Books - Category Archive
Who could resist a book subtitled “A Complete Guide to the Laws of The Universe”?
If you didn’t know that the author was Roger Penrose, you could be forgiven for assuming that The Road to Reality was one of the very many quasi-scientific, faith-based, wild-eyed polemics that appear each year under increasingly garish covers, [...]
Just got around to reading Blink. It’s a quick read - as usual with Gladwell the book’s central theme, the human ability to make almost instant decisions based on the unconscious mind and previously-acquired experience, is presented lucidly and with plenty of examples.
He structures the book in three broad areas:
Evidence of human ability to make [...]
Borrowing an idea from Matt, my current “nearest-to-hand” bookshelf is:
Strategy Maps
Working in the Twenty-First Century
Proactive Risk Management: Controlling Uncertainty in Product Development
Co-opetition
Competing for the Future
Thinking Strategically
Competitive Advantage
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Over the summer I’ve been spending more time reading than writing, but even then the reading has been going more slowly than I expected! Just finished [bliki]Thinking Strategically[/bliki] and started to wrap my thoughts around [bliki]Strategy Maps[/bliki].
Unlike the previous books in my strategy reading which have focused on the [bliki]Game Theory[/bliki] approach to strategy, this [...]
New on the bookshelf…
Proactive Risk Management, Controlling Uncertainty in Product Development
by Preston G. Smith and Guy M. Merritt
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In the strategy course we touched on (in varying levels of detail) the three main views of company strategy - since the course finished I’ve been adding reading on all three to my “incoming” bookshelf:
The market-focused, competitive advantage approach of Michael Porter:
The resource-based view of the firm, typified by Hamel and Prahalad:
The game theory approach [...]
Just getting to grips with
Freedom Evolves
Summary notes from chapter 3 of
Lean Software Development by Mary and Tom Poppendieck
Summary notes from chapter 2 of
Lean Software Development by Mary and Tom Poppendieck
Summary notes from chapter 1 of
Lean Software Development by Mary and Tom Poppendieck
Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin. Just finished reading the online edition - review to follow.
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The Journey of the Hero by Fridemann Wieland. This book is about applying Joseph Campbell’s mythological idea of “The Hero’s Journey” to personal development, using the Grail myth as the guiding metaphor. Review to follow. This book is currently out of print, I picked up a copy for £1 in a remainders bookshop.
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Measuring the Software Process by Florac & Carleton
This is about applying statistical process control to software development, and I’m reading it for work. Review to follow
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The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook by Peter Senge et. al.
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the sea, the sea is the first Iris Murdoch novel I have read - seeing the film “Iris” encouraged me to try some of her writing. Review to follow.
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As something of a counterpoint to the very essence of blogging, the Guardian reprints an essay from 1821 by William Hazlitt “Essay On Reading Old Books”
I hate to read new books. There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any [...]
Just reading How The Mind Works by Steven Pinker. After the intro he dives into explaining the computational theory of mind, and now (in the chapter I am currently reading) revisits the theory of evolution and explains how this impinges on the growth of the human mind.
It sometimes takes me a few weeks to read [...]