Yet another HBR book to add to my reading list is The Only Sustainable Edge, by John Hagel and John Seely Brown. The book ties together a number of today's crucial concepts impacting business strategies, such as open innovation, global connectivity, SOA and web services, social software, and more.

According to Hagel, "IT is a key enabler of these practices, and CIOs can be catalysts and change agents to help senior management recognize what's available to support these broader changes. There's also the ability to recognize what's possible through SOA through loose coupling and an important foundation in recognizing new processes."

See the authors' interview with Thomas Hoffman - Q&A: Driving innovation at the 'edge' of the enterprise  (Computerworld, May 9, 2005), the book's website - http://www.edgeperspectives.com, and of course, the book's blog - http://www.edgeperspectives.typepad.com/, authored by John Hagel.

My favorite quote from the book for today's management:

'Without illuminating, callibrating, and comprehending this background, we risk spreading our resources too thinly as we react to whatever crosses our paths along the way. Desperately diversifying our bets across an uncertain landscape, we may discover that our growing range of under-resources experiments is tripping us up rather than moving us forward.' (page 11)

10:36:39 AM    
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