Advanced Search

No description available for this content

No description available for this content

No description available for this content

Downes and Mui argue that the dominant trend behind the proliferation of killer apps is a combination of Moore's Law, which states that the processing power of the CPU doubles every 18 months, and Metcalfe's Law, which observes that the value of a network increases dramatically with each node that's added to it. These two laws are fundamentally changing how businesses interact with each other and with their customers. To exploit these changes, the authors outline 12 points for designing a digital strategy to help you identify and create killer apps in your own organization. The book includes dozens of examples of how killer apps were discovered and implemented.

Unleashing the Killer App provides an excellent framework for rethinking the nature of business in today's wired economy. No matter the size of your company or what it does--health care, publishing, or fast food--there's probably a killer app lurking somewhere. This book will help you find it. Highly recommended. --Harry C. Edwards

Editor's Note: read an excerpt at
http://www.contextmag.com/archives/199806/BookExcerpt.asp?process=print

From the chief scientist of Xerox Corporation and a research specialist in cultural studies at UC-Berkeley comes a treatise that casts a critical eye at all the hype surrounding the boom of the information age. The authors' central complaint is that narrowly focusing on new ways to provide information will not create the cyber-revolution so many technology designers have visualized. The problem (or joy) is that information acquires meaning only through social context. Brown and Duguid add a humanist spin to this idea by arguing, for example, that "trust" is a deep social relation among people and cannot be reduced to logic, and that a satisfying "conversation" cannot be held in an Internet chat room because too much social context is stripped away and cannot be replaced by just adding more information, such as pictures and biographies of the participants. From this standpoint, Brown and Duguid contemplate the future of digital agents, the home office, the paperless society, the virtual firm and the online university. Though they offer many insightful opinions, they have not produced an easy read. As they point out, theirs is "more a book of questions than answers" and they often reject "linear thinking." Like most futurists, they are fond of long neologisms, but they are given to particularly unpronounceable ones like "infoprefixification" (the tendency to put "info" in front of words). The result is an intellectual gem in which the authors have polished some facets and, annoyingly, left others uncut.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In this breakthrough business book, Pascale, Millemann and Gioja troll the emerging science of complexity for "ideas [that] can produce a concrete bottom-line impact." Extracting key "dynamics of survival" from the life sciences, these three management consultants successfully show business leaders how to turn their companies into agile and adaptable "living systems" that achieve long-term vitality and sustainability in a swiftly evolving environment. Their four "bedrock" principles are "Equilibrium is a precursor to death"; "Living things move toward the edge of chaos"; "Components of living systems self-organize" in response to turmoil; and "Living systems cannot be directed along a linear path." Writing with clarity and verve, the authors illustrate these larger points by comparing the functioning of organic systems (e.g., Yellowstone National Park), the behavior of organisms (dental plaque) and of insects (fire ants) with detailed case studies of five companies (British Petroleum, Hewlett-Packard, Monsanto, Royal Dutch/Shell and Sun Microsystems) and the U.S. Army. Practical-minded readers will appreciate their nitty-gritty insights into the relative advantages of "adaptive" and traditional "operational" leadership, as well as their consistent distillation of concrete business guidelines. While the authors aver that "there is no permanent victory in this eternal cycle of life and death," they make a persuasive case that "understanding living systems does not decisively win the game but, most assuredly, it improves the odds."
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This book has an official website at:
http://www.surfingchaos.com

No description available for this content

If The Future of Ideas is bleak, we have nobody to blame but ourselves. Author Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor and keen observer of emerging technologies, makes a strong case that large corporations are staging an innovation-stifling power grab while we watch idly. The changes in copyright and other forms of intellectual property protection demanded by the media and software industries have the potential to choke off publicly held material, which Lessig sees as a kind of intellectual commons. He eloquently and persuasively decries this lopsided control of ideas and suggests practical solutions that consider the rights of both creators and consumers, while acknowledging the serious impact of new technologies on old ways of doing business. His proposals would let existing companies make money without using the tremendous advantages of incumbency to eliminate new killer apps before they can threaten the status quo. Readers who want a fair intellectual marketplace would do well to absorb the lessons in The Future of Ideas. --Rob Lightner

The average life span of a Fortune 500 company is less than half a century, yet there also are corporations around the world that have been in business for 200, 500, even 700 years. Arie de Geus, a retired Royal Dutch/Shell Group executive, maintains after studying both extremes that the most enduring treat their companies as "living work communities" rather than pure economic machines. The Living Company: Habits for Survival in a Turbulent Business Environment persuasively outlines his resultant prescription for organizational longevity.

Editor's Note: read an excerpt of this book at
http://www.adl.com/insights/prism/pdf/1998_q1_30-34.pdf

Handy, a British specialist in organizational management, predicts that the 21st century will be the Age of Unreason. In an era when changes in business and society will be "discontinuous" or patternless, he suggests that our thinking must become discontinuous or "unreasonable" in order to use such changes to our advantage. While his thesis is generally in line with strategists like Tom Peters ( In Search of Excellence, LJ 2/15/83), Handy focuses more on the philosophy, rather than the mechanics, of adaptive change in society. His examples from the business world are interestingly extended to social institutions like marriage and family. Nicely written, this should be popular with open-minded management types. A good addition to management collections.
-Mark L. Shelton, Columbus, Ohio
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The title of this book is a mild pun. People are using smart "mobs" (rhymes with "robes") to become smart "mobs" (rhymes with "robs"), meaning, sophisticated mobile Internet access is allowing people who don't know each other to act in concert. In this timely if at times overenthusiastic survey of wireless communication devices, Rheingold (The Virtual Community) conveys how cell phones, pagers and PDAs are shaping modern culture. He interviewed dozens of people around the world who work and play with these technologies to see how this revolution is manifesting, and his findings are stirring. The concept has caught on among young Japanese, where cliques of teenagers hang out together all day, despite being in different places, by sending and receiving hundreds of iconic text transmissions on their iMode telephones. And demonstrators in Seattle and Manila relied on wireless telephones to coordinate their actions and evade barricades. In major cities, Rheingold says, techno-hipsters can congregate in "WiFi" areas that interact with their wireless devices to let them participate in a virtual social scene. In one amusing example, he tells of upscale prostitutes who can enter their services and prices into their mobile phones, allowing customers to discreetly determine if anyone nearby is selling what they want to buy (a Japanese company, Lovegety, has already adapted this idea to dating). This study of the potential of mobile, always on, fast Internet access nicely serves as a travelogue to the future, showing the possibilities and dangers of communications innovation.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

read an interview with the author at:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2002/tc20021120_2459.htm

Thanks to various technological, fiscal, and political revolutions that have reshaped our world over the past two decades, some observers believe, the new millennium will offer opportunities for economic expansion that rival any previously recorded. The Long Boom is a fascinating attempt to pin down this potential upsurge by combining a shrewd examination of where we've been headed for the last 20 years with a plausible forecast of where--with a bit of good fortune and tenacity--we might be going during the next 20. Moreover, its unique mixture of germane facts and figures with supportable projections and original storytelling techniques (most notably a letter to friends sent once a decade by a fictional observer born in 1960) make it as readable as it is provocative.
Originating as an article in Wired magazine, the optimistic scenario envisioned by authors Peter Schwartz (chairman of a combination think tank and consulting firm), Peter Leyden (a technology, economics, and political journalist), and Joel Hyatt (a Stanford entrepreneurship professor who cofounded the legal-services firm bearing his name) integrates existing and potential technological advancements, financial developments, political upheavals, and social movements. Among its predictions are a formulation of a "glass pipeline" that seamlessly tracks manufacturing and production processes, creation of a volunteer Global Corps to aid developing nations, the dawning of a true Space Age, and the birth of a unified worldwide society with "well-off people who share certain values that are transcending borders." The account is highly recommended to everyone concerned with, yet hopeful about, the future. --Howard Rothman

Just as information workers surpassed physical laborers in economic importance, Pink claims, the workplace terrain is changing yet again, and power will inevitably shift to people who possess strong right brain qualities. His advocacy of "R-directed thinking" begins with a bit of neuroscience tourism to a brain lab that will be extremely familiar to those who read Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open last year, but while Johnson was fascinated by the brain's internal processes, Pink is more concerned with how certain skill sets can be harnessed effectively in the dawning "Conceptual Age." The second half of the book details the six "senses" Pink identifies as crucial to success in the new economy-design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning-while "portfolio" sections offer practical (and sometimes whimsical) advice on how to cultivate these skills within oneself. Thought-provoking moments abound-from the results of an intensive drawing workshop to the claim that "bad design" created the chaos of the 2000 presidential election-but the basic premise may still strike some as unproven. Furthermore, the warning that people who don't nurture their right brains "may miss out, or worse, suffer" in the economy of tomorrow comes off as alarmist. But since Pink's last big idea (Free Agent Nation) has become a cornerstone of employee-management relations, expect just as much buzz around his latest theory. - Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Scenarios are now a part of every successful manager's toolkit. This book is the first comprehensive guide to the latest developments in scenario thinking written by today's leading practitioners in the field. -Napier Collyns.

Human beings are information omnivores: we are constantly collecting, labeling, and organizing data. But today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place--the physical world demanded it--but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Simply put, everything is suddenly miscellaneous.

In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. In his rollicking tour of the rise of the miscellaneous, he examines why the Dewey decimal system is stretched to the breaking point, how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your children’s teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future in virtually every industry. Finally, he shows how by "going miscellaneous," anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life.