Author: Jeffrey L. Cruikshank

Today’s entry is brought by Brian from freemacblog.com and freemacware.com. Since he read the book, I figured it would be better to have him be the reviewer instead of me. Everything below is his review. Thanks Brian.

I am a fan of Apple Computer products. They make make computing easy and more productive. But not only are the products unique, but the company itself is run in a unique way as well. In fact, I believe that their “insanely great” products are a direct extension of the decisions they make in the business division of 1 Infinite Loop. This book explains those unique decisions. Both the good and the bad.

More than just a history book, “The Apple Way” offers “12 Management Lessons From The World’s Most Innovative Company.” With topics ranging from the love/hate relationship with Mac User Groups to why Apple has an edge over Microsoft because they control the hardware AND the software of their products.

In all, this book addresses the history and business side of Apple and not so much the technology side. In it’s most basic reading, you learn the four rules.

• Make the customer king
• Make the product king
• Break the marketing mold
• Build the learning organization

And how Apple did them right…and wrong.

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Author:James Surowiecki

Eric Schmidt from Google recommended this book in the “mistakenly” published powerpoint presentation slide notes from Google’s Analyst Day a couple of weeks ago. I had heard of it, but didn’t know much about it, so I did a little research and it seems like James Surowiecki, a writer for the New Yorker, has some great evidence (or maybe just ideas) about trusting the masses.

Surowiecki goes over types of crowd wisdom, types of crowd wisdom, and failures of crowd intelligence and how when certain factors combine, the wisdom of the crowd is much more accurate than the wisdom of individuals, even experts. One of the stories he uses to illustrate this is a study done in the 19th century by a British Anthropologist named Francis Galton. In the study he took an ox to a county fair and had people guess its weight. He also had cattle ranchers and farmer (experts) guess the weight. The general public as a whole did much better at guessing the weight than the so-called experts.

In the review snippets there is a link to Wikipedia’s entry for the book, which goes over these and other topics in a bit more detail. Also, from what I can tell, Wisdom of Crowds reads a lot like a Malcolm Gladwell book.

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Author: Malcolm Gladwell

I really liked this book. It is all about rapid cognition or thin-slicing. Malcolm Gladwell goes into how we as people have the innate and effective ability to rapidly take in what is around us and make sense of it, understand it, and take action on it without consciously thinking about it.

This book isn’t about intuition though, what Gladwell calls thin-slicing is a skill that can be examined, understood, learned and our innate ability to use it can even grow through continual effort.

As with Gladwell’s other books, he has all sorts of pertinent stories and examples that drive his points home. Not directly a business book, but has all sorts of business applications.

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Author: Jim Collins

What Jim Collins’ site says:

Based on a five-year research project, Good to Great answers the question: “Can a good company become a great company, and, if so, how?” True to the rigorous research methodology and invigorating teaching style of Jim Collins, Good to Great teaches how even the dowdiest of companies can make the leap to outperform market leaders the likes of Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.

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