March 2009 Entries
Don Tapscott tackled an interesting topic in the late 90's, "how are children being affected by growing up in a digital world?" Unfortunately when you write on a topic that borders on pop-culture, your writing tends to have a pretty short shelf-life. Most of the material in this 1998 book would have been outdated by 2001 when I began work on my degree in Computer Information Systems. Even so, there is some interesting material in the book.
"A Whack on the Side of the Head" is a great little book to get you thinking creatively. Von Oech takes the reader through a list of 10 mental locks that keep many people from using creative thinking to solve problems. It is a very quick read but full of many little gems of ideas. Von Oech doesn't waste any words in introducting each mental lock and some very practical and yet insightful ideas on how to unlock your brain.
How can you predict what is going to happen 20, 50 or 100 years from now? Imagine writing a book in 1909 and trying to predict the events of the last 100 years. That is the feat that George Friedman, founder of Stratfor, tries to accomplish in this fascinating book called "The Next 100 Years: A Forecase For The 21st Century". Friedman freely admits that the task is daunting and fraught with pitfalls, however he brings and incredible breadth and depth of understanding to the task. Rather than