book+review category archives
I've had the Stop Starting, Start Finishing brochure / comic from Arne Rock and his team sitting in my briefcase ever since the Lean Kanban conference last spring. It's a fun read about how Justin (Time) does a Kanban implementation.
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I read Bob Sproull's _Epiphanized_ in just a few days and found it told a gripping story of TOC transformation, even if the writing style was sometimes off-putting.
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Thomas Corbett's _Throughput Accounting_ is a quick read and very familiar for someone who has been in the Theory of Constraints world. I wonder if anyone comes to TOC via this route, rather than through The Goal and some of the other business novels.
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This book is a collection of 122 management f/laws described by Ackoff and compiled and updated by Herbert Addison. Good fun.
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I just finished reading David Byrne's somewhat autobiographical research, How Music Works. I found Talking Heads and some of his other projects playing on the stereo much more frequently than usual.
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Portia Tung has a choose-your-own adventure version of a business novel, this time about going into a client as an Agile Coach (consultant) with five days to turn things around.
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The latest read from my backlog is David Anderson's 2004 look at "Agile Management for Software Engineering: Applying the Theory of Constraints for Business Results." It's a great combination of two of my interest areas today.
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The New Social Learning by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner is a great primer for thinking about using social media within organizations, with a focus around how these tools enhance organizational learning capacity.
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I recently finished an interesting set of books that seemed to share a theme. Or at least a thread of the familiar: Betterness by Umair Haque; The Elastic Enterprise by Nicholas Vitalari and Haydn Shaughnessy; Abundance by Peter H Diamandis and Steven Kotler; and At Home by Bill Bryson.
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Overall, David Weinberger's new book, Too Big to Know, is an interesting study of knowledge and where the networked world is taking us.
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I breezed through Jim Benson's short and informative Why Plans Fail: Cognitive Bias, Decision Making, and Your Business. As you can see from the subtitle, it isn't about blaming someone else for why plans fail. It's about helping us see how our own thinking gets us in this mess.
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Euan Semple's "Organizations Don't Tweet People Do" compiles his great thinking on helping organizations make the shift to being more human.
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To create change we have to move people to a new way of acting with each other (behaviors). The concept behind Viral Change is to make those behaviors infection: spread, copy, reinforce, and spread more.
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Christopher Avery's "Teamwork is an Individual Skill" may be ten years old, but it is a great resource. The short summary: I am responsible for the success of any venture in which I choose to participate
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Review of Eric Von Hippel's "Democratizing Innovation" which looks at the spread of user-inspired and user-created innovations throughout all industries. What creates it? What sustains it?
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Trying to make a decision and feel stuck between two options? Or is your organization struggling with the classic don't spend money but then overspend to "hit the numbers." Evaporating clouds to the rescue.
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I read Tom DeMarco's _Slack_. Short review: read the book, even if it is ten years old. Long review: read this entry.
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The Power of the 2x2 Matrix by Alex Lowy and Phil Hood gives some excellent material around problem solving and analytical thinking that goes into 2x2 matrices. Read the first two sections in detail and save the examples in Part 3 for reference material.
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Rob Newbold's "The Billion Dollar Solution" is a good buy for anyone who is interested in doing CCPM - either as an implementer / consultant or as the company for which CCPM is the way to run projects.
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Overview of Larry Leach's "Lead Project Leadership" in which he blends CCPM with other improvement perspectives and straight up Project Management skills.
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Andreas Scherer's business novel, Be Fast or Be Gone, was a very fast read for me. I thought it did a great job of describing how Critical Chain Project Management might be introduced to an organization without going into the gory detail of what-is-CCPM.
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I review Kate Pugh's new book on Sharing Hidden Know-How and the Knowledge Jam. Good stuff.
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If you are interested ideas about computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) and what might happen with smart technologies in everyone's pocket, have a look at Smart Mobs from Howard Rheingold.
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Mark White has published an eBook as your very own "Get Out of Jail Free" card - information jail. It's an interesting three-week program to help someone change their relationship to their own overload.
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Carla O'Dell and Cindy Hubert's new book _The New Edge in Knowledge_ covers a lot of ground on describing what organizations are doing with knowledge management.
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My thoughts on "Nudge" by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, a book about designing the world in which real people live and play. And where they make decisions that could be better.
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Interesting to read Womack and Jones' _Lean Thinking_ and see where there are similarities and differences with Theory of Constraints. I am always learning something new.
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Terminology from Womack and Jones book _Lean Thinking_ has me thinking and wondering. And it gives me reason to create a very brief glossary.
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I just finished David Anderson's _Kanban_, and I really enjoyed it for its sensible combination of ideas into something that really seems to work. And while he doesn't discuss it, I see application in many other areas than software development.
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My thoughts about Nick Bilton's book, I live in the future & here's how it works. If you enjoy technology, this may not tell you anything new. But it is a great collection of ideas and research about what it coming.
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Complexity is everywhere. We have to live with it! Donald Norman's book on the topic provides some suggestions to both designers and users on how to ease our lives.
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Well, it looks like I made it to 50+ books in 2010 with a combination of busines, fun and a few children's books thrown into the mix.
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Based on a recommendation, I decided to pick up Daryl Conner's Managing at the Speed of Change. The book's focus is more on the underpinnings of why changes work (or fail), based on his research and experiences. I enjoyed the model he developed in the book.
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I've been growing interested in how to use Kanban in the context of knowledge work and projects, so I took a quick scan through _Kanban Made Simple_ by John M. Gross and Kenneth R. McInnis.
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I read SPIN Selling for the first time and enjoyed it. SPIN is about asking questions to understand the Situation, Problem, Implications, and Needs-Payoff of your customers / clients. It's about creating buy-in by connecting to explicit needs of and benefits to the customer.
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The final chapter of SPIN Selling stood out for its emphasis on turning theory (the book) into a regular practice.
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I seem to be on a kick of late. This is my third book from John Kotter. This time, it is "Buy-In: saving your good idea from getting shot down" that just came out this fall. I read a copy from the library, but I have also decided to purchase a copy for use as reference - that's probably a recommendation already.
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A review of the TOC Handbook chapters on project management. It's good stuff but very dense. This is close reading and re-reading material, not something to read when you are tired.
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My brief review of John Kotter's "The Heart of Change." Throughout the book, Kotter emphasizes two things - moreso than in Leading Change. One, leading change is all about changing people's behavior. And two, the path through all the stories is about "See, Feel, Change."
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John Kotter's Leading Change has been sitting on my should-read list for quite a while, particularly since my association with the MS-LOC program at Northwestern. It's also come up a number of times on a Theory of Constraints mailing list as a must read to get a better understanding of why change implementations get stuck and what to do about it.
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I don't quite know how this happened, but I have just read another book on the tribal dynamics of organizations. This time it is Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright.
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Another book in my long backlog was Ray Immelman's "Great Boss Dead Boss." I finally picked up a copy and thoroughly enjoyed it. As with many good books, the ideas have me looking at the world in a slightly different way.
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Lisa Scheinkopf's Thinking for a Change: Putting the TOC Thinking Processes to Use came out over ten years ago, but it does a good job of describing and summarizing the Theory of Constraints (TOC) thinking processes.
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My review of The Conductive Organization by Hubert Saint-Onge and Charles Armstrong.
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It's surprisingly difficult to copy a personal book reading list into the online services of LibraryThing and Goodreads. It is doable, though. Now, if someone points me to a better service, I will either hug them or scream.
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John Hagel spoke this evening about his new book, The Power of Pull, at the Berkman Center. I took a boatload of notes and this is the result of that.
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I was sent a complimentary copy of The Imperfect Leader because I've been reading and reviewing a number of other business novels. As you might guess from the title, this one focuses on leadership.
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I've been meaning to read Bill Dettmer's The Logical Thinking Processes for a while. It covers the "thinking processes" as defined by the Theory of Constraints community. And these are a larger structure of tools used to help describe and define Change programs. In the TOC community, change is defined by What to Change, What to Change To, and How to Cause the Change.
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My review of Chip and Dan Heath's new book, Switch. It has been making the rounds of my networks, and now it sits next to me with lots of dog-eared paged and underlinings. And special thanks to Tammy Green for adding another point of view to my thoughts here.
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I don't quite know how I got on this kick of reading, but in the last year or two, I have read a number of books that are centered around the 18th and 19th Centuries and many of the discoveries and social upheavals that happened around that time. It's fascinating to learn about how these things are all inter-related. The Invention of Air by Stephen Johnson is another of those books.
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