Book Reviews

Book Review – Competing on Analytics

February 26, 2007

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning by Tom Davenport and Jeanne Harris
Tom and Jeanne have written a new book (building on a paper they wrote some time ago) about what they call “analytic competitors”, that is to say companies that use their analytic prowess not just to enhance their operations but as their [...]

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Book Review – Data Mining Techniques

December 26, 2006

Data Mining Techniques: For Marketing, Sales, and Customer Relationship Management
This is one of the classic works on data mining and well worth the read.I really liked the book both because it is well written and because, although it drilled into a fair amount of detail about some of the techniques, it started each new section [...]

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Book Review – Execution

December 20, 2006

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
Over the weekend I finished “Execution. The Discipline of Getting Things Done” by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. This book is a succinct summary of all that is wrong in many companies. Larry and Ram analyze many of the most dysfunctional behaviors seen in large corporations and lay out [...]

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Book Review – The world is flat

December 14, 2006

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
I have just finished reading “The World Is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. Firstly a health warning – it’s a REALLY long book. Even skimming some sections it took me a long while to read it. Overall it is a good if somewhat long winded read. [...]

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Book Review – Making robust decisions

December 11, 2006

Making Robust Decisions
I just finished reading Dr David Ullman’s new book, “Making Robust Decisions“. The book is a discussion of the challenges of making complex decisions, especially those with alternatives and uncertainty, and a methodology/software platform for approaching these kinds of decisions. It’s a quick read with some great advice for anyone trying to make [...]

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Book Review – The only sustainable edge

November 30, 2006

The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization
In this book John and John discuss how recent changes in the world will force, indeed are forcing, companies to change how they think about offshoring and outsourcing, innovation and even their core business processes. They describe how a combination of “Converging [...]

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Book Review – The Long Tail

November 26, 2006

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
Chris Anderson does a nice job of introducing some key concepts that are redefining business in the Internet era. As he says “The era of one-size-fits-all is ending, and in its place is something new, a market of multitudes”. In this world the [...]

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Book Review – Blink

July 26, 2006

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
The book is an easy read and full of wonderful stories and vignettes that illustrate Malcolm’s points. Essentially the book is about how people make rapid decisions, often before consciously processing the available data, and the good and bad consequences of this. We are all familiar with some of [...]

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