Books

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Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

Winning by not competing: a fresh approach to strategy Since the dawn of the industrial age, companies have engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation. Yet these hallmarks of competitive strategy are not the way to create profitable growth in the future. In a book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne argue that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and thirty industries, the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors, but from creating “blue oceans”: untapped new market spaces ripe for growth. Such strategic moves—which the authors call “value innovation”—create powerful leaps in value that often render rivals obsolete for more than a decade. Blue Ocean Strategy presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any company can use to create and capture blue oceans. A landmark work that upends traditional thinking about strategy, this book charts a bold new path to winning the future.

We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business

Wikinomics and The Wisdom of Crowds identified the phenomena of emerging social networks, but they do not confront how businesses can profit from the wisdom of crowds. WE ARE SMARTER THAN ME by Barry Libert and Jon Spector, Foreword by Wikinomics author Don Tapscott, is the first book to show anyone in business how to profit from the wisdom of crowds. Drawing on their own research and the insights from an enormous community of more than 4,000 people, Barry Libert and Jon Spector have written a book that reveals what works, and what doesn’t, when you are building community into your decision making and business processes. In We Are Smarter Than Me, you will discover exactly how to use social networking and community in your business, driving better decision-making and greater profitability. The book shares powerful insights and new case studies from product development, manufacturing, marketing, customer service, finance, management, and beyond. You’ll learn which business functions can best be accomplished or supported by communities; how to provide effective moderation, balance structure with independence, manage risk, define success, implement effective metrics, and much more. From tools and processes to culture and leadership, We Are Smarter than Me will help you transform the promise of social networking into a profitable reality.

Succeeding with SOA: Realizing Business Value Through Total Architecture

Today, business processes and information systems are so tightly intertwined that they must be designed together, as parts of a total architecture, to realize enterprise goals. In Succeeding with SOA, Paul Brown shows how service-oriented architectures (SOAs) provide the best structure for such integration: clean, well-defined interfaces between collaborating entities. But even SOAs need to be correctly understood and implemented to avoid common failures. Drawing on decades of experience, Dr. Brown explains what business managers and IT architects absolutely need to know–including critical success factors–to undertake this essential work.

SOA in Practice: The Art of Distributed System Design

This book demonstrates service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a concrete discipline rather than a hopeful collection of cloud charts. Built upon the author’s firsthand experience rolling out a SOA at a major corporation, SOA in Practice explains how SOA can simplify the creation and maintenance of large-scale applications. Whether your project involves a large set of Web Services-based components, or connects legacy applications to modern business processes, this book clarifies how — and whether — SOA fits your needs.

Rules for Revolutionaries

Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist at Apple Computer and an iconoclastic corporate tactician who now works with high-tech startups in Silicon Valley, is back in print with his seventh book: Rules for Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services. Entertainingly written in collaboration with previous co-author Michele Moreno, it lays out Kawasaki’s decidedly audacious (but personally experienced) strategies for beating the competition and triumphing in today’s hyper-charged business environment. The book is divided into three sections, whose titles alone epitomise its thrust and tone. The first, Create Like a God, discusses the way that radical new products and services must really be developed. The second, Command Like a King, explains why take- charge leaders are truly necessary in order for such developments to succeed. And the third, “Work Like a Slave,” focuses on the commitment that is actually required to beat the odds and change the world. A concluding section is filled with entertaining and inspirational quotes on topics like technology, transportation, politics, entertainment, and medicine that show how even some of our era’s most successful ideas and people–the telephone, Louis Pasteur, and Yahoo! among them–have prevailed despite the scoffing of naysayers. –Howard Rothman, Amazon.com

Lost In Translation

Do you speak business or IT? Perhaps you speak a little of both. In today’s connected world, where business and IT are fused, chances are that if you’re a business or IT executive, or someone working to transform a business, you speak a little of both. But what if there was a third language? A common language that was natural for both business and IT, straightforward enough to use, yet sophisticated enough to work in today’s connected world? What if such a language only comprised a handful of words? With such a language, the loss in translation between the business and IT would happen less, because both would be using the same language. With such a language, business outcomes and transformations would become much more achievable. This handbook describes what this language is – the language of Information Systems for the 21st century.