Listed.

I came across a couple of items this week that are somewhat related — and related to the idea of being on a list.

First:  I found Fredrik Savin’s blogs where he listed five book reviews of Andrew McAfee’s new book on Enterprise 2.0. My review is listed, and I recommend you read the other reviews too. It’s always interesting to read book reviews because they tell you more about the reviewer than about the book. Reviewers view books through the lens of their own value systems. They find those elements of a book that either score high or low with their world view. Reading reviews is a great way to get insight into a person’s world view.

Let me illustrate: When reading McAfee’s book I noticed that it began with four pages of endorsements — and each one revealed more about the reviewer than about the book. For example: Clay Christensen comments that “…McAfee has identified a truly disruptive innovation.” Clay is the author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and is a thought leader in the innovation field. Rodger Roberts notes McAfee’s clear perspective, implications to how executives will run their businesses, and that it provides pragmatic insights. Roberts is a partner at McKinsey and Company – a company that specializes in doing just that! Leo Apotheker, the CEO of SAP highlights how McAfee understands the role of IT to create superior customer value. You get my point — a reviewer will admire a book that reflects their values and highlight those. So read reviews, they are fun to decipher.

You’ll notice that my review of the book highlights that McAfee provides a deeper level of insight than you might expect and features many perspectives. It challenged you to think, but was not a book about hype, rather about facts, stories, and interpretations of those stories into ideas that should help you. And indeed these are values that I hold to be important, and I aspire to achieve these in my writing too.

I also found that I’m on another list – Andrew Filev of wrike.com collected a list of 33 Selected Blogs about Innovation, Project Management and 2.0.  I’m very grateful to be listed here as a nominee for the top 10.  I think I should refrain from voting since I’m listed myself, but there are blogs on this list which I read religiously and with admiration.  I think you should too.  Hint:  I use Google Reader so that the blogs come to me — it makes catching up on the news much more efficient.

By the way, I’d be very pleased if you went over to this list and voted for those blogs that you feel are deserving of recognition.

The third item is not really a list — yet. But is the realization that now is the time we’ll get to see 2010 predictions. So I decided to go back in time to last year when I made one such prediction when I was blogging on ZDnet

Last year at this time I predicted that the economy will force many businesses to strongly consider Software as a Service offerings that business units acquire independently of their IT departments. It’s been a year. Was my prediction correct? Based on the conversations I have with both vendors and clients, I believe I was on target. Although many clients will still tell me “There is no way we’ll do SaaS here, it’s just not secure (or something like that).” I find that in many cases they have already implemented at least one SaaS product somewhere in their company — and it’s working just fine. In some cases, they use a SaaS based spam filter, in other cases, they are using a SaaS based employee performance management system. And now I find an increase in the use of SaaS based E2.0 collaboration platforms. Is this everywhere? no. But it’s far more prevalent than it was in 2008.

Alas, many very significant things happened in 2009 that I did not predict at all. Those go on another list — the one that we examine when we reflect upon a year and count the many unpredictable blessings it has provided us.

Tagged as: Andrew McAfee, blogging, book, Enterprise 2.0, SaaS, Social Enterprise, Software as a service, writing