Consider Burj Khalifa.
It’s widely understood to be a triumph of architecture and engineering, for the most part due to its height and beauty.
I think so too, although I know nothing important about it. If I had an office on the 157th floor that was too warm or cold, the facilities manager might or might not agree with my assessment of the building – he might consider the HVAC system to be an engineering disaster, just as the network engineers responsible for cable management might or might not appreciate the provisions for cable runs and wiring closets.
Anyone working in the building will have yet another view of the situation, determined in part by the number of elevators, how they partition the floors, and their velocity.
The financial view? As it’s Dubai, the Leaning Tower of Pisa is probably an apt metaphor.
It’s easy to form a strongly held opinion when unencumbered by knowledge. The more you know about any subject, the harder it is to answer simple questions like, “Is it a good building or a bad building?”
Which is why a good book is a dangerous thing. Every time you read one, you lose a bit more of your belief in simple explanations and solutions.
Jason Meszaros, author of Interrogation of Morals, (2009), is CIO of a Minnesota state agency. The book has nothing to do with our trade, but since Jason is a CIO he’s one of us. You should read his book.
Most Americans have strong opinions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the morality and effectiveness of different interrogation techniques; the quality of our intelligence-gathering and the sorts of people involved; and of what we’re asking our soldiers to do there.
Jason served in Afghanistan as a reserve intelligence officer. He participated in interrogations, on-the-ground intelligence-gathering, and combat. The book describes his experience in vivid day-to-day detail, well enough that you get some feel for the live experience.
Having read this book, when you read, watch or listen to news reports and commentators discussing the war in Afghanistan, you’ll have a broader and deeper context to help you understand what’s going on.
And you’ll have an appreciation for what the members of our armed forces go through every day.
Highly recommended.
Also highly recommended is the next installment of Anita Cassidy’s Practical Guide series.
Co-authored with Dan Cassidy and titled A Practical Guide to Reducing IT Costs, it also make answering a simple question much harder. The simple question: “How can we reduce our IT spending?” Your new answer: “We have 58 short-term, 37 mid-term and 44 long-term opportunities to review. All but three will require a lot of work.”
(If you’re wondering, the three exceptions are: (1) Squeeze your vendors; (2) reduce unnecessarily high service levels; and (3) squeeze your vendors some more.)
What makes A Practical Guide so practical is that it goes beyond describing the cost-reduction opportunities themselves to provide guidance for what otherwise might turn into unintended consequences. Guidance on such details as the leadership, project management, and change management issues that will make the difference between good intentions and achieving lower costs and cost discipline.
Given what you do for a living, you probably know a lot of what’s in this book. That isn’t the same as having a ready-made list of 58 short-term, 37 mid-term and 44 long-term opportunities, complete with explanatory information.
I’m a Kindle convert, especially when traveling. For the most part I forget it’s an e-book after a page or two. Not so with Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett’s new Discworld novel. Pratchett puts some of his funniest material in footnotes. In a physical book you read the footnote and chuckle. On the Kindle you move the (pokey) cursor to the asterisk, click, wait for the page to pokily change, and then read the footnote. It ruins the timing.
One advantage of (or disadvantage to) the Kindle is that it makes buying books way too easy. Which explains how I ended up owning Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (2006). Read it and you’ll learning just how easily we’re all manipulated (example: If someone wants you to do them a favor, all they have to do is to do a favor for you first, unsolicited. Saying no after that is amazingly difficult.) It’s illuminating, depressing, and valuable, all at the same time.
But while the information is excellent and valuable, it would have been no less excellent and valuable, and just as complete, in half the space.
Scan Influence. The anecdotes and extended explanations are optional.
Business Agility by Hugos(a KJR recommendation)
Uniting the Virtual Workforce by Lojeski and Reilly
Bob – I think you book recommendations are ‘spot on’.
I have been meaning to tell you how much I liked a book that you recommended 2-3 years ago. Like some of these current recommendations, it does not address IT directly, but the reader takes away important concepts that apply to our profession. For the record, the book was ‘Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed’, and it was incredibly interesting. The implications for IT are important, although somewhat subtle. I am going to order at least one if not two of your current recommendations. Thanks.