I bought this book off the web and I couldn't "look inside" so I didn't really know what I was getting. I was surprised to see it was a fairly small book in terms of pages. But the size belies its value I suspect.

Lonnie Pacelli has put together a tight little package of wisdom, based it would seem on many of his experiences at Accenture and later Microsoft Corporation. He has 18 "screw ups" to share. ....read more

Johansson, F.

Johansson has produced an interesting story here. It's interesting because it is provides a thesis (perhaps the wrong word) on how and perhaps why, innovation occurs or why some people are able to gain breakthrough insights and others not. It's not an academic text, but it does have a "folksy" type of appeal with its stories and approach, which kind of makes me feel that it doesn't have that "robustness" to make it a real solid contribution, although I also suspect many will find it useful. It is all a bit lightweight and has a "guru" type feel to it that always makes me a bit suspicious of the validity of some of the insights.

I have had this book in my library for quite some time and although I've browsed it before, I recently had the opportunity to actually read it. Why I didn't read it earlier, I just don't know because it is just so full of stories and wisdom on many levels.

For those who don't know - the Skunk Works were (are still?) a top secret Lockheed shop for the design, development and manufacture of advanced and innovative aerospace systems.

Atomic attempts to identify the future business construct based upon trends identified today. Camrass and Farncombe take the analogy of an "atom" that can become part of larger molecules to form value adding business structures. These are more agile and focused organisations than the monolithic businesses today.

I have this question I ask at dinners/lunches which is "If you could have any three people as dinner guests who would you have?" with the variations of dead or alive or alive only or politicians or sports people and so on. It can sometimes give you an insight into the person, but it always throws up surprises as often they are an obscure person. I am shallow enough to admit that Elle McPherson is always on my list (...because she is an inspirational business person ... duh!!). BUT ...the other one is Wayne Bennett ...and I often change the third person.

This book started slowly for me. But once I could see where Nick Milton was coming from, quite a few things "clicked". Being a project and program manager myself, some of his concepts resonated tremendously and I will implement them in some of the areas I work in including some of my clients.

The message here is that if you wish to develop good software, particularly of any significant size, you need a robust process and a team of disciplined programmers/engineers. The operative words here are robust and disciplined. These two terms, particularly the discipline one, resonate particularly well with me, because one of the significant causes of a problem project is the lack of discipline to follow a defined process. The further message is that "quality counts" - even more so than schedule. This is particularly relevant to any business that does software engineering or projects of any sort.