Category: Communications, Creativity, Management, Philosophy

"Contextual Media : Multimedia and Interpretation," (Multimedia and
Information Systems Communication) by Edward Barrett (Editor), Marie Redmond (Editor) reviews, pricing or purchase

"The Web of Life : A New Understanding of Living Systems"
by Fritjof Capra reviews, pricing or purchase 
     "Systems thinking is "contextual," which is the opposite of analytical thinking. Analysis means taking something apart in order to understand it; systems thinking means putting it into the context of a larger whole.
       In nature there is no "above" or "below," and there are no hierarchies. There are only networks nesting within other networks."
       In the new systems thinking, the metaphor of knowledge as a building is being replaced by that of the network."
   … throughout the history of Western science and philosophy there has been a tension between the study of substance and the study of form. The study of substance starts with the question, What is it made of?; the study of form with the question, What is its pattern? These are two very different approaches, which have been in competition with one another throughout our scientific and cultural tradition."
       Economics emphasizes competition, expansion, and domination; ecology emphasizes cooperation, conservation, and partnership.
      In ecosystems the role of diversity is closely connected with the system's network structure. A diverse ecosystem will also be resilient, because it contains many species with overlapping ecological functions that can partially replace one another. … the more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be.
      In human communities ethnic and cultural diversity may play the same role. Diversity means many different relationships, many different approaches to the same problem. A diverse community is a resilient community, capable of adapting to changing situations.
      However, diversity is a strategic advantage only if there is a truly vibrant community, sustained by a web of relationships. If the community is fragmented into isolated groups and individuals, diversity can easily become a source of prejudice and friction."

"The Rise of the Network Society,"  Manuel Castells
reviews, pricing or purchase

"Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age : From Method to Metaphor," by Richard Coyne reviews, pricing or purchase

"The Living Company," Arie de Geus, 1977.  reviews, pricing or purchase
    "At the heart of this book is a simple question with sweeping implications: What if we thought about a company as a living being?"... seeing a company as a living being means that it can learn as an entity, just as a theater troop, jazz ensemble, or championship sports team can actually learn s an entity." From the foreword by Peter Senge)
     "Companies die because their managers focus on the economic activity of producing goods and services, and they forget that their organizations' true nature is that of a community of humans."
    "Defining the Living Company [characteristics of]: 1. Sensitivity to the environment, represents a company's ability to learn and adapt. 2. Cohesion and identity, ... aspects of a company's innate ability to build a community and a persona for itself. 3. Tolerance and its corollary, decentralization, are both symptoms of a company's awareness of ecology; its ability to build constructive relationships with other entities ... 4. .. conservative financing ... critical corporate attribute: the ability to govern its own growth and evolution ..."

"High Output Management," Andrew Grove, reviews, pricing or purchase
      "...automation is certainly one way to improve the leverage of all types of work. Having machines to help them, human beings can create more output. But in both widget manufacturing and administrative work, something else can also increase the productivity of the black box. This is called work simplification. To get leverage this way, you first need to create a flow chart of the production process as it exists. Every single step must be shown on it; no step should be omitted in order to pretty things up on paper. Second, count the number of steps in the flow chart, so that you know how many you started with. Third, set a rough target for reduction of the number of steps. In the first round of work simplification, our experience shows that you can reasonably expect a 30 to 50% reduction.
         To implement the actual simplification, you must question why each step is performed. Typically, you will find that many steps exist in your work flow for no good reason. Often they are there by tradition or because formal procedure ordains it, and nothing practical requires their inclusion…. We found that in a wide range of administrative activities at Intel, substantial reduction - about 30% _ could be achieved in the number of steps required to perform various tasks.
        …in the work of soft professions, [administrative, professional and managerial] it becomes very difficult to distinguish between output and activity. And as noted, stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.
       …the information most useful to me, and I suspect most useful to all managers, comes from quick, often casual verbal exchanges. This usually reaches a manager much faster than anything written down. And usually the more timely the information, the more valuable it is.
      …today's gap represents a failure of planning sometime in the past. By analogy, forcing ourselves to concentrate on the decisions needed to fix today's problems is like scurrying after our car has already run out of gas. Clearly, we should have filled up earlier. To avoid such a fate, remember that as you plan you must answer the question: what do I have to do today to solve - or better, avoid - tomorrow's problem?
      Thus, the true output of the planning process is the set of tasks it causes to be implemented. … in other words, the output of the planning process is the decisions made and the actions taken as a result of the process."

"Net Gain, Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities," by John Hagel & Arthur Armstrong.  reviews, pricing or purchase
    "...always member the principle of  "community before commerce" to keep the organization's eye on what matters most - the members' interests and their relationship with one another."
      "... the early value of communities will rest largely on their capacity to address the passions of their members. As a critical mass of members and purchasing power aggregate within a community, it will give members the opportunity to extract still greater value from the vendors they do business with."
    "... the most significant, and yet most subtle, barriers to switching communities are the relationships that members develop within them."

"Mastering the Art of Creative Collaboration," Robert Hargrove, 1998
reviews, pricing or purchase
"...an age of hierarchy and specialization is colliding with an age of complexity"
      ". ... we see the world through images of the past - nation-states, armies, and religious differences.  In doing so, we miss the shift from civilization to what Teihard de Chardin called the "planetization of mankind," or the many forces bringing us all closer together."
    "This new planetization is revolutionizing the world as we see it.  Examples of new ideas that we now accept as mainstream are: (1) the global economy, (2) the shift from hierarchies to networks, (3) the global economy, (4) the knowledge society. ..."
    "... [Albert Einstein] once told a girl who asked him about his experiments that he never conducted any.  He said his work relied heavily on the experiments of other people."
    "The collaborative corporation: A new era of collaborative organizations characterized by lateral leadership and virtual teams is emerging.   Their focus will be on engaging customers in a dialogue about their goals and problems.  Instead of asking, "How do we break down this complexity into small parts and delegate them?", managers will ask," What new patterns of relationship and interaction do we need to create to solve this complex customer problem?"
    "Thus, the idea of collaborative inquiry, where many different specialists think and work on a problem together, becomes a trend."
    "The Five Phases of a Collaborative Conversation: 1) Clarify the purpose of the conversation, 2) gather divergent views and perspectives, 3) Build shared understanding of divergent views and perspectives, 4) Create "new" options by connecting different views, 5) Generate a conversation for action."
    "Think of clarifying the purpose as focusing the conversation like a laser beam."
    "Put the challenge or problem in one sentence.  This is an important part of the creative process that involves formulation, preparation, illumination, and verification ..."

The Community of the Future, by Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith & Richard Beckhard, Editors. 24 essays by global leaders, including Peter Drucker, Lester Thurow, Stephen Covey, Howard Rheingold, Elie Wiesel.
    "The global community has the potential to become a nightmare: a world of conformity: with billions of people wearing the same baseball caps turned backward, the same baggy shirts, the same tennis shoes, speaking the same language, and laughing at the same jokes." Marshall Goldsmith
     "…life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonalty of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity." J. Lickkider.    reviews, pricing, purchase

Virtual Teams, by Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps reviews, pricing, purchase
"The number 5 sits at the approximate midpoint of a range for the size of a team. Researchers, popular writers, and experienced team leaders alike agree that the ideal team size ranges from 4 to 7 members. This is, not so coincidentally perhaps, the same size a s a typical stone age family and not very different from many families today.
      Is there a lower limit to team size?… This is not a questions for us: two can team. If we look just at the roles that people play in groups, then even two people can play many roles with one another, with a great diversity of communication between them.
      Is there an upper an upper limit on how big a team or small group can be? … the general upper limit figures range from 15 to 25. … Teams of 25, however, typically are groups of small groups."

"Historied Thought, Constructed World : A Conceptual Primer for the Turn of the Millennium," by Joseph Margolis reviews, pricing or purchase

Maslow on Management," Abraham Maslow, 1998. reviews, pricing or purchase.
     "I tuned my utopian purposes to education as a way of reaching the whole human species. ...it dawned on me that as important as education is, even more important is the work life of the individual since everybody works."
    "Enlightened management is one way of taking religion seriously, profoundly, deeply and earnestly ... for those who define religion ... in terms of deep concern with the problems of human beings, with the problems of ethics, of the future of man, then this kind of philosophy, translated into the work life, turns out to be very much like the new style of management."
    "... perhaps "work" itself has inspired our renewed interest in spirituality.  Organizations everywhere have undertaken the   process of defining their goals, values and mission statements.  The process forces leaders and employees to analyze the very heart and soul of their existence."
    "The more influence and power you give to someone else in the team situation, the more you have for yourself."
    "We fear our highest possibilities (as well as our lowest ones).  We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments.  We enjoy and even thrill to the god-like possibilities we see in ourselves.  And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe and fear before these same possibilities ..."
    "Creativeness is correlated with the ability to withstand the lack of structure, the lack of future, the lack of predictability, of control, the tolerance for ambiguity, for planlessness."
    "A good sales person is the eyes and ears of the company ... he is the ambassador of the enterprise ... any enterprise ought to have a very steady feedback about consumer demand, and about the needs of markets, about satisfaction and dissatisfaction of product and the salesperson is exactly the person to collect this information and feedback.  He is the Vice President in charge of innovation and development of future products ..."

"Constructionism in Practice : Designing, Thinking, and Learning in a Digital World," Yasmin B. Kafai (Editor), Mitchel Resnick (Editor)
reviews, pricing or purchase

"Cracking Creativity, The Secrets of Creative Genius," Michael Michalko, 1998. Excerpts below. reviews, pricing or purchase
      ".. the most respected produced not only more great works, but also more "bad" ones. Out of their massive quantity of work came quality.  Geniuses produce. Period.
     "Fluency of thought means generating quantities of ideas. Quantity breeds quality: ... the sensible thing to do is to produce many ideas before we evaluate."
      "Abstraction is a basic principle in restructuring a problem. .. Einstein despaired of creating new knowledge from already existing knowledge. ... So he reversed this procedure and worked at a higher level of abstraction."
    "The explosion of creativity in the Renaissance was intimately tied to the recording and conveying of a vast body of knowledge in a parallel language: a language of drawings, diagrams, graphs ..."

"The Death of Competition: Leadership & Strategies in the Age of Business Ecosystems," by James Moore. Excerpts below: reviews, pricing or purchase
     "...shared imagination is what holds together economies, societies, and companies....We are witnessing the next revolution beyond multidivisional organizations ... We are entering an age of imagination."
     "Market creation is actually a form of applied economic development.  It requires intensive cooperation among diverse contributors to realize a workable economic future.  It takes generating shared visions, forming alliances, negotiating deals, and managing complex relationships."
     "...competitive advantage stems principally from their cooperative, coevolving relationships with a network of other contributors to the overall economic scene.  This is the new paradigm in strategy-making, and it means the end of competition as we know it."
     "You want to provide the architecture for large-scale cooperation. In a sense, what you are doing is a form of community organizing."
     "...the central game of strategic management is moving from managing oneself to leading a community of allies."

"The De-Voicing of Society; Why We Don't Talk to Each Other Anymore," by John Locke reviews, pricing or purchase
     "... intimate talking has been edged out by news bulletins.  Our sentences are increasingly swollen with facts.  Spontaneity has taken a plunge.  The emotional warmth has gone out of speech.
     The destruction of the American town and village has gone so far that builders are now attempting to create anew that which strip malls, gas stations, and fast-food chains have wiped out.  Their goal is to build communities with proper sidewalks and places that people can go on foot.  But "a community is not something you can have, like a pizza," according to Kunstler. "it is a local organism based on a web of interdependencies." [quoting James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere]
     "We are not equipped, like termite, to become willing members of a vast community," said Desmond Morris, nearly 40 years ago. "Even if startling new and at present unimagined advances in mass-communications techniques are made in the years to come, they will continue to be hampered by the bio-social limitations of our species." [Morris, 1969] Little did he know what was coming.  Little do we."
     Computer-assisted communication is coming on like a steamroller, flattening intimate forms of self-expression. Justifying the cost and time associated with business trips will get harder, especially when the available communications systems were brought in order to obviate such travel.  Eventually, meeting or knowing someone with whom we work will be viewed as a coincidence."

"Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Nations," by Thomas Stewart,
reviews, pricing or purchase
       "Information and knowledge are the thermonuclear competitive weapons of our time. Knowledge is more valuable and more powerful than natural resources, big factories, or fat bank rolls.  In industry after industry, success comes to companies that have the best information or wield it most effectively - not necessarily the companies with the most muscle."
    "Structured capital belongs to the organization as a whole.   It can be reproduced and shared.  ... rapid knowledge sharing, collective knowledge growth, shortened lead times, more productive people - these are the reasons for managing structural capital."

"Blueprint to the Digital Economy: Creating Wealth in the Era of E-business," by Don Tapscott, 1998.  reviews, pricing or purchase
     "Coevolution is at the heart of e-business communities and wealth creation in the digital economy ... the key to growth is found in building innovative community relationships ..."

"Growing Up Digital, The Rise of the Net Generation," by Don Tapscott.
reviews, pricing or purchase
     "Their shift from broadcast to interactive is the cornerstone of the Net-Generation.  They want to be users - not just viewers or listeners."
    "Innovation is a hallmark of N-Gen culture.   Innovation, rather than traditional factors such as economies of scale, access to raw materials, productivity, and the cost of labor, determines success in the new economy."
    "In a recent survey I conducted of business leaders, 95.7 percent indicated that knowledge management was more important than to their success than business process reengineering ...  Knowledge sharing is at the heart of this challenge."

"Life on the Screen : Identity in the Age of the Internet," by Sherry Turkle.    "...the virtual self is fragmented, fluid, and always under construction." details

"World Poetry : An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time"
by Katharine Washburn (Editor), John S. Major (Editor), Clifton Fadiman (Editor)
reviews, pricing, purchase   
    “What is poetry which does not save Nations or people?” 
     ”What is pronounced strengthens itself.
      What is not pronounced tends to nonexistence.” Czeslaw Milosz 

updated July 11, 2000