'Power and Response-ability' book

Yup, I’ve been at it again – getting more of my previous material from the past few years out into printed-book form.

This one’s Power and Response-ability: the human side of systems – click the link or the graphic for more details on the Tetradian Books website.

As usual, there’s a free download of the e-book available from the Tetradian Books site; printed copies should become available in a couple of weeks’ time from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and other retailers.

Basic idea is a really simple dichotomy: the physics definition of ‘power’ is the ability to do work, whilst most social definitions are more like the ability to avoid it. As I put it in the book, “many of the common concepts of power in business are so close to perfectly wrong that it’s amazing any work happens at all…” The resultant mess is a key concern for enterprise architecture, particularly as we start to integrate the human side of systems into the architecture at the whole of enterprise level.

This isn’t as much of a workbook as the others in my Tetradian Enterprise Architecture series: the only diagnostic checklist is right at the end, in the appendix. It’s more of a text-based exploration of the issues around personal power, shared power and ‘ability to do work’ (hence ‘response-ability’), both in the workplace and in the wider business / economic milieu (themes I’ve been researching for the past couple of decades and more, really). In that sense, it also gives the business background to SEMPER and all the other tools and techniques that I’ve packaged under the Tetradian banner.

Share and enjoy, perhaps? Comments much appreciated, anyway.