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October 1, 2003
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The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful
Growth
By Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E.
Raynor
Harvard Business School Press September 2003
320 pages,
$29.95
In his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma, Christensen, a
professor at the Harvard Business School, argued that by doing what
they were supposed to do—satisfying the needs of their best
customers—companies made themselves vulnerable to rapid changes in
the marketplace. Here, aided by Raynor, a director at Deloitte
Research, he tries to solve that dilemma. The trick? Reshaping how
you develop new products and services so that they have more impact,
making your company one of the firms that reshapes the marketplace.
The authors then lay out a nine-step approach designed to do just
that.
Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve
Problems Big and Small
By Barry Nalebuff and Ian
Ayers
Harvard Business School Press September 2003
256 pages,
$27.50
The words "fun" and "business book" rarely go together.
But this book, by two Yale University professors—Nalebuff teaches
economics and Ayers teaches law—is the exception. The avowed purpose
is to present ways, à la Edward de Bono (Lateral Thinking), to think
more creatively. And they succeed by suggesting you ask yourself a
series of questions: How would the richest man in the world solve
the problem you face? Would turning an existing idea on its head
help? What new product can be paired with an existing one? But the
fun part is the products they create as examples: an insurance
policy that protects your house from dropping in value; making
telemarketers pay you to listen to their pitches; and having every
ATM machine accept deposits for any financial
institution.
Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry
Ellison and Oracle
By Matthew Symonds; commentary by Larry
Ellison
Simon & Schuster, October 2003
528 pages,
$28
The fascination with Larry Ellison continues. In a different
attempt to try to satisfy it, Symonds, an editor at The Economist,
was given unlimited access to Ellison himself—with the Oracle
chairman and CEO getting a chance to make comments in the text
(Ellison also wrote the forward). Not surprisingly, it is Ellison's
comments that are the most intriguing. Example: "If you work in
Silicon Valley long enough, you can't help noticing how much the
technology industry resembles the women's clothing business. Both
are fashion-driven. Fashionable ideas are hot, when others are not."
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Seek
and Ye Shall Find Having
done a pretty good job conquering the consumer Web search
business, Google is now going for the corporate search
market—giving the corporate world, ever more hungry for good
intelligence, exactly what it needs. By Eric
Nee
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Open-Source,
Closed Minds Heavy
lobbying by Microsoft Corp. succeeded in quashing a recent
meeting by the World Intellectual Property Organization to
consider the trend by world governments toward open,
nonproprietary technologies. How did they get away with it?
By Lawrence Lessig
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