These resources provide guidance on thinking about the world, with an aim to quietly challenging your world-view.
Some are aligned with our focus areas, some of general interest. The intent is to help you understand how you think about and understand your world. All of the books are available from Amazon.
A Technical Resource Library is also available.
We have never had a work force as educated, as mobile or as scarce as today. Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman's First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently provide some guidance on how to manage this work force.
Organizational change one band-aid at a time. Malcom Gladwell's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference points out it the details of environment that guide and determine change, success or failure.
A good case can be made that the rest of this page is also about Strategy. We use Scenarios to develop Strategy. Mats Lindgren, Bruce Pilbeam and Hans Bandhold's Scenario Planning: The Link Between Future and Strategy provides an accessible introduction to the details of scenario planning.
Art Kleiner's strategy + business article The Man Who Saw the Future traces the history of modern scenario planning back to Herman Kahn' (Thinking about the Unthinkable), and the pioneering work done by Pierre Wack at Royal Dutch Shell in the 70s.
Donald Norman writes about how people interact with their environment. Crucial to understanding how clients expect systems to behave. It all started with The Design of Everyday Things. He explores the impacts of technology design in The Invisible Computer, and Things That Make Us Smart. His latest work extends further into the emotional aspects of design Emotional Design: Why We Love or Hate Everyday Things.
Michael Gelb's How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci aims to unlock your creative genius. It provides a work plan to accomplish its lofty goal.
To understand ourselves we need to understand how we see, or don't see, the world around us. Erik Jonsson's Inner Navigation: Why We Get Lost will help you understand how you see the world.
In Scotland and Its Whiskies, Michael Jackson, the world's leading writer on whisky, relives his love affair with whisky through a tour of the countryside of Scotland and the bars of Edinburgh.
Coaching helps you bridge the gap between where you are and where you want to be by helping you become clear on what is important to you, set concrete actions, and provides support and accountability. Future Perfect Coaching provides a number of self-help courses and self-led retreats that help you get where you want to be.
Peter Weill's IT Governance: How Top Performers Manager IT Decision Rights for Superior Results research looks at IT Governance practises employed by 250 companies, with an eye to discerning what practises successfully align IT to business strategy and performance, and generate value for the business and shareholder.
Peter's recommendations and findings do not align completely with COBIT - pragmatically following what is proven to work tends to be a better than dogmatically implementing a standard.
Peter's findings are summarized in Australian CIO Magazine's online article Recipe for Good Governance.
Baltasar Gracian Y Morales, a 17th century Jesuit scholar, provides timeless wisdom in The Art of Worldly Wisdom
In Fifth Discipline Peter Senge's main thesis is that a 'Learning Organization' must embrace five disciplines:
The Fifth Discipline's Systems Thinking encourages us to use a holistic view of the organization and its environment.
Patrick Lencioni identifies and analyzes the five reasons teams fail: lack of commitment, failure to embrace conflict, lack of results focus, lack of accountability, and lack of trust using a simpler story in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable.
The Australian government's "A Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies" is a must-read. Crisp education on open source software and clear, concise guidelines for its use. The risk mitigation section outlines that key risks involved software are the same in proprietary and open source models. There is an excellent due diligence risk mitigation checklist. he report can provide a sound foundation for writing an agency's own set of policies.
Benjamin Hill's article "Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement" provides a good discussion of the Creative Commons licences, which are fairly common in documentary and artistic work. Creative Commons provides a simple mechanism for an author of a work to determine which rights, if any, are to be reserved.
Trying to understand what value Linux and open source can deliver to your business? Martin Fink focuses on the critical question how do you work with this Linux & Open Source and return a profit for your investors in Business and Economics of Linux and Open Source.
Lawrence Rosen's Open Source Licensing outlines the benefits, risks and implications of different Open Source licenses and their implications to different business models.
Andrew M. St. Laurent's book Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing, is itself an example of Open Source. This book is available under a Creative Commons license for free download, or purchase of a printed copy
For a quick broad overview of the main license concepts layman's terms see this video of Mark Webbink, Deputy General Counsel for Red Hat. In the video he looks at the GPL, BSD and proprietary licenses, as well as public domain.
Video (Real Player)
Open WorkBench is an "open source" competitor to MS Project. OWB has a less accessible interface than Project. In our assessment the less accessible interface is overcome by OWB's sophisticated levelling algorithm that is resource-focused not task-focused.
Open Workbench (Windows Only) Note: you must register to download OWB
Open WorkBench Manual
If your approach is to accept the risk because you have not examined anything, you do not know whether you are on a tightrope in a windstorm or having a coffee on a sunny day.
Dave
A good set of reference material for using scenario planning in strategy development can be found at themanager.org