What a coincidence that on the day I finished listening to the audio version of The Big Short by Michael Lewis, the SEC announced charges against Goldman Sachs for improprieties from the subprime mortgage mess.  A lot has been written about Goldman’s central role in the subprime industry since the meltdown, so it is not a surprise that they were the first investment bank to be targeted.  Will they be the last?  Only time will tell.

The “Book Smarts” series of articles provide a summary of the key themes from a recent business book.
How The Mighty Fall (by Jim Collins) is a must-read for anyone studying innovation. The author analyzed a number of companies to try and determine why some of the greatest companies in history had fallen. His conclusion:
“I’ve come to see institutional decline like a staged disease: harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages, easier to detect but harder to curer in the later stages. An institution …

There have been several dozen very popular business books published in the last decade, and the best way to retain and utilize the key points of any books are to write them down in a synopsis like this.
The Tipping Point was written by Malcolm Gladwell and published in the early part of the decade.  He defines the “Tipping Point” as “that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”  This concept is a critical one for business people to understand, as …

I think that I want an Amazon Kindle.  As a self-professed early adopter of gadgets, the Kindle should certainly rank near the top of my list.  I wish the product did more (touch screen, color, play movies, etc.) but I’ll just have to wait for the future Apple tablet to give me another multimedia toy.   At $299 it is also fairly expensive as noted by many reviewers, but that hasn’t stopped me from buying cool technology before.
So why haven’t I taken the plunge?  Because I have at least a dozen …

If the success of a book was based on the number of pages that I underlined or wrote notes on, then Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson might become the most successful book of all time.  Obviously that probably won’t happen, but by the time I finished my pen was out of ink.
What struck me first were the incredible number of examples – not just the known examples like Google and Facebook, but many companies and products that I had never heard of before.  Did you …

Until recently, if you asked me “what is the most important business book you’ve read in the last decade”, I would have instantly answered The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen.  Almost daily you see this book played out in real life – upstarts that are innovating , challenging, disrupting and even destroying industries and established companies.
But ask me that question now, and I have the more difficult choice between The Innovator’s Dilemma and Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe.   It …