Ein Nachtrag noch zur Reihe der rund um die re:publica erschienen Druckwerke zum netzpolitischen Themen: Ulrich Herb von der Wissenschaftsberatung scinoptica hat einen Sammelband mit dem Titel “Open Initiatives: Offenheit in der digitalen Welt und Wissenschaft” herausgegeben, der versucht die wachsende Vielfalt an Open-Bewegungen zu erschließen

Welcome to the worst decade since the Great Depression. Trillions of dollars of financial assets destroyed; trillions in shareholder value vanished; worldwide GDP stalled. But this isn't a financial crisis, or even an economic one, says Umair Haque. It's a crisis of institutions-ideals inherited from the industrial age. These ideals include rampant exploitation of resources, top-down command of resource allocations, withholding of information from stakeholders to control them, and a single-minded pursuit of profit for its own sake. All this has produced "thin value"-short-term economic gains that accrue to some people far more than others, and that don't make us happier or healthier. It has left resources depleted and has spawned conflict, organizational rigidity, economic stagnation, and nihilism. In The New Capitalist Manifesto, Haque advocates a new set of ideals: (1)Renewal: Use resources sustainably to maximize efficiencies, (2) Democracy: Allocate resources democratically to foster organizational agility, (3) Peace: Practice economic non-violence in business, (4) Equity: Create industries that make the least well off better off, and (5) Meaning: Generate payoffs that tangibly improve quality of life. Yes, adopting these ideals requires bold and sustained changes. But some companies-Google, Walmart, Nike-are rising to the challenge. In this bold manifesto, Haque makes an irresistible business case for following their lead.

Was ist eigentlich Linux, was der Kernel, was eine Distribution, und wofür steht GNU? Dabei geht er auch auf vermeintliche und echte Stärken und Schwächen des freien Betriebssystems ein: Software, Security, Support, Spiele und mehr.
Bevor er zum Praktischen und Technischen kommt, porträtiert der Autor außerdem noch die Open-Source-Community mit ihren Mailinglisten und Konferenzen und erklärt dem Linux-Neuling, wo er sich Hilfe holen kann.

The Bastards Book of Ruby is an introduction to programming and its practical uses for journalists, researchers, scientists, analysts, and anyone else whose job is to seek out, make sense from, and show the hard-to-find data. This does not require being "good at computers", having a background in programming, or the desire (yet) to be a full-fledged hacker/developer. It just takes an eagerness to be challenged.

epub is a plugin that will create EBooks from Dokuwiki pages that can be read in standard ebook readers. See ebook_readers below. EPUB is an open specification for digital books based on XML, CSS, and XHTML, and EPUB files can be read on portable e-ink devices, mobile phones, and desktop computers. The specification is overseen by the International Digital Publishing Forum. Unlike pdf files which have a standardized output, epub output is e-reader dependent, much like web pages, to which they are directly related. An epub page is XHTML with CSS styling. Ebooks can be collected in an e-reader's library of e-books and consulted off-line, making them always available

SARS, Bird Flu, terrorists, religious extremists, extreme religionists, DEMOCRATS—it seems that we find a new reason every week to mistrust those around us and yet our society has yet to implode in the orgy of fire and chaos that 24-hour-news networks would have you believe. Liars and Outliers by Bruce Schneier explains how civil structure continues advancing despite our best efforts.

In Cradle to Cradle, McDonough and Braungart argue that the conflict between industry and the environment is not an indictment of commerce but an outgrowth of purely opportunistic design. The design of products and manufacturing systems growing out of the Industrial Revolution reflected the spirit of the day-and yielded a host of unintended yet tragic consequences. Today, with our growing knowledge of the living earth, design can reflect a new spirit. In fact, the authors write, when designers employ the intelligence of natural systems—the effectiveness of nutrient cycling, the abundance of the sun's energy—they can create products, industrial systems, buildings, even regional plans that allow nature and commerce to fruitfully co-exist. Cradle to Cradle maps the lineaments of McDonough and Braungart's new design paradigm, offering practical steps on how to innovate within today's economic environment. Part social history, part green business primer, part design manual, the book makes plain that the re-invention of human industry is not only within our grasp, it is our best hope for a future of sustaining prosperity.

Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever

This book is about complexity science, data structures and algorithms, intermediate programming in Python, and the philosophy of science

Think Python is the manuscript of Python for Software Design, published by Cambridge University Press.

In support of Free Books, Cambridge has agreed to keep this manuscript available under the GNU Free Documentation License. Readers are free to copy and distribute the text; they are also free to modify it, which allows them to adapt the book to different needs, and to help develop new material.

Healthy information consumption habits are about more than productivity and efficiency. They're about your personal health, and the health of society. Just as junk food can lead to obesity, junk information can lead to new forms of ignorance. The Information Diet provides a framework for consuming information in a healthy way, by showing you what to look for, what to avoid, and how to be selective. In the process, author Clay Johnson explains the role information has played throughout history, and why following his prescribed diet is essential in today's information age.

Hellers Buch ist ein kompletter Gegenentwurf zum Privatsphären- und Datenschutzdenken in Deutschland. Seine Argumente treffen das Grundverständnis vieler unserer Werte und Erzählungen ins Mark. Erfreulicher Weise wird Heller bei aller Radikalität nie eifernd, sondern bleibt immer nüchtern und sachlich.

Kürzlich hat das //SEIBERT/MEDIA-Autorenkollektiv Martin Seibert, Sebastian Preuss und Matthias Rauer das Buch Enterprise Wikis: Die erfolgreiche Einführung und Nutzung von Wikis in Unternehmen

"How We Know" is Freeman Dyson's essay on information theory in next month's New York Review of Books, inspired by James Gleick's The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. Dyson's thoughts on Claude Shannon, Wikipedia, and twenty-first century science are illuminating, and man, does it ever leave me wanting to read the book -- Gleick being one of the greatest science writers of all time, and information theory being one of the subjects that interests me the most.

Jimmy Wales hoped when he started Wikipedia that the combination of enthusiastic volunteer writers with open source information technology would cause a revolution in human access to knowledge. The rate of growth of Wikipedia exceeded his wildest dreams. Within ten years it has become the biggest storehouse of information on the planet and the noisiest battleground of conflicting opinions. It illustrates Shannon's law of reliable communication. Shannon's law says that accurate transmission of information is possible in a communication system with a high level of noise. Even in the noisiest system, errors can be reliably corrected and accurate information transmitted, provided that the transmission is sufficiently redundant. That is, in a nutshell, how Wikipedia works.

The information flood has also brought enormous benefits to science. The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.



How We Know

(via MeFi)

 How to talk to ET Boing Boing
Reality is a quantum computer - Boing Boing
Pictish art may have actually been written language - Boing Boing
James Gleick: Life is different with email - Boing Boing

Re-reading my review and flicking back through the pages of Open Leadership, I’m suddenly struck by the thought that this book is like the grown up, better experienced and more refined sibling of The Cluetrain Manifesto. The idea of organisations pursing an open strategy really has grown up and the technologies that support it continue to mature. This books sets the scene for management and how to start thinking about dealing with it.

Overall, Designing Interfaces is an excellent resource for anyone designing interfaces that allow people to interact with machines, and it also works as a good resource for coding or testing interfaces. If you're having an issue with an interface, or a piece of that interface that just doesn't seem quite right, this book might be the tool you're missing.

The "synthesis" of which Kolko speaks is the ability to create "normalcy out of chaos," and the predominant tool for doing so is mapping. One amazing set of maps include what Kolko calls "Semantic Zoom" and "Temporal Zoom," which borrow the Eames' famous Powers of Ten metaphor and applys it to the scope of the interaction. Level 10 to the 0 is the product, but as we move towards 10 to the -2 we're zooming out toward the marketplace, and as we move into the positive power range, we're seeing features, then elements, then details. It's a wonderful metaphor and leads to some fascinating maps.

But what is the message that common or garden managers will take away from Monkeys with Typewriters? This is where, at the risk of flogging the same point I started with, the song remains pretty much the same. To be a good leader, the story goes, you have to give up control, abandon management by metrics, and learn to trust the people you lead. Business writers have been saying this for almost as long as artists have been trying to shake up the bourgeoisie. Brian Eno once responded to the latter, saying "those poor bourgeoisie: everyone's always trying to shake them up; why don't they give them a little space…" Managers, it seems to me, face a similar dilemma, caught between these repeated exhortations to loosen up and let their people develop their own fully-rounded solutions, on the one hand, and, on the other, ever-present pressures to demonstrate that their commands are as lean and effective as they could possibly be.

This is a review of the book “The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion” by John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison.  Finally I find a book that speaks plainly about the dramatic change that we are going though, and how a fresh approach is needed to be successful.I am not going to try to relate all the ideas from the book here, but I will focus on those things are relevant to Adaptive Case Management, and how such “Pull System” can be an advantage to organizations today. 

In the end, all of these real-world examples point to two core rules (1) meaningful communication and (2) compelling conceptual models. While the core thrust of Norman's ideas should be familiar to those who read The Design of Everyday Things, as our world becomes more networked, the services that products support are rapidly becoming more important than the devices industrial designers produce. As the world grows beyond the understanding of any one Renaissance man or woman, Donald Norman's missive is well timed. Every product designer is an interaction designer whether they want to be or not.

list of the Most Important Info-Tech Policy Books of 2010.

It’s that book that will give you the holes in your business planning. It’s that book that tells you that you could really use a bit more work in ___ department. It’s a great opportunity to see visual thinking applied to a real business challenge. And it’s so well done.

I hope what you get from reading What Technology Wants is a useful framework for understanding what technology means in our lives -- a way to anchor your own self in the face of ceaseless accelerating technological change.

I welcome general responses, positive or negative, about the content of this book. For specific issues, like errors, typos, etc. I've started another thread. Also I've initiated a few other threads on related facets of this book. Once singed in, you are welcome to start other threads about aspects of this book if you are so inclined.

The book is published recently enough (August 2010) to be fresh still. Jamison, Hanley, and Cardarelli’s Essential SharePoint 2010: Overview, Governance & Planning is my favorite SharePoint book to date.  If your organization is implementing SharePoint 2010, buy this book immediately—buy several, one for each team member. You will not regret it. 

Living with Complexity
Norman, Donald A
MIT Press, October 2010
280 pages
Amazon
If only today’s technology were simpler! It’s the universal lament, but it’s wrong. We don’t want simplicity. Simple tools are not up to the task. The world is complex; our tools need to match that complexity.

Simplicity turns out to be more complex than we thought. In this provocative and informative book, Don Norman writes that the complexity of our technology must mirror the complexity and richness of our lives. It’s not complexity that’s the problem, it’s bad design. Bad design complicates things unnecessarily and confuses us. Good design can tame complexity.

Norman gives us a crash course in the virtues of complexity. But even such simple things as salt and pepper shakers, doors, and light switches become complicated when we have to deal with many of them, each somewhat different. Managing complexity, says Norman, is a partnership. Designers have to produce things that tame complexity. But we too have to do our part: we have to take the time to learn the structure and practice the skills. This is how we mastered reading and writing, driving a car, and playing sports, and this is how we can master our complex tools.

Complexity is good. Simplicity is misleading. The good life is complex, rich, and rewarding—but only if it is understandable, sensible, and meaningful.

Read first chapter

Donald Norman
Business Week has named Don Norman as one of the world’s most influential designers. He has been both a professor and an executive: he was Vice President of Advanced Technology at Apple; his company, the Nielsen Norman Group, helps companies produce human-centered products and services; he has been on the faculty at Harvard, the University of California, San Diego, Northwestern University, and KAIST, in South Korea. He is the author of many books, including The Design of Everyday Things, The Invisible Computer (MIT Press, 1998), Emotional Design, and The Design of Future Things.

Organizational change is notoriously difficult to effect. Management consultants have tried it, now designers are trying it. Building on Roger’s description, and offering my explanation of the underlying value system, I now offer an application designing a design-thinking organization. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fcopernicusconsulting.net%2Forganizations-embrace-design-thinking

The book's central premise is that institutions will be shaped to provide platforms to help individuals achieve their full potential by connecting with others and better address challenging performance needs. This is greatly possible thanks to the use of technology and digital media.

While many are talking about the future of social as communities and collaboration, Hagel, Seely Brown, and Davidson seem to take a different approach. The individual is in fact a key component of future breakthroughs.

The pull environment they describe is based on three principles:

Accessing the people and resources you need
Attracting people and resources to yourself that are relevant and valuable 
Achieving your potential by attaining new levels of performance

So. In summary. The Power of Pull is a masterful book, bringing together many disparate strands of thinking over the years, placing them in a grounded, measured manner within the context of the institution. It helps us move from the decreasing-returns transaction-costs hierarchical closed model of the enterprise to an increasing-returns abundance-economy networked and open model. It helps us understand the move from stocks to flows, how the boundaries of the firm must change as a result, what will happen to firms that don’t. How the right talent is attracted, how serendipitous value is created by that attraction and consequent spiking. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fconfusedofcalcutta.com%2F2010%2F04%2F25%2Fof-push-and-pull

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.movito.net%2Fthe-summer-of-enterprise-2-0-reading-list-part-1

Most team meetings don’t just switch people off – they eat away at team members souls. Instead of the collective hum of a highly motivated and engaged team, working collaboratively to solve problems and share ideas, managers herd team members together and turning them in to the living dead.

In this FREE New Rules of Work eBook you’ll learn:

4 Priorities of an effective team meeting
How to use team meetings to improve performance
Best practice strategies that switch people on
Where to spend your time and effort

“The book asks: what would Da Vinci do today in the midst of our technology bounty? How wide would his vision of AND not OR be today? Which disciplines would he choose to focus on: Nanotechnology? Biochemistry? Would he work on architecture of next-generation, green cities? Prepare for the Mars shot? Or would he be told to quit dabbling and be good at one thing – like plastics a la Dustin Hoffman? Given the Grand Challenges have grown exponentially in the 5 centuries since Da Vinci lived, The New Polymath can no longer be just one person, but a collection of many.”

Dieses Buch fasst den Stand von Wissensmanagement praxisorientiert zusammen; es richtet sich an Führungskräfte aus kleinen, mittleren und großen Unternehmen oder Non-Profit-Organisationen sowie an alle anderen Personen, die sich mit wissensorientiertem Management befassen, zum Beispiel aus den Bereichen HR, F&E, IT, Marketing oder Verwaltung und Controlling. Kompakte Beiträge – geschrieben aus Sicht der Unternehmen – bieten jeweils einen Überblick über die Themengebiete Wissensmanagement, Wissenstransfer, Wissenssicherung, effektives Auffinden von Wissen und Wissenscontrolling/Wissensbilanz. Ein wesentlicher Aspekt liegt in der Darstellung von Querbeziehungen zu verwandten Managementansätzen wie Qualitäts- oder Prozessmanagement, soziale Netzwerke, Innovation und ethisches Management.

Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that's notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you'll learn the ins and outs of how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. This entire book is available to read for free online and you can purchase the electronic or full-color print version.

You could argue it would’ve grown quicker or bigger if a business plan was in place—you’d be wrong! You see business plans are just guesses at best and for us, staying fluid with just a core principle of “everything we do must kick ass” (another words never do a bad gig) has been enough to cement our pedigree and ensure success.

That being said, it’s now time to get a little bit more serious about future direction and growth. Not one for a traditional approach I devoured the book opposite which is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new, innovative models of value creation.

noch weniger als das internet, mag gaschke allerdings die leute, die das internet gut finden. alle die das internet nicht entschieden ablehnen, nennt sie „Digitalisten“ oder „Internet-Apologeten“. sie wirft alle in einen topf: techniker, unternehmer, industrielle, blogger, twitterer, suchmaschinenoptimierer, netzpolitik-aktivisten, marketing-fuzzis, netzpolitik-aktivisten — selbst differenzierenden kritikern des internet oder seiner auswüchse unterstellt sie oppurtunismus oder konfliktscheu, wenn sie nicht, wie sie, das internet undifferenziert, klar und deutlich verurteilen. sie wirft alle zusammen in einen eimer mit der aufschrift „Digitalisten“. man muss sich nur mal vorstellen wer sich alles in diesem eimer wiederfindet, brin und page neben lawrence lessig, stefan niggemeier neben kai dieckmann, bill gates neben linus thorvald, barack obama neben angela merkel, jeff jarvis und hubert burda. alles „Digitalisten“.

Most companies today have innovation envy. They yearn to come up with a game-changing innovation like Apple's iPod, or create an entirely new category like Facebook. Many make genuine efforts to be innovative--they spend on R&D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants. But they get disappointing results. Why? In "The Design of Business," Roger L. Martin offers a compelling and provocative answer: we rely far too exclusively on analytical thinking, which merely refines current knowledge, producing small improvements to the status quo. To innovate and win, companies need design thinking.

In fact, with all due respect to Collins, I think Collaboration is better book than Good to Great -- because it is based on better evidence and provides more details about what managers can actually do. I am hoping that, like Clay Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma, which languished for a year before Andy Grove discovered it and talked it up, that despite Collaboration's modest start, the story will be the same.

The first is how varied the reactions are to the book and the second is the strength. There is an argument that, although this style is not my cup of tea, that the moist important thing that any author can do is to provoke varied and strong reactions, as it is a sign that he or she has made people think, energized them enough to engage with the ideas and argue with others about them. So, by that standard, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is certainly successful -- if all the comments were negative that would be one thing, but clearly this book touches a nerve in people. I especially thank the people who have left positive comments, as having both perspectives represented makes things more interesting, and at least forces me to examine my assumptions and opinions more closely.

The Peter Principle made us laugh, but it also made us aware of the importance of simple competence—and of how elusive it could be. When people do their jobs well, Dr. Peter argued, society can't leave well enough alone. We ask for more and more until we ask too much. Then these individuals—promoted to positions in which they are doomed to fail—start using a bag of tricks to mask their incompetence. They distract us from their crummy work with giant desks, replace action with incomprehensible acronyms, blame others for failure, cheat to create the illusion of progress.

I have seen many similar frameworks for new technology over the past twenty plus years. This is a good one and it focuses more on business drivers and organizational change issues. This is part of the adaption of the traditional implementation approaches for Enterprise 2.0. The other big change I see is the experimental nature. There is a paradox here. While the focus should not be on technology, the tools do take us to some unforeseen places and we need to be open to this. There is ample room for that discovery and refinement in this framework.

Informal Coalitions adopts a similar position to Stacey’s on the dynamics of organizations. And a number of earlier posts on this blog echo Stacey’s comments. Examples include Does it make sense to differentiate between levels of complexity? and The dynamics of continuity and change in organizations - an analogy. So I sit four-square with Stacey and his colleagues in their challenge to conventional management wisdom and most of the conclusions that they draw.

If you have a wiki in your workplace, or you are thinking about setting one up, then this book is for you. It offers a logical path for the successful deployment of wiki technology in your organisation with the goal of improving your business.

The book is a wiki and it is licensed under a Creative Commons license, which means you can read, edit and reuse it for free. The site uses the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, which is basically the same as the one used by Wikipedia.

My vision is for the book to be a reference point for people who are establishing wiki technology in their work environments and I hope that people will also contribute their own experiences and best practices. Over time, I want to grow the content and the community around Wiki While You Work so that it becomes a well known, trusted and relevant source in the exploding field of organisational wikis.

Simplexity is at its best when it focus on the general theories and definitions around the connection between simplicity and complexity. For example, the simplest systems are either inert (like a lump of carbon) or highly chaotic (a room full of gas molecules). Complexity emerges when systems fall between the highly static and the highly dynamic - like an organism. Unfortunately, these types of graspable principles are not carried out through the book. I found myself wondering whether Kluger had used the theme of simplicity/complexity as a convenient thread to assemble of number of disparate, but individually interesting ideas.

Tribal Leadership is part of the management and leadership part of the USC Executive MBA, which was ranked #1 in this area by the Wall Street Journal.

A complexity approach removes simplistic hopes of an ordered and controllable existence where, if only we had the right ‘keys’ or ‘tools’, we would be able to fashion a successful organisation. Instead, it offers a way to identify underlying patterns of order and indicators for influencing future sustainable practice; it shows how simple recurrent rules result in complex behaviour and that ‘influential interventions’ do not take a neat cause-and-effect path but may generate unexpected outcomes.

Social media are highly effective in the middle of the purchase funnel, to improve brand or product consideration during the period when consumers are gathering opinions and listening to word of mouth

The Ten Commandments for Business Failure by Donald R. Keough.

1. Quit taking risks.
2. Be inflexible.
3. Isolate yourself.
4. Assuming infallibility.
5. Play the game close to the foul line.
6. Don’t take time to think.
7. Put all your faith in experts in outside consultants.
8. Love your bureaucracy.
9. Send mixed messages.
10. Be afraid of the future.
11. Lose your passion for work – for life.

Design Thinking wird hier als systematische Innovationsmethode, bei der multidisziplinäre Teams bestimmte Arbeitsschritte nutzen um neue, und unkonventionelle Lösungen zu erarbeiten bei denen der Nutzer im Mittelpunkt steht, beschrieben die das kreative Denken anderen Berufsgruppen näher bringen soll. Dabei gliedert sich der Prozess in 7 Phasen: "Understand / Verstehen", "Observe / Beobachten", "Point of View / Standpunk definieren", "Ideate / Ideen finden", "Prototype / Prototypen entwickeln" und "Test/Testen".

Richard Florida arbeitet heraus, dass sich die Creative Class eher an Städten bzw. Regionen denn an Staaten orientiert. Gründe sind die Verteilung der 3-T: “Technology Talent, and Tolerance” (Seite 249). Zentrale Maßstäbe für Tolerance sind die Offenheit gegenüber Einwanderern und Homosexuellen. Ich weiß nicht, ob es eine vergleichbare, genaue Untersuchung für Deutschland gibt, aber hier scheint mir die Verteilung unklarer zu sein. Während München beispielsweise den größten Teil der IT-Industrie beherbergt, gilt die Stadt wohl nicht als besonders tolerant. Berlin mit seiner hohen Arbeitslosigkeit wird wohl als kreativ gelten, aber diese Kreativität zieht keine Arbeitsplätze an.

The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities.

This book introduces design thinking, the collaborative process by which the designer’s sensibilities and methods are employed to match people’s needs with what is technically feasible and a viable business strategy. In short, design thinking converts need into demand. It’s a human-centered approach to problem solving that helps people and organizations become more innovative and creative.

Design thinking is not just applicable to so-called creative industries or people who work in the design field. It’s an approach that has been used by organizations such as Kaiser Permanente to increase the quality of patient care by re-examining the ways that their nurses manage shift change or Kraft to rethink suppl

For those readers seriously interested in how to work from home, and whether they possess the aptitudes and skills to do so, this book is a valuable resource - especially if you are over the age of approximately 40 and therefore have the experience to fit yourself into their examples and options. I do suggest you start your reading at chapter three however, where the writing becomes stronger and the inaccurate assumptions about today’s office as well as the forced cliches around working in your underwear are dropped.

Two charts in the book really stood out for me. The first is: "Enterprise 2.0: Key Barriers and Responses." Dawson divides 15 key barriers into Culture, Executive Attitudes, Vested Interests, and Design of Initiatives. He covers the gamut of problems and suggests practical solutions. The second is an extensive table on "Return on Investment Calculations." Although, it's been largely debated whether Enterprise 2.0 can be seen through the same lens as other investments in technology (and Dawson recognizes this), he points to realistic data sets that can be used to compile a custom ROI for each company based on real costs with related tangible and intangible values.

Design Is The Problem is a thorough and informative survey of just about every aspect of sustainable design. It covers important frameworks, schools of thought and specific tools. It’s interspersed with good examples and case studies that reveal the complexity of the issue and that force the reader to engage with the topic rather than assume simple answers, which of course don’t exist. Design Is The Problem does not go into significant depth on each topic but it will give you a place to start on pretty much anything related to sustainability. Definitely an important book to have in your library.

What are the real generational differences and how will they influence collaboration at the workplace?

... Lehrbuch schließt gleich mehrere Lücken: die wachsende Lücke zwischen aktueller Theorieentwicklung in der Organisationswissenschaft und der Alltagspraxis in den Unternehmen; die Lücke an systemtheoretischer Literatur für die Hochschulausbildung; und die Lücken im eigenen Wissen über die innovative Kraft systemtheoretischer Perspektiven für Unternehmen und Organisationen. In 13 Kapiteln vermitteln die Autorinnen und Autoren die zentralen systemtheoretischen Ideen und Konzepte zur Strategie- und Organisationsentwicklung. Das Spektrum reicht von den Wurzeln der systemischen Organisationstheorie bis zu Fragen von Wissen, Lernen und Kultur in Organisationen. Eine Besonderheit des Buches ist sein didaktischer Aufbau: Am Beginn eines Kapitels wird das Thema kurz zusammengefasst. Am Ende stehen Wiederholungsfragen und weiterführende Literaturhinweise. So kann das Buch sowohl veranstaltungsbegleitend für die universitäre Ausbildung als auch als Grundlage für Selbststudium und Weiterbildung

Lightness, Speed, Mobility, Locality, Situation, Conviviality, Learning, Literacy, Smartness, and Flow. In the Bubble is a tour de force that rides along these principles.

Driving results through social networks by Bob Cross. I wanted to read this book because I’m looking for insights into the latest thinking on building new external Value Networks for organisations engaged in Open Innovation. Although a lot of the book is focused on the important area of improving internal networks within organisations I was struck by the section of the book dealing with behaviours which can energise networks both inside and outside of organisations.

… changes in organizational strategies usually create micro challenges at the working level. These become opportunities for outsider-insiders throughout the organization to identify gaps between current work practices and changes needed to address the new strategic objectives. … Here is an opportunity for outsider-insiders within each functional group to identify gaps and introduce new ways of working collaboratively to achieve the company's strategic objectives. (p53)

Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success.

In a nutshell, Gladwell argues that extreme individual success - the success of people who are "outliers" in terms of performance and outcomes - is not due to levels of IQ or what specifically they are educated in, but is primarily due to three things:

1. the circumstances of when and where we were born and the opportunities that that presents to us,
2. the social culture and norms we inherit from our society and family
3. the amount of time we invest in developing a skill or talent

I always thought that there was a sort of aesthetic to the Kind of Blue album that expressed the tenets of restraint, simplicity, and naturalness. In the music you hear a kind of free yet structured spontaneity, an idea that seems oxymoronic until you study one of the Zen arts...or jazz.

The importance of being a good listener
I wonder how many leaders could be better leaders if they listened more than they spoke. As Wynton points out, jazz is about listening. Much of the music is improvised so you always have to be listening to the logic of what the soloist, for example, is playing so you will know how to respond. You can not be a good jazz musician and be a bad listener. Can't you say the same thing for a leader or anyone giving a presentation?

for example, there is a lot of research on charismatic leadership that he ignores, which shows it is effective under many conditions -- most striking to me is that he defined it as, essentially, flashy and arrogant leadership, which isn't how most researchers define and measure it. They they do talk about charismatic leaders being articulate and able to set down a clear vision, but the key thing is the ability to motivate and direct followers' energy -- muck like Collins' Level 5 leaders

Building on his pioneering work on the management of technology and innovation in his first book, Managing the Flow of Technology, Thomas J. Allen of MIT has joined with award-winning German architect Gunter Henn of HENN Architekten to produce a book that explores the combined use of two management tools to make the innovation process most effective: organizational structure and physical space. They present research demonstrating how organizational structure and physical space each affect communication among people?in this case, engineers, scientists, and others in technical organizations?and they illustrate how organizations can transform both to increase the transfer of technical knowledge and maximize the ?communication for inspiration? that is central to the innovation process.

10 design rules to keep in mind
(1) Communicate — don't decorate.
(2) Speak with a visual voice.
(3) Use two typeface families maximum. OK, maybe three.
(4) Pick colors on purpose.
(5) If you can do it with less, then do it.
(6) Negative space is magical — create it, don't just fill it up!
(7) Treat the type as image, as though it's just as important.
(8) Be universal; remember that it's not about you.
(9) Be decisive. Do it on purpose — or don't do it at all.
(10) Symmetry is the ultimate evil

a review in the current issue of American Scientist of Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet - and How to Stop It

The book, which grew out of the digital natives project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center, investigates “what it means to grow up in a mediated culture and the ways in which technology inflects issues like privacy, safety, intellectual property, media creation, and learning,”.

In a long review in the Washington Monthly with the title “Open Society - The rules of the digital era aren’t clear, even to the generation that has grown up in it“, Doron Taussig argues that digitisation means social change.

“To live online is to live in a sort of permanent public, and it’s not clear that people have grasped this.”

"A Byte of Vim" is a book which aims to help you to learn how to use the Vim editor (version 7), even if all you know is how to use the computer keyboard.

Image:Vim editor.gif

The first part of this book is meant for new users who want to understand what Vim is and learn how to use it.

The second part of this book is for people who already know how to use Vim and want to learn about features that make Vim so powerful, such as windows and tabs, personal information management, making it a programmer's editor, how to extend Vim with your own plugins, and more.

Michael has created a practical and unbiased guide to showing how to take advantage of Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies to enhance collaboration, fuel team productivity, and improve business processes. The book reintroduces Michael's Seven Pillars of Team Productivity and I think he does a balanced job of pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of SharePoint and then offering ways to make the most of a SharePoint implementation. This book could have been written about using IBM/Lotus technology for collaboration, but it looks like Microsoft Press got to Michael first. So, instead of being a blue book, it's orange.

7 key survival skills that they appear to lack:

* Critical thinking and problem solving -- at every level in the organization, people need to be rigorous thinkers who test assumptions and don't rely on preconceived notions.
* Collaboration across networks and leading by influence -- increasingly people need the skills to lead across departmental lines by influence rather than authority.
* Agility and adaptability -- given the rate of change, today's job may not exist tomorrow. So, we need people who can learn and change, rather than relying on static technical skills.
* Initiative and entrepreneurship -- we need self-directed people who can find creative solutions to difficult problems.
* Effective oral and written communication -- without good communication skills, it's hard to collaborate, influence or lead.
* Accessing and analyzing information -- we need to be able to select and process information efficiently and effectively.
* Curiosity and Imagination ............

Zachary Shore draws on literature, culture, history and politics to illustrate seven common "cognition traps". You will recognize many of these in your own organization:

* Exposure Anxiety: fear of being seen as weak
* Causefusion: confusing the causes of complex events
* Flat View: seeing the world in one dimension
* Cure-Allism: thinking that one-size solutions can solve all problems
* Infomania: an obsessive relationship to information
* Mirror Imaging: thinking the other side thinks like you do
* Static Cling: the refusal to accept that circumstances have changed

Concept worker --> a "higher order" of knowledge worker? Thoughts from Tony on Daniel Pink's book A Whole New Mind.

In the next chapter he provides some grounding in that explanation with reference to the Coase theorem, social networks and the limits of traditional efficiencies that come out of organisational structures. This is where everything begins to fall into place. He explains the impact of social software this way:

“Think of these activities as lying under a Coasean floor; they are valuable to someone but too expensive to be taken on in any institutional way, because the basic and unsheddable costs of being an institution in the first place make those activities not worth pursuing.”