Books

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The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative

In his best–selling book, Squirrel Inc., former World Bank executive and master storyteller Stephen Denning used a tale to show why storytelling is a critical skill for leaders. Now, in this hands–on guide, Denning explains how you can learn to tell the right story at the right time. Whoever you are in the organization CEO, middle management, or someone on the front lines you can lead by using stories to effect change. Filled with myriad examples, A Leader’s Guide to Storytelling shows how storytelling is one of the few available ways to handle the principal and most difficult challenges of leadership: sparking action, getting people to work together, and leading people into the future. The right kind of story at the right time, can make an organization “stunningly vulnerable” to a new idea.

The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative

The book introduces the concept of narrative intelligence – an ability to understand and act and react agilely in the quicksilver world of interacting narratives. It shows why this is key to the central task of leadership, what its dimensions are, and how you can measure it. The book’s lucid explanations, vivid examples and practical tips are essential reading for CEOs, managers, change agents, marketers, salespersons, brand managers, politicians, teachers, parents—anyone who is setting out to the change the world.

Change by Design: How Design Thinking Creates New Alternatives for Business and Society: How Design Thinking Can Transform Organizations and Inspire Innovation

The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities. This book introduces the idea of design thinking, the collaborative process by which the designer’s sensibilities and methods are employed to match people’s needs not only with what is technically feasible and a viable business strategy. In short, design thinking converts need into demand. It’s a human-centered approach to problem solving that helps people and organizations become more innovative and more creative. Design thinking is not just applicable to so-called creative industries or people who work in the design field. It’s a methodology that has been used by health organizations to increase the quality of patient care by re-examining the ways that their nurses manage shift change, or rethink supply chain management.

The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century

Organizations today face a crisis. The crisis is of long standing and its signs are widespread. Most proposals for improving management address one element of the crisis at the expense of the others. The principles described by award–winning author Stephen Denning simultaneously inspire high productivity, continuous innovation, deep job satisfaction and client delight. Denning puts forward a fundamentally different approach to management, with seven inter–locking principles of continuous innovation: focusing the entire organization on delighting clients; working in self–organizing teams; operating in client–driven iterations; delivering value to clients with each iteration; fostering radical transparency; nurturing continuous self–improvement and communicating interactively. In sum, the principles comprise a new mental model of management.

recrEAtion: Realizing the Extraordinary Contribution of Your Enterprise Architects

Simon is a seasoned Enterprise Architect who joins a corporation in New York as their first-ever Vice President of Enterprise Architecture. On his very first day, he meets the global Chief Executive Officer (CEO) who asks Simon What do you do? Simon’s reply triggers the CEO to respond in a way that our hero least expects. What follows is a journey across continents and oceans in which Simon uncovers the true meaning of Enterprise Architecture, who is doing it, and how successful they are. On his travels, Simon teams up with senior executives around the world to integrate Enterprise Architecture into their strategies and business plans, and to innovate in the architecture of their enterprise. Everyone he meets has some wisdom to offer, and is looking for his in return. Finally, Simon has to make a choice between the kind of Enterprise Architect he used to be and the one he has become. Join the characters in this sequel to the highly-acclaimed business novel fruITion, as they contribute to Simon’s journey and he makes his final choice. Share in his thoughts and experiences, and join the author in observing key messages along the journey.

Wired for Innovation: How Information Technology Is Reshaping the Economy

A wave of business innovation is driving the productivity resurgence in the U.S. economy. In Wired for Innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson and Adam Saunders describe how information technology directly or indirectly created this productivity explosion, reversing decades of slow growth. They argue that the companies with the highest level of returns to their technology investment are doing more than just buying technology; they are inventing new forms of organizational capital to become digital organizations. These innovations include a cluster of organizational and business-process changes, including broader sharing of information, decentralized decision-making, linking pay and promotions to performance, pruning of non-core products and processes, and greater investments in training and education. Brynjolfsson and Saunders go on to examine the real sources of value in the emerging information economy, including intangible inputs and outputs that have defied traditional metrics. For instance, intangible organizational capital is not directly observable on a balance sheet yet amounts to trillions of dollars of value. Similarly, such nonmarket transactions of information goods as Google searches or views of Wikipedia articles are an increasingly large share of the economy yet virtually invisible in the GDP statistics. Drawing on work done at the MIT Center for Digital Business and elsewhere, Brynjolfsson and Saunders explain how to better measure the value of technology in the economy. They treat technology as not just another type of ordinary capital investment by also focusing on complementary investments–including process redesign, training, and strategic changes–and ton he value of product quality, timeliness, variety, convenience, and new products. Innovation continues through booms and busts. This book provides an essential guide for policy makers and economists who need to understand how information technology is transforming the economy and how it will create value in the coming decade.