of organizations established that the right combination of strategic and technology insights and execution could lead to results worth the attention of CEOs and Boards of Directors. One of those successes was a major [...]
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Gawande, Atul
The idea of a simple checklist to raise the quality of a routine practice seems innocuous enough. It also seems to rankle those with lots of education and experience as an unnecessary intrusion on their autonomy.
The canonical example is the story of the effort [...]
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Pink, Daniel H.
Pink takes a look at much the same evidence base as Lawrence and Nohria do in Driven with a slightly different purpose. His take is that organizations rely too heavily on extrinsic motivators (carrots and sticks) at the expense of tapping into much [...]
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, Pressfield, Steven
I recently finished Seth Godin’s excellent new book Linchpin (see Choosing to Draw Your Own Maps for my review). In it, he devotes a central chapter to the notion of resistance and how we get in our own way [...]
