The Second Order Of Business



The following books seem to share a common mindset about the nature of modern business that represents a radical break from conventional thinking. But, what exactly *is* the common thread that ties them all together? I don't know, but I hope that listing all their key findings here will leading to conceptual unification -- what I call "Kepler's Hedgehog."

The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People (Stephen Covey)
• Be Proactive: Principles of Personal Vision
• Begin with the End in Mind: Principles of Personal Leadership
• Put First Things First: Principles of Personal Management
• Think Win/Win: Principles of Interpersonal Leadership
• Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood
• Synergize Principles of Creative Communication
• Sharpen the Saw: Principles of Balanced Self-Renewal

Good to Great (Jim Collins)
• Level Five Leadership
• First Who, Then What
• The Stockdale Paradox: Confront Brutal Facts Yet Believe in Victory
• The Hedgehog Concept: A Single, Deep Understanding
• The Three Circles: Proficiency, Profit & Passion
• A Culture of Discipline
• Technique (Technology) as Accelerator
• The Flywheel and the Doom Loop

Built to Last (Jim Collins)
• Be clock-builders, not time-tellers
• Embrace the “and”, reject the “or”
• More than profits
• Walk the talk
• Preserve the core [ideology] while stimulating progress
• Never-ending process
• Build the vision (BHAG)

The Innovator's Dilemma (Clay Christensen )
• Value Networks and the Impetus to Innovate
• What Goes Up, Can't Go Down
• Give Responsibility for Disruptive Technologies to
• Organizations Whose Customers Need Them
• Match the Size of the Organization to the Size of the
• Market
• Discovering New and Emerging Markets

The Fifth Discipline (Peter Senge)
Creating Learning Organizations
• Systems Thinking: Positive/Negative Feedback + Delays
• Personal Mastery: Creating Tension between Vision & Reality
• Shared Vision
• Mental Models
• Team Learning: Dialogue vs. Discussion
Community formation: what to give, not what to get
Learn when we have power to act, take responsibility to create

The Tipping Point (Malcom Gladwell)
• The Law of the Few: Connectors, Maven, Salesmen
• The Stickiness Factor
• The Power of Context: Broken Windows, Rule of 150

A Study of History (Arnold Toynbee)
1. Genesis: a response to "golden mean" challenges
2. Growth: following a Creative Minority
3. Time of Troubles: loss of creativity/legitimate authority
4. Universal State: Dominant Minority + Internal/External Proletariat
5. Disintegration: complete loss of central control by the State, emergence of a Church

All Marketers are Liars (Seth Godin)
• The Power of Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World
• Wants vs. Needs
• The Needle and The Vise vs. The Rattle

General Systems Theory
* reinforcing destructive vs. constructive
* balancing
* latency

Basics of the Unix Philosophy
• Rule of Modularity: Write simple parts connected by clean interfaces.
• Rule of Clarity: Clarity is better than cleverness.
• Rule of Composition: Design programs to be connected with other programs.
• Rule of Separation: Separate policy from mechanism; separate interfaces from engines.
• Rule of Simplicity: Design for simplicity; add complexity only where you must.
• Rule of Parsimony: Write a big program only when it is clear by demonstration that nothing else will do.
• Rule of Transparency: Design for visibility to make inspection and debugging easier.
• Rule of Robustness: Robustness is the child of transparency and simplicity.
• Rule of Representation: Fold knowledge into data, so program logic can be stupid and robust.
• Rule of Least Surprise: In interface design, always do the least surprising thing.
• Rule of Silence: When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing.
• Rule of Repair: Repair what you can — but when you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible.
• Rule of Economy: Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time.
• Rule of Generation: Avoid hand-hacking; write programs to write programs when you can.
• Rule of Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it.
• Rule of Diversity: Distrust all claims for one true way.
• Rule of Extensibility: Design for the future, because it will be here sooner than you think.

Rethinking the Social Responsibility of Business (John Mackey)
• Sustainably create value for all stakeholders

Benjamin Franklin's Lessons for Web 2.0 (Josh Peterson)
From Expert [back] to Amateur
• For Love and not for Money
• Learning as you go -> making [visible] mistakes is OK (increases trust)
• Work together


John Maxwell: Life @ Work
Tim McGuire: More than Work

Posted: Wed - November 16, 2005 at 06:08 PM        

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