Books about Reaping from Amazon.com

If you're like most people, you bet your career and company on innovation--because you must. Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation offers you a new way to think about and manage innovation that will dramatically improve the odds of success.

Authors James Andrew and Harold Sirkin, senior partners in The Boston Consulting Group, describe an approach to managing innovation based on the concept of a cash curve--which tracks investment against time. They ask the questions you need to ask: How much should you invest in a new product or service? How fast should you push it to market? How quickly can you get to optimal value? How much additional investment should you pour into sustaining and building the product or service?

Payback offers you practical and economically sound advice on when to pursue cash flow indirectly by first pursuing other benefits, such as brand and knowledge. It also shows you how to reshape the cash curve by using different business models--integrator, orchestrator, and licenser--each of which balances risk and reward differently.

The authors then present a short list of decisions and activities that you must make--not delegate--to achieve a high return on innovation. You won't find facile answers in Payback--but you will find valuable insights and practical guidance for mastering one of the most challenging and critical business activities: innovation..
Price: $4.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Open source software is changing the world of Information Technology. But making it work for your company is far more complicated than simply installing a copy of Linux. If you are serious about using open source to cut costs, accelerate development, and reduce vendor lock-in, you must institutionalize skills and create new ways of working. You must understand how open source is different from commercial software and what responsibilities and risks it brings. Open Source for the Enterprise is a sober guide to putting open source to work in the modern IT department.

Open source software is software whose code is freely available to anyone who wants to change and redistribute it. New commercial support services, smaller licensing fees, increased collaboration, and a friendlier platform to sell products and services are just a few of the reasons open source is so attractive to IT departments. Some of the open source projects that are in current, widespread use in businesses large and small include Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, JBOSS, and Perl. These have been used to such great effect by Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, and major commercial and financial firms, that a wave of publicity has resulted in recent years, bordering on hype. Large vendors such as IBM, Novell, and Hewlett Packard have made open source a lynchpin of their offerings. Open source has entered a new area where it is being used as a marketing device, a collaborative software development methodology, and a business model.

This book provides something far more valuable than either the cheerleading or the fear-mongering one hears about open source. The authors are Dan Woods, former CTO of TheStreet.com and a consultant and author of several books about IT, and Gautam Guliani, Director of Software Architecture at Kaplan Test Prep & Admissions. Each has used open source software for some 15 years at IT departments large and small. They have collected the wisdom of a host of experts from IT departments, open source communities, and software companies.

Open Source for the Enterprise provides a top to bottom view not only of the technology, but of the skills required to manage it and the organizational issues that must be addressed. Here are the sorts of questions answered in the book:

• Why is there a "productization gap" in most open source projects?
• How can the maturity of open source be evaluated?
• How can the ROI of open source be calculated?
• What skills are needed to use open source?
• What sorts of open source projects are appropriate for IT departments at the beginner, intermediate, advanced, and expert levels?
• What questions need to be answered by an open source strategy?
• What policies for governance can be instituted to control the adoption of open source?
• What new commercial services can help manage the risks of open source?
• Do differences in open source licenses matter?
• How will using open source transform an IT department?

Praise for Open Source for the Enterprise: "Open Source has become a strategic business issue; decisions on how and where to choose to use Open Source now have a major impact on the overall direction of IT abilities to support the business both with capabilities and by controlling costs. This is a new game and one generally not covered in existing books on Open Source which continue to assume that the readers are 'deep dive' technologists, Open Source for the Enterprise provides everyone from business managers to technologists with the balanced view that has been missing. Well worth the time to read, and also worth encouraging others in your enterprise to read as well." ----Andy Mulholland - Global CTO Capgemini

"Open Source for the Enterprise is required reading for anyone working with or looking to adopt open source technologies in a corporate environment. Its practical, no-BS approach will make sure you're armed with the information you need to deploy applications successfully (as well as helping you know when to say "no"). If you're trying to sell open source to management, this book will give you the ammunition you need. If you're a manager trying to drive down cost using open source, this book will tell you what questions to ask your staff. In short, it's a clear, concise explanation of how to successfully leverage open source without making the big mistakes that can get you fired." ----Kevin Bedell - founding editor of LinuxWorld Magazine

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Price: $12.48 [Notify me when price goes down.]

(Pearson Education) Shows the user how to measure critical success factors, diagnose the difficulties of implementation, analyze the project as a single entity, assess resource strategy and management, put enterprise-wide project management into organizations. Softcover. .
Price: $27.80 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Edited by Frances Smith Foster

Winner of the College Language Association Book Award

Frances Smith Foster has rediscovered three novels by Frances E. W. Harper that were originally serialized in The Christian Recorder between 1868 and 1888. These works, the first written for African-Americans, address issues of passing, social responsibility, sexuality, and temperance.

"Foster's discovery . . . may well be the literary find of the century."
— Quarterly Black Review.
Price: $89.08 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The ABCs of e-Learning is your hands-on guide for finding the right e-learning path for you and your organization Written by Brooke Broadbent-an international expert in the field of e-learning-the book is created to be an easy-to-use and flexible tool. The ABCs of e-Learning offers the background information needed to solve a wide variety of e-learning problems. It compares the four basic types of e-learning: leader-led, self-paced, performance support tools, and informal learning. It also includes answers to common problems and will get you started on your road to e-learning..
Price: $23.80 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Frances Smith Foster has rediscovered three novels by Frances E.W. Harper, the best-known Africa-American writer of the nineteeny century and author of the classic Iola Leroy. Originally serialized in issues of THE CHRISTIAN RECORDER between 1868 and 1888, these works are the first written specifically for an African-American audience; they address issues of passing, social responsibility, courtship, sexuality, and temperance. Winner of the College Language Associateion Book Award, these novels make a profound contribution to our understanding of a crucial era in American history.
Price: $15.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The long agony" was over: Kansas, as of January 29, 1861, was a state--it had "moved to America " In Leavenworth, Lawrence, Topeka, and other towns Kansans celebrated the "glorious news" of the coming of statehood in a "fury of excitement " Cannons boomed, cheering crowds gathered on the street corners, a judge and a militia general stood on their heads, and the saloons were scenes of inebriated revelry.

So begins Albert Castel's classic history of Kansas during the Civil War. Long recognized as a key study on the war in the trans-Mississippi West, Civil War Kansas describes the political, military, social, and economic events of the state's first four years. Castel contributes to a better understanding of the Civil War in this region through a realistic presentation and analysis of the Kansas-Missouri border conflict, the operations of the Missouri guerrillas under Quantrill, and the Union and Confederate military campaigns in Missouri, Arkansas, the Indian Territory, and Kansas itself.

This book is part of the Modern War Studies series..
Price: $12.18 [Notify me when price goes down.]