They give you everything but the guts to make the leap and the easy, cheap capital that was available when the book was being written but largely disappeared along with the dot-com economy.Į-Work Architect: How HR Leads the Way Using the InternetĮdited by Al Doran ( International Association for Human Resource Information Management, 252 pages, $39). They also talk about how to survive once you've made the deal, and even list financial models to analyze the agreement and lenders to help pay for it. The authors give pointers on how to recognize a good opportunity to buy your own company and hazards to avoid in deal- making, such as being so in love with the idea of making the deal that you ignore your due diligence. Some of the issues Kerth discusses for retrospective 'facilitators' include knowing the project's goals and the organization's culture, and holding the session at a site that can induce participants to discuss what happened and how the lessons learned can help the organization move forward.īuyout: The Insider's Guide to Buying Your Own Companyīy Rick Rickersten, with Robert E. Kerth, who has led project post-mortems (or, as he prefers to call them, retrospectives) for more than 20 years, covers everything from establishing goals to completing a report that can help disseminate the lessons learned from a project to the rest of the organization. But sometimes the worse a project is, the more you can learn by looking back at it. Sure, IT projects can be time-consuming ordeals that take a long time to reach their objectives.

(Dorset House Publishing, 288 pages, $39.45). Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews, by Norman L. The writing style is entertaining, painting a vivid picture of a colorful, egotistical and fascinating icon in the world of computing. The book offers revealing insights about Torvalds and his revolutionary operating system, his sometimes odd relationships with friends and family, his hermitlike work ethic during college and his thoughts about open-source software development. Torvalds' new autobiography is an interesting 'you are there' view of how a geeky Finnish teen became enamored with computers and eventually created his own operating system, Linux, which is now widely used. Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionaryīy Linus Torvalds and David Diamond (HarperBusiness, 288 pages, $26).

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