By John McPartlin
Winter 2007

Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution
by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill and David C. Robertson
(Harvard Business School Press, 2006)

Executive Summary: Frustrated by their inability to fully understand and help companies implement solid IT architecture efforts, three academics/consultants decided to broaden their analysis to include enterprise architecture and how IT processes fully support a company’s business model. Top-performing companies, they say, create a stable base of digitized core processes elegantly executed. Ironically, this stable base actually allows those firms to be more flexible in responding to market changes and new challenges. The authors’ credentials couldn’t be better: Weill is director of the MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research (CISR); Ross is a CISR principal research scientist; and Robertson is a professor at IMD International in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he teaches innovation, technology management and IT.

Excerpt: Top-performing companies define how they will do business (an operating model) and design the processes and infrastructure critical to their current and future operations (enterprise architecture), which guide the evolution of their foundation for execution. Then these smart companies exploit their foundation, embedding new initiatives to make that foundation stronger, and using it as a competitive weapon to seize new business opportunities. And what makes this capability a competitive advantage is that only a small percentage of companies do it well—we estimate 5 percent of firms or less.

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
by Daniel Pink
(Riverhead Trade, 2006)

Executive Summary: Daniel Pink, author of the influential bestseller Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself, returns with a fascinating look at the kind of business skills that will be most valuable in this new century. According to Pink, the long reign of the left brain linear, logical and analytical thinker is over. In its place, the new dawn of the right brain artistic, intuitive and holistic thinker is now upon us. In this new environment, the most valuable academic degree for businesspeople will be the MFA(Master of Fine Arts), not the traditional MBA, Pink predicts.

Excerpt: A few years ago GM hired a man named Robert Lutz to help turn around the ailing automaker. Bob Lutz is not exactly a touchy-feely, artsy-fartsy kind of guy. He’s a craggy, white-haired white man in his seventies. During his career he’s been an executive at each of the big three American automakers. He looks and acts like a marine, which he once was. He smokes cigars, he flies his own plane. He believes global warming is a myth peddled by the environmental movement. But when Lutz took over his post at beleaguered GM, and the New York Times asked him how his approach would differ from his predecessors, here’s how he responded: ‘It’s more right brain ... I see us being in the art business. Art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation.

Becoming a Real-Time Enterprise: Harnessing the Power of RTE to Maximize Competitive Advantage
by Behnam Tabrizi (McGraw-Hill Trade Press, 2006)

Executive Summary: Tabrizi, a professor in Stanford University’s department of management science and engineering, explodes the myths about what proper real-time enterprise (RTE) implementations are. He also shows which organizations have gotten RTE right, and which went about it completely the wrong way. Helpfully, Tabrizi also spells out what the often-confusing concept of RTE is, and isn’t.

Excerpt: The goal of RTE is not just to do everything ... Real time does not imply such terms as instantaneous or sub-second response times. Rather, the key is to deliver information at the right time to the right audience as dictated by the business processes that exist in the organization. Information only needs to be as up-to-date as necessary for business processes to run optimally.

The Visible Ops Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and Auditable Steps
by Kevin Behr, Gene Kim and George Spafford
(Information Technology Process Institute, 2005)

Executive Summary: The Visible Ops Handbook attempts to remove the mystery from Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) implementations and replace it with a practical blueprint for rolling out IT Service Management improvement efforts in just about any organization. The first thing to do, the authors say, is to quickly “stabilize the patient.” In other words, get your company out of constant-firefighting mode so you can concentrate on making improvements, not just keeping disaster at bay.

Excerpt: We need to decrease the amount of unplanned work in order to free up enough resources to create proactive processes. To do this, we start where the most damage is being done. Fortunately, this happens to be the place where we also have the most control. If 80 percent of our injuries are self-inflicted, then that means we are also causing 80 percent of our unplanned work. Therefore, we must start by reducing the number of self-inflicted problems by gaining control of the change process. Start by identifying the systems and business processes that generate the greatest amount of fire fighting. When problems are escalated to IT operations, which servers, networking devices, infrastructure or services are constantly being revisited each week? (Or worse, each day!) These items are your list of ‘most fragile patients’.

The Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine—and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It
by Cynthia Barton Rabe
(American Management Association, AMACOM Books, 2006)

Executive Summary: Nothing frustrates eager new managers more than being told, “But we’ve always done it this way.” In this provocative new book, consultant Rabe, a former Intel innovation strategist and part of the team that created the Energizer Bunny, rails against the negative effects that group think, expert think and conformity have on most organizations. Rabe also shows how adhering to the status quo keeps good companies from becoming great companies and market leaders. To keep her book from becoming too abstract, Rabe also provides concrete examples of how organizations ranging from software maker Intuit to the Oakland A’s to the East Village Opera Company have stayed competitive by embracing true innovation.

Excerpt: Whether we want to admit it or not, we are dependent on other people for our well-being. Co-workers, bosses, members of our professional associations, etc., all can have an impact on how much money we make, what professional credentials we attain, even how much social status we have. As a result, there is a lot of evidence to suggest we’re hard-wired to conform( sometimes at almost any cost) with the people we work with. But that’s not usually a recipe for innovation. In fact, ‘innovation by consensus’ could be considered an oxymoron.

The Effective Executive in Action: A Journal for Getting the Right Things Done
by Peter F. Drucker and Joseph Maciariello
(Harper Collins, 2005)

Executive Summary: This new—and handsomely leather-bound —edition of management guru Drucker’s classic book about strong leadership and decision making gets a timely update. This time around, Drucker and co-author Maciariello have turned it into a practical workbook for the everyday boss. Includes probing chapter ending questions and subjects for further exploration, as well as copious room for your own notes and observations, Drucker’s ideas can be even more easily worked into a busy schedule. Food for thought—and action.

Excerpt: The average knowledge worker will outlive the average employing organization. Few businesses, for instance, are successful for more than 30 years. But the working life expectancy of the knowledge worker is more likely to be 50 years. And so, for the first time in history, more and more people are going to outlive their employing organizations. And this means something totally new and unprecedented: Knowledge workers now have the responsibility for managing themselves. No one—or very few super achievers, a Mozart, for instance, an Einstein or an Edison —even dreamed in the past of such autonomy and responsibility.

John McPartlin has written about technology, business and entertainment for publications including InformationWeek, NetGuide and CFO Magazine. He is also a former vice president and editor in chief of TV Guide Online.

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