Seth Godin, who I first discovered through his bestselling Permission Marketing has made something of a specialty of writing compact and focused books around single clear ideas. His latest, a tiny little book called The Dip, is his most abstract yet, but still fits the mold and develops a single punchy idea. The idea [...]

Posted in Book Reviews, Business, Thinking 2 Comments »

Do labels like “broad thinker,” “generalist,” “synthesizer,” “right-brained,” or “conceptualizer” get at aspects of a coherent personality type? Call this mind the “Da Vinci” mind for short. Recently, two rather interesting takes on such minds have appeared: A Whole New Mind (WNM) by Dan Pink and Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner. [...]

Posted in Book Reviews, Culture, Thinking 4 Comments »

The catchphrase of Henry Chesbrough’s work on innovation (a doctrine called “open innovation” and described in Open Innovation, 2003, and Open Business Models, 2006), is “not all the smart people work for you.” The key operational message that corporations seem to take away from it though, is “buy and sell intellectual property vigorously and throw [...]

Posted in Book Reviews, Business, Economics, Technology 1 Comment »

I don’t usually write strongly negative reviews of books, because most of the time, when you encounter a bad book, it is usually obviously bad from page 1 on. Intelligent readers don’t need help figuring that out. Blue Ocean Strategy is a bad book, but it is not your usual bad book. It is a [...]

Posted in Book Reviews, Business, Economics 4 Comments »

I read Competing on Analytics because my boss began swearing by it, and my conversations with her were starting to get seriously confusing. So I bought a copy, and was plowing diligently through it at a local Rochester coffee shop, when a friendly woman — your inevitable next-table laptop warrior — noticed the book, came [...]

Posted in Book Reviews, Business, Technology 1 Comment »

Two recent popular science books provide a startling peek into the deep scientific and sociological troubles in the world of superstring theory. Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit and The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin together triangulate the core of the trouble. If you, like me, have been distracted from the foundational problems of [...]

Posted in Book Reviews, Science-Math 18 Comments »

Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams
Despite the name, which suggests both a me-too jumping on the Levitt/Dubner Freakonomics bandwagon and a possible reductive identification of all evolving Web technologies with wikis, this is a surprisingly good book, written at a calibrated level of abstraction, with a tasteful blend of concepts, anecdotes and statistics. It [...]

Posted in Book Reviews, Business, Economics 6 Comments »