Billion-Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years, Carroll, Paul B. and Chunka Mui Progress in science and engineering proceeds from the dispassionate analysis of failure. We learn more when we screw up than when we succeed. However, since Waterman and Peters In Search of Excellence,
The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why, Ripley, Amanda Amanda Ripley has taken an interesting premise and turned it into an excellent book. A writer for Time magazine, she
Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, Davenport, Thomas H. and Jeanne G. Harris Tom Davenport has turned his attention of late to the prospects for business intelligence and information analytics. Competing on Analytics offers a managerial introduction to the topic. It emphasizes why organizations ought to be interested in the topic, what [...]
Tagged business intelligence, information analyticsBrain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, Medina, John John Medina is a molecular biologist bent on sharing how what we know about the brain can help us be more effective in the world at large. His central argument is that there are simple, but very important, lessons to [...]
Tagged brain, curiosityLittle Brother, Doctorow, Cory It may be time to get more serious about using PGP and learning about Tor. Little Brother takes us into a near-future version of San Francisco where Jack Bauer has clearly become the U.S. Attorney General. Marcus is a seventeen year-old high school student who likes to play video games, role [...]
The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, Roam, Dan One of the rules of thumb I learned in the early days of my consulting career was that your project wasn’t real until you had at least one napkin or placemat filed in your working papers with some sketch that captured [...]
Strategy and the Fat Smoker; Doing What’s Obvious But Not Easy, Maister, David David Maister has spent years advising professional service firms on the particular challenges of running their businesses. I first met David during my MBA days when I was a student in his course on the Management of Service Operations. I’ve come [...]
Tagged Knowledge workYour Inner CEO: Unleash the Executive Within, Cox, Allan This book is a bit of an unusual hybrid, lying somewhere between a management text and a self-help book. While it’s being marketed as a business book, it’s applicable in a much wider range of settings. Your Inner CEO is another entry in the long [...]
Spook Country, Gibson, William I’ve been a fan of Gibson since discovering Neuromancer twenty years ago. A lot of people whose opinions I value have had great things to say about Spook Country and it’s been on the NY Times best seller list for a number of weeks. It even has it’s own Wikipedia [...]
True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, Vinge, Vernor Vinge is a mathematician turned computer scientist. True Names is one of those stories that gains additional relevance for me because of its influence over many of those who went on to develop the technology for real that Vinge dreamt up in his [...]
