What Makes Message Not Received Different?

Message Not Received is both similar to—and different than—the other six books that I've written.

Let me explain.

Most of my other six texts were the first in their sub-genres—or very close to it. (More on that below). A few examples will illustrate the point.

Let's go back to 2009. Sure, many books had been written about IT project failures, yet Why New Systems Fail was anything but a copycat text. As Bruce Webster pointed out in the foreword to the book's revised edition, it was (at least to our knowledge) the first that looked at the pervasive failures of COTS applications—specifically, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. As for The Next Wave of Technologies, no book had taken a similar approach to emerging enterprise technologies.

Books on small businesses are a dime a dozen. Again, as far as I know, The New Small was the first that examined how the smallbiz community was benefitting from emerging technologies like open-source software, cloud computing, and the like. A few mostly academic books had been written about platforms prior to 2011, but The Age of the Platform explored platforms and the Gang of Four through a unique lens that many have since covered. Even The Visual Organization attacked data visualization from a very different perspective than books by Tufte, Few, and others. I’m unaware of any prior text that took a case-study approach and incorporated what we now call Big Data.

The Evolution of the New Book: A Look at My Writing Process

At a high level, a great deal of my job entails communication. I explain technology, language, disruption, management, history, and other potentially complex subjects to people in plain English. I can do this because I spend a great deal of time staying on top of current trends and, less frequently, attempting to predict where we are going. In short, I separate the signal from the noise. I simplify.