The IT Skeptic - Comments for "Porter quotes"

the books are less worth referencing

skeptic — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:38:08 +0000

Charles, that's an interesting different angle on it i had missed: perhaps the books are less worth referencing.

it fits: books tend to be fizzier, trendier and more opinionated - only way to get readers these days. You end up with light-weight personal viewpoints like Introduction to Real ITSM. They are not built to last any more than the mags and webpages are.

Not true of all of them of course, just a sweeping generalisation (this site's forté). The ITIL V3 books are built to last many years. So too are the works of a number of contributors here (e.g. Charles Betz's Shoes for the Cobbler's Children). But a number of books I have read in the past couple of years fit that: Freakonomics, Blink, Richistan, the Four Hour Work Week, The Dip [...is crap], Cult of the Amateur...

no problem with HBR

skeptic — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:59:35 +0000

I have no problem with HBR - a very reliable shortcut to avoid reading the book :-D

HBR

JamesFinister — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:02:01 +0000

Perhaps I am too trusting, but I do tend tyo give more credibility to anything published in HBR rather than the average mag, notwithstanding the American bias.

Why we don't read books

Charles Rattray — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:10:52 +0000

As others have said, googling a subject reveals a multitude of web articles, published periodical material and references to book material. Today, we also have an abundance of books which are not grounded in quantitative or qualitative research, but instead spell out opinion, only sometimes drawn from experience. These types of books often become best-sellers perhaps because they tell a story and we like to believe in stories. My opinion is that the web enables many more people to express their thoughts and opinions publically, sometimes using established texts to quote from, but usually only adapting those quotes to re-enforce a badly concluded point. A bit like "How to lie with quotes". As more and more material becomes globally available the real skill we will all need is how to find good accurate content versus garbage.

Incidentally, I quote Porter here: http://www.tideway.com/community/blog/ in a piece which builds on Porter's acknowledged strategy principles to support strategic thinking in IT.