1-7 Star Rating – Page 123 – Public Intelligence Blog

Amazon Exclusive: Hugh MacLeod Reviews Linchpin

Hugh MacLeod is an artist, cartoonist, and Web 2.0 pundit whose blog, gapingvoid.com, has two million unique monthly visitors. His first book, Ignore Everybody, was an Amazon Top Ten Business Book of the Year and a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of Linchpin:

This is by far Seth’s most passionate book. He’s pulling fewer punches. He’s out for blood. He’s out to make a difference. And that glorious, heartfelt passion is obvious on every page, even if it is in Seth’s usual quiet, lucid, understated manner.

A linchpin, as Seth describes it, is somebody in an organization who is indispensable, who cannot be replaced—her role is just far too unique and valuable. And then he goes on to say, well, seriously folks, you need to be one of these people, you really do. To not be one is economic and career suicide.

No surprises there—that’s exactly what one would expect Seth to say. But here’s where it gets interesting.

In his best-known book, Purple Cow, Seth’s message was, “Everyone’s a marketer now.” In All Marketers Are Liars, his message was, “Everyone’s a storyteller now.” In Tribes, his message was, “Everyone’s a leader now.”

And from Linchpin?

“Everyone’s an artist now.”

Continue reading “Review (Guest): Linchpin–Are You Indispensable?”

2010/09/212010/09/22

Review: The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management–Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century

6 Star Top 10%, Best Practices in Management, Culture, Research, Economics, Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Leadership, Priorities, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Startling clarity, common sense, and immediate relevance

September 21, 2010

Steve Denning

I received a copy of this book as a galley from the publisher, and I strongly recommend it in any form. I first met Steve Denning when he was recently retired from being program director of knowledge management at the World Bank, and had created no-cost global networks for multinational information sharing decades before the term M4IS2 came into vogue (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making). His first book, The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations (KMCI Press) remains an essential reference for any leader at any level.

This book grabbed me right away, and while it reminds me of Peter Drucker, Peter Senge, and Gifford Pinchot, with a strong leavening from all the books I have been reading in the Collective Intelligence, Evolutionary Activism, Human Scale, and Epoch B Leadership arenas, this is clearly his own unique work and I would venture to say that this is the first book that captures the essence of 21st Century leadership.
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2010/09/192010/09/19

Review (Guest): The New Social Learning–A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Communications, Culture, Research, Economics, Education (General), Information Society, Intelligence (Commercial)

Phi Beta Iota: two reviews are provided, one from the blogsphere (Tip of the Hat to Pierre Levy at LinkedIn, and one from Amazon. If not obvious, this new trend in organizational learning assures that “secret” organizations will get dumber and dumber as time goes by.

Authors: Tony Bingham and Marcia Connor

I (Bill Ives) was very pleased to receive a review copy of The New Social Learning by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner. Tony is President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD). Marcia is a Partner at Altimeter Group, founder of the Twitter chat #lrnchat, and writes the Fast Company column “Learn at All Levels.”

Getting a chance to read this timely work excited me for several reasons. First, I began my consulting career in the learning space in the 80s and have remained convinced of its importance for accelerating business performance. I presented at several ASTD session during this period. Second, Marcia was also a colleague of mine at Pistachio Consulting where we did some projects together. I had a chance to review an earlier version of one of the chapters of this book. But most importantly, it is the first book I have seen to help organizations understand and harness the huge workplace learning potential of social media and enterprise 2.0.

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2010/09/182010/09/18

Review: Rethink–A Business Manifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Information Operations, Information Technology, Intelligence (Commercial), Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean)

It's About Context, Business Ecosystems, and IT Impact

September 18, 2010

Ric Merrifield

I bought this book on the recommendation of a colleague whom I have known for twenty years, both of us members of the Silicon Valley Hackers Conference started by Stewart Brand and now managed by Glen Tenney. When I came to buy the book and say all of the very short, very empty, largely negative reviews, I was surprised. Trying to understand this, and having looked up the author's history, I speculate that a bunch of folks bought this book because of who the author is (Microsoft's business rethink strategist and innovator), and then did not have the contextual background to appreciate the story line.

Of course the books suffers some from being a book-length expansion of a core idea originally published in the Harvard Business Review, “The Next Revolution in Productivity” (free online at Phi Beta Iota), but from where I sit, 47 of the 53 reviews miss the whole point, and I am not that thrilled with the remaining six, but they did help me.

POINT NUMBER ONE: Businesses are eco-systems within eco-systems. The industrial era has piled up a mish-mash of stovepipes, conflicting chains of command, etcetera etcetera. Until Web 2.0 (I'm working on Web 4.0) there was not much one could do about it, but now Information Technology (IT) has reached a point where it CHANGES EVERYTHING. Bare bone zero sum reviews are a priority.

Continue reading “Review: Rethink–A Business Manifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation”

2010/09/112010/09/11

Review: People of the Central Intelligence Agency–Francis Gary Powers, Tscherim Soobzokov, Bob Barr, William F. Buckley, Jr., Valerie Plame [Paperback]

4 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Online Distillation?

September 11, 2010

No listed author

I am in this book, but that is not saying a great deal since I came out from under cover with permission after Alvin Toffler built the chapter on “The Future of the Spy” around me, in War and Anti-War: Making Sense of Today's Global Chaos.

Based on the lack of authorship, details, and the kludge of names, I was tempted to give this a three but went to a four solely because it is probably a good illustration of the range of information about CIA officers that is online today AND the price is sensational. This is a very fairly priced book, and for that alone I do recommend its purchase.

Continue reading “Review: People of the Central Intelligence Agency–Francis Gary Powers, Tscherim Soobzokov, Bob Barr, William F. Buckley, Jr., Valerie Plame [Paperback]”

2010/09/102010/09/10

Journal: 21st Century Management–New Rules

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Leadership

Steve Denning: re-inventing the workplace for the 21st Century: innovation, deep job satisfaction and client delight

The biggest difference between 20th and 21st Century Management

Management in the 20^th Century was about achieving a finite goal: delivering goods and services, to make money.

Management in the 21^st Century is about the infinite goal of delighting customers; the firm makes money, yes, but as a consequence of the delight that it creates for customers, not as the goal.

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UTTERLY BRILLIANT STUFF HERE

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A radical new management model for twenty-first century leaders

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.

Author outlines the basic seven principles of continuous innovation
The book describes more than seventy supporting practices
Denning offers a rethinking of management from first principles

2010/08/282010/08/28

Review: Whose Water Is It?–The Unquenchable Thirst of a Water-Hungry World

5 Star, Complexity & Catastrophe, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Intelligence (Public), True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Core selection, not a substitute for the master works

August 28, 2010

Bernadette McDonald and Douglas Jehl (editors)

Published by the National Geographic in 2003, this is an edited work with several but not all of the greats brought together. The short pieces are a fine collage for undergraduate reading and discussion but the book does not make the jump to graduate-level thinking. I place it behind Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource published in 2001 and Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water, while also recommending The Atlas of Water, Second Edition: Mapping the World's Most Critical Resource and Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water as well as Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit. I have written summary reviews on all of them.

The book sets out to address (in a general but most informed way) the areas of water ownership, water scarcity, water conflict, and water prospects. Below I identify the author of the individual section, and then highlights that I retained from that section.
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