Organizational Change
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.
Thinking about the world
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.
Thinking about ourselves
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.
Personal Development
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.
IT Governance
Peter Weill's IT Governance: How Top Performers Manager IT Decision Rights for Superior Results research looks at IT Governance practices 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.
Thinking about people & society
Baltasar Gracian Y Morales, a 17th century Jesuit scholar, provides timeless wisdom in The Art of Worldly Wisdom
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.
Open Source Guide
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 licenses, 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.
