by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
Kim and Mauborgne advocates value innovation to ensure that businesses create uncontested new markets spaces - i.d. sails in blue oceans rather than the blod red oceans of regular competition.
Recommended.
Challenges and Perspectives
by John McAuley, Joanne Duberly and Phil Johnson
An interesting book on organisational theory from a sociological or philosophical angle.
At times the book gets a bit to sociological or philosophical loosing its grounding.
Recommended.
by Gary Hamel with Bill Breen
A book on management innovation which Hamel considers necessary in the new world.
Hamel's main point is that businesses need to be able to adapt their strategy to the changing and disruptive surroundings.
Recommended
Driving co-created value through global networks
by C. K. Prahalad and M. S. Krishnan
An interesting book on how to co-creating value with customers using two basic concepts:
N=1: one consumer co-created experience at a time
R=G: resources from multiple sources
I like the book but still find it a bit simplistic.
The Times calls Prahalad:
The #1 most influential management thinker in the world.
Recommended.
The Lost Lessons of the Worlds Greatest Management teacher
by William A. Cohen
A book based on Cohen's notes as a PhD student with Drucker. It is divided into 16 lessons with several interesting points on a basic management level. The book is just as much the author's story as it is it is Drucker's. Cohen is himself a professor with a previous military career.
I do, however, find the Drucker worship a bit annoying.
In 1983 Peter Drucker said of Cohen:
Bill Cohen was singularly stimulating and attractive student from whom my colleagues on the faculty and I learned at least as much as we could teach him.
Recommended.
by Andrew Crane and Dirk Matten
An excellent textbook on CSR and business ethics.
Personally, I have reservations with respect to Crane and Matten's handling of ethical theories. They do not seem to really understand moral philosophy. Also the problem of not having reasons to justify stating that CSR is a moral abligation is not solved with an assumption that there is a moral obligation to do CSR.
Used at the Copenhagen Business School.
Recommended.
En indføring i organisation og ledelse
af Dag Ingvar Jacobsen og Jan Thorsvik
Hvordan organisationer fungerer kommer godt rundt om teorien inden for organisationi. Det er dog et problem, at bogen forsøger at få det hele med. Hvis bogen havde været mere rettet mod specifikke teoriretninger, ville den være mere forståelig for læserne.
Bogen bruges i faget Organisationsanalyse på CBS.
Anbefalet.
Integrating technological, market and organizational change
by Joe Tidd, John Bessant and Keith Pavitt
An MBA, MSc and advanced undergraduate course text book on innovation.
Dorathy A. Leonard, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School wrote:
Managing Innovation masterfully synthesizes the extensive literature on this extremely complex, often fragmentef topic.
Excellent book.
Highly recommended.
Leading Through Technological Innovation
by David Birchall and George Tostiga
An excellent book on innovation.
Birchall and Tovstiga both with Henley Business School considers innovation a strategic capability that needs to be honed. The also advocate a dual strategy of both doing radical and incremental innovation.
Somewhat difficult so do not let be your first book on innovation.
Recommended.
Understanding and Implementing the Problem-Solving Tools and management Techiniques of the World's Top Strategic Consulting Firm
by Ethan M. Rasiel and Paul N. Friga
Two ex-McKinsey consultants share the McKinsey way of consulting.
At times you will find interesting information in this book but mostly it is just plain common sense techniques.
Most of the time you will find the book annoying with its glorifying of McKinsey & Co.
Well, reading it is not a total waste of time.
by Steven Ten Have
A management model reference book.
Three to four pages per model (56 in all) covering The big idea, When to use it and The final analysis.
Great as a quick reference.
Recommended.
by Sue Harding and Trevor Long
45 business models summarised in a standard format.
Ten Have's Key Management Models covers more models and has better graphics.
Recommended as a quick reference.
by Richard Luecke
An introduction to the basics of innovation.
Quite good and easily read.
Part of the Harvard Business Essentials series.
Recommended.
My Two Years Inside the Cauldron of Capitalism
by Philip Delves Broughton
The story of the author's two years at HBS.
It is a quite intersting read - mostly because Broughton is the odd man at HBS. He is older and a journalist. He also cannot really stomach the hard nosed business attitude of the school and the students.
Brioughton spends to much time demonstrating some of the things he has learned which if you read the book with a business background is a bit annoying.
George Osborne, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer wrote:
'Original, clever, funny - and full of insights into one of the most Influential institutions in the world'.
Recommended.
about great managing. great leading and sustained individual success
by Marcus Buckingham
The book has chapters on all the sub-title subjects. It is easily read.
Tom Peters wrote:
This is a wise - and radical - book, a true gem worth saving.
I suggest reading First Break All the Rules before this book.
An ok read.
The Impact of the Highly Improbable
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A black swan is a highly unlike and unpredictable event that chances everything.
Financial Times wrote:
Excellent and thought-provoking ... an entertaining book.
Taleb has written an interesting book on the scary power of randomness and how we continuesly misinterpret the world.
One of Taleb's important points is that we should not just look a things in terms of risk but also in terms of consequence - in particular if the consequences are unacceptable.
A bit to long but very literary quoting e.g. Sartre and Proust.
Recommended.
The Key to Competitive Advantage
Edited by Tom Nash
An innovation guide published by Institute of Directors.
An ok read.
It is far more, and less, than you ever imagined
by Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel
A provocative collection of short texts on management topics. For instance the interesting story of Honda's entry on the American marked for motorcycles.
Recommended.
Awareness and Change
John Thompson with Frank Martin
A text book on strategic analysis, choice and implementation structure.
Part of the curriculum on the Henley MBA.
Recommended.
The Strategy Faculty of Henley Management College
edited by Terry Gerrison
An MBA/DBA text book on strategy.
An ok read.
Linking business performance and value creation
by Roger W. Mills and Carole F. Print
A book about how shareholder value and value based management can create value and drive strategy.
Used on the Henley MBA.
A hard look at the soft practise of managing and management development
by Henry Mintzberg
Mintzberg has an axe to grind. MBA programmes teach the wrong people the wrong things at the wrong time. Executive MBA programmes teach the right people the wrong things.
The basic idea is that MBA programmes creates analysts and not managers.
Michael Skapinker, Financial Times, wrote:
Managers not MBAs goes beyond polemic.
Although Mintzberg has some excellent points and one certainly should not automatically consider MBA programmes as management training I have to say that the book is too polemic and Mintzberg's documentation is at times only anecdotal.
An ok read.
How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand
by Chris Anderson
Anderson is the Editor-in-Chief of Wired magasine.
The Long Tail started out as an article and was subsequently expanded into this book.
While the concept of the book is quite brilliant (that digitalisation creates endless choice and supply of goods) it gets kind of tedious to read an entire book about it.
Although Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, writes:
Read this brilliant and timely book if you want to get a look at the future of business.
An ok but important read.
How to develop your talents and those of the people you manage
by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton
Building on research from the Gallup International Research & Education Centre Buckingham and Clifton have created a programme to analyse and build talents based on strengths and not weaknesses.
The book is mostly a book on profiling. Basically I would recommend reading First, Break All The Rules unless your specifically are interested in their profiling system.
An ok read.
by J Nevan Wright and Peter Race
A magement book on supply chain, operations and service operations management.
Most accounting departments could be cut by at least 50 per cent, and probably more, if they were restricted to recording what the operations managers wanted. The point is that while accountants keep themselves busy demanding useless information and challenging every other function for explanations and more detail, the other functions don't have the knowledge or time to challenge them.
The book is not as bad as this quote might seem to indicate but I do feel that the book is somewhat unfinished.
The book is used on the Henley MBA.
An ok book on service management.
by Derek Torrington, Laura Hall, ans Stephen Taylor
An excellent book on human resource management covering resourcing, performance, deveolpment, employee relations, pay, and cross-functional issues.
The book is used e.g. on the Henley MBA.
Recommended.
Why some companies make the leap ... and other's don't
by Jim Collins
Collins and his research team from Stanford University reseached 1,435 US companies finding 11 who consistently outperformed the the market over a 15 year period. The book details the common characteristics.
A great management book.
Highly recommended.
What the World's greatest managers do differently
by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffmann
Based on Gallop research Bucking and Coffman found twelve simple question that correlate to high performance organisations This book is about high performance people management and the principle of focussing on your strengths and manage around your weaknesses.
A great book on people management.
Highly recommended
Technology, Development and Management for the E-Business
by Simon Hickie, Paul Bocij, Dave Chaffey, Andrew Greasley
Part 1 of this book is useless:
Starting the web browser
Using the Windows Start menu choose Internet Explorer, Netscape Communicator or Navigator. Type in the web address such as www.bt.com into the address (Internet Explorer) or location (Netscape Navigator) box (after double clicking on it to highlight the existing text).
How can an author manage to be outdated, wrong, and get the educational level of a book so wrong (published in 2006) in just four lines?
That said the second and third part of this book which are on business systems development and management are actually quite good. And that is the reason the book is used at for instance the Henley MBA.
I cannot really bring myself to recommend it, though.
Praktisk viden for den nye leder
af Kim Judson
En kort bog om det at blive leder samt de opgaver og faldgrupper, som den nye leder står over for.
Steen Hildebrandt skriver i forordet:
Jeg har læst bogen med interesse. Den er kompetent og velskrevet. Den er nærværende. Forfatteren forstår sin målgruppe. Jeg håber, at bogen vil blive læst af mange nye og også af potentielle ledere.
Det er jeg enig i. Men den erfarne leder vil næppe hente noget i bogen.
Anbefales med ovenstående forbehold.
by Gerry Johnson, Kevan Scholes and Richard Whittington
An excellent book on the basics of strategy. It is used for instance in the Henley MBA programme.
Professor Andrew Pettigrew, School of management, wrote:
Exploring Coporate Strategy is one of the outstanding texts in international management education.
Highly recommended.
by Sondhi Rakesh
A quick book on the basic concepts of business strategy. It is used by some MBA schools as supplementary literature.
The editing process should have been more thorough. Sun Tzu is suddenly 2,500 years older than he really is. Sondhi also references Kondratief cycles which certainly by now has been disproven. I also find it annoying that management books still use Maslow's theories when nobody else does.
An ok book for referencing key strategic concepts.
Competitive Edge in Business, Politics and Everyday Life
by A. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff
Game theory without the math.
A Financial Times Top Ten book of the year.
Recommended.
Historier om medarbejdere og ledere
af Per Thygesen Poulsen
tegninger af Claus Seidel
En række korte essays om ledelse af forskellig slags.
Nogle gode pointer og nogle lidt ligegyldige.
En ok bog.
af Kirstine Andersen
En bog om værdibaseret ledelse og det at træde i karakter som leder med inspiration fra læsning af Kierkegaard.
Kirstine Andersen forsøger at sætte forskellige ledertyper ind i Kierkegaards stadieteori, hvilket aldrig bliver særlig interessant eller nyskabende, men afsnittene omkring værdibaseret ledelse er værd at læse.
Bogen hæver sig dog aldrig over det almindelige, og Andersen når ikke at komme videre end de kilder, som hun har læst fx Sløks Kierkegaards univers og Coveys 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Andersen ønsker netop at hæve sig over det ledelsestekniske, men det lykkedes desværre ikke rigtig.
Bogen indeholder desuden en række perspektiverende esseys af en række især kvindelige ledere, der ligeledes er af noget svingende kvalitet.
Desuden er bogen kommet lidt for hurtigt igennem korrekturlæsningen, og det irriterer i alt fald mig, at Andersen henviser til den håbløse 1963-udgave af Kierkegaards værker og ikke den nye delvist udkomne Samlede skrifter.
Bogen er ok at læse, fordi der mig bekendt ikke findes andre med den vinkel, men den er for tynd, og emnet Kierkegaard og ledelse fortjener et grundigere arbejde af en, som også har en tilstrækkelig filosofisk bagggrund.
by Stephen R. Covey
A book about personal leadership.
The seven habits are:
Be proactive
Begin with the end in mind
Put first things first
Think "win/win"
Seek first to understand and then to be understood
Synergise
Sharpen the saw
Like any other author of selfhelp book Covey can be quite annoying and simplistic at times. However, basically his ideas are sound. Whether they are right for you is another matter.
An ok read.
by Kenneth Blanchard, Ph.D. and Spencer Johnson, M.D.
Rereading The One Minute Manager some twenty years later I find myself longing for a time where three simple rules of One Minute Management might actually suffice though I doubt they ever did.
The three rules are:
One Minute Goals
One Minute Praisings
One Minute Reprimands
The idea is that if you cannot find a winner you hire someone with the potential to be a winner and systematically train them to be a winner with the simple behavioural rules.
Still the hour you spend reading or rereading it is not completely wasted. You do not get to write a bestseller without writing something original.
If you can't tell what you would like to be happening, he said, you don't have a problem yet. You're just complaining. A problem exists only if the is a difference between what is actually happening and what you desire to be happening.
En nøgle til øget medansvarlighed på arbejdspladsen
af Henrik Sebastian Nybo
En bog om samarbejdet på arbejdspladsen.
Bogen er sådan set ok, men den er noget forsimplet med irriterende udtryk som det psykiske kørekort og det psykiske køleskab.
En ok bog.
A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results
by Stephen C Lundin, Harry Paul, John Christensen
The management philosophy of the fish mongers of the famous Pike Place Fish market.
A short novellisation of a burned out manager's chance meeting with a fish monger that changes her way of thinking about work and helps her change her employee's attitude towards their work. Based in part on John Christensen's film about Pike Place Fish.
In short: Work made fun gets done!
Once you see through the many obvious flaws of the book (everybody asking the right questions, reacting the right way, and the diamond ring at the end) you will find some basic truths in the four point Fish philosophy:
Choose You Attitude
Play
Make Their Day
Be present
An OK read.
by Gareth Morgan
The second and revised edition of this classic international bestseller on organisational theory.
If you only get one book on organisational theory this is the book to get. If you get more than one you should certainly get this one as well. If you already have it get it anyway. I am sure you know someone that you can give it to.
... our simple premise that all theory is metaphor has far-reaching consequences. We have to accept that any theory or perspective that we bring to the study of organization and management, while capable of creating valuable insights, is also incomplete, biased, and potentially misleading. not seing.
...
Metaphor is inherently paradoxical. It can crete powerfull insights that also become distortions, as the way of seing created through a metaphor becomes a way of
Journal of Occupational Psychology wrote:
An intellectual tour-de-force ... a major contribution to the literature.
Eric Trist, late professor emeritus of the Wharton School wrote:
The book is profoundly original and has the quality of a masterpiece.
Donald Schon, Ford Emeritus Professor at MIT wrote:
Images of Organization rewrites the history of recent organizational history.
Highly recommended.
by Dan Borge
You now climb to the mountaintop for a period of deep introspection (don't forget to pack a nice lunch). When you return, you have quantified your preferences for all the possible outcomes and are ready to show me your decision tree ...
Borge has written a book about some of the generel principles of risk management. It is, however, not a textbook on risk management as you might have guessed from the above quote.
The author tries to demystify risk management and to convince you that any risk assessment is better than none. That is of cause true but assigning numbers to utility as in the above quote is taking it too far.
The first half of the book is an excellent introduction to the basics. The last part with chapter headings like "Grooming You to be CEO" can be skipped.
The future may be uncertain but it is not unimaginable and what I can do can shift the odds in my favor.
Borges is right that any amount of risk assessment is better than none and so in that context I will recommend this book in spite of my reservations and my dislike of his personal writting style.
An ok read.
Understanding Personality Type
by Isabel Briggs Myers, Peter B. Myers
Originally published in 1980 the second edition of Gifts Differing (published in 1995) is an excellent source for understanding and broadening your knowledge of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality system.
The book is well written with lots of insights for understanding yourself and others and especially the way personality effects communication and coorporation.
No type has everything. The introverts and thinkers, though, likely to arrive at the most profound decisions, may have the most difficulty in getting their conclusion accepted. The opposite types are best at communicating, but not as adept at determining the truths to be communicated.
For maximum effectiveness, all types must add to their natural endowment the appropriate use of the opposites, either by using them in other people or by developing a controlled use of them within themselves.
Highly recommended.
in a week
by Donald Teale
A short and easy introduction to the practise of project risk assessment.
The book is divided into 7 reading sections (a week of reading) covering the basics of risk assessment. It will also provide you with a run down of the basic tools of the trade.
An easy read with lots of information if you do not know much about risk assessment.
Recommended.
Getting past burnout, busywork, and the myth of total efficiency
by Tom DeMarco
A book that is meant to be read on for instance a plane from Boston to Chigago. That is a book that is meant to inspire amd make you think about things in a new way.
The general idea is that the fast pace of modern businesses inhibits innovation since innovation can only hapen in a environment with slack - that is an environment where the main goal is not trying to meet an insane deadline.
You will find lots of interesting points of views but no solutions.
Recommended.
by Scott Adams
Someone described Dilbert as engineer's humour. That might be true - at least it would explain why I find Dilbert to be only partly funny.
Scott Adams explains that he has written the book on the premiss that "People are idiots". He admits that he also is an idiot, however, somewhat less of an idiot since he has been able to persuade a publisher to pay him to write this book where as you most likely have not.
The world has become so complicated that we're all bluffing our way through the business day, hoping we're not unmasked for the boobs that we really are. I see the world as a massively absurd endeavor, populated by people who struggle every minute to rationalize the silly things they do.
You most likely know Dilbert which means that you also know whether or not you will like this book.
Some of it is very funny and some of it is to far out to be funny.
Productive Project and Teams
by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
The classic book on people management. Originaly published in 1987 the 2nd edition (1999) has an additional 8 chapters.
The book is an absolute classic that all managers should read. However, I also find the book is a bit dated and that the authors should have rewritten it in stead of just adding 8 chapters. Furthermore, I cannot help thinking that the book suffers somewhat from presenting just one side of the coin. The is always a flipside. That is probably the nature of books on this subject so you should not hold it against it.
A must own!
by Frederick P. Brooks, JR.
The classic book on software project management reissued in 1995 with four additional chapters. Brooks draws on his experience as Project Manager for the IBM System/360 computer and OS/360 to expose some rather startling things about the inherent difficulties of project management. Things like Books's Law (Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later) and his favouring the The Surgical Team style of software development.
If you ever worked on software project or if you plan to you should read this book.
The Education of America's Managerial Elite
by Peter Cohen
A book describing Cohen experiences in the early 1970s when he was at the Harvard Business School.
This book made me want to be an MBA.
Read Broughton's What They Teach you at the Harvard Business School for an updated account.
