In my opinion, this book is misnamed. Its proper main audience does not consist of managers but those in public relations; likewise, its main topic is not crisis management but communicating in a crisis. It admonishes the readers to plan for emergency situations, but it does very little to coach readers exactly how to do so. To be fair, it suggests that each company perform a “vulnerability analysis” to detect weaknesses that might be exploited…
This work is the result of a cohort business study. The control group consisted of publicly owned companies that had good performance for 15 years and then great performance (defined as outperforming the market by over three times) for 15 years. There were only 11 good-to-great companies. Eleven other companies in similar lines of work were chosen into the comparison group. Then the research group dissected those companies to figure out what the great companies…
This book helped change the way that software development is generally practiced, from the leadership to the programmers, from the business to the design. It is important to note that this book has been delivered in two very different editions. The first edition in 1999 set the direction while the second edition in 2005 brought insight out of several years of experience in an updated text. What’s so “extreme” about Extreme Programming? First, it advocates…
Coyle’s book on business cultures centers on the theme that highly successful groups over-perform when they have healthy interactions. This trait – not smarts or good marketing or strong financial support – is what business leaders should focus on cultivating in the people they direct. This theme is then explicated in a series of success stories from a variety of groups in fields like NBA basketball, the Navy Seals, restaurant service, and college hockey. Although…
This work is a sequel to Kim’s other novel The Phoenix Project. Although the books fit together, they need not be read together. In other words, both books are self-standing. This work – essentially about dealing with the software industry in an age of constant change – does an even better job than The Phoenix Project at highlighting how businesses can adapt to and thrive in the digital era. The book is set in an…
With the advent of the Internet and social media, word-of-mouth marketing has come into its own. Word of mouth was always a potent force offline, but online, its force has only amplified. The trouble, I find, is the excess noise. Yes, everybody’s doing it, and your product’s survival is at stake. What can make your product thrive via word of mouth? Baer and Lemin offer some answers with their concept of Talk Triggers. Talk Triggers…
I often use slow times of the year to read psychologically oriented books that apply to my life. This Christmas, I picked up this book that deals with leadership and being up-front with emotions in the workplace. This book’s author served in the military before getting a PhD in sociology. Her topic of interest is vulnerability as a leadership trait. The influx of women into the American workplace has changed workplace dynamics. This book –…
Jill Ker Conway has left us with quite a trilogy of autobiographies. In so doing, she has divided her life into thirds – growing up on the Australian outback, coming of age in North-American academe, and gaining a feminist voice as president of the elite Smith College. This work examines her experiences at Smith College. She poured her soul into learning to articulate an authentically feminine institutional voice in a world of coeducation. Instead of…
This book is the seminal statement of systems thinking – the philosophic idea that knowledge is increasingly aligned in groups of thought. And the goal of systems thinking is to produce an organization of human endeavors that – wait for it – learns. The learning organization trumps not only individual learners but also established organizations that have ceased to learn/grow/adapt effectively. While this might seem obvious to those (like myself) in research, much of this…
Do conversations ever catch you off-guard? Do you ever feel unprepared for conversations that pop up spontaneously yet seem to matter a lot and to affect dramatically the course of our lives? These situations often occur in families and in businesses, and this book attempts to prepare us better for handling those weighty situations. This book came recommended to me as a part of a book club at my workplace. I can see why. It…