Five Best Management Books of 2009

Here are my favourite five business books that I read this year:

1) Inside Steve’s Brain by Leander Kahney, tells the story of how Steve Jobs has moved from creating computers in a garage to leading a multi-million dollar organisation. It investigates the Apple approach; an obsession with design, ease-of-use and detail. It describes Jobs’s maverick method to product development: not consulting customer focus groups, going through endless iterations of prototyping and an almost tyrannical approach to driving projects forward. If only all digital projects were so focused to come up with something great for their customers.

2) Chris Anderson’s book, The Long Tail’s basic premise is that markets are radically different now than they were even ten years ago. Products used to need a large potential audience to be profitable. Films were only made if they were likely to be blockbusters, books only written for mass-market appeal. Now with new technologies, products are far cheaper to create. Books are written online, music and films can be made at a fraction of the cost that they used to be. The web makes it easier to reach a large global market. Niche audiences find niche products easily using search engines. Anderson describes this new environment with plenty of examples and describes novel ways to take advantage of it.

3) Flip by Peter Sheahan is another book whose theme is radical change in the business environment. Sheahen describes a world where expectations have risen radically. We now all see the mobile phone, laptop, cable TV and several holidays a year as standard. It’s an economy of unpredictable change, where new markets like iPhone applications appear overnight. Faced with this Sheahan argues, long-term planning makes no sense. He quotes Meg Whitman of eBay, who says “Forget about five year plans, we’re working on five-day plans here!” He advocates an approach of action even if the results are uncertain, saying this will produce clarity. One of the numerous examples he uses is the early days of the digital camera market, when it was difficult to see how things would develop. Faced with this situation Konica Minolta, sat back and tried to gauge the direction, whereas Sony dived in and started producing products. By the time Konica got into the market it was too late. There are lots of other ideas to be successful in our unpredictable world.

4) Extreme Programming Explained, by Kent Beck is a book for all people who have been involved with failed IT projects, either from the client or supplier side. Beck exposes the fallacy of long IT projects where requirements from the business are collected and then suppliers go away for several months (or in some cases years) to develop the products. Waiting this long without communication between the users and the producers, Kent argues, inevitably leads to a product that doesn’t please the clients. Beck’s approach is very different, lots of rapid releases and lots of interaction between the producers and the end users throughout the project, not just at the beginning and end. A good read and really the only way to develop products in the 21^st Century

5) Managing Successful Projects with Prince2. At last the Office of Government Commerce have released a new version of the Prince2 manual. Stripped of nearly 100 pages, it has lots of practical examples and is easier to read. It contains lots of useful ideas for managing projects such as a way of identifying stakeholders on a project and using some of them to create a project governance board, a simple but effective risk management approach and a planning method which splits the project into manageable chunks. Also there’s an excellent chapter on how to flex Prince2 for smaller projects.

What business or management books have you found to be good this year? Let us know via the comments section for this post