Books

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The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

The neo-liberal economic policies—privatization, free trade, slashed social spending—that the Chicago School and the economist Milton Friedman have foisted on the world are catastrophic in two senses, argues this vigorous polemic. Because their results are disastrous – depressions, mass poverty, private corporations looting public wealth, by the author’s accounting – their means must be cataclysmic, dependent on political upheavals and natural disasters as coercive pretexts for free-market reforms the public would normally reject. Journalist Klein (No Logo) chronicles decades of such disasters, including the Chicago School makeovers launched by South American coups; the corrupt sale of Russia’s state economy to oligarchs following the collapse of the Soviet Union; the privatization of New Orleans’s public schools after Katrina; and the seizure of wrecked fishing villages by resort developers after the Asian tsunami. Klein’s economic and political analyses are not always meticulous. Likening free-market shock therapies to electroshock torture, she conflates every misdeed of right-wing dictatorships with their economic programs and paints a too simplistic picture of the Iraq conflict as a struggle over American-imposed neo-liberalism. Still, much of her critique hits home, as she demonstrates how free-market ideologues welcome, and provoke, the collapse of other people’s economies. The result is a powerful populist indictment of economic orthodoxy. Publishers Weekly

How to Survive in the Jungle of Enterprise Architecture Frameworks

Several times in my Enterprise Architecture (EA) practice, people asked me which framework shall I adopt or what are the benefits of the Zachman framework over TOGAF, etc. Others asked me to help them to define their own corporate EA framework. Before answering these types of questions, it is important to know what the differences and commonalities are of these frameworks and standards. This book explains the role of Enterprise Architecture Frameworks and shows the differences between the most popular Enterprise Architecture Frameworks now a day available in the world. Giving an overview of the history of most Enterprise Architecture frameworks as well as their purpose, scope, principles, structure, guidance and compliance, will support you in identifying the usefulness of these Enterprise Architecture frameworks for your own situation. For the in-depth details of the described Enterprise Architecture Frameworks, references to the original sources of information are added in the chapter References and Bibliography. Separate chapters are addressing the most popular Enterprise Architecture tools on the market and their support of existing frameworks. The book compares the 14 most popular Enterprise Architecture Frameworks in the world.

Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications

Want to tap the power behind search rankings, product recommendations, social bookmarking, and online matchmaking? This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build Web 2.0 applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by people on the Internet. With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you’ve found it. Programming Collective Intelligence takes you into the world of machine learning and statistics, and explains how to draw conclusions about user experience, marketing, personal tastes, and human behavior in general — all from information that you and others collect every day. Each algorithm is described clearly and concisely with code that can immediately be used on your web site, blog, Wiki, or specialized application. This book explains: Collaborative filtering techniques that enable online retailers to recommend products or media Methods of clustering to detect groups of similar items in a large dataset Search engine features — crawlers, indexers, query engines, and the PageRank algorithm Optimization algorithms that search millions of possible solutions to a problem and choose the best one Bayesian filtering, used in spam filters for classifying documents based on word types and other features Using decision trees not only to make predictions, but to model the way decisions are made Predicting numerical values rather than classifications to build price models Support vector machines to match people in online dating sites Non-negative matrix factorization to find the independent features in adataset Evolving intelligence for problem solving — how a computer develops its skill by improving its own code the more it plays a game Each chapter includes exercises for extending the algorithms to make them more powerful. Go beyond simple database-backed applications and put the wealth of Internet data to work for you.

The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks

C.K. Prahalad, the world’s premier business thinker, and IT scholar M.S. Krishnan unveil the critical missing link in connecting strategy to execution–building organizational capabilities that allow companies to achieve and sustain continuous change and innovation. The New Age of Innovation reveals that the key to creating value and the future growth of every business depends on accessing a global network of resources to co-create unique experiences with customers, one at a time. To achieve this, CEOs, executives, and managers at every level must transform their business processes, technical systems, and supply chain management, implementing key social and technological infrastructure requirements to create an ongoing innovation advantage. In this landmark work, Prahalad and Krishnan explain how to accomplish this shift–one where IT and the management architecture form the corporation’s fundamental foundation. This book provides strategies for: Redesigning systems to co-create value with customers and connect all parts of a firm to this process; Measuring individual behavior through smart analytics; Ceaselessly improving the flexibility and efficiency in all customer-facing and back-end processes; Treating all involved individuals–customers, employees, investors, suppliers–as unique; Working across cultures and time-zones in a seamless global network; Building teams that are capable of providing high-quality, low-cost solutions rapidly. The fomula is N=1 and R=G.

Innovation to the Core: A Blueprint for Transforming the Way Your Company Innovates

If you’re like most business leaders, innovation now tops your corporate agenda. But despite all the talk and excitement about the importance of innovation, managers have so far found scant help for innovating in a systematic way that fuels consistent growth and sustained success. In Innovation to the Core, Strategos CEO Peter Skarzynski and business strategist Rowan Gibson change all that. They share the accumulated wisdom from Strategos–the consulting firm Skarzynski co-founded with Gary Hamel that helps clients instill innovation into their very core. Drawing on a wealth of stories and examples, the book shows how companies of every stripe have overcome the barriers to successful, profitable innovation. You’ll find parts devoted to crucial topics–such as how to organize the discovery process, generate strategic insights, enlarge your innovation pipeline, and maximize your return on innovation. Frequent hands-on tools–frameworks, checklists, probing questions–help you put the book’s ideas into action. Crafted in close coordination with Gary Hamel–the man who Fortune magazine has called “the world’s leading expert on business strategy”–Innovation to the Core is the definitive fieldbook for making innovation a core competence in your organization.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Mark Twain once observed, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas–business people, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others–struggle to make their ideas “stick.” Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the “human scale principle,” using the “Velcro Theory of Memory,” and creating “curiosity gaps.” In this indispensable guide, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds–from the infamous “kidney theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony–draw their power from the same six traits. Made to Stick is a book that will transform the way you communicate ideas. It’s a fast-paced tour of success stories (and failures)–the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of “the Mother Teresa Effect”; the elementary-school teacher whose simulation actually prevented racial prejudice. Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick shows us the vital principles of winning ideas–and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.