The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Author : Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1400063515 , 978-1400063512


A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.

Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”

For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don’t know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.

Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. The Black Swan is a landmark book–itself a black swan.

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THE ROAD AHEAD

Author : Bill Gates
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 0140260404 , 978-0140260403

Readers of The Road Ahead fortunately will find an author that is an entrepreneur, not a corporate bureaucrat. Indeed, Bill Gates stands as one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the late twentieth century.
From the outset, Gates exhibits a clear preference for private economic actions over government. He dislikes the metaphor of the information superhighway to describe the unfolding developments in the information economy. He worries about the implication that a highway should be built by government, an option Gates considers a major mistake.
In the end, entrepreneurs lie at the center of the capitalist economy as the sources of creativity, innovation, and invention. Gates correctly notes: Entrepreneurship will play a major role in shaping the development of the information highway, the same way it shaped the personal-computer business. And he grasps the full benefits of entrepreneurship as well: The good news is that people learn from both the successes and the failures, and the net result is rapid progress.

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The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Author: Malcolm Gladwell

Publisher : Little, Brown, 2002

ISBN 0316346624, 9780316346627

It's a book about change. In particular, it's a book that presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does. For example, why did crime drop so dramatically in New York City in the mid-1990's? How does a novel written by an unknown author end up as national bestseller? Why do teens smoke in greater and greater numbers, when every single person in the country knows that cigarettes kill? Why is word-of-mouth so powerful? What makes TV shows like Sesame Street so good at teaching kids how to read? I think the answer to all those questions is the same. It's that ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. They are social epidemics. The Tipping Point is an examination of the social epidemics that surround us.


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http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/index.html

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Business Process Management Applied

Title : Business Process Management Applied
Creating the Value Managed Enterprise

Author : Charles Poirier , Ian Walker
ISBN : 1-932159-33-9




Acquire the roadmap for achieving success that relates specific process improvements to bottom-line profit growth. Business Process Management Applied: Creating the Value Managed Enterprise illustrates how process improvement can add value for firms of any size in any industry and the method for tracking those savings to financial statements, using a proven maturity model and a SCOR® model. It features a guiding framework and a presentation of the underlying architecture, including the basic elements of optimizing the extended enterprise, applying business process management (BPM) tools and techniques, and bringing increased value to all constituents of the networked enterprise — especially the end consumer.

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Using Knowledge Management to Drive Innovation

Title : Using Knowledge Management to Drive Innovation




This report, the tenth Best-Practice Report on knowledge management, explores how innovative organizations manage their knowledge and how to approach KM to drive innovation. Using Knowledge Management to Drive Innovation chronicles the value innovative organizations find in better managing the flow and reuse of knowledge, effective practices to enhance knowledge creation and reuse for innovation, and implications for other organizations that might wish to better nurture knowledge. The report focuses on how to:

1. Foster a supportive culture and link KM, innovation, and business strategy and results;
2. Enable collaboration;
3. Establish support roles and structures;
4. engage the educational and training functions and
5. Incorporate recruiting strategies; and
measure the success of consciously enabling knowledge to drive innovation.


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Imagining India : Ideas for the New Century

Title: Imagining India : Ideas for the New Century
Author: Nandan Nilekani
Publisher: Penguin Books India
ISBN: 9780670081967



Since the early 1990s, India has witnessed great social, political and cultural change. As the world’s largest democracy, its most diverse nation and one of its fastest growing economies, India is now, sixty years after Independence, universally regarded as an emerging superpower. In this sweeping and comprehensive book, one of the country’s finest and most dynamic minds examines the central ideas that have shaped modern India, and offers an original perspective on our past, present and future. Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, who has been a key player in India’s growth story, points out that the country’s future rests on more than simply economic growth; it also depends on reform and innovation in all sectors of public life. Looking closely at India’s recent history, he examines the ideas and attitudes that evolved with the times and contributed to the country’s progress, as well as those that kept it shackled to old, unproductive and fundamentally undemocratic ways. He discusses how India’s early socialist policies, despite good intentions and astonishing idealism, stifled growth and weakened democracy; how, contrary to received wisdom, the country’s large and overwhelmingly young population has now become its greatest strength; how information technology is revolutionizing not just business but also governance in the everyday life of a vast majority of Indians; and how rapid urbanization is transforming both society and politics. Nilekani also gets to the heart of charged debates about caste politics, labour reform, infrastructure, higher education, the English language in India and the role of the state in a globalized world where the wealth of big corporations exceeds that of some nations. And as he does this, he asks the key questions of the future: how will India as a global power avoid the mistakes of earlier development models? Will further access to the open market continue to stimulate such extraordinary growth? And how will this growth affect—and be shaped by—the country’s young people? India is in the middle of a huge transformational process, Nilekani argues, and only a safety net of ideas—from genuinely inclusive democracy to social security, from public health to sustainable energy—can transcend political agendas and safeguard the country’s future.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

Title of book: The Snowball

ISBN: 9780553905496

Publisher: Bantam Books

Author of Book: Schroeder, Alice

Here is THE book recounting the life and times of one of the most respected men in the world, Warren Buffett. The legendary Omaha investor has never written a memoir, but now he has allowed one writer, Alice Schroeder, unprecedented access to explore directly with him and with those closest to him his work, opinions, struggles, triumphs, follies, and wisdom. The result is the personally revealing and complete biography of the man known everywhere as “The Oracle of Omaha.”Although the media track him constantly, Buffett himself has never told his full life story. His reality is private, especially by celebrity standards. Indeed, while the homespun persona that the public sees is true as far as it goes, it goes only so far. Warren Buffett is an array of paradoxes. He set out to prove that nice guys can finish first. Over the years he treated his investors as partners, acted as their steward, and championed honesty as an investor, CEO, board member, essayist, and speaker. At the same time he became the world’s richest man, all from the modest Omaha headquarters of his company Berkshire Hathaway. None of this fits the term “simple.”When Alice Schroeder met Warren Buffett she was an insurance industry analyst and a gifted writer known for her keen perception and business acumen. Her writings on finance impressed him, and as she came to know him she realized that while much had been written on the subject of his investing style, no one had moved beyond that to explore his larger philosophy, which is bound up in a complex personality and the details of his life. Out of this came his decision to cooperate with her on the book about himself thathe would never write.Never before has Buffett spent countless hours responding to a writer’s questions, talking, giving complete access to his wife, children, friends, and business associates—opening his files, recalling his childhood. It was an act of courage, as The Snowball makes immensely clear. Being human, his own life, like most lives, has been a mix of strengths and frailties. Yet notable though his wealth may be, Buffett’s legacy will not be his ranking on the scorecard of wealth; it will be his principles and ideas that have enriched people’s lives. This book tells you why Warren Buffett is the most fascinating American success story of our time.

http://www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell/snowball/