Posts Under Book Reviews Category

There have been other good books of late about Corporate Storytelling– the Elements of Persuasion by Maxwell comes to mind— but few remotely touches the key function of story telling for corporate branding like Storytelling. In its second edition, this book has only improved with richer examples and case studies. Highly recommended for organizations seeking to raise itself above mediocrity…

The basic difference between Design and Design Thinking is that the latter tends to be micro and product-focussed, in the traditional sense of the word. Moving into the realm of the latter, Design Thinking, we open ourselves to a totally new level of macro thinking and systemic consideration. This significant difference is well captured in Change By Design by Tim…

The term ‘a little pregnant’ has its equivalent in the business context. If you are ‘a little misaligned’ with customer, you would already be in a black and white zone of missing the customer boat completely. This is especially the case with business innovation- the management competency that seeks to allow organizations to edge closer to market needs and to…

Unbeknownst to most non-financials, the powerful finance function constantly undergoes painful introspection about whether they are accountants plus-plus, or are they integral components of the executive suite, working in partnership with the chief executive function. Jeremy Hope suggests in his timely book that CFO’s can and should opt for the latter. Drawing some interesting case studies and personal experience, he…

This little book, not even 100 pages of actual content, provides scant but up to date information on the major pointers on ePublishing. This book is best borrowed from a library to get up to speed quickly on a topic. Not worth the space on your library shelf. Content includes: Communities trump companies Dive into electronic text Publish to the…

While there are a growing number of books dedicated to discussing the growth and importance of social media, Open Leadership is one of the few and certainly one of the more instructive ones on positioning leadership in the face of the Web2.0 tsunami. It provides insightful anecdotes of Web1.0 leaders getting the message and benefiting from the personal effort to…

This is the seminal text that created the framework shaping much of what Open Innovation has grown to be. While other books are clearer in the implementation of Open Innovation, Chesbrough shows his clarity of thought here, giving us a precious insight into the case of Open Innovation vs the limitations of Closed Innovation Content includes: Xerox PARC The Closed…

In grappling with Business Modelling, one obvious question arises: what is business modelling and what are the components. In truth, the definitions vary tremendously. Some point to Business Modelling being distinct from Strategy, while others have business modelling as a monetisation strategy, and yet others might view competitive strategy as a component of business modelling. So it feels really comforting…

Prior to the internet, the paradigm of zero cost reproduction of digital content was already established. With the advent of Tim Berners-Lee’s brainchild, the cost of distributing suddenly trended to zero as well.  And together, spawned a whole new industry based on  internet marketing. Different from internet-based marketing, internet marketing is a murky, fast-growing service industry based largely on the…

Costas Markides makes a startling observation: big, established firms tend to fail in pioneering new business models in their industry.  This he attributes to the difficulty in navigating a nascent idea through a thicket of existing corporate culture and bureaucracy.  From the viewpoint, we get this very readable book on creating and implementing (the nine months of gestation followed by…