Squeezed Books

davidw's latest comments

The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business (Collins Business Essentials) 6 months ago

The basic point is that some technologies improve so much that they go above and beyond what most people actually need. We may see this with solid state drives (SSD’s): right now they do not hold as much data as what most people need from their hard drives, and are expensive to boot. However, once they are able to handle a couple hundred gigs for a relatively cheap price, how many people will care about the difference between that space and the terabyte that a ‘regular’ hard drive could hold, when the SSD is so much faster? It will have met and surpassed the storage capacity needs of most people.

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It 8 months ago

This book had some good ideas - the big one for me was “work on your business rather than in it”, and the idea of the technician vs entrepreneur and manager. I am definitely a technician and am happiest when working on technical problems, so that was a bit of an eye opener in terms of how to go about building a small business.

On the other hand, I am a bit dubious that what I do - computer consulting work - is an area where “systems, systems, systems” will really be all that effective, as the specialized knowledge that each person has varies a lot, and can’t easily be substituted like building blocks.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't 9 months ago

Looks like this article:

http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2009/04/are-great-companies-just-lucky/ar/1

Which seems to examine a lot more data than ‘Good to Great’.

I actually enjoyed In Search of Stupidity more than good to great: his point is that the survivors are those that limited their huge mistakes, and learned from them, not that they followed some magic recipe.

Just Ask Leadership: Why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions 10 months ago

How to Win Friends and Influence People makes the same point, about asking questions rather than telling.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't about 1 year ago

http://blog.asmartbear.com/blog/business-advice-plagued-by-survivor-bias.html

Nice article explaining some of the problems with this book.