Technological books

Books about Technological from Amazon.com

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

The Challenge
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning.

But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

The Study
For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

The Standards
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.

The Comparisons
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?

Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't.

The Findings
The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:

Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.

“Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.”

Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?

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Price: $11.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]

State of Fear

In Tokyo, in Los Angeles, in Antarctica, in the Solomon Islands . . . an intelligence agent races to put all the pieces together to prevent a global catastrophe

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Price: $3.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns

A crash course in the business of learning-from the bestselling author of The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution�

. .

�A brilliant teacher, Christensen brings clarity to a muddled and chaotic world of education.�
-Jim Collins, bestselling author of Good to Great

. .

According to recent studies in neuroscience, the way we learn doesn't always match up with the way we are taught. If we hope to stay competitive-academically, economically, and technologically-we need to rethink our understanding of intelligence, reevaluate our educational system, and reinvigorate our commitment to learning. In other words, we need �disruptive innovation.�

. .

Now, in his long-awaited new book, Clayton M. Christensen and coauthors Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson take one of the most important issues of our time-education-and apply Christensen's now-famous theories of �disruptive� change using a wide range of real-life examples. Whether you're a school administrator, government official, business leader, parent, teacher, or entrepreneur, you'll discover surprising new ideas, outside-the-box strategies, and straight-A success stories.

You'll learn how

Customized learning will help many more students succeed in school.
Student-centric classrooms will increase the demand for new technology.
Computers must be disruptively deployed to every student.
Disruptive innovation can circumvent roadblocks that have prevented other attempts at school reform.
We can compete in the global classroom-and get ahead in the global market.

Filled with fascinating case studies, scientific findings, and unprecedented insights on how innovation must be managed, Disrupting Class will open your eyes to new possibilities, unlock hidden potential, and get you to think differently. Professor Christensen and his coauthors provide a bold new lesson in innovation that will help you make the grade for years to come.

. .

The future is now. Class is in session.

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Price: $17.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]

State of the Union: A Thriller

America's worst nightmare has just become a brutal reality The most unlikely terrorist enemy of all now holds a knife against the country's throat. With both diplomatic and conventional military options swept from the table, the president of the United States calls upon America's only hope, Navy SEAL turned Secret Service agent Scot Harvath.

With the fragile peace between the world's nations shattered, Harvath must unravel a brilliantly orchestrated, fiendishly timed conspiracy intent upon bringing the United States to its knees. Teamed with beautiful Russian Intelligence agent Alexandra Ivanova and a highly trained CIA paramilitary detachment, Harvath races from the corridors of power in Washington, D.C., to the streets of Berlin, the coast of Finland, and into the heart of Mother Russia herself before returning home for a final showdown with an enemy from America's past more sinister and deadly than has ever been seen before.....
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Next

Is a loved one missing some body parts? Are blondes becoming extinct? Is everyone at your dinner table of the same species? Humans and chimpanzees differ in only 400 genes; is that why a chimp fetus resembles a human being? And should that worry us? There's a new genetic cure for drug addiction—is it worse than the disease?

We live in a time of momentous scientific leaps, a time when it's possible to sell our eggs and sperm online for thousands of dollars and to test our spouses for genetic maladies.

We live in a time when one fifth of all our genes are owned by someone else, and an unsuspecting person and his family can be pursued cross-country because they happen to have certain valuable genes within their chromosomes . . .

Devilishly clever, Next blends fact and fiction into a breathless tale of a new world where nothing is what it seems and a set of new possibilities can open at every turn.

Next challenges our sense of reality and notions of morality. Balancing the comic and the bizarre with the genuinely frightening and disturbing, Next shatters our assumptions and reveals shocking new choices where we least expect.

The future is closer than you think.

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The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization

From one of our most perceptive commentators and winner of the National Book Award, a comprehensive look at the new world of globalization, the international system that, more than anything else, is shaping world affairs today.

As the Foreign Affairs columnist for The New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman has traveled the globe, interviewing people from all walks of contemporary life: Brazilian peasants in the Amazon rain forest, new entrepreneurs in Indonesia, Islamic students in Teheran, and the financial wizards on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley.

Now Friedman has drawn on his years on the road to produce an engrossing and original look at globalization. Globalization, he argues, is not just a phenomenon and not just a passing trend. It is the international system that replaced the Cold War system; the new, well-greased, interconnected system: Globalization is the integration of capital, technology, and information across national borders, in a way that is creating a single global market and, to some degreee, a global village. Simply put, one can't possibly understand the morning news or one's own investments without some grasp of the system. Just one example: During the Cold War, we reached for the hot line between the White House and the Kremlin--a symbol that we were all divided but at least the two superpowers were in charge. In the era of globalization, we reach for the Internet--a symbol that we are all connected but nobody is totally in charge.

With vivid stories and a set of original terms and concepts, Friedman offers readers remarkable access to his unique understanding of this new world order, and shows us how to see this new system. He dramatizes the conflict of "the Lexus and the olive tree"--the tension between the globalization system and ancient forces of culture, geography, tradition, and community. He also details the powerful backlash that globalization produces among those who feel brutalized by it, and he spells out what we all need to do to keep the system in balance. Finding the proper balance between the Lexus and the olive tree is the great drama of he globalization era, and the ultimate theme of Friedman's challenging, provocative book--essential reading for all who care about how the world really works..
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Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives

The first generation of “digital natives” – children who were born into and raised in the digital world – are coming of age, and soon our world will be reshaped in their image. Our economy, our cultural life, even the shape of our family life will be forever transformed.

But who are these digital natives? How are they different from older generations – or “digital immigrants” – and what is the world they’re creating going to look like? In Born Digital, leading internet and technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser offer a sociological portrait of this exotic tribe of young people who can seem, even to those merely a generation older, both extraordinarily sophisticated and strangely narrow.

Based on original research, Born Digital explores a broad range of issues, from the highly philosophical to the purely practical: What does identity mean for young people who have dozens of online profiles and avatars? Should we worry about privacy issues – or is privacy even a relevant concern for digital natives? How does the concept of safety translate into an increasingly virtual world? Is “stranger-danger” a real problem, or a red herring? What lies ahead – socially, professionally, and psychologically – for this generation?

A smart, practical guide to a brave new world and its complex inhabitants, Born Digital will be essential reading for parents, teachers, and the myriad of confused adults who want to understand the digital present – and shape the digital future.

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Crossing the Chasm

Here is the bestselling guide that created a new game plan for marketing in high-tech industries. Crossing the Chasm has become the bible for bringing cutting-edge products to progressively larger markets. This edition provides new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing, with special emphasis on the Internet. It's essential reading for anyone with a stake in the world's most exciting marketplace.

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Price: $10.07 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The Race between Education and Technology

This book provides a careful historical analysis of the co-evolution of educational attainment and the wage structure in the United States through the twentieth century. The authors propose that the twentieth century was not only the American Century but also the Human Capital Century. That is, the American educational system is what made America the richest nation in the world. Its educational system had always been less elite than that of most European nations. By 1900 the U.S. had begun to educate its masses at the secondary level, not just in the primary schools that had remarkable success in the nineteenth century.

The book argues that technological change, education, and inequality have been involved in a kind of race. During the first eight decades of the twentieth century, the increase of educated workers was higher than the demand for them. This had the effect of boosting income for most people and lowering inequality. However, the reverse has been true since about 1980. This educational slow-down was accompanied by rising inequality. The authors discuss the complex reasons for this, and what might be done to ameliorate it.

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iPhone: The Missing Manual

iPhone: The Missing Manual Sneak Preview: David Pogue's Favorite iPhone Tricks

The iPhone's finger-driven interface seems natural and obvious. But when you really think about it, making it seem that way was no easy task. There are no menus in the iPhone software, for example, and no checkboxes or radio buttons. Everything on the screen has to be big enough for a fleshy fingertip.

On the other hand, the finger makes an outstanding pointing device; heck, you've been pointing with it all your life. It's much faster to scroll diagonally with a fingertip, for example, than with fussy adjustments on two different scroll bars.

Here, then, are some of the iPhone's unadvertised taps, double-taps, and other shortcuts, all culled from iPhone: The Missing Manual.

Double-Tapping

Double-tapping is actually pretty rare on the iPhone. It's not like the Mac or Windows, where double-clicking the mouse means "open." On the iPhone, you open something with one tap.

A double tap, therefore, is reserved for three functions:

In Photos, Google Maps, and Safari (the Web browser), double-tapping zooms in on whatever you tap, magnifying it by a factor of two.
In the same programs, as well as Mail, double-tapping means, "restore to original size" after you've zoomed in. (Weirdly, in Google Maps, you use a different gesture to zoom out: tap once with two fingers. That gesture appears nowhere else on the iPhone.)
When you're watching a video, double-tapping eliminates or restores letterbox bars.

See, the iPhone's screen is bright, vibrant, and stunningly sharp. It's not, however, the right shape for videos. Standard TV shows are squarish, not rectangular. So when you watch TV shows, you get black letterbox columns on either side of the picture.

Movies have the opposite problem. They're too wide for the iPhone screen. So when you watch movies, you wind up with letterbox bars above and below the picture. Some people are fine with that. At least when letterbox bars are onscreen, you know you're seeing the complete composition of the scene the director intended. Other people can't stand letterbox bars. You're already watching on a pretty small screen; why sacrifice some of that precious area to black bars? That's why the iPhone gives you a choice. If you double-tap the video as it plays, you zoom in, magnifying the image so that it fills the entire screen. Part of the image is now off the screen; now you're not seeing the entire composition originally broadcast. You lose the top and bottom of TV scenes, or the left and right edges of movie scenes. If this effect winds up chopping off something important--some text on the screen, for example--restoring the original letterbox view is just another double-tap away.

Secrets of the Sensors

The iPhone has three cool sensors. First, it has an accelerometer that detects when you've rotated the iPhone into landscape orientation. In programs like Photos, Safari, and iPod, it triggers the screen image to rotate as well.

Camouflaged behind the black glass where you can't see them except with a bright flashlight are two more sensors: a proximity sensor that shuts off the screen illumination and touch sensitivity when the phone is against your head (it works only in the Phone application), and an ambient-light sensor that brightens the display when you're in sunlight and dims it in darker places.

Apple says that it experimented with having the light sensor active all the time, but it was weird to have the screen get brighter and darker all the time. So the sensor now samples the ambient light, and adjusts the brightness; it does this only once--each time you unlock the phone after waking it.

You can use that tip to your advantage. By covering up the sensor (just above the earpiece) as you unlock the phone, you force it to a low-power, dim screen-brightness setting (because the phone believes that it's in a dark room). Or by holding it up to a light as you wake it, you get full brightness. In both cases, you've saved all the taps and navigation it would have taken you to find the manual brightness slider in Settings.

Earbud Cord Switch

Without close inspection, you'd have a hard time telling the iPhone's white stereo earbuds apart from a regular iPod's--but don't get them mixed up. The iPhone's earbuds have a tiny, embedded clicker/microphone partway down the right earbud cord.

That's right, "clicker/microphone." The tiny bulge is the microphone for phone calls. But if you pinch the bulge, you'll find that it clicks.

Pinch once to answer an incoming phone call. Pinch for a couple seconds to dump the call to voicemail. (You can also double-tap the Sleep/Wake switch on top of the iPhone to send the call to voicemail.)
During music or video playback, pinch once to pause the music; pinch again to resume playback.
During music playback, double-pinch to skip to the next song.

Customizing the iPod Buttons

The iPod module on the iPhone starts out with buttons along the bottom for summoning four lists: Playlists, Artists, Songs, and Videos.

But what about Albums? Genres? Composers? They're there, all right, but hidden; you have to tap More to see them.

But what if you use those lists more often than Artists or Songs? No problem: you can replace one of those starter buttons with a list of your own.

Tap More, and then tap the Edit button (upper-left corner). You arrive at the Configure screen. Here's the complete list of music-and-video sorting lists: Albums, Podcasts, Audiobooks, Genres, Composers, Compilations, Playlists, Artists, Songs, and Videos.

To replace one of the four starter icons, use a finger to drag an icon from the top half of the screen downward, directly onto the existing icon you want to replace. It lights up to show the success of your drag.

When you release your finger, you'll see that the new icon has replaced the old one. Tap Done in the upper-right corner.

Keyboard Speedups

Don't bother using the Shift key to capitalize a new sentence. The iPhone does that capitalizing automatically. Don't put apostrophes in contractions, either; the iPhone will put those in for you, too.

Force Quit, Reset

The iPhone is pretty darned simple and stable, but it's still a computer. In times of troubleshooting, these tips may come in handy:

Force quit a program. Press and hold the Home button for six seconds to force-quit a program that seems to be stuck.
Reset. If the entire iPhone locks up--it can happen--press and hold both the Home button and the Sleep/Wake switch for eight seconds. You'll see the screen go black, and then the Apple logo appears as the iPhone reboots.

McCallum's Awesome iPhone Period-Typing Shortcut

I have in my possession a nugget, a secret bit of iPhone information that's so valuable, such a headache- and time-saver, that I don't know what to do with it.

One voice in my head says, "Hoard it! Keep it a secret until your book is published! If you reveal it, it'll be all over the Net in hours, and all your competitors' books will have it, too."

But another voice says, "But this information is too good to keep quiet. Plus, you didn't discover it yourself. And besides, you're not gonna starve, either way."

Eventually, the second little voice prevailed. I'm going to share with you the solution to one of the most annoying things, if not THE most annoying thing, about typing on the iPhone:

The punctuation keys and alphabet keys appear in two different keyboard layouts.

So every time you want to type a period or a comma, it's a three-step, awkward dance: (1) Tap the ".?123" key in the lower left to summon the punctuation layout. (2) Type the period. (3) Type the ABC key in the lower left to return to the alphabet layout.

Imagine how excruciating it is to type, for example, "a P.O. Box in the U.S.A.!" That's 34 finger taps and 10 mode changes!

And therefore imagine how thrilled I was to receive an email from reader Andrew McCallum, containing a method of typing a period or a comma with only a SINGLE finger gesture.

The iPhone doesn't register most key presses until you *release* your finger. But Andrew discovered that the Shift and Punctuation keys register their taps on the *press-down* instead.

So here's what you can do, all in one motion:

1. Touch the ".?123" key, but don't lift your finger as the punctuation layout appears.

2. Slide your finger a half inch onto the period or comma key, and release.

Incredibly, the ABC layout returns automatically. You've typed a period or a comma with one finger touch instead of three. In fact, you can type ANY of the punctuation symbols the same way.

This makes a HUGE difference in the usability of the keyboard.

Type on, bro.

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Price: $9.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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