800-CEO-READ New Releases

Wikinomics

by Don Tapscott

(Penguin USA, 288 Pages)

In just the last few years, traditional collaboration?in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention center?has been superseded by collaborations on an astronomical scale.

Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success.

A brilliant guide to one of the most profound changes of our time, Wikinomics challenges our most deeply-rooted assumptions about business and will prove indispensable to anyone who wants to understand competitiveness in the twenty-first century.

Based on a $9 million research project led by bestselling author Don Tapscott, Wikinomics shows how masses of people can participate in the economy like never before. They are creating TV news stories, sequencing the human genome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding a cure for disease, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, or even building motorcycles. You'll read about:

• Rob McEwen, the Goldcorp, Inc. CEO who used open source tactics and an online competition to save his company and breathe new life into an old-fashioned industry.
• Flickr, Second Life, YouTube, and other thriving online communities that transcend social networking to pioneer a new form of collaborative production.
• Mature companies like Procter & Gamble that cultivate nimble, trust-based relationships with external collaborators to form vibrant business ecosystems.

An important look into the future, Wikinomics will be your road map for doing business in the twenty-first century.

Open Business Models

by Henry Chesbrough

(Harvard Business School Press, 224 Pages)

In his landmark book Open Innovation, Henry Chesbrough demonstrated that because useful knowledge is no longer concentrated in a few large organizations, business leaders must adopt a new, "open" model of innovation. Using this model, companies look outside their boundaries for ideas and intellectual property (IP) they can bring in, as well as license their unutilized home-grown IP to other organizations.

In Open Business Models, Chesbrough takes readers to the next step, explaining how to make money in an open innovation landscape. He provides a diagnostic instrument enabling you to assess your company's current business model, and explains how to overcome common barriers to creating a more open model. He also offers compelling examples of companies that have developed such models�including Procter & Gamble, IBM, and Air Products.

In addition, Chesbrough introduces a new set of players,"innovation intermediaries",who facilitate companies access to external technologies. He explores the impact of stronger IP protection on intermediate markets for innovation, and profiles firms (such as Intellectual Ventures and Qualcomm) that center their business model on innovation and IP.

This vital resource provides a much-needed road map to connect innovation with IP management, so companies can create and capture value from ideas and technologies wherever in the world they are found.

Payback

by James P. Andrew and Harold L. Sirkin

(Harvard Business School Press, 256 Pages)

If you're like most people, you bet your career and company on innovation--because you must. Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation offers you a new way to think about and manage innovation that will dramatically improve the odds of success.

Authors James Andrew and Harold Sirkin, senior partners in The Boston Consulting Group, describe an approach to managing innovation based on the concept of a cash curve--which tracks investment against time. They ask the questions you need to ask: How much should you invest in a new product or service? How fast should you push it to market? How quickly can you get to optimal value? How much additional investment should you pour into sustaining and building the product or service?

Payback offers you practical and economically sound advice on when to pursue cash flow indirectly by first pursuing other benefits, such as brand and knowledge. It also shows you how to reshape the cash curve by using different business models--integrator, orchestrator, and licenser--each of which balances risk and reward differently.

The authors then present a short list of decisions and activities that you must make--not delegate--to achieve a high return on innovation. You won't find facile answers in Payback--but you will find valuable insights and practical guidance for mastering one of the most challenging and critical business activities: innovation

Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur

by Stuart Skorman

(Jossey-Bass, 224 Pages)

Looking for the audio CD? Click here.

Book Description
Entrepreneur Stuart Skorman—the founder of Elephant Pharmacy, Hungryminds.com, Reel.com, and Empire Video—grew up in a retailing family in Ohio. He worked every kind of job, from cab driver to professional poker player to CEO. In this entertaining, personal account of his coming-of- age in the business world, Skorman gives an insider’s view of what it takes to start a business from the ground up.

Stuart Skorman offers his hard-won lessons in business for any entrepreneur or small businessperson who wants to create a company that has a heart and soul. He reveals what he learned about marketing while working a stint as a rock band manager and bares his soul about his failure during the dot-com bubble. He describes in vivid terms the roller coaster ride of the entrepreneur in good times and bad and explains how to survive in today’s uncertain business environment.

Miracle Medicines

by Robert Shook

(Penguin USA, 256 Pages)

It’s the business of saving lives.

Miracle Medicines goes behind the scenes of the pharmaceutical industry and into the high-security laboratories to tell the stories of the men and women---chemists, physiologists, medical and clinical researchers, engineers---who have chosen to toil for years in the lab in order to transform scientific theories into new lifesaving medicines.

You’ll witness the day-to-day labors, victories and defeats of the dedicated professionals who are waging a war against the diseases that still plague mankind. From the confines of their laboratories, these pharmaceutical adventurers explore unknown territories in health and science.

Miracle Medicines reveals what really happens during the long and uncertain journey that each new drug and its creators must endure from theory, to research, to testing and, finally, FDA approval and delivery to the public. It’s a very human story within the context of fascinating scientific innovation.

Through first hand interviews you’ll also meet the patients who benefit from these manmade miracles and learn how, within their bloodstreams, an ongoing battle is raging.

The drugs profiled are:

• Advair: GlaxoSmithKline’s revolutionary asthma medication, the first packaged as both a control and emergency drug.
• Gleevec: The Novartis’ chronic myeloid leukemia treatment born from decades of medical research in a field of study that was once considered hopeless.
• Humalog: Eli Lilly’s reinvention of insulin to control diabetes has been described as being better than nature
• Lipitor: Pfizer’s miracle antidote for high cholesterol that was nearly lost to the pharmaceutical vaults and has since become the world’s top-selling medicine.
• Norvir: Abbott’s contribution to the fight against HIV that nearly erases all traces of the disease from the bloodstream and prolongs the life of patients.
• Remicade: Created for the treatment of Crohn’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis and other Immune Mediated Inflammatory Diseases, Johnson & Johnson’s revolutionary biomedicine was developed from technology that once was only found in science fiction.
• Seroquel: AstraZeneca’s treatment for both schizophrenia and bipolar mania that has given millions of psychiatrics a new lease on life.

This compelling and truth-revealing book will forever change the way you view the medicines in your medicine cabinet, and the people who create them.

Your Gut Is Still Not Smarter Than Your Head

by Kevin Clancy

(John Wiley & Sons Inc, 304 Pages)

Book Description

How to make marketing scientific, accountable, and effective

Marketing has traditionally been gut-driven, undisciplined, and often unaccountable. Marketing executives rarely had to defend their expenditures and results. But those times are changing. In Your Gut Is Still Not Smarter Than Your Head, marketing consultants Clancy and Krieg explain how to implement disciplined, accountable marketing that achieves results. Similar to Six Sigma in its methodologies, disciplined, accountable marketing will revolutionize the industry as we know it. The authors explain what disciplined marketing looks like in every crucial type of marketing decision, from positioning to distribution, and provide case histories that clearly show how disciplined marketing beats gut-level thinking and planning every time.

Kevin Clancy (Boston, MA) is Chairman and CEO of Copernicus Marketing Consulting, a leading research and consulting organization with an international clientele. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Marketing at Boston University. Peter Krieg (Boston, MA) is Executive Vice President of Copernicus.

Selling Blue Elephants

by Howard R. Moskowitz, Alex Gofman

(Pearson P T R, 272 Pages)

Can you remember the world before the iPod? How about the world before chunky tomato sauce or brown mustard? Many of these products came about not through focus groups and polling, but rather through research and development labs and marketers developing the products they knew customers would want, before customers knew they wanted them. Today your customers can actually help you create your next product. Rule Developing Experimentation (RDE) is a solution-oriented learning experience. RDE is the systematized process of designing, testing and modifying alternative ideas, packages, products, or services in a disciplined way so that the developer and marketer discover what appeals to the customer, even if the customer can't articulate the need, much less the solution. The book begins by presenting best practices in the RDE from some of today's top companies: HP, Prego, Vlasic, and Mastercard. It then goes on to examine RDEs use in innovation and design, and goes on to examine its possible uses in the international, political, bioinformantics, and finance areas. Filled with real-life stories, this book will change the way people think about selling to their present and future customers.

Weird Ideas That Work

by Bob Sutton

(Free Press, 240 Pages)

Creativity, new ideas, innovation -- in any age they are keys to success, but in today's whirlwind economy they are essential for survival itself. Yet, as Robert Sutton explains, the standard rules of business behavior and management are precisely the opposite of what it takes to build an innovative company. We are told to hire people who will fit in; to train them extensively; and to work to instill a corporate culture in every employee. In fact, in order to foster creativity, we should hire misfits, goad them to fight, and pay them to defy convention and undermine the prevailing culture. Weird Ideas That Work codifies these and other proven counterintuitive ideas to help you turn your workplace from staid and safe to wild and woolly -- and creative. Stanford professor Robert Sutton is an authority on innovation and a popular speaker. In Weird Ideas That Work he draws on extensive research in behavioral psychology to explain how innovation can be fostered in hiring, managing, and motivating people; building teams; making decisions; and interacting with outsiders. Business practices like "hire people who make you uncomfortable," "reward success and failure, but punish inaction," and "decide to do something that will probably fail, and then convince yourself and everyone else that success is certain" strike many managers as strange or even downright wrong. Yet Weird Ideas That Work shows how some of the best teams and companies use these and other counterintuitive practices to crank out new ideas, and it demonstrates that every company can reap sales and profits from such creativity. Weird Ideas That Work is filled with examples of each of Sutton's 11 1/2 practices, drawn from hi- and low-tech industries, manufacturing and services, information and products.

Smart World

by Richard Ogle

(Harvard Business School Press, 352 Pages)

Since ancient times, people have believed that breakthrough ideas come from the brains of geniuses with awesome rational powers. In recent years, however, the paradigm has begun to shift toward the notion that the source of creativity lies “out there,� in the network of connections between people and ideas.

In this provocative book, Richard Ogle crystallizes the nature of this shift, and boldly outlines “a new science of ideas.� The key resides in what he calls “idea-spaces,� a set of nodes in a network of people (and their ideas) that cohere and take on a distinctive set of characteristics leading to the generation of breakthrough ideas. These spaces are governed by nine laws--illuminated in individual chapters with fascinating stories of dramatic breakthroughs in science, business, and art.

Smart World will change forever the way we think about creativity and innovation

Something Really New

by Denis J. Hauptly

(Amacom Books, 224 Pages)

Book Description
Product innovation is the key to business growth. But many books deal with innovation from the business process view alone, or confuse innovation with creativity. Written by an innovation expert whose products generate more than one billion dollars in annual revenue, Something Really New introduces a straightforward but powerful framework for creating exciting new product and service concepts . . . simply by asking three essential questions.

About the Author
Denis J. Hauptly (Minneapolis, MN) is the Vice President, New Product Development for Westlaw, and has held product innovation positions for Westlaw or its parent company, The Thomson Corporation, for the past 12 years.

The New Age of Innovation

by C.K. Prahalad, M.S. Krishnan

(McGraw-Hill, 304 Pages)

From the greatest minds in business today comes a groundbreaking new blueprint for executing the next stage of customer-created value. C.K. Prahalad, the world's premier business thinker, and IT scholar M.S. Krishnan unveil the critical missing link in connecting strategy to execution--building organizational capabilities that allow companies to achieve and sustain continuous change and innovation.

The New Age of Innovation reveals that the key to creating value and the future growth of every business depends on accessing a global network of resources to co-create unique experiences with customers, one at a time. To achieve this, CEOs, executives, and managers at every level must transform their business processes, technical systems, and supply chain management, implementing key social and technological infrastructure requirements to create an ongoing innovation advantage.

To successfully compete on the battlefields of 21st-century business, companies must reinvent their processes and culture in order to sustain innovative solutions. The New Age of Innovation is a complete program for achieving this transformation to meet the needs of the end consumer of the future.

The One Minute Entrepreneur

by Ken Blanchard, Don Hutson, Ethan Willie

(Currency, 144 Pages)

Talent

by Edward E. Lawler

(Jossey-Bass Inc Pub, 288 Pages)

The source of competitive advantage has shifted in many organizations from reliability to innovation and flexibility. But what does it take for an organization that innovates to then manage effectively? In this follow-up to Built to Change, Ed Lawler argues that it is a combination of the right structure and the right people. First, organizations must decide what structure they are: are you a high-involvement organization that has products and services that require a high level of coordination and cooperation among employees? Or do you have a more global competitor structure in which you are constantly bringing in new talent and technological expertise? Are you a mixture of both? Lawler outlines the unique human capital strategy for each approach, shows what it looks like in action, and provides the foundation and tools for creating competitive and innovative organizations.

Uniting The Virtual Workforce

by Edward Baker, Richard R. Reilly Ph.D., Karen Sobel Lojeski

(Cliff Notes, 208 Pages)

Disrupting Class

by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael Horn, Curtis W Johnson

(McGraw-Hill, 288 Pages)

According to recent studies in neuroscience, the way we learn doesn't always match up with the way we are taught. If we hope to stay competitive-academically, economically, and technologically-we need to rethink our understanding of intelligence, reevaluate our educational system, and reinvigorate our commitment to learning. In other words, we need “disruptive innovation.”

Now, in his long-awaited new book, Clayton M. Christensen and coauthors Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson take one of the most important issues of our time-education-and apply Christensen's now-famous theories of “disruptive” change using a wide range of real-life examples. Whether you're a school administrator, government official, business leader, parent, teacher, or entrepreneur, you'll discover surprising new ideas, outside-the-box strategies, and straight-A success stories.

Filled with fascinating case studies, scientific findings, and unprecedented insights on how innovation must be managed, Disrupting Class will open your eyes to new possibilities, unlock hidden potential, and get you to think differently. Professor Christensen and his coauthors provide a bold new lesson in innovation that will help you make the grade for years to come.

Innovator's Guide to Growth

by Mark Johnson, Scott D. Anthony, Joseph V. Sinfield, Elizabeth J. Altman

(Harvard Business School Press, 320 Pages)

More than a decade ago, Clayton Christensen's breakthrough book The Innovator's Dilemma illustrated how disruptive innovations drive industry transformation and market creation. Christensen's research demonstrated how growth-seeking incumbents must develop the capability to deflect disruptive attacks and seize disruptive opportunities.

In The Innovator's Guide to Growth, Scott Anthony, Mark Johnson, Joseph Sinfield, and Elizabeth Altman take the subject to the next level: implementation. The authors explain how to create this crucial capability for unlocking disruption's transformational power.

With a foreword by Christensen, this book provides a set of market-proven tools and approaches to innovation that have been honed through fieldwork with innovative companies like Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi, Intel, Motorola, SAP, and Cisco Systems. The book shows you how to:

· Follow a market-proven process -- so your company can reliably create blockbuster businesses

· Create structures, systems, and metrics -- so the disruptive innovations that will power your firm's future growth receive the funding and personnel needed to succeed

· Create a common language of disruptive innovation -- so managers can reach consensus around counterintuitive courses of action

Incisive and practical, this book helps your company take the steps necessary to benefit from disruption -- instead of being eclipsed by it.

Author Bio:

Scott D. Anthony is president of Innosight, a consultancy cofounded by Clayton Christensen that helps organizations build innovation expertise. Mark W. Johnson is chairman and cofounder of Innosight. Joseph V. Sinfield is a partner at Innosight. Elizabeth J. Altman is vice president of strategy and business development in Motorola's Mobile Devices business.

Unleashing Innovation

by Nancy Tennant Snyder, Deborah L. Duarte

(Jossey-Bass Inc Pub, 0 Pages)

In 1999, Whirlpool was undergoing a company-wide reorganization to meet the demands of the post-globalization marketplace. To succeed in executing their transformative Brand-Focused Value-Creation strategy, Whirlpool needed to be both operationally excellent and innovative.

In publications such as BusinessWeek and Fast Company, the media have celebrated Whirlpool's transformation into a leading-edge innovator and Nancy Tennant Snyder's role as chief innovation officer. Ten years after this remarkable transformation, Unleashing Innovation tells the inside story of one of the most successful innovation turnarounds in American history. Nancy Tennant Snyder and coauthor Deborah L. Duarte reveal how Whirlpool undertook one of the largest change efforts in corporate history and show how innovation was embedded throughout the company, which ultimately led to bottom-line results.

Unleashing Innovation is filled with illustrative examples from Whirlpool and Whirlpool's cutting-edge brands including Jenn-Air, Bauknecht, KitchenAid, and Brastemp. Snyder and Duarte reveal the inner workings of Whirlpool's innovation machine, a framework that creates consistent and profitable innovation by involving all of Whirlpool's employees, and they debunk the myth that innovation comes only from the geniuses at the top. Rather than a cookie-cutter "how to" manual, Unleashing Innovation shows what happens when an organization creates a machine that involves everyone and fosters an environment that puts the emphasis on "learning and creating, dreaming, the mythology of heroes, and the spirit of winning." Unleashing Innovation shows how the engine of its innovation can be adapted to run in any business of any size and captures the steps the company took along the way, the key learnings, the tools used, the challenging setbacks, and the critical successes.