January 22, 2005

80 Books Every Manager Should Read

800-CEO-READ Blog has a preamble from the Financial Times Book of Management (3rd Edition):

In the instant, action-oriented, pressurized world of business, books change things. They change perceptions. They change behavior. They alter expectations and aspirations. They inform. “In no other profession [besides business], not excepting the ministry and the law, is the need for wide information, broad sympathies, and directed imagination so great,” reflected Owen D. Young, then chairman of Radio Corporation and General Electric in 1929. And never has the need been greater than the present.

In no other field do books now hold such a central role in the dissemination of best practice and new concepts. Helped by the fact that business is increasingly global and the skills of management often universal, books make their way round the world, shaping the management of the future.

From the past 30 years: 1990-99, 1980-89 and 1970-79.

Tagging and Folksonomies

David Weinberger: “Thanks to del.icio.us and then flickr in particular, hundreds of thousands of people have been introduced to bottom-up tagging: Just slap a tag on something and now its value becomes social, not individual. As these tags are added willy-nilly, two issues arise: We want to get more value from them and we want to work out the scaling problems it’s one thing when there are 30 things tagged with “weasels” and another when there are 300,000. A site like technorati, which already gets its value as an aggregator, is in a good position to innovate around both issues.”

A paper by Adam Mathes on “Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata.”

This paper examines user-‍generated metadata as implemented and applied in two web services designed to share and organize digital media to better understand grassroots classification. Metadata – data about data – allows systems to collocate related information, and helps users find relevant information. The creation of metadata has generally been approached in two ways: professional creation and author creation. In libraries and other organizations, creating metadata, primarily in the form of catalog records, has traditionally been the domain of dedicated professionals working with complex, detailed rule sets and vocabularies. The primary problem with this approach is scalability and its impracticality for the vast amounts of content being produced and used, especially on the World Wide Web. The apparatus and tools built around professional cataloging systems are generally too complicated for anyone without specialized training and knowledge. A second approach is for metadata to be created by authors. The movement towards creator described documents was heralded by SGML, the WWW, and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. There are problems with this approach as well – often due to inadequate or inaccurate description, or outright deception. This paper examines a third approach: user-‍created metadata, where users of the documents and media create metadata for their own individual use that is also shared throughout a community.

Robin Good has more.

Long Tail Definitions

Chris Anderson writes:

Ideally, the three key elements of the Long Tail that a good definition should explain are: 1) the shift from hits to niches; 2) the economics of abundance (infinite shelf-space effect); 3) the aggregation of many small markets to make a big one.

These are the ones the are closest so far (several were articulated by more than one person; in those cases I’ve usually picked the shortest one; I’ve also tweaked a word or two):

Best Definitions:

* “The Long Tail is the realization that the sum of many small markets is worth as much, if not more, than a few large markets.” –Jason Foster
* The Long Tail is what you get when the obscure becomes ubiquitous.– Eric Akawie
* The Long Tail is the 80% of stuff that didn’t used to be worth selling.–Greg
* “The Long Tail is the story of how products that were once considered fringe, underground or independent now collectively make up a market share that rivals the bestsellers and blockbusters.” –Bob Baker

Best Slogans:

* Trickle-up economics!Joshua Wood
* The end of the 80/20 Rule!Eric Etheridge
* Everything, all the time!Jim Treacher (channeling Don Henley)
* A small number times a very big number equals a big number!Me (nominated by several readers)