The quadrant diagram has achieved the status of an intellectual farce. If you, as a presenter, do not make an ironic joke when you throw one on the screen, you will automatically lose a lot of credibility. For some very good reasons though, the diagram is an indispensable one for the presenter’s toolkit. As a listener, if you have a default dismissive attitude towards the thing, you will have to sit out far too many important conversations with a cynical, superior smile. So here’s a quick tutorial on quadrant diagrams. I’ll tell you both how to make them, and how to evaluate them. Here’s a made-up one to get the basics clear. You basically take two spectra (or watersheds) relevant to a complex issue, simplify each down to a black/white dichotomy, and label the four quadrants you produce, like so:
This particular one is nonsense, and falls apart at the slightest poking (we’ll poke later in the article), and I made it up for fun. Let us discuss three real examples from business books before we develop a critical theory and design principles. The three I will use are from The Power of Full Engagement
several months ago, when she 
. If the cold is bitter today, my attitude towards one of my pet subjects, the future of work, is bittersweet. On the one hand, I am receiving a steady trickle of news of layoffs affecting friends around the world. On the other hand, my own modest efforts at punditry on the subject of work are heading in cheerful, hopeful directions. My friends at 
, which became the operating system of the 
where the 
should probably be your second one (thanks Kapsio, for the recommendation), after Oliver Sacks’ 
by Jackie Fenn and Mark Raskino of Gartner, manages to do that about a third of the way through. Now, the Hype Cycle (the 
(2004) and do a two-in-one review. It took a good deal longer to write than I expected, mainly because I kept getting distracted by other connections I wanted to explore, which threatened to turn this post into an extended and discursive riff on all sorts of other subjects. I finally firmly trimmed off the wayward thoughts and put them into other post drafts, so luckily for you, this is a relatively focused two-for-one book review.
is a guest post by George Gibson, a colleague of mine at Xerox. George originally posted it on our internal blogs as a series, and I found it so much fun to read, I asked if I could repost it on ribbonfarm. So here you go.] 
has helped frame an entire decade of thinking on innovation. His taxonomy of radical/incremental//sustaining/disruptive, despite being very 
