Book Reviews
March 2012 (Vol 29, Issue 2) – This issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) includes a book review of “Take Charge Product Management: Time-Tested Tips, Tactics, and Tools for the New or Improved Product Manager” by Greg Geracie.
“Take Charge Product Management” is a short, easy to read narrative following a newly-minted Product Manager named Sean through his first 12 months on the job. Sean works for a small to mid-sized firm which had no formal product manager role prior to his appointment.
Sean learns (quickly) that a product manager needs to focus on both strategic and tactical levels, managing short-term and long-term plans and visions, all the while building interpersonal and cross-functional relationships across department boundaries. Along his 12-month journey, Sean implements standard new product development (NPD) and portfolio management business practices, as well as learning about the market for his product line.
You can read the full review of Take Charge Product Management. If you are a PDMA member, you can access the full content of this issue at www.pdma.org.
January 2012 (Vol 29, Issue 1) – This issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) includes a book review of “Taming Change with Portfolio Management: Unify Your Organization, Sharpen Your Strategy, and Create Measurable Value” by Pat Durbin and Terry Doerscher.
“Taming Change” is packed with information for executives, project managers, product development professionals and business process improvement specialists. Organized into six sections, each of the 20 short chapters concludes with an outline summary of the concepts presented in that chapter. As this text is best used as a reference, the outline summaries can help the reader target chapters for more in-depth study.
Section 1 presents the case for action with the premise that change is inevitable and continuous in organizations today. Portfolio management is a superior tool set to manage that cycle of change. Further, in Chapter 2, the authors show evidence that today’s project environment is more about managing knowledge and knowledge workers than simply accomplishing multi-tasking skills.
Principles of portfolio management are described in Section 2. In particular, “portfolio management allows you to group a set of common subjects, like products, projects, or resources, so they can be managed collectively” (pg. 33). This is a recurring theme throughout the book: common tools and business processes define shared information and collaboration for increased work productivity.
You can read the full review of Taming Change here. If you are a PDMA member, you can access the full content of this issue at www.pdma.org.
November 2011 (Vol 28, Issue 6) – This issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) includes a book review of “iLearning: How to Create an Innovative Learning Organization” by Mark Salisbury.
In “iLearning: How to Create an Innovative Learning Organization,” Mark Salisbury brings together common sense knowledge about knowledge and learning so that teams and organizations can work together more effectively. iLearning, short for innovative learning, “ simply describes learning that is facilitated during collaborative work” to create new and unique solutions. Clearly, as economies move from a manufacturing driven foundation to knowledge based markets, managers are challenged to improve organizational behavior while still delivering enhanced learning for their workers.
This book is appropriate for knowledge workers and innovation managers to clarify company best practices on learning and retrieving information for problem-solving. Success in New Product Development (NPD) depends on capturing both tacit and explicit knowledge for application to next-generation problems. An extensive introduction in “iLearning” guides the reader to those sections most relevant to his or her role in today’s knowledge economy.
- Part One – Facilitating collaborative work,
- Part Two – Facilitating innovative learning,
- Part Three – Organizational intervention for effective learning,
- Part Four – Applying methods and technology to support iLearning, and
- Part Five – Impact of learning and innovation on education.
You can read the full review of iLearning here. If you are a PDMA member, you can access the full content of this issue at www.pdma.org.
January 2011 (Vol 28, Issue 1) – This issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) includes a book review of “Conquering Innovation Fatigue: Overcoming the Barriers to Personal and Corporate Success” by Jeff Lindsay, Cheryl Perkins, and Mukund Karanjikar.
A set of guiding principles intended for (1) entrepreneurs and innovators, (2) corporate leaders and strategists, and (3) policy makers and influencers, Conquering Innovation Fatigue defines nine factors that hinder creative transformation of ideas into profit. Divided into three sections, Part One of the book conceptually introduces the nine innovation Fatigue Factors. Part Two, comprising the bulk of the text, delves deeply into causes and examples of these Fatigue Factors, and finally, Part Three offers a handful of suggestions and solutions as “Energizing Factors”.
With the numerous personal stories from the authors’ own experiences, this is not a tome to be read from cover to cover. Taken individually, each chapter offers some pithy advice captured through the unfortunate innovation efforts of historic and contemporary inventors. Approaching “Conquering Innovation Fatigue” as you would a newspaper, each idea, or Fatigue Factor, is self-contained in just ten or so pages, allowing the reader to quickly identify what may be holding him or her back from personal innovation success. Quoting the authors (p. 177), “That’s what innovation is all about: believable real solutions o real problems that make life better for real people.”
You can read the full review of Conquering Innovation Fatigue here. If you are a PDMA member, you can access the full content of this issue at www.pdma.org.
November 2010 (Vol 27, Issue 10) – This issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) includes a book review of “Burning the Ships: Intellectual Property and the Transformation of Microscoft” by Marshall Phelps and David Kline.
This is a book as much about teams and organizations managing conflict brought on by significant change as it is about Intellectual Property (IP). Intertwined throughout a series of engaging and personal stories – showing how Microsoft instituted a strategic personality makeover from a monopolistic bully to a respected collaborative partner – are lessons that every business person can utilize in building and implementing diverse teams to meet clear strategic objectives. Collaboration (pg. 46) “enables a company to more broadly and rapidly disseminate its technologies and products into the market through the cooperative efforts of others. It provides the framework for pursuing joint product development work with other companies that can lead to greater success in the marketplace.”
You can read the full review of Burning the Ships here. If you are a PDMA member, you can access the full content of this issue at www.pdma.org.
September 2010 (Vol 27, Issue 5) – This issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) includes a book review of “Innovation Nation: How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters, and What We Can Do To Get It Back” by John Kao.
Though originally written to inform the 2008 U.S. Presidential primary agenda, Innovation Nation yet offers an insightful roadmap for anyone with global operations to develop innovative solutions for so-called “wicked problems”. Dr. Kao draws on his wide-ranging experiences, covering the spectrum from Harvard Business School to Hollywood to the U.S. Navy Postgraduate School, yielding policy direction for corporations, governments, and academics in the United States and other nations to face ever-more competitive challenges in the global economies of the 21st century.
The book can be roughly divided into three sections: first, the history of large innovation projects in the U.S. (Manhattan Project, NASA); next, the importance of strong leaders driving heavyweight teams; and finally, a prolific vision of innovation for the future world.
You can read the full review of Innovation Nation here. If you are a PDMA member, you can access the full content of this issue at www.pdma.org.
