2008

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Communities of Practice: Creating Learning Environments for Educators, Volume 1

The aim of this set of books is to combine the best of current academic research into the use of Communities of Practice in education with “hands on” practitioner experience in order to provide teachers and academics with a convenient source of guidance and an incentive to work with and develop in their own Communities of Practice. This set of books is divided into two volumes: volume 1 deals principally with the issues found in colocated Communities of Practice, while volume 2 deal principally with distributed Communities of Practice”

fruITion: Creating the Ultimate Corporate Strategy for Information Technology

Called ‘part entertaining novel and part enlightening textbook’ by reviewers, FruITion is about Ian the CIO. How will Ian as the CIO react when the management team explores a very different relationship with IT? The strategy that emerges has major implications for the CIO and everyone in the IT department. The book is followed up with two other books, RecrEAtion and DefrICtion. Chris Potts has developed a unique approach to enterprise architecture and portfolio management, called Enterprise Investment.

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

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.

Execution Premium. Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage

In a world of stiffening competition, business strategy is more crucial than ever. Yet most organizations struggle in this area–not with formulating strategy but with executing it, or putting their strategy into action. Owing to execution failures, companies realize just a fraction of the financial performance promised in their strategic plans. It doesn’t have to be that way, maintain Robert Kaplan and David Norton in The Execution Premium. Building on their breakthrough works on strategy-focused organizations, the authors describe a multistage system that enables you to gain measurable benefits from your carefully formulated business strategy. This book shows you how to: Develop an effective strategy–with tools such as SWOT analysis, vision formulation, and strategic change agendas; Plan execution of the strategy–through portfolios of strategic initiatives linked to strategy maps and Balanced Scorecards; Put your strategy into action–by integrating operational tools such as process dashboards, rolling forecasts, and activity-based costing; Test and update your strategy–using carefully designed management meetings to review operational and strategic data. Drawing on extensive research and detailed case studies from a broad array of industries, The Execution Premium presents a systematic and proven framework for achieving the financial results promised by your strategy.