Books

You know: heavy, look like laptops but open sideways and don’t take batteries? Yeah, books. No one book guarantees you’ll be a great manager, but these books may help you understand the many forces you’ll contend with as you try to use information systems to guide your company to the Fortune 500.

Books I can vouch for:

Benkler, Yochai (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University. Riffing on similar themes, but smarter than Wikinomics. Benkler tackles the implications of increasing connection and collaboration not just for business, but also for culture, justice, and freedom. (Hardcore thinkers should read Benkler side by side with Adam Smith.)

Scoble, Robert, and Israel, Shel (2006). Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley. People expect authentic communication. They can see through marketing and propaganda. Use the Internet to engage your customers (and maybe even your employees) in real interactive discourse, not just sales pitches.

• Scoble’s blog
• Israel’s blog

Friedman, Thomas L. (2005; updated 2007). The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Want to understand what’s happening to your business and the modern economy? Friedman gives you the best layman’s explanation you can get your hands on.

Sunstein, Cass R. (2006). Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University. Getting everyone together to talk about a problem and come up with a solution is a great idea, right? Not so fast, says Sunstein. You can still call your meetings, but you have to be aware of (and counter!) the information influences and social pressures that can prevent different (and good!) ideas from emerging in group discussions. (Sunstein also discusses prediction markets: very cool.)

• more summary and notes from CAH@DSU.
• Sunstein’s U. Chicago site

Tapscott, Don, and Williams, Anthony D. (2008). Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Expanded edition. New York: Portfolio. On my short list for instant classics of the dawn of… whatever this age will be called. Think about this paradox: to compete, you have to collaborate. Hmmm….

Weinberger, David (2007). Everything Is Miscellaneous. New York: Henry Holt and Company. The Internet is not the physical world. This is more more important than you may think when it comes to organizing and finding information.

• Why I love this book: Chapter 9, “Messiness as a Virtue.”
• Weinberger’s Joho the Blog

Books I haven’t read yet, but which sound worthwhile:

Raymond, Eric S. (2001). The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. Cambridge, MA: O’Reilly Media. A good browsing read: not a single tome, but a collection of essays by a long-term hacker. One reviewer refers to Raymond’s writings as the Federalist Papers of the open source movement.

• Raymond considers himself a Libertarian defender of freedom… and firearms!