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Blue Ocean Strategy
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The book’s major premise is that most markets degenerate into what the authors call "red oceans." (As in, blood in the water from vicious competition and survival of the fittest.) The characteristics of the red ocean are that the established players have implicitly agreed on the basis of competition and become embroiled in escalating competition, which eventually becomes price-based, which ultimately takes all the profit out of the game, for all the players. (The commercial airline industry is exhibit one.) The blue ocean is a new market, one that potentially co-exists side-by-side with the existing red ocean, but where there is little or no competition. Most of the book consists of tips on how to design your own blue ocean interspersed with examples of other companies who have done it. (Perhaps most memorable is Cirque du Soleil which has, very profitably, reinvented the circus.) If you are in charge of your company’s strategy, this is a must-read.
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Service Orient or Be Doomed!
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| The lads from ZapThink (Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer) have put their oar in the water with Service Orient or Be Doomed! Yes, the title is a bit over the top, but the book does have its strengths. The main thing is that it is well written, and doesn’t presuppose you know a lot of the background, which many other books on SOA do. This is a good book for management. It is much more of a “why SOA” than a “how to SOA.” Only complaint is the short shrift they give Web services. While we go out of our way to make sure people don’t equate Web services with SOA, this treatment was almost dismissive of Web services. |
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On Intelligence
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Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Pilot and the Treo, is now tackling the nature of consciousness.
The main takeaway that I got from this book was that the important, and mostly overlooked aspect of the working of the mind, is the central role that constant prediction and verification play in the ability to think.
He summarizes a great deal of neurobiological research as he examines, in great detail, how the pyramidal neurons are connected from layer to layer in different regions of the cortex, and the significance of their inconnections.
Fascinating, and sure to become a classic. |
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The Ultimate Question
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| A while back I read an article called The One Number You Need to Grow. It described Bain & Company's research to establish what they called “the loyalty effect.” They discovered that a specific measure of customer satisfaction, which they called the “Net Promoter Score” (NPS), correlated extremely well with longer term financial results. Your NPS is determined by asking your customers, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely would you be to recommend [our company/product] to your colleagues?” People who rate you 9 or 10 are your “Promoters." People who rate you 7 or 8 are “Passives,” and those who rate you 0 to 6 are “Detractors.” Your score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. A large positive number is good news. Reichheld also distinguishes between “good profit” (value-adding) and “bad profit" (e.g., gained by excessive late fees). Once you become addicted to bad profit you are on the slippery slope towards obsolescence. | |
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The Stuff of Thought
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Steven Pinker has done it again. Somehow he has managed a feat that has eluded me for more than a decade: how to make Semantics interesting and, especially, popular.
The premise of the book is that by examining how we acquire and apply proper verb use, for example: we all know that "load" goes both ways in that you can "load hay into the wagon" or "load the wagon with hay" but "pour" does not. You can "pour water into the cup" but not "pour the cup with water."
His exploration leads to the conclusion that we are not merely cutting and pasting words into templates. Even at an early age, we create a deep semantic understanding of the meaning of words which allows us to construct well-formed sentences. |
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XML for Data Architects
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Great book for data analysts coming into the XML world. XML is introduced and elaborated in a way that will make sense to DBA's, DA's and the like.
Starts with rationale for XML and moves through XML data types, Schema, structural patterns for XML use and wraps up with Web services. |
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Modeling Business Objects with XML Schema
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This is the best book out there on XML. If you want an intro to XML get Mark Johnson's article, “XML for the Absolute Beginner.“ If you want to go into the subject depth, this is the place to go.
Unlike the hundreds of other books that just describe what XML and XML Schema are, Daum's book gets deeply into why it is the way it is, by exploring how it fits in with conceptual modeling and how you would fit it into a complex environment.
He introduces a beguilingly simple example domain (jazz musicians) which he revisits over and over again throughout the book. Through this simple example he works out subtle differences in different approaches to modeling, to schema construction, to constaint definition and modeling and finally how you would map this back to Object or Relational technology.
He introduces Asset Oriented Modeling, which is a form of conceptual modeling more attuned to XML schema model creation. His treatement of polymorphism in Schema, and techniques for evolving schema, are as good as I've seen anywhere.
It's probably too late, but if you get no other book on XML and XML Schemas, this is the one to get. |
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The NHS IT Project
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| In 2001, Bill Gates visited Tony Blair and convinced him to embark on a national program to create an Electronic Patient Record and Electronic Health Records for the UK. Some 30,000 physicians work within the 300 state-run hospitals and trusts, and they treat over 50 million patients. The informal budget was one or two billion dollars. It's likely that the price tag is well over $20 billion now and may end up at twice that. To put this into perspective, this is bigger than two of the biggest capital projects in recent memory: Boston's “Big Dig” was about $15 billion as was the “Chunnel” (UK to France) - about as far from “human scale systems” as possible. The book has an excellent summary of why we need Electronic Medical Records and it covers the history of the project and strategies for bidding out the various components. If there is a flaw to the book, it’s that it is too Pollyanna-ish. It was copyrighted in 2005, when it was possible to be more optimistic than subsequent events would have warranted. | |
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Pricing on Purpose
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Most of us tend to think of our company in terms of what it is and what it does. We tend to worry about what our resources cost, how much of them we use, and therefore whether our prices will cover our costs. Baker keeps reminding us that everything that is important is outside our firm. All the value is created outside the firm, by the customer deciding that what they want is worth at least as much as they are willing to pay. He calls the difference between what the customer is willing to pay for something, and the market price of the good or service that will satisfy their need, the “consumer surplus.” How much of the surplus you share with your customer, and how you go about doing that, is what makes you more attractive to them. Instead of charging for our time, we should focus on the value of our results to the customer, and determine how to economically deliver it. |
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The Origin of Wealth
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| This could be the most important work on economics in this century. The basic thesis: economics is woefully short of what we need, and advances in other areas shed light on a new science of economics. Tthe first quarter of the book explains just how economics ran off the rails. His most damning criticisms: traditional economics treats the economy as if we were always at or very near equilibrium, and it deals almost exclusively with wealth distribution and treats wealth creation as an exogenous force. The book would be worthwhile just for the section on five relatively new disciplines that provide a basis for understanding how something as complex as an economy comes into being. He proposes that an economy is not like a biological system, and that a business plan is composed of modules - small units that can be tried out and combined into an overall strategy. His more disturbing observation is that firms don’t innovate, markets do: as conditions change, the market selects firms with the DNA to adapt. A must-read.
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The Software Architect's Profession, Marc T. Sewell & Laura M. Sewell
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This is a simple but profound book. The book is a call to arms to establish Software Architecture as a profession. The authors correctly point out that it would be premature to try to set up credentials and tests just yet, as there is no commonly accepted guidelines for what constitutes the body of knowledge, but they point us in the right direction for such a pursuit. The book deals almost exclusively with the analogy between building architects and software architects, and does so better than any treatment I've ever seen.
The book spends far more time on the building side of the analogy, but that is where we feel its real strength is. Highly recommended for Software Architects and their clients. |
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Enterprise Ontology
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This is a very profound work. It concerns the semantic underpinning of human discourse (and therefore the foundation of the enterprise). Dietz holds that a conversation for action (and, by extension, almost any business transaction) has two parts and operates at three levels. The two parts are the “production act” (information about a physical act) and the “conversation act” (the set of statements about mutual commitments being made about production acts) Dietz says there are 3 conversation acts: a claim to truth, to justice and to sincerity. Their relative importance depends on the context of the interaction. The claim to truth is that the statement uttered is literally true. The claim to justice concerns whether or not the particular “actor” has the right to even ask the question. The claim to sincerity is that the speaker is revealing an internal belief. He goes on to build an entire theory of the firm. |
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Seeing What's Next
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This book is a pragmatic guide for investors as well as small business people looking for the point of entry into large but well protected markets. One of the author's main tools is a matrix he calls the “Motivation/Ability Framework." One axis is Motivation, essentially the pot of gold waiting for the winners; the other is Ability, the capability of obtaining and deploying resources. He uses this framework to explain why many new companies that looked promising, with disruptive technology and the like, such as Cricket the low-cost local phone service, failed to thrive. Excellent book, very thought provoking.
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