Entries tagged “business”

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Open source as infrastructure

On the last day of FOSS.in 2009, some of us gathered in the speakers’ hotel to hang on to that sense of wonder for just a bit longer. Ramkumar Ramachandra and I ended up discussing open source philosophy late into the night. Ram’s consolidated his thoughts from that evening into a pair of posts on open source as infrastructure and community and business interaction. Both were posted earlier this month, but I somehow missed them.

My own understanding of the infrastructure angle to open source comes from Doc Searls’s writing around 2001. Doc has a more recent write-up on understanding infrastructure (Apr 2008) that’s well worth reading.

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Thursday, May 22, 2008

Reading business books

Seth Godin shares my take on reading business books. In How to read a business book:

... How to read a business book... it’s not as obvious as it seems.

  • Bullet points are not the point.

If you’re reading for the recipe, and just the recipe, you can get through a business book in just a few minutes. But most people who do that get very little out of the experience. Take a look at the widely divergent reviews for The Dip. The people who ‘got it’ understood that it was a book about getting you to change your perspective and thus your behavior. Those that didn’t were looking for bullet points. They wasted their money.

My notes on Twitter:

two kinds of business books: the absolutists who tell you what is good for you, and the relativists who tell you what they experienced. 03:14 PM April 14, 2008

the more i read, the more i prefer adapting from the relativists than kowtowing to the absolutists. 03:14 PM April 14, 2008

I’m currently reading What Management Is by Joan Magretta and totally loving it. Blossom’s in Bangalore has it for Rs 160.

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