What I'm Reading

I thought that for a change, I'd put down some of the things that I'm reading about at the moment as no doubt it will influence what I will write about.

I've picked up some new books as I went past a shop that was having a clear out.

• Strategy Maps by Kaplan and Norton - This is so that I can refresh myself on the Balanced Scorecard.

• Essentials of Service Marketing by Hoffman and Bateson - as I wanted to re look at how service companies can market themselves.

• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Partially because I was interested why a number of people raved about it - but I wanted to see if it had any insights that could be placed back into the sphere of knowledge management.

• Gary Hamel's new book The Future of Management - mainly because I read Hamel & Prahalad's work on Competing for the Future - about 7 years ago and I'm a fan - and also from some of the articles and podcasts I've listened to earlier - I think that it will have some relevance for knowledge workers and the need for management structures to amend to allow them to thrive.
  
  
• Scott Adams - The Dilbert principle - just to look at the lunacies of corporate life and to balance the earlier readings.
  

• Wisdens Cricketers Almanack 1971 - mainly because this has details of the first cricket match that I ever saw - which was at Newlands in Cape Town between South Africa and Australia and I remember going for the first two days and watching a powerful Australian team blown away by a very good South African cricket team and thinking that they would have done very well if the 1970 tour had gone to England..... at 9 you don't always understand the politics of the world - you look at these sportsmen as your heroes. It also talks about why the tour was cancelled in full without bias which wasn't available to me when I was 9.

I've recently finished reading PJ O' Rourkes masterly book on the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. I've never had the opportunity to read the book in full and this is a good summary and shows how 200 years later Smith's book is still relevant to us. Economic progress like it or not is based on three prerogatives - pursuit of self interest, division of labour and freedom of trade and these are also those that effect knowledge flows throughout organisations. This has permeated my belief in most of my blogs in the past about how we can encourage the market in knowledge.

Finally I also got my copy of Harvard Business Review today and there is a great looking article by Warren Bennis and Noel Tichy on Making Judgement Calls.

So watch this space as I may comment on them in due course.