These days, for reasons I will develop later, I am diving deeper into the most influential and the latest theories in my fields of professional interest, which gravitate around Innovation, Marketing, and the mental processes that best support both. I am interested in integrating those separate topics, and developing a systematic, practical approach I can use to facilitate breakthrough innovation and help produce killer applications, especially in my favorite space (geeks rule!), the Organization of Information, a broader term I use to refer to knowledge management, semantic and tagging, and a range of other related fields aiming at organizing and leveraging information.
To conduct all that groundwork, I have created a reading list with both the most thought-provoking and the most recommended books I came across on those topics. You can find this list in the right column of this blog, by scrolling down.
The list deserves a warning: generally, reading lists are lists of books one likes. Not this one. My list contains books I admire for their ideas, books I find irritating, and books I haven't read yet but will, because I was invited to, think I want to, or just so I can support my views on their theories. I am a tough public for business books, finding most to be simplistic gospel from pompous authors. Those owe a lot of their success to catchy sentences and serious-looking charts that are totally impractical in the real world. A picture of the author with a "blue steel" look on the inside cover usually constitutes a fair warning that this is make-believe prophetic material...
I laugh inside when I talk to executives who keep referring to such books as their bibles... Cults have never been innovation hotbeds. Thinking for oneself is the real innovation driver and, to be useful, theories must be critically examined, digested, locally transformed, gauged against alternative theories, and integrated in a unified approach. Ask the executives to actually tell you how the theories was applied in their organizations and what killer application it can be credited for. Anything short of that and you likely are in Lemmingsland.
Above all, the main shortcoming I see in business books, is that, even if there are good ideas in some of them, I haven't so far come across one that was broad enough, granular enough, and actionable enough, to be used as an integrated process to create and sustain killer value propositions. Which I'd argue is the only thing, in my opinion, that an organization leader should care about. So let's look at those published building blocks and see if we can come up with that unified theory. Did you really expect a promotional speech on my reading list?
