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A nice way to keep yourself attuned to private equity issues.

thick

Snake Oil

The Visionary's Handbook

When was the Future?

The Visionary's Handbook: Nine Paradoxes That will Shape the Future of Your Business
Watts Wacker , and Jim Taylor
Manufacturer: Collins
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Amazon.com

At a time when business bestsellers such as Six Sigma are touting scientific management, The Visionary's Handbook desires to be different. Authors Watts Wacker, Jim Taylor, and Howard Means forgo the nuts-and-bolts approach for a philosophical look at management, examining nine broad trends, or "paradoxes," they say are shaping business today.

At the heart of these paradoxes lies change--change that is occurring at an increasing rate. The more certain we are of the future, say the authors, the more likely we are to be wrong. To support their argument, they cite both online and real-world examples, including Xerox, eBay, Kodak, and Cisco. Their observations, if not groundbreaking, are certainly accurate. For instance, the Paradox of Size--the bigger your company, the smaller it needs to appear--has been explored at length in Customers.com. Similarly, the need for continual innovation--even to the detriment of your core business--is a paradox that merits attention and one that readers of The Innovator's Dilemma will recognize.

The Visionary's Handbook is about more than just paradoxes, though. Interspersed throughout its pages are exercises challenging readers to pencil in the future they want to see, to visualize and outline their success. Some may find these exercises a valuable and practical addition to the text. Broadly conceived and thought-provoking, The Visionary's Handbook will be an eye opener for many readers. --Demian McLean

Book Description

Building upon the Age of Possibility first espoused in their provocative and acclaimed The 500 Year Delta, Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor now welcome readers to the Age of Uncertainty, where, because life has never been easier, it has never been more difficult.

In this unprecedented new book, Wacker and Taylor present a vision of the present and future that goes beyond all the chaos and complexity of our times.With a clear and firm grasp of their material, they proceed to chart a method for readers to create a personal course for the future.

This navigational route is premised upon the authors' profound understanding of nine mind-boggling paradoxes that capture the imponderables of modern life, and define the business and social climates of the world as we move forward into the new millennium:

The Paradox of the Visionary The closer your vision gets to a provable truth, the more you are simply describing the present. In the same way, the more certain you are of a future outcome, the more likely you will be wrong.
The Paradox of Value The value of any product becomes inseparable from a buyer's perception of worth. Instead of intrinsic value, we have relative value only--the products that a business makes bear diminished relations to the physical content of the offering.
The Paradox of Size The bigger you are, the smaller you need to be.
The Paradox of Time To succeed in the short term, you need to think in the long term. Yet the greater your vision and the longer the time interval over which you predict results, the greater the risk that you will be unable to take the necessary steps in the short term to achieve the long-term goals. The tension between short- and long-term planning has never been more tormented.
The Paradox of Competition Your biggest competitor is your own view of your future; competition comes from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
The Paradox of Action You've got to go for what you can't expect to get; nothing will turn out exactly as it's supposed to. You must act intuitively and be equally ready to take resolute counter-intuitive action.
The Paradox of Leadership To lead from the front, you have to stay inside the story. In an inherently inconsistent world, consistency is not the virtue it once was in our leaders.
The Paradox of Leisure Play is hard work; play and work are blending and becoming indistinguishable.
The Paradox of Reality Every person on planet Earth today has the potential to be connected to every other person, and every single one of us inhabits a world of our own and is a marketing segment of absolutely one. As our links become stronger, our individuation becomes starker.

A bold, incisive book, The Visionary's Handbook captures the interlocking web o paradoxes that abound in everyday business life, and provides an essential map to help make the future work for every individual and every company in the challenging and uncertain times ahead.

Customer Reviews:

A nice way to keep yourself attuned to private equity issues........2006-08-31

Futurists are a necessity to connect with people who think outside the box of conventional wisdom. Inconvenient to read (those damn tasks), but fun and insightful. This handbook provides a tool to get outside the box.

thick.......2006-07-11

If only that were true of The Visionary's Handbook: Nine Paradoxes That Will Shape the Future of Your Business, by Watts Wacker, Jim Taylor, and Howard Means. Talk about self-empowerment jargon. You can tell right off that this is supposedly a "big think" book, because it tells us we should "live today not in one tense, but in two," the present and the future. The way to do that, the authors write, is by compartmentalizing your future tense from your present tense. That might best involve outsourcing, since your "Fool Box" might otherwise unduly influence your "Future Box." Then list all of your "neotribes" to figure out which one bonds most closely to your corporate values.

Dig hard enough here and you may find one salient piece of visionary advice: "You have to tell yourself the story of what you are going to be and retell it again and again until you believe it absolutely and until there's not a thread of inauthenticity left in what you aspire to."

Sound advice, perhaps, but it still seems pretty thick.

Snake Oil.......2001-01-03

Thought provoking yes, but not for its marketed reasons. While reading Wacker and Taylor's work, one's train of thought turns to how could they possibly churn out another 254 pages of mindless drivel (after "The 500 Year Delta"), spun around one or two interesting blips of thought? Wacker and Taylor's underlying advice to question "What am I?" and "What will I be?" offers little more than a sophomoric therapy session - hardly visionary. ...

The Visionary's Handbook.......2000-07-21

In "The Visionary's Handbook," Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor lay out a vision of the future where change is the only constant and decision-making is shrouded by various paradoxes that often contradict each other. The stated goal of this "handbook" is to help readers identify nine paradoxes that they deem critical to understanding the future and managing business activity.

The so-called Age of Uncertainty that Wacker and Taylor describe picks up where their popular 1998 book, "The 500-Year Delta: What Happens After What Comes Next?", left off. In that book they argued that The Age of Reason was rapidly coming to a close after 500 years, and that the shift would force businesses to increasingly rely on chaos-based logic rather than traditional reasoning and economics.

In "The 500-Year Delta," Wacker and Taylor called the current business model an Age of Possibility, and established that an overabundance of possibilities was leading to a crises for decision-makers, an embarrassment of options that leaves chaos and confusion in its wake.

The nine paradoxes presented here are a guide to cutting through this clutter, providing clarity in a sea of chaos and a mechanism for managing decisions based on a well-defined vision of the future. Wacker and Taylor open with the Paradox of the Visionary, which states: "The more you are right, the more wrong you will be." The idea being that as we experience higher levels of success, we are faced with greater and more frequent "collisions with chaos." Ultimately, the authors conclude that we are no longer in control of outcomes, and the more successful we become, the more poignant that becomes.

They caution, "All we can do is attempt to influence our own future or the future of our own business, absorb the paradoxes that our personal and professional life presents us with, and be prepared for whatever tomorrow does arrive." In order to do that, they insist throughout the book, organizations and individuals must constantly ask themselves two fundamental questions: "What am I?" and "What will I be?"

While this may echo James Stockdale's--Ross Perot's 1992 Presidential running mate--befuddled debate question ("Who am I, and why am I here?"), Wacker and Taylor relentlessly pursue those questions throughout the book and meticulously apply them to each paradox. Every chapter features "future exercises," where they ask readers to define themselves, their company and products and how they visualize them in the future, according to the paradox in question.

Readers may find each chapter's command to soul-search and to put it in writing to be somewhat annoying. Who really relishes the idea of writing "the resume of the person you want to be in X number of years" or composing an exhaustive list of "all the qualities ascribed to you, and all the stories you have reason to believe are told about you by your colleagues?"

However, the paradoxes themselves are thought provoking and cleverly grounded with solid historical and anecdotal examples. The Paradox of Time, for example, illustrates the concept that at the speed of light, nothing happens: "To succeed in the short term, you need to think long term, yet the greater your vision and the longer the time interval over which you predict results, the greater the risk you will be unable to take the steps necessary in the short term to achieve long-term ends." While this almost sounds like theoretical doubletalk, they do provide concrete analogies, in this case ranging from Kodak's difficult transition into digital imaging to Apple's rollout of the new G-4 chip.

A couple of other paradoxical gems are to be found in the Paradox of Competition ("Your biggest competitor is your own view of the future") and the Paradox of Leadership ("To lead from the front, you have to stay inside the story").

In the end, Wacker and Taylor have some interesting ideas and an unusual historical approach, but don't expect their technique to be taught at Harvard's School of Business anytime soon. They themselves admit upfront, "We don't know if we are right about the future--how can we until it happens?"

(This review originally appeared on Notara.)

When was the Future?.......2000-06-02

It was great to get another fix of Watts - Matter on Fact is good but does not really allow a theme to really develop.

I though the book will be great. The discussion on Brand is tremendous - the best I have ever read. This should be required reading for anyone entering business let alone those who seek to specialise in Brand Marketing like I did once, a long time ago. The theme of Paradox is also well handled throughout. Will be great? Greatness is a property acquired over time...I need to muse on the stuff for a little while longer...

To pick holes seems a little churlish, but these are the observations I have:

· The overall concentration on business and the use of money to value things was not where I thought the book would be. Whilst the authors did a brilliant job of dismantling the present business model for Harvard, maybe the value of a Harvard Education is priceless? What could be applied to the failing inner city schools who can't seem to get kids to read or write let alone count money?

· Were they able to charge anything out to Kodak? (After all they benefited considerably from the wisdom therein).

· Jon Krakauer's 'Into Thin Air' is a good book, Anatoly Boukreev's 'The Climb' (same subject, professional guide's point of view) is better. I've been long fascinated by the indomitable nature of the human spirit - other suggestions are 'Touching the Void' by Joe Simpson and 'South' by Sir Ernest Shackleton.

· I found the main thrust a little bit US centric - I know there were bits and pieces from the rest of the world - but they did feel like bits and pieces.

· I also found the future exercises and exams a little distracting.

I'd also be fascinated to know how to write a book in a threesome, and what is fascinating the authors now? (where does a futurist who's done Paradox go next?) For me I'm thinking on applying complexity thinking to business (I thought that Howard Sherman's book was a bit disappointing - Stu Kauffmann / Chris Langton are still the standard bearers); and, what after money? I still see the pursuit of wealth as the biggest human preoccupation - shame on us. Is this general, or national/ regional? Zen Bhuddists and Taoists seem to get it. All the .com millionaires and VCs jetting off to Tibet definitely don't get it.

Thanks for a great book

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The Visionary's Handbook: Nine Paradoxes That Will Shape the Future of Your Business
Watts / Taylor, Jim / Means, Howard B. Wacker
Manufacturer: Collins
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OFATYS

Average customer rating:
The Visionary's Handbook: Nine Paradoxes that Will Shape the Future of Your Business
Watt and Taylor, Jim, with Howard Means Wacker
Manufacturer: Collins
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OFATU2

Book Description

How would you like to visit clients in three different cities, work with suppliers and partners on two continents, reduce time to market by 25%, reduce costs by 10% and still make it home in time for dinner? By adopting the strategies and technologies set forth in Being There Without Going There, you can attract and retain top employess, increase productivity and efficiency and learn how to manage people and projects anywhere in the world. This book will show you how distributed teams operate, introduce the basic technologies that allow teams located in different places to work together and provide practical examples and case studies of these principles at work.

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Customer Reviews:

Long live GVN..........2007-08-22

George was way ahead of his time. This book is the last effort of a great man. If George were here, i'm sure he would have kept his book up to date with new and evolving material.

Rest in peace dear friend.

Ha.......2003-11-26

Not all businesses can be run without "going there". If all a company handles is information that can be zipped through the internet, it might be fine. But you can't send a car through email or a conference call.

Vice President.......2003-07-29

I have spent 17 years in selling Information Systems and had to travel alot for meeting which took me out of my territory but with the concept of this book implemented alot of time, money and effort could have been saved - I have recommended that we implement this concept - very good book

It is the way to do it.......2003-07-18

I still work at this company, but that is not relevant to the book. The book outlines very well how business can and will be conducted at future looking companies. While some of the concepts may appear difficult, most have been employed with success at many companies. What this book does is present them in a concise and easy to read style that causes good business people to question why the do business the way they do and search for ways to improve company performance while improving employee lifestyle. Carried further, it shows how companies can expand their employee base to really hire and retain the best tallent without disrupting peoples families and lives for the sake of a job.

Well written, with real life experience behind it. For a business based book, fun to read.

Book Description

This book contains fourteen of Professor Domar's principal papers, beginning with On the Measurement of Technological Change, published in 1961 and ending with The Blind Men and the Elephant, which has not appeared in print before. The book is divided into four parts. Part I presents three non-technical essays on economic development and economic systems, including a novel comparison between them. Part II deals with the theory and measurement of the so-called "Index of Total Factor Productivity" for several countries, and includes an essay on the theory of index numbers. Part III compares the Soviet and American patterns of economic development. Part IV presents three applications of economic theory to historical problems: in particular, serfdom and slavery, and contains the now classic essay The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom.

Customer Reviews:

Good start.......2001-11-27

As a Management Consultant with an IT company, I have always been compelled by ideas to improve communications between the "top" consultants and the actual analysts and programmers. This is a very hard exercice indeed as everybody seems to speak his own language.

UML can certainly improve on this and more, but beware, it is not a panacea as it is only a way to express situations. There are still a bunch of loopholes like uniform B-IT patterns that have to be developed (in-house).

So, yes indeed, this book gives you more than a few kicks in the butt, but we still have to walk a long walk.

A fair Overview, but lacking substance.......2001-09-05

This book provides a fair description about modeling for basic business components. However, it fails to be useful for specifying a buildable or testable system and does not address enterprise issues. The models in chapters 4 and 5 are useful only for coffee discussions - they are far from practical for business analysts, requirements engineers, testers, and OO designers.

Furthermore, it misses the mark by representing OO design as ontology under the disguise of UML diagrams. I was disappointed and expected more from a book that is published in the Object Technology Series.

Could not see the value of the book.......2001-07-13

I bought this book by seeing its title. But, when I finished reading it, I did not learn anything new. The book is written as a novel instead of a technical book. Bottom line, I did not get the worth of my money back after reading this.

Nice starting point for real work.......2001-04-20

Usually I don't like BPR books or others regarding business subjects: they're all contain discussions based on simple common sense. As Marshall starts from the UML perspective, he deals with the issue with great concreteness and, most of all, you can understand there's a way to setup real business models. Don't think this book can show you everything. Instead, watch it as a good starting point if you really want to do business modeling and probably also real BRP. Good work, Chris... but I'm waiting for even more...

Great inspiration.......2000-08-31

Reading this book triggers a lot of innovative ideas not only about modeling in UML but also about running and optimizing a business to make it fit for the future. The only problem with the book is that it is much too short: the main body consists of 171 pages only. However, these pages contain very high-desity information. Will there ever be a volume 2?

Business Engineering With Object Technology

Average customer rating:

A good book, but possibly reaching too far
Essential to integrating software/business
Required Reading
Easy to read, but not up-to-date, and a bit naive
Clear, Concise, Transformational

Business Engineering With Object Technology
David A. Taylor
Manufacturer: John Wiley & Sons
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Object Technology: A Manager's Guide

ASIN: 0471045217

Book Description

All the ideas, examples and designs are drawn from the author's years of experience in designing object-oriented business models for Fortune 500 companies. This concise, practical book contains proven techniques on applying object technology for the design and analysis of business information systems (IS). Demonstrates how to overcome IS limitations in the re-engineering process.

Customer Reviews:

A good book, but possibly reaching too far.......2007-06-19

This was an odd read for me. I got a lot out of the book, but did not enjoy reading it nor agree with the final approach devised by the author. The author's view of a business application got a bit too framework-y for me and too restrictive. I agreed with many of the book's statements about a business-driven design and using business objects as the core of the code base. If you are looking for more fresh ways to think about how objects behave and/or fit in to your business object development then I think this book can be worth the read.

Essential to integrating software/business.......2006-03-19

It's interesting that one of the more recent reviews criticizes this book for not following UML; in fact this book illustrates many of the failings of UML when it is applied too generally. I don't think UML was ever intended as an integrative technology for business/software. Rather, it was intended as an adjunct to the RUP, which was (as its developers clearly state in a number of places) intended for the development of very large software deployments, such as aircraft control systems. The techniques Dr. Taylor advocates are integrative, and designed to scale easily from very small to medium big -- which is the domain of 90+% of business software, I would suggest. I'm often struck by how many times programmers (usually C++, occasionally Java) will tell me that "object-orientation is broken" or "never worked". Yet few, if any, of these people have ever attempted a CRC session along the lines Dr. Taylor suggests. That doesn't surprise me. The main thrust of this book follows the main ideas that the "inventor" of O-O, Alan Kay, put forward, which is essentially that in developing business software, the programmers should not be especially privileged. The use of objects, then, is not driven by "code optimisation" or "code re-use", but by a desire to make some of the architecture of the software understandable to a wider, non-technical range of contributors. This opening of the system can lead to a co-operative development, instead of the code/review/re-code cycle that wastes so much time in most devlopments. I'm still astonished by how many so-called O-O programmers still don't "get" that.

Required Reading.......2005-09-11

This is the book that, for me, "made it click". I had been trying to wrap my head around object-oriented analysis for years, when a colleague recommended this book. I read it, and suddenly -- -- I GOT IT! Since then, I have always been one of the few in any workplace that actually "gets" OO design.

The thing is, 90% of people look at OO as "data plus functions". But that's only the minimal truth. To really gain the full power of OO you have to go beyond that, and that's what Taylor does. He takes you right up to the edge and even lets you peek over into the vast possibilities: "the customer should know how to bill himself"!! I still get excited about this!! Most people just use accessor methods to make their objects into dumb bags o' bits that are tossed around like big fat dead blobs. Well, after this book, you'll never be that pedestrian again. Screw accessor methods! - give your object an intelligence within its environment.

To me, David Taylor is a genius. As a consultant, I purchased this book for every client I had to work for, so we could work at a higher level -- together. As another colleague said, programming is all about communication; objects ARE the way humans think about the world ("What is that thing?" "That object? That's a Truck.") and the most efficient way to discuss something is to use the same language, don't you think?

If you haven't read this book, read it. If you read it and didn't think it was incredible, then maybe you didn't get it. Don't worry, though, you can. Just keep trying. It's worth it.

Easy to read, but not up-to-date, and a bit naive.......2001-03-28

The author presents an enthusiastic view of applying some ideas from object-oriented programming to business modeling. In doing so, he makes a number of unsubstantiated, if not false, claims such as "... object technology reflects fundamental cognitive processes" or "... directly supports the way managers think about their business". Compare this to the sobering statement of Jacobsen, one of the founders of the standard model of object orientation (the "UML"), who said that "it is bizarre to apply the way of thinking that governs computer systems to business processes". Clearly, the software engineering concepts brought up by object technology do neither reflect the way the business world is like nor do they reflect the way we think about it. Another weakness of the book is its age. In a world of rapid changes through scientific and technological progress, it is not suprising that the book is not up-to-date. Today, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) defines the standard model of object orientation. Unfortunately, the book is both incomplete and inconsistent with the UML. For instance, it does not discuss the important concept of associations, it calls attributes "variables", and it uses the terms "collections" and "composition" in a way that is incompatible with the UML.

Clear, Concise, Transformational.......2000-11-04

Pulls you through quite a thought process. Great step-by-step manual. The diagrams and margin summaries would make several classic PowerPoint presentations.

Representing group technology classification and coding techniques with object oriented modeling principles.: An article from: IIE Transactions

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Representing group technology classification and coding techniques with object oriented modeling principles.: An article from: IIE Transactions
Richard E. Billo , and Bopaya Bidanda
Manufacturer: Institute of Industrial Engineers, Inc. (IIE)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

Book Description

This digital document is an article from IIE Transactions, published by Institute of Industrial Engineers, Inc. (IIE) on August 1, 1995. The length of the article is 7281 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the author: The purpose of this paper is to show the common basis of several object-oriented design modeling principles as compared with those used in classification and coding (C&C) for group technology applications. Five types of decision tree (E-trees, N-trees, X-trees, D-trees, and C-trees) are shown to be in exact correspondence with the object-oriented modeling principles generalization with disjoint subclasses, generalization with overlapping subclasses, classification, generalization with restriction, and aggregation, respectively. In addition, C&C modeling and subsequent database implementation are shown to be enhanced through application of such object-oriented modeling principles as association and role names. Finally, a case study is presented that illustrates the application of these principles in the design and implementation of a C&C system for abrasive flow machining.

Citation Details
Title: Representing group technology classification and coding techniques with object oriented modeling principles.
Author: Richard E. Billo
Publication: IIE Transactions (Refereed)
Date: August 1, 1995
Publisher: Institute of Industrial Engineers, Inc. (IIE)
Volume: v27 Issue: n4 Page: p542(13)

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