DavePress » Reading

Open Leadership

Dave — Thu, 27 May 2010 18:22:03 +0000

Am reading an excellent book at the moment – Open Leadership by Charlene Li.

Fans of dead-tree web 2.0 reading will be familiar with Groundswell, which Li co-authored and was chock-full of interesting case studies – mostly from the US private sector – around how collaborative relationships with customers, often using the web as a platform, lead to success.

Here’s some of the blurb for Open Leadership:

Open Leadership reveals step-by-step, with illustrative case studies and examples from a wide-range of industries and countries, how to bring the precision of this new openness to both inside and outside the organization. The author includes suggestions that will help an organization determine an open strategy, weigh the benefits against the risk, and have a clear understanding of the implications of being open. The book also contains guidelines, policies, and procedures that successful companies have implemented to manage openness and ensure that business objectives are at the center of their openness strategy.

It’s a great read too. One of my favourite bits is where Li lists early on five new rules for leaders to bear in mind when managing relationships:

Respect that your customers and employees have power
Share constantly to build trust
Nurture curiosity and humility
Hold openness accountable
Forgive failure

Hear, hear!

You can get a flavour of the book with this free snippet:

Open Leadership Introduction

View more documents from Charlene Li.

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Some recent reading

Dave — Sat, 01 May 2010 10:40:40 +0000

As well as blogs, tweets and reports that are published online, I spend quite a bit of time reading books too. They are often great for the bigger picture stuff which requires a bit of thought and chewing over.

Here’s a list of some of the stuff I’ve been reading recently – I’ve marked them as either DT (dead tree, ie a real paper book) or K (meaning I have it on my Kindle). It’s all in no particular order.

Causewired – Tom Watson (K)
Rework – Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (DT)
The Mythical Man-Month – Frederick P Brooks Jnr (K)
Web 2.0 Architectures – James Governor, Dion Hinchcliffe, and Duane Nickull (K)
FruITion – Chris Potts (K)
Enterprise Architecture as Strategy – Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David C. Robertson (K)
Enterprise 2.0 Implementation – Aaron C Newman and Jeremy G Thomas (DT)
Open Government – Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma (K)
The Little Innovation Book – James A Gardner (K)
Systems Thinking in the Public Sector – John Seddon (DT)
The Art of Community – Jono Bacon (DT)

The Kindle has really changed the way I read techy books. I now won’t buy a work related book in paper form unless I have to – they just seem to suit the Kindle really well. I won’t switch to the Kindle for novels just yet, I don’t think, but for some reason the digital form suits non-fiction rather well.

(Disclaimer – where I have linked to Amazon, I have used associate links, meaning I get a few pence if you buy the book via the link. All the money I make from these goes towards the running of Palimpsest, a book group forum I host.)

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Christmas reading

Dave — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:02:36 +0000

The pile of books I’ve been working my way through during the holidays.

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DavePress bookshop

Dave — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 17:10:57 +0000

I’ve always wanted to own a bookshop. Somewhere nice and quiet, with tables to sit down and read, some sort of tea and coffee arrangement and plenty of books to browse and buy.

I’m obviously not ever going to have one – after all, if Borders can’t cope, then how could I? But I can have a virtual arrangement, thanks to Amazon’s astore service.

You can find it here. I’m still stocking the shelves, but you should find some good stuff in there. In fact, they are all books I have read and liked, so you can blame me if they’re crap.

Disclosure – I get a few pence every time you use the bookshop. I’m not going to get rich out of it, though!

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Leaving the Asylum

Dave — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:27:34 +0000

I read this post with some sadness, as John is giving his blog a break. He writes book reviews, great pieces about proper books. He says it’s going to be temporary, I hope it will be.

John’s blog is an example of why handing the process of publishing into the hands of everyone is a good idea. Amongst the egos, the idiots and the talentless are the gems like John, who make sifting through all the shit worthwhile.

Without the internet, and without the development of the technology that democratises the power to publish, I would never have bought the books he recommended and my life would have been less rich as a result.

Just another reason why this stuff matters.

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Kindling

Dave — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:36:13 +0000

My Kindle arrived today.

For those that don’t know, it’s Amazon’s own e-reader, a portable device that can hold around 1,500 books in its memory which can be read by turning pages using the buttons.

Even though I knew the screen was 6 inches, it still seemed smaller than I was expecting. The device is also a lot thinner than I thought it would be:

The screen is really weird, it’s like nothing you’ve looked at before – other than the page of a book. Very odd.

Another interesting thing is the wireless – the Kindle uses the cell network, the cost of which is covered by Amazon and is presumably a part of the cost of the device.

Anyway, I can buy and download books from Amazon.com – not from the UK store yet (which may mean spelling issues…), or add books or documents from my computer. This can be done either by plugging the Kindle into my computer with the supplied USB cable (also my only way of charging it, since the plug supplied is US only too), or by sending a file by email to a special address, which is pretty neat.

You can also use the keyboard to add annotations to documents or books, so this could be really useful for students.

As well as established e-readers like the Sony Reader, the Kindle also has competition from Barnes and Nobles’ new Nook. Crunchgear has a useful comparison chart.

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The Twitter Book

Dave — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:04:35 +0000

This is a lovely little guide to getting to grips with Twitter:

Thoroughly recommended.

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Compo winner!

Dave — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 18:37:59 +0000

Well done to Richard Smedley who has won my spare – but pristine! – copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers in the first and perhaps last competition to be held here on DavePress.

Richard blogs at Good GNUs and is @richardsmedley on Twitter. Am sure he will be sharing his thoughts on the book with us all soon!

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Win! Win! Win!

Dave — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 16:11:52 +0000

I was lucky, in a sense, to get this through the post today as a reward for subscribing to a magazine:

“In a sense”, because I already own it.

‘So!’ I thought. ‘Here’s a chance for a competition!’

If you want the book, all you have to do is comment on this post. Put what you like in the body of the comment, all I really need is your name and email address. Mossychops will then pick a winner at random next Friday (21st August).

Good luck!

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Tech books

Dave — Sat, 30 May 2009 14:55:14 +0000

A year or so ago, I wrote about my dead tree web 2.0 reading list, which was all about what books were being published about the interactive web. I’ve bought most of those on the list, plus a bunch of others that folk suggested.

There are other books one can buy about this stuff though, which don’t just talk about the issues and culture of the web, but which actually tell you how to do things.

I don’t tend to buy too many of these, as a lot of the help one needs one can get from the web itself, but I got a couple through the post from Amazon the other day.

Using Drupal is a really good entry level guide to what is a fiendishly complicated, but amazingly powerful CMS. It’s genuinely readable and am really pleased I got it.

Ning for Dummies is a guide to using and setting up your own networks on Ning. As someone who Ninging is entirely based on playing with stuff, it’s great to have a resource to pick up and find out what some of those options I dare not touch do. Again, recommended reading.

One book I have had for a while, which I have to mention here, though, is WordPress for Dummies:

Which isn’t for Dummies at all, in fact it’s for very sensible people. It takes you right the way from setting up a WordPress.com blog to writing your own themes and plugins – awesome stuff.

What techie books do you swear by?