Enterprise 2.0 Book Reviews
Having finished a number of books related to E2.0 I thought that it was only right that I made a quick summary of my views on them. As a very slow reader of books and someone who always has at least 4 books on the go at any one time excluding manuals 
content can get fused. This has the plus side of allowing me to remix ideas and content to suit my business requirements. For example real world stories from non E2.0 books may actually provide context or anecdotes for business scenarios. I tend to read a lot of history related books, which is very strange considering it was one of my least favourite subjects at school. Typically I read military based history books so at the moment I am reading Tobruk: The Great Siege 1941-42 by William Buckingham as well as Admirals by Lambert. Both these show how people interact, work, collaborate,fail and succeed.
So back to the two books I have finished in recent months on E2.0. The first was the long awaited Andrew McAfee – Enterprise 2.0 : New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges and the second was Willms Bushe, Soren Stamer – The Art of Letting Go Enterprise 2.0. The first thing that struck me about both these works was the excellent references to real world examples.
Coming from a technology background and having implemented, supported and sold collaborative capabilities over the past 12 years I am always looking for content that will aid me challenge my customers views of the new fads in the IT world and how to look for unique business opportunities to drive adoption and participation of E2.0 platforms.
I think this book really captures the essence of Andrew’s blog and hopefully will provide the opportunity for him to deliver a follow-on work that provides a more detailed insight into the progression of E2.0 and of course E3.0, or whatever term is coined to label the next wave of collaboration capabilities.
One final comment relates to the term social, I like Andrew’s idea of avoiding this term in some circumstances as in reality this is about collaboration and this has been a perfectly good term to describe the capabilities.
Moving on to the Art of Letting go this was a great example of essays from different people on real world situations and implementation of E2.0 style technologies to fulfil business requirements as well as enhance businesses standing with their customers. The book drew on experiences from Prof Andrew McAfee, Craig Cmehil (SAP), Stephen Johnston (Nokia), Stefan Bocking (Vodafone), Willm Buhse (CoreMedia AG), Suw Charman-Anderson, Nicole Dufft (Berlecon Research GmbH), Gotz Hamann (Die ZEIT), Prof / Dr Michael Koch, Prof / Dr Kathrin Moslein, Prof Dr Frank Piller, Prof / Dr Ralf Reichwald and Soren Stamer (CoreMedia).
All of these different authors bring their experiences to you enabling you to see how different organisations implement and use these types of capabilities everyday. I would recommend both of these works.
Tags: Books, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, history, military.admirals, Social Software, social_networking, war, Web2.0
