Just finished What's the Big Idea?, a book written by Davenport with Larry Prusak and (in slightly smaller type*) H. James Wilson. This book looks at the uptake of business ideas such as re-engineering & KM. Rather than focus on the gurus, it highlights "idea practitioners", the people in organisations who take these ideas and make them work - thus giving the gurus case studies to talk about at conferences. This shift in focus is very good and I recommend to book to those of you who work for The Man yet want to do cool new stuff. The only comment I would make is that the authors treat idea practitioners as lone guns (albeit ones who must persuade & influence others). What would be interesting to know is the extent to which practicing ideas is a social effort - i.e. do groups of idea practitioners work together within organisations? If so, how? Do you they play different roles? Are those roles stable & identifiable? I guess my question wants to take the book's view of the idea ecosystem in organisations and explore it in more detail.
Any suggestions?
*Davenport & Prusak are the "name" authors but I wonder how much of the actual work was done by Wilson. Is there an inverse relationship between size of your name on the cover and the amount of donkey work you have to do?
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6 comments:
It was Wilson (I remember when I was being interviewed for it)
However, my impression was that veto and censorshiup powers were retained buy the "name"d authors.
Ah ha...
As the smaller-fonted third author of "What's the Big Idea?," I can assure you that Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak deserve the larger fonts. Indeed, it's often the case that there's "an inverse relationship between the size of your name on the cover and the amount of donkey work you have to do," especially with business books. However, Tom and Larry carried more than their share of the writing and research load.
Thanks for responding Jim & welcome to the blog - interesting to get the background on this.
What are you working on now?
Ideas are often the easy part ... but executing on them -- actually making them happen is real challenge. This is where the proposition (an idea for creating value) actually becomes tangible (measurable value). And while I don't read a lot of business books, I might just check this one out (since you liked it so much).
BTW I love that Jim responded, but that Larry and Tom did not (or have not so far).
Gav - This book is largely about ther people who make business ideas a reality in organisations. The BS level is reasonably low & the style is clear - which differentiates it from many business books.
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