Entries Tagged as 'Book Reviews'

Acceleration as Strategy, Urgency as Doctrine

July 23rd, 2008 · No Comments

Three things happened today that created a sort of nuclear reaction in my head. The result was a rather blinding flash of insight concerning a set of knotty problems I am wrangling with. The first thing was a reaction, from a colleague, to a whirlwind burst of activity I put in last night to react [...]

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Tags: Book Reviews · Business · Thinking

Peter Cappelli’s “Talent On Demand”

July 17th, 2008 · 1 Comment

There is a compelling scene in HBO’s quasi-fictional Western, Deadwood, which qualifies as an instant lesson in the essentials of talent management. The 1870s mining boom town of Deadwood, which is just emerging from Wild West state-of-nature conditions, has attracted the attention of the robber baron George Hearst. Al Swearengen, the [...]

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Tags: Book Reviews · Business · Economics

Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

June 11th, 2008 · 2 Comments

Probably the best thing about Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies is its cover, by Stephani Finks (I hope I linked to the right profile on Facebook). The contents aren’t too shabby either — the book officially bumps Naked Conversations from the top position in the Marketing 2.0 category in my mildly-famous [...]

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Tags: Book Reviews · Business · General · Technology

Outsider Innovation 101

May 28th, 2008 · 8 Comments

This article is an introduction to an idea — outsider innovation — whose time has come. I’ll present the idea, and along the way include short reviews of three fun books about innovation (Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko, Make us More Innovative by Jeffery Phillips, and Awake at the Wheel by Mitch Ditkoff) that belong [...]

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Tags: Book Reviews · Economics · Technology · Thinking

Megacommunities and Macrotrends

May 18th, 2008 · No Comments

Big and complex problems sometimes do require require big and complex solutions. This thought was hammered home for me powerfully last week by way of a triple-punch: a conference I was attending, a book I was reading, and the earthquake in China. The conference was the IRI Annual Meeting, where I was part of a [...]

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Tags: Book Reviews · Business · Economics

Jump Point by Tom Hayes

May 1st, 2008 · 3 Comments

Tom Hayes‘ Jump Point, a recent addition to the emerging World 2.0 canon presents an argument that evokes a foggy sort of deja vu. If you’ve been keeping up with the literature, you’ll probably frown a bit and think, “wait, this is familiar, somebody’s said this before.” But as you process the argument, you’ll realize [...]

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Tags: Book Reviews · Economics · Technology

A Map of the World 2.0 Canon

April 19th, 2008 · 9 Comments

I have been reviewing a good many books that fall into the loose category of ‘World 2.0.’ Books that attempt to organize our understanding of the impact of Web 2.0 and social media. Structure the blooming, buzzing confusion, so to speak. So I thought I’d go meta and attempt to visualize this emerging canon. This [...]

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Tags: Book Reviews · Business · Economics · Technology

The New Location, Location, Location

April 8th, 2008 · No Comments

So far in my series on virtual geography, I have talked mainly about relative location — the 50-foot-rule, the Twitter Zone and the notion of ambient presence are all about where a is in relation to b, in cognitive and physical ways. What can we say about absolute location? The man with the best (and [...]

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Tags: Book Reviews · Culture · Economics · Technology

Generation Blend by Rob Salkowitz

April 5th, 2008 · 3 Comments

Generation Blend: Managing Across the Technology Age Gap, by Rob Salkowitz is a book that might have saved me a lot of trouble. I have been managing a social media evangelism effort at Xerox for the past year, and learned many of the lessons in this book the hard way. But then, a year ago, [...]

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Tags: Book Reviews · Business · Culture · Economics

Inventoritis and the Grabowski Ratio

April 3rd, 2008 · 4 Comments

“Overcoming Inventoritis” by Peter Paul Roosen and Tatsuya Nakagawa is a little rough diamond of a book. Though it is very amateurishly produced and designed, and reads like a set of long, disorganized, conversational email notes, it is packed densely with interesting practitioner insights, strung together loosely to argue that “Inventoritis” (never explicitly defined, but [...]

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Tags: Book Reviews · Business · Economics · Technology