Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Book: Hardvard Business Review on Innovation

This is basically a compilation of articles that appeared on the HBR magazine. The articles present on this book are:

* Creating New Market Space
* Creating Breakthroughs at 3M
* Building an Innovation Factory
* Knowing a Winning Business Ida When You see One
* Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change
* Discovering New Points of Differentiation
* From Spare Change to Real Change: The Social Sector as Beta Site for Business Innovation
* Enlightened Experimentation: The New Imperative for Innovation


What did I learn from it? Consciously not much, the book started very well but it became boring or not that enlightening at the end so it took me much more time to finish it than expected (as falling sleep while reading a single page).

But what it left me with 2 mayor notes, the way to innovation is breaking models and managers solve but innovator leads (or similar). I am sure that if one day I do the change from my low technically emotional job working under and with completely useless people in my opinion, I will read it again quickly to remember the tips it gives on how to think.

Also the fact that they sell a book at almost 20U$D made of articles from a magazine that they already sold (physically, on the web, subscription, pamphlets, umbrellas, etc) gives a little of faith on the innovation of this guys.

So do I recommend it? Yes but as quick read.

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Book: Stories of Your Life and Others


Stories of Your life and Others by Ted Chiang might be the second science fiction book I read in the last two years and I recommend it to everyone. The previous one was "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" but I liked Chiang's writing better.

I might be doing a comparison of rocks and apples here but the different writing stiles of each history make it great. I was impressed with one of them about a man whose intelligence gets increase on where the writing makes your heart beat accelerate and takes you to a journey were you can feel how the main character is feeling things.

All stories were great and unique making you think, dream and look back. Again a book recommended to all. By the way you have no idea how much it took me to upload the image of the cover of the book (copyright to the owner, publicist, etc, etc), kind of spooky maybe the fiction is should not be before the science.

Read, explore, open new windows and get lost as much as possible!

(As always all images, etc are copyright by the owner and this never happened)