Shapiro points out that innovation is a well-worn subject and that in many cases those tried and true beliefs about innovation are neither innovative nor effective.  In response Shapiro offers 40 tips some of which confirm but many of which breath new life into innovation thinking and practice.

The book is recommended to individuals and teams who are looking to initiative innovation programs, particularly for the first time, as it gives fresh thinking to the field.  Experienced innovators or students of innovation will find much of the first part of the book familiar and may tend to discount is value.  That would be a mistake as Shapiro effectively bridges the best parts of current innovation practices with new ideas to create new results.

The book presents each of the 40 tips in short and focused descriptions, many with examples that make them easier to understand and deploy.  In addition, Shapiro makes use of illustrations when it matters to help people see the ideas clearly.  This gives the book both an intellectual feel as its stimulates your thinking as well as an actionable and practical side needed to create value from innovation.

Among the better tips I found in the book include:

• Don’t think outside the box; find a better box
• The performance paradox
• Hire people you do not like
• Why pyramids are one of the seven wonders

Other tips are more familiar but provide a comprehensive view of the issues and practices associated with innovation.   The combination creates a new set of ‘proven’ practices that give people a leg up on getting new results from their innovation projects.

Read the whole book, which may sound silly but the information in the introduction, overview and appendices is valuable not filler.

The book is recommended for teams starting innovation projects where these new ideas can have the greatest impact.  Experienced teams will tend to view many of these tips as ‘old ground’ and need to be encouraged to think differently about innovation and how to employ it in your organization.

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This book is highly recommended to anyone who wants to understand why we can have a recession, a jobless recovery and growing income distribution inequities all at the same time.  This book does a tremendous job steering its explanation based on facts, insights from other economists and thought leaders.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s basic argument is that we are just beginning to see the long-term impact of technology on the economy. The authors highlight this using the analogy of Chinese story where the emperor agrees to pay a servant a grain of rice and then doubling that amount for each square on the chessboard.  That doubling is the foundation of technology’s driving forces embodied in the laws of Moore, Metcalfe and others.

The authors believe that we are just getting to the back half of the chessboard where a doubling of technology creates gigantic leaps in capability at an unprecedented pace.  These leaps are beginning to displace human work as technologies like IBM’s Watson and others demonstrate the ability to handle complex work.

The book is divided into five chapters:

Chapter 1. Technology’s influence on the employment and the economy.  The first chapter provides an overview of the book and its chapters.  Here the authors do a good job supporting their argument based on the observation and ideas of others.  The chapter could have been a dry recitation of prior research, but Brynjolfsson and McAfee have described the issue in ways that are broadly accessible.

Chapter 2.  Humanity and technology on the second half of the chessboard — discusses the impact of technology on the economy, productivity and employment.  This chapter focuses on things that are emerging as the capability of technology has crossed a threshold.  The most interesting part of this discussion concentrated on General Purpose Technology (GPT) and how these technologies drive further investment in technology.

Chapter 3.  Creative destruction: the economic of accelerating technology and disappearing jobs.  This chapter is the most informative as it explains the impact of technology on employment and income.  Here the discussion of highly-skilled vs. skilled workers, Superstars vs. Everyone else, and Capital vs. Labor all explain different aspects of the economy we all live in.

Chapter 4: What is to be done?  Prescriptions and Recommendations — contains a list of 13 recommendations for fostering organizational innovation and investing in human capital.  These are two areas where investments can lead to creating new employment opportunities and growth.  I will not go over the recommendations, many are ones that you may have heard of in the past, but the authors put these recommendations into a new context.

5. Conclusion: the Digital Frontier — provides a discussion of the new economy emerging and the impact of digitalization in terms of creating new sources of value and disruption.  It is an apt conclusion to the book.

Each chapter focuses on a different aspect technology, the economy, employment etc. in a concise and informative way.  The authors take full advantage of the book’s electronic form by providing active links to referenced research and opinion.  While not accessible when you are disconnected, the ability to quickly jump into some original source material adds to the value of the book.

The book can be easily read in under 4 hours and would be the best use of your time on a long plane ride where you can read and think through the author’s ideas and their implications.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee have created a readily accessible, influential and provocative book that should be read by business executives, policy makers and technologist to give them a better understanding of the deep forces at work in the global economy.  Some will disagree with the author’s recommendations, particularly given that it would be easy to associate some of their recommendations and moderately to the right.  That would be a mistake, as I believe Brynjolfsson and McAfee have been able to take a relatively neutral view of an economist to these issues.

At $3.99 on Amazon, this book is more than well worth the cost and most importantly your time and attention.

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Jim Collins extends and deepens the body of knowledge around the fundamentals of success. Great by Choice represents the second half of Collin’s earlier book on company failure – How the Mighty Fall. While that earlier book concentrated on factors that drive failure, this describes the characteristics of sustained success.

This book is classic Collins. Well researched, clearly describes and expertly packaged for executives to incorporate these concepts into their lexicon and thoughts. This book is recommended as the capstone of the study of the fundamentals of great companies.

Great by Choice is a lot like How the Mighty Fall as it’s a short, concise and focused book. About half of it is content and half is appendices, FAQs and methodology – just like HtMF. Put the two together and you get a comprehensive look at modern corporate success.

This is a book for understanding and admiring the factors Collin’s points out as driving superior performance.

The book describes these factors,
but description is not prescription.

This book is not a ‘how to’ book, nor one that provides much action oriented help. It relies on the reader understanding Collins points and then tailoring them to their situation. That places the burden of value on the reader, which is where it should be as greatness is less a recipe than a recommitment to hard work.

Great by Choice contains a set of core concepts that define the major chapters in the book. Here is a short description of each to provide an idea of what is in Great by Choice and how Collins describes the characteristics of companies that have exceptional performance, what Collins calls 10x.

20 Mile March describes the fanatic discipline that leads you to manage for the long term rather than chasing short-term results or the fade. Essentially this is the business version of the classical Greek axiom of balance and discipline.

Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs by being empirically creative by experimenting intelligently everywhere and exploit where you know you are having success. This is more than the idea of ‘failing fast’. It is a definition of innovation based on the combination of creativity, discipline and data.

Leading above the death line describes the productive paranoia that was captured by Andy Grove’s management mantra. This is a business version of the Boy Scout’s principle of ‘Be Prepared.’ This chapter concentrates on the success and practices of preparation and having reserves that enable you to achieve more.

SMaC describes the company’s principles that are Specific, Methodolical and Consistent. This chapter in essence describes the power of common vision, direction and culture. Collins points out that SMaC is one of the more powerful ways to exert control in a dynamic world.

Return on Luck discusses how leaders and laggards face unpredictable positive and negative events. This is perhaps one of the best chapters as it describes how Collins and his team investigated the phenomenon of luck. As expected the conclusion is that luck does not play a guiding factor, rather its how you take advantage of good luck and are prepared (death line) for bad luck.

These concepts are all interrelated and go beyond the book’ s triangle graphic. You cannot do a 20 mile march well without SMAC and both are worth lest without the preparation associated with leading above the death line.

Overall, I recommend Great by Choice for both fan’s of Collins’ work and for people who are new to this discussion. Yes this book is a continuation the prior books, but it does a great job of providing new insight without overly repeating prior points.

Great By Choice to be a good place for people to start. You do not need to read Collin’s other books, but logically this book is the second half of How the Mighty Fall. I would suggest that if you are going to read both that you read HtMF first as you need to fix that first before the ideas in this book will have and effect.

Strengths

The book contains strong ideas that are simple to communicate and easy to mentally think about how they fit with your organization. Its easy to see how they would may your company a 10X performer.

The case descriptions are informative, insightful and illustrative. The cases are well worn: Southwest Airlines, Microsoft, Apple, Progressive Insurance and Intel, but well applied.

The use of mountaineering and explorers as non-business based examples will give you the stories to tell around the water cooler.

Challenges

The book provides powerful description of concepts that we already know. Rewriting Collins’ points boil down to the following: have along term vision (20 miles), experiment to innovate (bullets and canon), ‘Be Prepared’ (death line), follow your core (SMaC) and take advantage when possible (Return on Luck)

The companies featured are studied from 1977 to 2002 which was a period of significant change: the internet, oil crisis, stagflation, etc. However, historically economists have dubbed this period part of what they call the great moderation. So while these principles are timeless, they do not account for what has happened and happening now.

There is no treatment of technology in the book. Given that much of the global, collaborative and social world is driven by technology, this is a big omission. It csn also give executives the impression that they do not need to change the way they operate or the elements of the operations to choose to be great.

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Professionally we remain socially isolated behind firewalls and management’s concerns about relinquishing control while retaining responsibility.

The irony is that while organizations are working feverishly to participate in social media marketing, they see it as something that is more relevant outside of their company than inside.  I spoke with a CEO of social media software company who could talk for hours about the power of customer collaboration, yet when asked if he applied his tools in house said, ‘this is not for us, we do not work that way.’ It seems like the last frontier of social collaboration just might be inside your company.

Creating a social capability and a capacity for collaboration inside your company presents challenges at all levels of the organization.

• Leaders, executives and managers who do not want to let go of their authority, resources, responsibility or control,
• Corporate functions, like HR, Finance, IT, etc., who see social media based collaboration as competition for their role, creating IP risk, or wasting employees time,
• IT professionals who concentrate on providing tools leading to a strategy of ‘provide and pray’,
• Individuals who are reluctant to stick their necks out and share, or to get involved as they have been burned by similar initiatives in the past.

It seems that while everyone wants to be social on the outside, inside they continue to operate as always on the inside.   While there are some good books on social marketing, Adam Metz’s The Social Customer is one, there is little in the way of advice, process, tools for bringing social media inside an organization.

That is the focus of a new book by Anthony Bradley and myself called “The Social Organization: how to tap the collective genius of your customers and employees.” The book is now shipping both electronically on Amazon and out to bookstores.  The book will be featured at Gartner’s Symposia this fall in Orlando, Barcelona, Australia’s Gold Coast and Mumbai.  Executive Programs members will receive a complimentary copy.

The book is based on looking at companies that have done more than deployed social media tools, but incorporated those tools into the core of their operations.  In the process they have become social organizations, which is something different than having social media deployed on your intranet.

If your organization is trying to be socially outgoing with customers but socially shy internally or even anti-social when it comes to how you work inside the firewall, then this book offers an approach to building collaborative communities that achieve results not possible via traditional top-down task forces or end-to-end process teams.

Future blog posts will present ideas about what it means to be a social organization and asks you to share your comments.   To get things started, I thought I would describe the issue we have focused on, talk a little about the book itself, and invite you to read the first chapter by following this link to The Social Organization Website.  The site is publically available, after a brief registration.

Other links concerning the book include:

Harvard Business Review Blog Post : All organizations are social but few are social organizations

Financial Times Interview about the book.

The Social Organization Facebook Page

A blog post from my co-author Anthony Bradley

More to come, not as marketing, but more of a discussion and collaboration on the challenges, concepts, tools and experiences of making where you work as socially dynamic, inviting and engaging as how you are trying to sell what you do to customers.

After all, why do you have to lead a double life, social at home and cloistered at work!

More to come and please let us know what you think.  Is it time for work and your organization to become social?  What is holding it back?

Anthony Bradley and Mark McDonald are the co-authors of Fall 2011 book, The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees

Moore is a well-established innovator, thinker and marketing expert in the Silicon Valley.  His prior books like Crossing the Chasm,  Dealing with Darwin, etc. are foundational in the tech industry.  This book leverages these prior works, but it does not require you to have read them.  Suggestion if you are looking to read a companion work I would suggest Crossing the Chasm as it is related to the topics discussed in Escape Velocity.   This book is not a rehash of Moore’s market adoption model.

What makes this book highly recommended is that Moore offers a broad set of tools that work outside of tech to give executives and leaders real tools that they need right now.  This book is a model for a business book that is actionable, practical and deep enough to help you apply the ideas while still being engaging and interesting.

The book organizes itself around a hierarchy of powers that together shape a market, companies competing in that market and the products and services they offer in that market.  The powers are:

Category Power – the demand for a class of products, for example smart phones, fuel-efficient cars, or energy bars.

Company Power – the relative status and prospect for your company compared with peers.  For example:  Nokia vs. Samsung, Honda vs. Ford,  Cliff vs. Kashi

Market Power – the company’s power relative to a market segment, for example Subway in Quick Service Restaurants.

Offer Power – the demand for a product or service relative to reference competitors. The classic here is Whopper vs. Big Mac.

Execution Power – the ability to outperform competitors under equal conditions

The remaining chapters in the book concentrate on each of these powers, what they are, how they work, tools for applying them and at least two specific case studies that illustrate their importance.  Put all of this together and you get a powerful and actionable playbook for creating new market strategies.

Moore does surprisingly little pontification on market strategies, something common in other marketing related books.  Instead he shows you via 13 tools that you can use found in each of the powers.  To give you an example of the completeness of this book and here is a list of the tools it contains and explains:

Category Power

• Category maturity lifecycle
• Growth/Maturity Matrix
• Horizon model

Company Power

• Competitive separation
• Two-business architecture model
• Crown Jewels model

Marketing Power

• Nine point market strategy framework

Offer power

• Retain or innovate model
• Six levers model
• Price/Benefit model
• Core/context model

Execution Power

• The arc of execution

Listing all of these models may give the impression that the book is more of an encyclopedia or compendium than a book that makes an actionable argument.  Nothing could be further from reality.  Moore uses his experience, the central thesis of the book and case studies to describe why certain things have happened, why leaders made different decisions and the results of those decisions.

Moore finishes the book with a discussion of how you use these tools to transform you execution, vision or strategy.  This brings the toolset together and demonstrates that these tools work in practice rather than in theory.

Escape Velocity is a culmination of Moore’s other works.  Rather than simply restating them in today’s context, Moore is sharing the fundamental tools leaders can use to develop and execute their company’s strategies.  This is one of those rare books that should be purchased, studied, annotated and tried in your company.  Not every tool will fit, but the book gives you enough support such that you can make that judgment for yourself.

This sounds like a gushing review, and this has been one of the best books I have read in 2011.  The book does have some flaws.  The examples and cases concentrate on high-tech, which may turn off some.  The requirement for a leader that is willing to make asymmetric investments in new products and services is true, but under developed in the book.  The book covers Moore’s personal experience, which will make some see it as a digital infomercial.   I believe these weak points exist, but this book is more than worth your time and attention.

A suggestion, buy the hardcopy as you will be making notes throughout the book, dog earing pages, etc.  I read it on an eReader, which is great, but now using it as a reference is not the same as a hard copy.  You will use this book as a future reference.

Highly Recommended for any business executive who feels that their current strategy has lost its potency, punch and power.

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Every organization faces the need to create new solutions, processes, products and services better, faster and cheaper.  Often mislabeled as innovation what firms need is a better approach to ‘start up’ new things.  This is the focus of Eric Ries’s book The Lean Startup.  This book is an excellent resource for innovators looking to start something new either a new company or a new capability in an existing company.

Highly recommended for anyone who wants to create something new, whether in their garage on the weekend or within their company.    I suggest that this book is required reading for every CIO, product developer and business unit leader each of whom is charged with creating new solutions and revenue streams.

Eric Ries’s book describes an innovative approach to starting a new business, based on his experience as a social media start-up and consulting other companies.  The term ‘lean’ in Lean Startup applies to a different form of waste that traditional lean thinking.  In a start-up waste is defined by Ries as anything that keeps the team from learning about how to create value for the customer.   The techniques Ries applies to being a Lean Startup are related to general lean principles but unique to the challenges of creating something new.

Ries makes a significant point when he wrote, “Entrepreneurship is a kind of management.”  And that point sets the context for the rest of this book.  Taking a management approach enables Ries to focus on the mechanics and approaches to getting new ideas out and into the market.  It also allows him to incorporate Lean thinking in ways that address many of the limitations of high risk, low yield, long lead time product development processes.

Unlike prior books on startups, Ries focused on approaches and metrics used to guide the actual process of creating a startup. This is in marked contrast to other books that discuss funding, marketing, etc. – everything other than the work required to create a startup.  The fact that these practices can be applied within companies makes this book one of the top two or three I have read so far in 2011.

Strengths

• Describes the principles of entrepreneurship as management in terms that are readily applicable in a startup as well as in established companies that are creating an internal start up.
• Discussion of specific techniques and concepts related to running an effective startup.  Ideas like validated learning, vanity metrics, innovation learning, and minimum viable products, among others.  Each of these techniques offers a new approach and way of thinking about the process of creating new sources of value.
• Ries uses his experience to discuss how these ideas are applied in real life providing the reader with sufficient depth to think about how these ideas might apply to your situation.
• The book presents these ideas in a clear and engaging manner that builds understanding.

Challenges

• The book’s examples and cases concentrate on eCommerce and social media Startups that will limit its direct applicability outside of high tech.
• The book gives you just enough detail to start you thinking but not enough to give you a recipe that you can apply on your own.
• The book can be read as an extended advertisement for Reis and his startup consulting practice.  You get this feeling when he introduces a new subject, providing a description without actionable advice and examples.

Overall, this is one of the books that everyone should take the time out to read, as the Lean Start-up practices are actionable both within a start up and an established company.  Everyone needs more than a stream of ideas, we need a stream of new solutions and the Lean Start-up provides a strong description of how to bring those ideas to market.

Related Post on Lean IT, although not directly related to the book:

Lean IT — Muda Matters

A model for a Lean IT organization

Adam Metz provides a comprehensive, well through out, and well-presented view of as much of the totality of social media, CRM and marketing as anyone.

Metz provides a simple and descriptive way to think about social CRM.  Companies need to recognize that the customer is no longer just a customer but a ‘social customer’ with different needs, ideas and wants.  Your brand, product, or service is no longer just that – rather you want it to become a social object.  A social object is something that people look at, discuss, and pass from person to person, put their stamp on.  These simple ideas are powerful in changing the way you think about social media, branding, marketing building and CRM.

This book is more like a downloaded website on Social Customers and Social CRM than it is a book.  It has a heavy focus on implementation decisions and realities rather than trying to make an executive argument about Social CRM.   This is a treatment we desperately need to create value from Social CRM.

The table of contents provides the best illustration of the coverage of this book.  I found these chapters break into three distinct sections which I have described below:

These first four chapters constitute the firs part of the book that lays out the concepts and argument for Social CRM.

• Chapter 1: The Brand as Social Object and the Business for Social CRM
• Chapter 2: The “How” and “Where” of Engagement and the Four Social Customer Scenarios
• Chapter 3: Social Customer Relationship Management
• Chapter 4: Social Customer Insights and an Introduction to the 23 Use Cases of Social CRM

The next six chapters that detail the 23 Use Cases for Social CRM follow the first part.

• Chapter 5: Social Marketing
• Chapter 6: Social Sales
• Chapter 7: Social Support
• Chapter 8: Social Innovation and Product Development
• Chapter 9: Collaboration
• Chapter 10: Seamless Customer Experience

The third section starts at chapter 11 and focuses on the implementation and operational aspects of Social CRM.  Organizational, metrics and operational issues are the focus of these remaining chapters.

• Chapter 11: Metrics and Rationale
• Chapter 12: The Methodology
• Chapter 13: Social CRM Strategy
• Chapter 14: Misunderstandings and Failures in Social CRM
• Chapter 15: The 98 Percent Customer Management Model
• Chapter 16: Social Customer Analytics: How to Tell if Your Team’s Doing it Right
• Chapter 17: Work Flows and Escalation Paths
• Chapter 18: Social Advertising, The Social/Mobile Platform, and Integration with Retail
• Chapter 19: The Social Customer and the Law
• Chapter 20: Consumer Trust and Ethics
• Chapter 21: International Feel

Now 21 chapters in less than 260 pages means that the book is not equally deep in all areas, but each chapter provides a context and links to materials you will need to consider.   This book is not a series of blog posts loosely stitched together. The chapters are small, ranging form 6 – 12 pages that provide a connected view of the issue.

Strengths

• The book treats the topic of social CRM comprehensively considering it from all angles and aspects.  I found the pieces on Social Customer and the Law and the 23 use cases particularly helpful.
• Open, in the truest sense of open source and open innovation.  Metz liberally borrows and builds on the solid word put forth by others from Greenberg’s CRM at the Speed of Light, to Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.  Metz does not claim to know everything and he builds onto these and other ideas and frameworks.  This is in the true sense of open source as these additions advance everyone’s thinking.
• Flexible as Metz often raises issues through asking you consider various questions, conditions or situations rather than assuming that your company is the same as the others or that all situations require the same solution.  This is critical to creating an implementable set of advice.

Challenges

• The book is a little vendor centric, particularly at the beginning where it seems that the advice, ideas and recommendations are attributed to people from Social CRM technology companies.  This balances itself out as the book progresses.
• The book gets a bit ponderous in the middle as you go through the 23 use cases.  The march through 21 chapters make some of the middle chapters blend together so its not a bad idea to put it down and come back latter.  Definitely read some of the latter chapters on measurement, the law and trust.
• The case studies are short, helpful but a little too superficial to give you a sense of their issues and implementation experience.

These challenges are not insurmountable.  I would recommend reading the first part of the book, Chapters 1 – 4 and then take a pause.  Put the book down for a few days and then read the middle section on the 23 use cases and the last section on implementation details.

Highly recommended as an actionable, practical and integrative resource for engaging the social customer and creating your own social objects.  Business Unit Leaders and CEOs will learn what social media applied to marketing and CRM are really about. Marketers and Sales professionals will get new tactics and ways of thinking about social CRM.  CIO’s and IT professionals will better understand the context of social CRM and the convergence of technology, marketing and the social web.

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The book mirrors much of Drucker’s latter books.  Those were anthologies of articles.  This book is an anthology of blog posts written by Wartzman over the past two years organized into seven broad categories:

• Management as a discipline
• The practice of management
• Management challenges of the twenty-first century
• On Wall Street and finance
• On values and responsibility
• The public and social sectors
• Art, music and sports

Within each category is about a dozen individual blog posts organized around an event that illustrates an organization that would benefit from or best illustrates one or more of Drucker’s ideas. Each post is about 1,000 words long making for quick and condensed reading that propels the reader through the situation and then how Drucker might respond based on his past writings and ideas.

Publishing a collection of blog posts as a book is a fairly new genre that has few rules or guidelines.  Wartzman has done a good job selecting individual posts for the topics involved.  However, the posts do repeat themselves across the length of the book and in some cases two different posts on the same subject provide slightly conflicting advice.  The book would be great if it was edited and rewritten to be better in tune with a book reader rather than a blog reader.

Overall, the book is a good general introduction for people who are not familiar with Peter Drucker’s ideas and concepts.  Recommended to people who have a passing familiarity with Drucker and are interested to learn more.  They will benefit from Wartzman’s blog posts that put Drucker into modern situations and contexts.    Those who are deep Drucker fans will enjoy the book as well, but it is not a ‘must read’ for them.   For people wanting to really study and understand Drucker’s ideas and theories of management, there is no better substitute than reading the man himself.

Strengths

The organization of situations and ideas into the topics above is an influential way to make the material accessible to people who do not know Drucker’s work in detail.

The blog posts are well written, focused and well selected to be topical and connect the reader with recent business events.

The blog posts provide a topical and context heavy index to Drucker’s work and publications.  The reader can easily go to the original source material from reading these posts.  This creates a gateway into the considerable body of Peter Drucker’s work.

Challenges

The blog posts are rather fragmented leading to fragmenting Drucker’s ideas and messages.  In several places the same idea, for example the theory of the business, is repeated in different places and as answers for different situations.  Understanding that and other concepts would have been clearer if the posts were less fragmented or organized by concept rather than topic.

It is understandable that Wartzman would be a devotee of Drucker as he is the executive director of the Drucker institute.  His affection for Drucker shows through in the writing, which when taking together for more than 250 pages can get in the way of the message.  Drucker was a great thinker, but not every one of his ideas was perfect.  The superlatives found in the blog posts do get in the way.

The book is more about what would Drucker do based on what he has written rather than how would current events evolve, strengthen or challenge Drucker’s ideas.  It is true that Drucker’s principles and main points are mostly timeless, but to say that they are universally applicable and provide a path forward places Drucker at a disadvantage.

People who are fans of Peter Drucker should probably access the website which originated these blog posts as I am sure there is more there and discussions of the posts.  People who are interested in learning more about Drucker and the relevance of his ideas should read this book as it provides a topical introduction to Drucker’s ideas and thoughts.

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What is the business value of IT?

This is a perennial question that dominates executive discussions. Many have sought to answer this question with fancy algorithms, consulting practices, benchmark data and other tools. However, the question is basic to IT so it should have a basic answer – right? Absolutley and fortunately Hunter and Westerman provide much of the answer in this book.

The Real Business of IT is a clear and focused look at the issue of IT value and the approaches to capture, communicate and increase that value. This book is unique in several respects. It is a book written for CIOs largely based on the experience of CIOs.

The book features extended practices from leading companies like McKesson, Intel, Freescale, Deltak and many others. Building on those sources, Hunter and Westerman explain a simple virtuous cycle for driving IT value. They illustrate this cycle with about a dozen concepts that CIOs can use tomorrow to change the way they talk about value.

Hunter and Westerman make good use of these resources creating a book that is filled accessible information. One of the ways they do this is through using analogies from outside of IT. This not only makes the ideas easy to understand but also it gives the CIOs stories that they can use to inform and educate their business peers about IT.

This book helps CIOs avoid common value traps that limit the view of IT’s value in the enterprise. It then goes on to build the tools and techniques to demonstrate the value for money in IT, how IT helps run, grow and transform the enterprise, manage IT’s unit costs, and other key concepts.

The book is tuned and intended for CIOs and IT executives, rather than business executives. This is not to say business executives should not read this book, its just that it is not written for them. By focusing on CIOs, the authors avoid much of the complexity found in other books. This should be taken as a strength since that focus enables the authors to clearly provide practices and tools that CIOs can use.

The business value of IT sits in the conversations within your enterprise not in compliance with some industry standard. Therefore, I would suggest that CIOs use this book with their teams to build that conversation, in their terms and their situation.

This book is highly recommended for CIOs and IT executives all of whom will face the need to answer questions about the value of IT. In this book, CIOs will learn directly from the authors as well as the insights of leading CIOs and their examples. This is a powerful combination that makes the investment in The Real Business of IT a good value.

Strengths

Anchoring IT value solidly in terms of business performance. This is critical to establishing a clear and unequival way of measuring the value of IT.
Actionable and practical advise that comes directly from CIO experience.

Contains positive and negative examples on the business value of IT

Clearly illustrated tables and tools that CIOs can put into action quickly

References actual performance data and metrics

Uses non-IT analogies and stories that facilitate both understanding IT value issues and CIOs to use these analogies to make their own case in the enterprise.

Challenges

While the book is strong in terms of tools and advice, many of these specfics are generic. This means that CIOs will have to tailor these tools to their own situation. This is not a big weakness, as CIOs should not simply implement solutions blindly.

Business executives often express value in terms of financial measures and terms. While the book advises CIOs to focus on business performance, it could have done with some expanded financial content.

The latter chapters that discuss BPR and organizations change cover them in a traditional way. This reinforces the importance of creating value beyond more than just IT.

A powerful resource for every manager and a critical resource for every new manager — 5 stars.

When I was coming up the ranks we all observed that whenever someone on our team was promoted into management, they changed. At the time we used to joke that they had a ‘management lobotomy’ as they seemed to no longer care about things that used to matter. It wasn’t until I was promoted that I realized the differences when you are a being a manager.

Explaining those differences and how you become an effective manager what Being the Boss is all about.

This is one of those rare books’s that takes a serious and comprehensive look at the practices, processes and personal traits required to be an effective manager and leader. It is highly recommended for anyone making the transition to becoming a manager as well as a reference that managers should consult when the going gets tough.

Encourage your HR department to buy every manager a copy, as the book is a virtual MBA level orientation and course on management and leadership. Taking this approach will save your company significant time and money, as this book will help mangers more than most management training out there.

Here is why:

Hill and Lineback provide a powerful study of the management from the perspective of showing and telling new managers what they need to know and how to adapt to being a manager rather than a team member.

The book contains a mix of academic discussion and allegory that illustrates the major points. The combination makes for s book that is thick with good advice and accessible explanation that helps managers realize why things are different and how they need to adapt and change their approaches. The book will challenge their thinking without compromising the courage required to become the boss.

Hill and Lineback center their advice on three specific and important tasks facing new managers.

• Managing yourself
• Managing your network
• Managing your team

The book then goes into detail by providing a discussion of the realities associated with the modern organization and how that shapes the way managers build their success. At times the book goes almost into too much depth, becoming akin to an operating manual than a guide for management. Experienced managers will see these discussions as a bit redundant, however careful reading and consideration of these explanations will help even the most experienced manager.

The authors take a very real politick view of management in the modern organization which leads the point out that mangers have to hold their nose and accept the less attractive aspects of managing in a corporate reality. While this is very realistic, it also tells new managers that the system is what it is and they have little chance of changing it.

Being the Boss avoids becoming a dry manual by illustrating it is advice through an ongoing story of Jason Pedersen, a new manager that is being thrown from the frying pan into the fire. The credible story around the management challenges Jason faces not only raised the accessibility of the advice, but also helps you identify with the practices. The authors use the allegory as effectively as Goldratt does in the Goal.

One unexpected bonus in the book is that Jason is working on a technology intensive project making Being the Boss mandatory reading for new IT managers, at least in my opinion.

Overall this is a strong book on a strategic subject. It is unique from the perspective that this is not a study of managers or management, rather it is a hard look at what it means for someone — you — to be a manager.

Hill and Lineback show you how managers need to work and explain why they need to work that way. At times you will find the chapters sometimes go down in the weeds, but that is ok as new managers have a lot to learn. I know I did and often still do.