193 books.
List by Date, Author or Rating.
Books
Gary Hamel (2012)
Obviously, there are lots of things that matter now. But in a world of fractured certainties and battered trust, some things matter more than others. While the challenges facing organizations are limitless; leadership bandwidth is not. That is why you have to be clear about what really matters now. What are the fundamental, make-or-break issues that will determine whether your organization thrives or dives in the years ahead? Hamel identifies five issues are that are paramount: values, innovation, adaptability, passion and ideology. In doing so he presents an essential agenda for leaders everywhere.
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4 votes
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Richard Sennett (1991)
With an eye toward the architecture, the art, the literature, and the technology of urban life, Richard Sennett gives an account of the search for shelter and the fear of exposure to strangers and new experience in Western culture – and how these two concerns have shaped the physical fabric of the city. “Why do we avert our eyes when we encounter the unaccustomed?” asks Sennett. In answer, he moves between past and present from the assembly hall of Athens to the Palladium Club; from Augustine’s City of God to the Turkish baths of the Lower East Side; from eighteenth-century English gardens to the housing projects of East Harlem; from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy to subway graffiti. The Conscience of the Eye is an exploration of the politics of vision.
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2 votes
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Richard Sennett (1977)
“Public” life once meant that vital part one’s life outside the circle of family and close friends. Connecting with strangers in an emotionally satisfying way and yet remaining aloof from them was seen as the means by which the human animal was transformed into the social – the civilized – being. And the fullest flowering of that public life was realized in the 18th Century in the great capital cities of Europe.
Sennett shows how our lives today are bereft of the pleasures and reinforcements of this lost interchange with fellow citizens. He shows how, today, the stranger is a threatening figure; how silence and observation have become the only ways to experience public life, especially street life, without feeling overwhelmed ; how each person believes in the right, in public, to be left alone. And he makes clear how, because of the change in public life, private life becomes distorted as we of necessity focus more and more on ourselves, on increasingly narcissistic forms of intimacy and self-absorption. Because of this, our personalities cannot fully develop: we lack much of the ease, the spirit of play, the kind of discretion that would allow us real and pleasurable relationships with those whom we may never know intimately.
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1 vote
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Richard Sennett (1999)
Drawing on interviews with dismissed IBM executives in Westchester, New York, bakers in a high-tech Boston bakery, a barmaid turned advertising executive, and many others, Sennett explores the disorienting effects of the new capitalism. He reveals the vivid and illuminating contrast between two worlds of work: the vanished world of rigid, hierarchical organizations, where what mattered was a sense of personal character, and the brave new world of corporate re-engineering, risk, flexibility, networking, and short-term teamwork, where what matters is being able to reinvent yourself on a dime. In some ways the changes characterizing the new capitalism are positive; they make for a dynamic economy. But they can also be destructive, eroding the sense of sustained purpose, integrity of self, and trust in others that an earlier generation understood as essential to personal character.The Corrosion of Character enables us to understand the social and political context for our contemporary confusions and Sennett suggests how we need to re-imagine both community and individual character in order to confront an economy based on the principle of “no long term.”
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2 votes
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Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald (2011)
Being a social organization goes beyond experimenting with social media technology tools - the provide and pray approach. In fact, it is not about the technology at all. A social organization addresses significant business challenges and opportunities using the social media platform to create mass collaboration - what Gartner predicts will be the next evolutionary pillar defining how work gets done around the world. Mass collaboration extends beyond social media to enable your employees, customers, suppliers and all other stakeholders to participate directly in the creation of value. That, in broad strokes, is the promise of social media, declare Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald, authors of The Social Organization, which reveals how executives from CEOs to managers can make mass collaboration a source of enduring competitive advantage in their enterprise.
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1 vote
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Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring (2011)
The Innovative University illustrates how higher education can respond to the forces of disruptive innovation , and offers a nuanced and hopeful analysis of where the traditional university and its traditions have come from and how it needs to change for the future. Through an examination of Harvard and BYU-Idaho as well as other stories of innovation in higher education, Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring decipher how universities can find innovative, less costly ways of performing their uniquely valuable functions.
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2 votes
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Richard Sennett (2012)
Living with people who differ - racially, ethnically, religiously, or economically - is the most urgent challenge facing civil society today. We tend socially to avoid engaging with people unlike ourselves, and modern politics encourages the politics of the tribe rather than of the city. In this thought-provoking book, Richard Sennett discusses why this has happened and what might be done about it. Sennett contends that cooperation is a craft, and the foundations for skillful cooperation lie in learning to listen well and discuss rather than debate. In Together he explores how people can cooperate online, on street corners, in schools, at work, and in local politics. He traces the evolution of cooperative rituals from medieval times to today, and in situations as diverse as slave communities, socialist groups in Paris, and workers on Wall Street. Divided into three parts, the book addresses the nature of cooperation, why it has become weak, and how it could be strengthened. The author warns that we must learn the craft of cooperation if we are to make our complex society prosper, yet he reassures us that we can do this, for the capacity for cooperation is embedded in human nature.
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2 votes
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John Kotter (2006)
Most of the denizens of the Antarctic penguin colony sneer at Fred, the quiet but observant scout who detects worrying signs that their home, an iceberg, is melting. Fred must cleverly convince and enlist key players, such as Louis, the head penguin; Alice, the number two bird; the intractable NoNo the weather expert; and a passle of school-age penguins if he is to save the colony. Their delightfully told journey illuminates in an unforgettable way how to manage the necessary change that surrounds us all. Simple explanatory material following the fable enhances the lasting value of these lessons.
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1 vote
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Richard Hunter and George Westerman (2009)
If you're a general manager or CFO, do you feel you're spending too much on IT or wishing you could get better returns from your IT investments? If so, it's time to examine what's behind this IT-as-cost mind-set. In The Real Business of IT, Richard Hunter and George Westerman reveal that the cost mind-set stems from IT leaders' inability to communicate about the business value they create-so CIOs get stuck discussing budgets rather than their contributions to the organization. The authors show how to communicate about these forms of value with non-IT leaders-so they understand how your firm is benefiting and see IT as the strategic powerhouse it truly is.
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22 votes
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Harold 'Bud' Lawson (2010)
Systems are everywhere and affect us daily in our private and professional lives. We all use the word system to describe something that is essential but often abstract, complex and even mysterious. However, learning to utilize system concepts as first class objects as well as methodologies for systems thinking and systems engineering provides a basis for removing the mystery and moving towards mastery even for complex systems. This journey through the Systems Landscape has been developed to promote learning to think and act in terms of systems. A unique aspect is the introduction of concrete system semantics provided as a "system survival kit" and based upon a limited number of concepts and principles as well as a mental model called the system-coupling diagram. This discipline independent presentation assists individuals and is essential for building a learning organization that can utilize a systems approach to achieving its enterprise goals. The eight chapters are presented as stops along a journey that successively build system knowledge. Each chapter terminates with a Knowledge Verification section that provides questions and exercises for individuals and groups. Case studies reflecting the utilization of the system related concepts, principles and methodologies are provided as chapter interludes.
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10 votes
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Cay Hasselmann (2011)
This book will provide IS architects with an easy pragmatic (non academic) way to deliver proven ROI, lower risks and a faster time to market in Enterprise Architecture. The chapters will concentrate on the motivations of enterprises, the pragmatic reuse of the existing assets, the implementation of a standard process in architecture and the description and implementation suggestions on some standard business processes This book will not assume that you familiar with any frameworks or theories on Enterprise Architecture.
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4 votes
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Kirk Hausman (2011)
Intended for anyone charged with coordinating enterprise architectural design in a small, medium, or large organization, Sustainable Enterprise Architecture helps you explore the various elements of your own particular network environment to develop strategies for mid- to long-term management and sustainable growth. Organized much like a book on structural architecture, this one starts with a solid foundation of frameworks and general guidelines for enterprise governance and design. The book covers common considerations for all enterprises, and then drills down to specific types of technology that may be found in your enterprise. It explores strategies for protecting enterprise resources and examines technologies and strategies that are only just beginning to take place in the modern enterprise network.
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10 votes
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Danny Greefhorst, Erik Proper (2011)
Enterprises, from small to large, evolve continuously. As a result, their structures are transformed and extended continuously. Without some means of control, such changes are bound to lead to an overly complex, uncoordinated and heterogeneous environment that is hard to manage and hard to adapt to future changes. Enterprise architecture principles provide a means to direct transformations of enterprises. As a consequence, architecture principles should be seen as the cornerstones of any architecture. In this book, Greefhorst and Proper focus on the role of architecture principles. They provide both a theoretical and a practical perspective on architecture principles. The theoretical perspective involves a brief survey of the general concept of principle as well as an analysis of different flavors of principles. Architecture principles are regarded as a specific class of normative principles that direct the design of an enterprise, from the definition of its business to its supporting IT. The practical perspective on architecture principles is concerned with an approach to the formulation of architecture principles, as well as their actual use in organizations. To illustrate their use in practice, several real-life cases are discussed, an application of architecture principles in TOGAF is included, and a catalogue of example architecture principles is provided. With this broad coverage, the authors target students and researchers specializing in enterprise architecture or business information systems, as well as practitioners who want to understand the foundations underlying their practical daily work.
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9 votes
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Peter Senge (2006)
Peter Senge, founder and director of the Society for Organisational Learning and senior lecturer at MIT, has found the means of creating a 'learning organisation'. In The Fifth Discipline, he draws the blueprints for an organisation where people expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nutured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are contually learning together. The Fifth Discipline fuses these features together into a coherent body of theory and practice, making the whole of an organisation more effective than the sum of its parts.
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8 votes
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Klaus D. Niemann (2008)
This book shows its readers how to achieve the goal of genuine IT governance. The key here is the successful development of enterprise architecture as the necessary foundation. With its capacity to span and integrate business procedures, IT applications and IT infrastructure, enterprise architecture opens these areas up to analysis and makes them rich sources of critical data. Enterprise architecture thereby rises to the status of a crucial management information system for the CIO.
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2 votes
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Sharon C Evans (2010)
This book will help you understand what is in store for you if you are a new or an aspiring EA. Step One will help you assess whether you are qualified to do the job. Steps Two and Three will help you learn the skills and abilities you need to excel in the role as well as help you define your future in the role. In these steps, you will read and learn information about deciding to pursue a career in enterprise architecture. Steps Four and Five will allow you to visualize and think like a master architect. They will provide a step-by-step approach to gaining the hard and soft skills you need to be in the top 10 percent of all enterprise and IT architects.
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16 votes
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Alexander Osterwalder (2010)
Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don′t yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation. Co–created by 470 Business Model Canvas practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4–color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game–changing business model––or analyze and renovate an old one.
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3 votes
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Thomas Lockwood (2009)
This title is filled with practical and insightful expert advice on how to increase productivity through creativity and innovation. Packed with intriguing and insightful case studies and practical advice, "Design Thinking" is a comprehensive guide to increasing productivity through cultivating creativity. Divided into three sections that focus on the use of design for innovation and brand-building, the emerging role of service design, and the design of meaningful customer experiences, this book provides readers with the strategies and confidence necessary to encourage the growth of creative thought within their business. Featuring 30 articles, written by industry experts, that show how to build a solid brand foundation, solve problems with simplified thinking, anticipate and capitalize on trends, figure out what consumers want before they do, and align mission, vision, and strategy with a corporate brand, this is a must-have reference for anyone wanting to increase their businesses productivity.
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1 vote
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Roger L. Martin (2009)
Most companies today have innovation envy. They yearn to come up with a game-changing innovation like Apple's iPod, or create an entirely new category like Facebook. Many make genuine efforts to be innovative-they spend on R&D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants. But they get disappointing results. Why? In The Design of Business, Roger Martin offers a compelling and provocative answer: we rely far too exclusively on analytical thinking, which merely refines current knowledge, producing small improvements to the status quo. To innovate and win, companies need design thinking. This form of thinking is rooted in how knowledge advances from one stage to another-from mystery (something we can't explain) to heuristic (a rule of thumb that guides us toward solution) to algorithm (a predictable formula for producing an answer) to code (when the formula becomes so predictable it can be fully automated). As knowledge advances across the stages, productivity grows and costs drop-creating massive value for companies. Martin shows how leading companies such as Procter & Gamble, Cirque du Soleil, RIM, and others use design thinking to push knowledge through the stages in ways that produce breakthrough innovations and competitive advantage.
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1 vote
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Stephen Denning (2005)
In his best–selling book, Squirrel Inc., former World Bank executive and master storyteller Stephen Denning used a tale to show why storytelling is a critical skill for leaders. Now, in this hands–on guide, Denning explains how you can learn to tell the right story at the right time. Whoever you are in the organization CEO, middle management, or someone on the front lines you can lead by using stories to effect change. Filled with myriad examples, A Leader's Guide to Storytelling shows how storytelling is one of the few available ways to handle the principal and most difficult challenges of leadership: sparking action, getting people to work together, and leading people into the future. The right kind of story at the right time, can make an organization "stunningly vulnerable" to a new idea.
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1 vote
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Stephen Denning (2007)
The book introduces the concept of narrative intelligence - an ability to understand and act and react agilely in the quicksilver world of interacting narratives. It shows why this is key to the central task of leadership, what its dimensions are, and how you can measure it. The book’s lucid explanations, vivid examples and practical tips are essential reading for CEOs, managers, change agents, marketers, salespersons, brand managers, politicians, teachers, parents—anyone who is setting out to the change the world.
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1 vote
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Stephen Denning (2010)
Organizations today face a crisis. The crisis is of long standing and its signs are widespread. Most proposals for improving management address one element of the crisis at the expense of the others. The principles described by award–winning author Stephen Denning simultaneously inspire high productivity, continuous innovation, deep job satisfaction and client delight. Denning puts forward a fundamentally different approach to management, with seven inter–locking principles of continuous innovation: focusing the entire organization on delighting clients; working in self–organizing teams; operating in client–driven iterations; delivering value to clients with each iteration; fostering radical transparency; nurturing continuous self–improvement and communicating interactively. In sum, the principles comprise a new mental model of management.
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1 vote
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Tim Brown (2009)
The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities. This book introduces the idea of design thinking, the collaborative process by which the designer's sensibilities and methods are employed to match people's needs not only with what is technically feasible and a viable business strategy. In short, design thinking converts need into demand. It's a human-centered approach to problem solving that helps people and organizations become more innovative and more creative. Design thinking is not just applicable to so-called creative industries or people who work in the design field. It's a methodology that has been used by health organizations to increase the quality of patient care by re-examining the ways that their nurses manage shift change, or rethink supply chain management.
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1 vote
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Chris Potts (2010)
Simon is a seasoned Enterprise Architect who joins a corporation in New York as their first-ever Vice President of Enterprise Architecture. On his very first day, he meets the global Chief Executive Officer (CEO) who asks Simon What do you do? Simon's reply triggers the CEO to respond in a way that our hero least expects. What follows is a journey across continents and oceans in which Simon uncovers the true meaning of Enterprise Architecture, who is doing it, and how successful they are. On his travels, Simon teams up with senior executives around the world to integrate Enterprise Architecture into their strategies and business plans, and to innovate in the architecture of their enterprise. Everyone he meets has some wisdom to offer, and is looking for his in return. Finally, Simon has to make a choice between the kind of Enterprise Architect he used to be and the one he has become. Join the characters in this sequel to the highly-acclaimed business novel fruITion, as they contribute to Simon's journey and he makes his final choice. Share in his thoughts and experiences, and join the author in observing key messages along the journey.
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11 votes
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John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (2000)
The gap between the hype of the Information Age and its reality is often wide and deep, and it's into this gap that John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid plunge. Not that these guys are Luddites--far from it. Brown, the chief scientist at Xerox and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and Duguid, a historian and social theorist who also works with PARC, measure how information technology interacts and meshes with the social fabric. They write, "Technology design often takes aim at the surface of life. There it undoubtedly scores lots of worthwhile hits. But such successes can make designers blind to the difficulty of more serious challenges--primarily the resourcefulness that helps embed certain ways of doing things deep in our lives." The authors cast their gaze on the many trends and ideas proffered by infoenthusiasts over the years, such as software agents, "still a long way from the predicted insertion into the woof and warp of ordinary life"; the electronic cottage that Alvin Toffler wrote about 20 years ago and has yet to be fully realized; and the rise of knowledge management and the challenges it faces trying to manage how people actually work and learn in the workplace. Their aim is not to pass judgment but to help remedy the tunnel vision that prevents technologists from seeing larger the social context that their ideas must ultimately inhabit.
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3 votes
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