The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life by Richard Florida

Millions of Americans are beginning to work and live the way creative people like artists and scientists always have – and as a result our values and tastes, our personal relationships, our choices of where to live, and even our sense and use of time, are changing. Leading the shift are the nearly 38 million Americans in many diverse fields who create for a living – the Creative Class. The first person to name this revolution was renowned urban studies theorist, Richard Florida.

In The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida chronicles the ongoing sea change in people’s choices and attitudes and describes a society in which the creative ethos is increasingly dominant. With updated city rankings and a new preface, this is the national bestseller that swept the country and showed how the very future of our cities depends on a new economic class.




The Long Tail: Why The Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson

What happens when everything in the world becomes available to everyone? When the combined value of all the millions of items that may sell only a few copies equals or exceeds the value of the few items that sell millions each? When a bunch of kids with no profit motive can record a song or make a video and get the same electronic distribution for it as the most powerful corporation?

Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, first explored "The Long Tail" in an article that has become one of the most influential business essays of our time. using the worlds of movies, books, and music, he showed how the Internet has made possible a new world in which the combined value of modest sellers and quirky titles equals the sales of the top hits. He coined the term "The Long Tail" to describe this phenomenon, a phrase that's since appeared in boardrooms and media around the world.




On the Profession of Management by Peter Drucker

For nearly half a century Peter Drucker has inspired and educated managers – and influenced the nature of business – with his landmark articles in the Harvard Business Review. Here, gathered together and framed by a thoughtful introduction from former Review editor nan Stone, is a priceless collection of his most significant work.

Through his unique lens, this volume gives us the rare opportunity to trace the evolution of the great shifts in our workplaces, and to understand more clearly the role of managers in the ongoing effort to balance change with continuity. Drucker manages to paint a clear and complete picture of management thinking and practice both as it was and as it will be. Infused with a perspective that holds new relevance today, these essays represent Drucker at his best: direct, wise, and challenging.




Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minsky – one of the fathers of computer science and cofounder of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT – gives a revolutionary answer to the age-old question: “How does the mind work?”

Minsky brilliantly portrays the mind as a “society” of tiny components that are themselves mindless. Mirroring his theory, Minsky boldly casts The Society of Mind as an intellectual puzzle whose pieces are assembled along the way. Each chapter – on a self-contained page – corresponds to a piece in the puzzle. As the pages turn, a unified theory of the mind emerges, like a mosaic. Ingenious, amuzing, and easy to read, The Society of Mind is an adventure in imagination.




A Whole New Mind by Daniel H.Pink

Lawyers. Accountants. Radiologists. Software engineers. That's what our parents told us to be when we grew up. But Mom and Dad were wrong. The future now belongs to a very different person with a very kind of mind. The era of "left-brain" dominance - and the Information Age that it engendered - is giving way to a new world in which artistic and holistic "right-brain" abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who falls behind. That's the argument at the centre of this provocative and original book, which uses the two sides of the brain as a metaphor for understanding the contours of our times.

A Whole New Mind reveals the six essential aptitudes - Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play and Meaning - on which professional success and personal fulfillment now depend.




Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through The Wilds of Strategic Management
by Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand, Joseph Lampe

Strategy making is considered the high point of managerial activity. But bombarded by fads and fixes, most managers have been groping blindly to get their arms around the proverbial elephant. Now Henry Mintzberg, author of the award-winning The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, has teamed up with Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel to create a powerful antidote: a comprehensive and illuminating – as well as colorful – tour through the fields of strategic management. Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel have shaped each of ten different approaches into a coherent school of strategy formation. In the process, the authors clarify the enormous amount of confusion that exists.

The result is a tour de force: a brilliant, penetrating primer on business strategy that is, at the same time, immensely readable and fun. The authors provide a thorough critique of the contributions and limitations of each school – from the design, planning, positioning, entrepreneurial, and cognitive schools to the learning, power, cultural, environmental, and configurational schools – culminating in how they might combine to reveal that elephant.

Unique, insightful, and essential, Strategy Safari is the indispensable guide for the creative manager.




The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation
by Ikujiro Nonaka, Hirotaka Takeuchi

This book addresses the generation-old question of why the Japanese are so successful in business. The authors, professors of management at Hitosubashi University, contend that Japanese firms are successful because they are innovative, that is, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. They identify two types of organizational knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in procedures and manuals, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience. U.S. managers tend to focus on explicit knowledge and stress approaches such as benchmarking, while the Japanese focus on tacit knowledge. Using corporate examples such as Honda, NEC, Nissan, 3M, and GE, the authors provide insights that reveal how to blend the best of both worlds. This scholarly volume is highly recommended not only for academics (especially in organizational theory) but also for readers doing business in and with Japan.




Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know
by Thomas H. Davenport, Laurence Prusak

When new-car developers at Ford Motor Company wanted to learn why the original Taurus design team was so successful, no one could tell them. No one remembered or had recorded what made that effort so special; the knowledge gained in the Taurus project was lost forever. Indeed, the most valuable asset in any company is probably also its most elusive and difficult to manage: knowledge. Authors Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak assert that learning how to identify, manage, and foster knowledge is vital for companies who hope to compete in today's fast-moving global economy.

Working Knowledge examines how knowledge can be nurtured in organizations. Building trust throughout a company is the key to creating a knowledge-oriented corporate culture, a positive environment in which employees are encouraged to make decisions that are efficient, productive, and innovative. The book includes numerous examples of successful knowledge projects at companies such as British Petroleum, 3M, Mobil Oil, and Hewlett-Packard. Concise and clearly written, Working Knowledge is an excellent resource for managers who want to better harness the experience and wisdom within their organizations.






Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen
Usability rules the web. Look at the web as you’ve never seen it before: through the eyes of the average user.

Users experience the usability of a site before they have committed to using it and before they have spent any money on potential purchases: The web is the ultimate environment for empowerment, and he or she who clicks the mouse decides everything. In this landmark design reference, the world’s acknowledged authority on web usability. Jakob Nielsen, shares with you the full weight of his wisdom and experience. From content and page design to designing for ease of navigation and users with disabilities, Jakob Nielsen delivers complete direction on how to connect with any web user, in any situation.




Data Strategy by Sid Adelman, Larissa Moss, and Majid Abai

You can no longer manage enterprise data “piecemeal”. To maximize the business value of your data assets, you must define a coherent, enterprise-wide data strategy that reflects all the ways you capture, store, manage, and use information.

In this book, three renowned data management experts walk you through creating the optimal data strategy for your organization. Using their proven techniques, you can reduce hardware and maintenance costs, and rein in out-of-control data spending. You can build new systems with less risk, higher quality, and improve data access. Best of all, you can learn how to integrate new applications that support your key business objectives.




Data Modeling Essentials by Graeme C. Simsion and Graham C. Witt

Data Modeling Essentials, Third Edition provides expert tutelage for data modelers, business analysts, and systems designers at all levels. Beginning with the basics, this book provides a thorough grounding in theory before guiding the reader through the various stages of applied data modeling and database design. Later chapters delve into advanced subjects, including business rules, data warehousing, and enterprise-wide modeling and data management.




Data Model Patterns: Conventions of Thought
by David C. Hay, Richard Barker

Analyzes data structures common to many types of businesses in areas such as accounting, material requirements planning, process manufacturing, contracts, laboratories, and documents, for analysts who have learned the basics of data modeling (or entity/relationship modeling) but who need more insight to prepare a model of a real business. Includes B&W diagrams, and a set of ready-to-use models for typical applications in many industries.




A Semantic Web Primer by Grigoris Antoniou and Frank van Harmelen

The development of the Semantic Web, with machine-readable content, has the potential to revolutionize the World Wide Web and its use. A Semantic Web Primer provides an introduction and guide to this emerging field, describing its key ideas, languages, and technologies. Suitable for use as a textbook or for self-study by professionals, it concentrates on undergraduate-level fundamental concepts and techniques that will enable readers to proceed with building applications on their own. It includes exercises, project descriptions, and annotated references to relevant online materials. A Semantic Web Primer is the only available book on the Semantic Web to include a systematic treatment of the different languages (XML, RDF, OWL, and rules) and technologies (explicit metadata, ontologies, and logic and inference) that are central to Semantic Web development. The book also examines such crucial related topics as ontology engineering and application scenarios.




Information Design by Robert Jacobson

Information design is the newest of the design disciplines. As a sign of our times, when the crafting of messages and meaning is so central to our lives, information design is not only important--it is essential. Contemporary information designers seek to edify more than to persuade, to exchange more than to foist upon. With ever more powerful technologies of communication, we have learned that the issuer of designed information is as likely as the intended recipient to be changed by it, for better or worse.

The contributors to this book are both cautionary and hopeful as they offer visions of how information design can be practiced diligently and ethically, for the benefit of information consumers as well as producers. They present various methods that seem to work, such as sense-making and way-finding. They make recommendations and serve as guides to a still young but extraordinarily pervasive--and persuasive--field.




Building and Managing the meta Data Repository: A Full Lifecycle Guide by David Marco

Meta Data repositories can provide your company with tremendous value if they are used properly and if you understand what they can, and can't, do. Written by David Marco, the industry's leading authority on meta data and well-known columnist for DM Review, this book offers all the guidance you'll need for developing, deploying, and managing a meta data repository to gain a competitive advantage. After illustrating the fundamental concepts, marco shows you how to use meta data to increase your company's revenue and decrease expenses. You'll find a comprehensive look at the major trends affecting the meta data industry, as well as steps on how to build a repository that is flexible enough to adapt to future changes. These vendor-neutral guide also includes complete coverage of meta data sources, standards, and architecture, and it explores the full gamut of practical implementation issues.






THE ZACHMAN FRAMEWORK FOR ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE - A PRIMER
This is the long-awaited book on the Framework for Enterprise Architecture, written by the originator of the Framework for Enterprise Architecture – John A. Zachman. This definitive book, distributed by Intervista, is now available in convenient electronic format.